Dancing Music: Isadora Duncan and Wagnerism in the American Imagination
Dancing Music: Isadora Duncan and Wagnerism in the American Imagination
Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) is frequently described as a maverick whose unconventional, improvisatory movement aesthetic helped to establish and shape American modern dance. Yet Duncan’s dances and conceptions of art were heavily influenced by Richard Wagner. Dancing to excerpts of Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde, quoting and referencing his artistic theories in her own speech “The Dance of the Future,” and relating tales of her summer at Bayreuth, Duncan staged an intermedial interrogation of Wagner’s works and ideas. The American Wagner cult has long been associated with the Gilded Age and conductor Anton Seidl (1850–1898). Isadora Duncan’s American performances demonstrate that American Wagnerism persisted well into the twentieth-century, albeit in a different form. Conjuring herself as a rebellious disciple of Wagner, Duncan’s intermedial performances knit together music and dance, but also join strands of Wagnerism and Victorian ideologies with early modernist aesthetics.
Keywords: Isadora Duncan, Richard Wagner, early modernist aesthetics, intermediality, “The Dance of the Future,”, American Wagnerism
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