Isadora Duncan.

Isadora Duncan in her art, as well as her life, embodied the progressive forces of the new century.

Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future: the free spirit who will inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet been ... the highest intelligence in the freest body!

--Isadora Duncan, The Dance (New York: The Forest Press, 1909)

How could a young, self-educated woman, born in 1877 in San Francisco, make such an impact on sophisticated Europe shortly after the turn of the twentieth century? Why, almost seventy-two years after her death, is there artistic, political, and scandalous resonance to her very name--Isadora Duncan? In an age when news traveled slowly, Duncan's personal life made her an international celebrity as much as did her artistic vision, but it was her creation of that most uniquely American art, expressive dance, that is her continuing legacy. Rather than being a vessel for another's ideas, Duncan was the maker and the performer. Her subject matter was more abstract than narrative. Dancing her feelings about love and rebellion, human emotions and world events, she aroused similar emotions in her audiences.

Duncan's tangible achievements are no less singular now than in the turbulent period in which she lived: a dedication to educating children (albeit in her own image); an inspiration to young women to throw off the societal constraints that inhibited their gender; and a personal magnetism that attracted other artists intent on transforming the worn-out notions of the academies. As a visionary she was accepted as an equal by scenic designer Edward Gordon Craig, stage director Konstantin Stanislavsky, and actress Eleonora Duse, agents of change who were leading the theater into modem times.

In truth, Duncan did not spring fully formed from the late-nineteenth-century soil. She came of age in a country that was just beginning to export innovations abroad. Her immediate family was shaped by her mother, Dora Gray Duncan, a single parent who made a living despite considerable economic hazards. She was a role model; Isadora and her three siblings lived freely, answerable to no organized religion or institution. While earning money by giving piano lessons, Dora Duncan managed to instill in her children her love of music, poetry, and the other arts.

From childhood, Isadora learned to depend on her own resources, to take what she needed from a situation and then move on. She lasted only a few years in the public schools, choosing to break off her formal education to run dance classes for the neighborhood children; within a year, she and her sister Elizabeth were also teaching adults. Her intellectual curiosity never flagged. She indulged her passion for reading at the Oakland Public Library; later, in London, she would soak up the principles of the classical artisans of fifth-century B.C. Athens by studying the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and absorbing the elements of their composition. She also adopted the flowing tunics of ancient Greece for both her costume onstage and her everyday dress, to the horror of her buttoned-up, bone-bodiced contemporaries. (At that-time, dress reform was as much an issue as voting rights were in the women's movement.) Another source of inspiration was the Delsarte technique, a system of poses and gestures representing human emotions that helped form the basis of physical education for women in the United States; Duncan created her works by building on images suggested by these exercises.

Barely out of her teens, Duncan, along with her mother, left San Francisco for a stage career in Chicago and then New York City. After nearly two years in shows mounted by Augustin Daly, a leading Broadway producer, she went off on her own to perform in small concert evenings in a studio in Carnegie Hall. At first she danced to poems read by Elizabeth, with piano accompaniment by composer Ethelbert Nevin; later she would discard the spoken word. The concept of a solo performance artist onstage was a novel one, except at private parties sponsored by wealthy patrons. One of Duncan's accomplishments was to elevate dance beyond its decorative purpose in operas and melo-dramas to be considered in its own right as a serious art form.

Just before 1900, Duncan and her family sailed for Europe, where her career would flourish. Unlike ballet, which depended upon teaching an established technique to a chosen few over a period of years, Duncan's dance evolved from spontaneous improvisations motivated from within. Her discoveries in the studio were shaped into a finished performance product, deriving a vocabulary shared in common with other human beings: locomotion, turns, jumps, rising and falling through space--a plastic body moving in acknowledgment of the demands of gravity. She prided herself on the universality of her movements, linking the swaying of her arms to the branches of trees in the wind, her leaping to the crescendo of waves before they broke on the shore, and--another innovation for dance--she matched the rhythm and grandeur of her conceptions to the concert music of the great composers.

When I first began to write about dance, I had a connection to Duncan: older friends had seen her perform in the legendary Boston concert at Symphony Hall in 1922, five years before her death. They vividly recalled that night: the fiery speech in support of the emancipation of women, the waving of a blazing red scarf, and the baring of one breast, which caused proper citizens to scurry from the hall. Now that these friends are gone, my direct link to Duncan no longer exists, except through the image I keep of her dancing her way across the stages of Europe and America, giving courage to others to remain true to the beliefs that propel them.

Iris Fanger, a contributing editor of Dance Magazine since 1972, is a theater and dance critic for the Boston Herald and a contributor to the Christian Science Monitor; she directed the Harvard Summer Dance Center from 1977 to 1995.