Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon Craig and the Dream of an Impossible Theatre

This chapter focuses on Duncan’s and Craig’s experiments in movement and manifestos for The Dance and The Theatre of the Future, and the ways they engage notions of Hellenism, especially in its utopian aspects. It reads their projects in tandem (the dancer and the marionette), underlining the emphasis on the performer and introducing the concept of embodied ekphrasis. Both Duncan and Craig’s experiments were not based on readings of Greek plays, and gestured towards a form of Hellenism echoed in the modernist concept of total theatre. Theorising and expressing performance through the double figures of the puppet and the dancer is given a classical genealogy through the introduction of Plato’s ideas on the subject, also quoted by Craig, again stressing the ways these modernist debates rehearse the ancient quarrel about the political and aesthetic efficacy of performance.