Dancing the Future, Performing the Past: Isadora Duncan and Wagnerism in the American Imagination

Abstract

AbstractDuring the first two decades of the twentieth century, dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) regularly appeared on concert hall and opera house stages in New York and other American cities. Audiences were taken with her striking persona and nontraditional conception of dance, and impressed by her success in Europe. Duncan's artistic, intellectual, and personal self-association with Richard Wagner—a mythological being in the contemporary American imagination—also captured the attention of many audience members. Duncan danced to excerpts from Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and other works while rejecting Wagner's conception of dance; she borrowed language and ideological formulations from his writings while dismissing his aesthetic theories. 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 modeled a second generation of American Wagnerism that combined contemporary cultural debates and early modernist aesthetics with strains of Wagner's art and ideologies.