Isadora Duncan's Dance Theory

In America, around 1900, Edith Wharton wrote in her autobiography, “[O]nly two kinds of dancing were familiar…: waltzing in the ballroom and pirouetting on the stage”. Wharton missed her earliest opportunity to see Duncan, in 1899, when a Boston philanthropist and Newport hostess featured the young dancer at a garden party:“Isadora Duncan?” People repeated the unknown name, wondering why it had been used to bait Miss Mason's invitation.… I hated pirouetting, and did not go to Miss Mason's. Those who did smiled, and said they supposed their hostess had asked the young woman to dance out of charity—as I daresay she did. Nobody had ever seen anything like it; you couldn't call it dancing, they said. No other Newport hostess engaged Miss Duncan, and her name vanished from everybody's mind.No doubt, the young Duncan's earliest performances must have looked peculiar. She neither waltzed nor pirouetted. She did not kick up her legs; she manipulated no skirts; she rarely portrayed any specific character. Legend even has it (though not quite accurately) that she was maverick enough at a very tender age to disavow her toe dancing lessons. In her more semantically polemical moments, Duncan rejected the label “dancer” altogether, in order to disassociate herself from the questionable antics of her colleagues. Instead, she set herself apart as an “artiste.” That is what she listed as her occupation on the birth certificate for her second child, Patrick Augustus Duncan, in 1910.