Duncan on Dance

Author: (American) Duncan Chen, Zhang Bennan
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
Features: Duncan is regarded as a wise individual. Her will and spiritual strength are just one aspect of her personality; the other side of her character is reason, wisdom, and a clear mind, which support her rebellion against the aesthetic value and philosophical concepts of traditional dance. This aspect is often overlooked. She had an insatiable passion for dance, music, and philosophical literature. She spent years diligently studying classical and modern art classics in libraries and museums. She thoroughly read the works of numerous thinkers such as Whitman, Shakespeare, Goethe, Haeckel, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. She delved into a wide range of fields, including literature, history, philosophy, poetics, and dramatic studies. She was closely associated with many highly creative contemporaries—painters, poets, actors, musicians, and sculptors. This is the foundation of her status as a theorist. This book compiles Isadora Duncan's essays on dance, including published short articles and program notes from her lifetime, as well as unpublished scattered letters, articles, and manuscripts that were never fully transcribed. Before her untimely death, Duncan had planned to publish a monograph on dance and had submitted some drafts to editors for review. This book is compiled based on these materials, meaning there will be no significant omissions in her theoretical writings on dance and art. Many view Duncan solely as a dancer rather than a dance theorist, believing she could not have written these essays alone. In reality, she has been underestimated. Aside from some early manuscripts that may have been co-authored with her brothers Augustine or Raymond, most of her articles were independently written. She is hailed as a great artist and considered a pioneer who elevated interpretive dance to a creative art form. She freed dance from artificial technical constraints, allowing it to break free from its reliance on hollow and contrived movement techniques. She wrote her autobiography, My Life, which is regarded as a classic in the history of biographical literature. However, when writing it, she followed a friend's advice not to discuss art excessively, placing the theoretical sections on dance outside the autobiography. These deliberately moved theoretical writings have been compiled into this book, Duncan on Dance, thus filling the notable gaps in her extraordinary autobiography. These gaps were left because she chose not to discuss her art extensively in the autobiography, as advised by others. This is not just talent—it is true genius, the highest and most perfect art, as the renowned artist Rodin wrote in Paris.
For classical ballet enthusiasts or opponents, modern dance scholars or enthusiasts, modernism scholars or enthusiasts, and scholars of American literary history.