ISADORA(舞蹈家邓肯传)

Book Description
Welcomed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review -and now in paperback-ISADORA brings to life "the most influential and the most notorious woman of the first quarter of the 20th century" (The New York Times Book Review); "one of the true visionaries of modern dance-and, by extension, of modernism in all its guises" (Washington Post); a performer who invented her own language of movement to express her needs for art and freedom; a woman whose life, set against the backdrop of Europe and the U.S. in the early 1900s, was crowded with love affairs, passions, and tragedies. AUTHORBIO Peter Kurth is the author of Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, and American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson. He lives in Vermont.

Amazon.com
It's a bit of a stretch to suggest, as Peter Kurth does in his biography of the expatriate artist, that Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) single-handedly invented modern dance, a claim that Vaslav Nijinsky and George Balanchine, among others, would almost certainly contest.
But Kurth has that claim on good authority, namely Duncan herself, who recalled, "I was possessed by the dream of Promethean creation that, at my call, might spring from the Earth, descend from the Heavens, such dancing figures as the world had never seen." Never shy of self-promotion, Duncan captivated audiences wherever she took the stage, earning a following--but also stirring controversy--in her native United States, and even greater exaltation and stormier criticism in Europe, where she made her home for most of her adult life. There she emerged as a textbook bohemian, avidly practicing and preaching free love and other convention-flouting doctrines, breaking hearts, taking up with political radicals and some of the great artists of the day, and drinking far too much. She also defined the figure of the artist as celebrity, living each day, as one Russian critic remarked, "as though bewitched by music" and unconcerned by the mundane. She even died spectacularly, done in by a fashion accessory and bad timing.

Toward the end of her life Duncan remarked, "I am not a dancer. I have never danced a step in my life." She was a dancer, of course, and one whose influence has endured. She was also an original, self-aware and certain of her greatness. Kurth tells her story well in this vivid biography, one of value to students of modern dance and the history of the Lost Generation.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Gregory McNamee

Amazon.co.uk Review
A product of 10 years' labour, Peter Kurth's Isadora: The Sensational Life of Isadora Duncan is a substantial and very thorough biography. The events of the dancer's flamboyant life have long been overshadowed by her dramatic and horrific death--strangled by own her scarf when it became entangled in the wheel of a sports car (the scarf was actually a tasselled batik shawl). Kurth, who only allocates a couple of pages to her demise, redresses this in balance by providing a wealth of pertinent information about her formative years. Duncan was raised by her independent-minded mother in California during the 1880s, a time when the state was obsessed by all things Greek. (Kurth maintains that Isadora's dance always bore the hallmarks of this distinctly Californian trend.) A rebellious spirit, the young Duncan outraged her teachers by announcing that Santa Claus was a lie. She never mellowed with age, always defying convention in life and in art, usually with little regard for the consequences. Arriving in Chicago at the age of 18, she declared "I have discovered the true movement of man" and at no point does her self-belief ever appear to have wavered. Her dance first scandalised and then beguiled audiences in Paris, London, Moscow, New York and Berlin. Isadora worked with Stanslavski, mingled with Rodin, Gertrude Stein and the Fitzgeralds. She appears to have had a truly voracious appetite for sex--conducting intemperate love affairs with Ellen Terry's son, Gordan Craig, the millionaire dilettante Paris Singer; the Russian poet Sergei Esenin (who she briefly married); and, apparently, competing with Jean Cocteau for sailors.
Such adventurous living had its costs. At 40 she was a "prematurely aged and bloated woman, coarsened by terrible trials" (including the tragic drowning of her two children), "labouring through gossamer steps and classical evocation". Kurth describes her decline with a great deal of compassion; unfortunately it is actually quite difficult to like Duncan. She emerges as a distinctly indulgent and, frankly, unpleasant, racist prima donna--a belle époque Joan Crawford with a dash of Judy Garland thrown in. This "Muse of the Modernists" might have danced like an angel but, as this exemplary book reveals, she was a bit of a devil offstage.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Travis Elborough

From Publishers Weekly
Kurth (Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson) presents an exhaustive march through an exhausting, tragic life, organizing endless material into a coherent chronology. Duncan's contributions to dance are better documented and analyzed elsewhere. With minimum commentary, Kurth follows Duncan's frenetic existence from her 1877 birth in San Francisco until her infamous death (when her scarf caught in the wheel of her car, strangling her) in France in 1927. Duncan, her sister and two brothers, professionally entwined throughout their lives, spent early childhood vacillating between luxury and penury (her financier/swindler father, an integral part of San Francisco's 1877 banking collapse, was prone to long disappearances), a tendency which prevailed throughout their adulthood. Duncan seemed marked by tragedy: various fires destroyed belongings and homes (her earliest memory was of being tossed from the window of a burning building); her father died in a shipwreck; two of her children perished when a chauffeur rolled their car into the Seine; the third died shortly after birth. Throughout adulthood, Duncan moved restlessly and incessantly about, principally from Paris to Berlin to Russia. She danced, drank and enjoyed volatile long-term relationships while simultaneously leaping into bed with numerous so-called geniuses. Occasional professional successes peppered Duncan's life, but perhaps her most defining experience was her 1922 marriage to the mad, alcoholic and abusive Russian poet Esenin. By the time of his suicide in 1925, the couple had essentially destroyed each other professionally and personally. Neither a dance history nor a portrait of an era although Duncan knew everyone and participated in everything this book instead offers a meticulous chronology of an extraordinary life. (Nov. 15)Forecast: This is not, as the publisher claims, "the first major biography" of Isadora (Frederika Blair's predates it by 15 years). Its exhaustive rather than illuminative qualities will limit its readership to the most dedicated dance fans.

From Library Journal
Known to some as a leading light of early modern dance and to others as an ill-starred celebrity of the early 20th century (she was strangled when the long scarf she was wearing caught in the rear wheel of a sports car in which she was riding), Isadora Duncan has been the subject of a number of biographies and films over the years. On and off stage Duncan was unconventional, free-spirited, and, to purists of dance and morality, downright shocking. Her style of dance (incorporating everyday movements like skipping and jumping) and dress (barefoot, uncorseted, Grecian-style gowns) were unheard of even in the theater of those late Victorian times. Kurth, a regular contributor to Salon.com and author of American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson and An……