Isadora Duncan

Dancer, Author

1877 – 1927

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Who was Isadora Duncan?

Angela Isadora Duncan was an American dancer. Born in California, she lived in Western Europe and the Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50. She performed to acclaim throughout Europe after being exiled from the United States for her pro-Soviet sympathies.

Duncan's fondness for flowing scarves contributed to her death in an automobile accident in Nice, France, when she was a passenger in an Amilcar. Her silk scarf, draped around her neck, became entangled around the open-spoked wheels and rear axle, breaking her neck. In 1987, she was inducted into the National Museum of Dance's Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame.

Famous Quotes:

  • Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love --to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.
  • So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.
  • I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.
  • It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.
  • Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.
  • Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?
  • People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.
  • The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.
  • So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.
  • We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.

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Born
May 27, 1877
San Francisco
Also known as
  • Angela Isadora Duncan
  • Dora Angela Duncan
  • isadora_duncan
Parents
Siblings
Spouses
Children
Nationality
  • United States of America
  • France
  • Russia
  • Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
Profession
Employment
  • Daly's Company
    (1895 - 1899)
Lived in
  • San Francisco
    (1877/05/26 - 1880)
  • Oakland
    (1880 - 1895)
  • New York City
    (1895 - 1899)
  • London
    (1899 - 1900)
  • Paris
    (1900 - 1922)
  • Moscow
    (1922 - 1924)
  • Paris
    (1924 - 1927)
Died
Sep 14, 1927
Nice
Resting place
Père Lachaise Cemetery

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

Citation

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"Isadora Duncan." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Mar. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/isadora_duncan>.

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