Anna Duncan: In the Footsteps of Isadora.

Anna Duncan, nee Denzler, was one of the six. She seems to have been a very pretty girl who felt compelled to leave the Duncan entourage in 1921 because she and Isadora were both in love with Isadora's pianist, Walter Rummel.

Although her independent performing career initially included original works, Anna vowed after Isadora died in 1927 to devote the rest of her life to teaching and performing only Isadora's dances. A dead end was the result. Eventually she had to resign herself to working as a saleslady.

Her final years were spent in the Jewish Home for the Aging Blind in Yonkers, New York. Kathleen Quinlan, a third-generation Duncan devotee, visited her regularly and inherited her memorabilia. Quinlan has given this collection to the Stockholm Dance Museum. Anna Duncan: In the Footsteps of Isadora is the souvenir book published in connection with a recent exhibit of the Anna Duncan material.

The volume consists of a chronology of Anna's life and fourteen commissioned articles of highly capricious quality. The most substantial contribution is Hedwig Muller's "The Story of the Duncan School in Germany." Muller, a professor of theater at the University of Cologne and editor of the periodical Tanz Drama, builds a fascinating picture of the school supported by Isadora and directed by her sister Elizabeth. We are taken through a student's typical day, and beyond that, the school is placed within the social and political context of the times. While it lasted, the Grunewald school offered a remarkable range of creative and intellectual stimuli.

The photographs in Anna Duncan are principally of "the girls," as Isadora called them. These photographs grow monotonous in their carefully posed archaism or their bucolic gamboling. One can see the seeds of decline. Since there are a number of photographs by Otto, Arnold Genthe, George Platt Lynes, and Nickolas Muray, as well as wash drawings by Abraham Walkowitz, there are also articles about them. They offer little perspective. The same can be said of the articles about Anna by Julia Levien, Edwin Ver Becke, and Quinlan. Eventually it is Isadora, and not Anna, who takes over.