1922, for what proved to be her final visit to her native country. The
earlier American series were in 1908, when she danced with Walter
Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra, at the Metropolitan Opera
House, prior to a tour; in 1911, when she again danced with Damrosch;
again in 1916, when she returned to California, early the next year,
after a twenty-two years’ absence. She also visited New York, briefly,
in 1915, impulsively renting a studio at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third
Street, with the idea of establishing a school. It was during this brief
visit that she made history of a kind by suddenly improvising a dance to
the French national anthem at the Metropolitan Opera House.
As I have pointed out, enlightened dance criticism, so far as the
newspapers were concerned, in those days was almost non-existent. For
those readers who might be interested, however, there are available, in
the files of _The New York Times_, penetrating analyses of her
performances by the discerning Carl Van Vechten.
The story of Isadora’s intervening years is marked by light and shadow.
Hers was a life that could not long retain happiness within its grasp.
Snatches of happiness were hers in her brief association with England’s
greatly talented stage designer, that misunderstood genius of the
theatre, Gordon Craig, the son of Ellen Terry, by whom Isadora had a
child; and yet another child by the lover who was known only as
Lohengrin.
Her passionate love of children was touching. Never was it better
exemplified than by her several schools, her devotion to the girls and
her concern for them. Most of all was it apparent in her selflessness in
her attitude towards her own two children. It is not difficult to
imagine the depth of the tragedy for her when a car in which they were
riding on their way to Versailles toppled into the Seine, and the
children were drowned. A third child, her dream of comfort and
consolation, died at birth.
It was in an attempt to forget this last tragedy that she brought her
school to New York. That same Otto Kahn, who had made Pavlova’s first
visit to America possible, came to her rescue and footed the bills for a
four weeks’ season at the old Century Theatre, which stood in lower
Central Park West, where Brother Augustin held forth with Greek drama
and biblical verse, and Isadora and the “children” danced. The public
remained away. There was a press appeal for funds with which to
liquidate a $12,000 indebtedness and to provide funds with which to get
Isadora and the “children” to Italy. Another distinguished art patron,
the late Frank Vanderlip, and others came to the rescue with cash and
note endorsements. Thus, once again, Isadora put her native America
behind her in disgust. Her parting shot at the country of her birth was
a blast at Americans living and battening in luxury on their war profits
while Europe bled.
Her 1916-1917 visit to her home shores was no more auspicious than the
others. She danced, as I have said, at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Lover Lohengrin gave her a magnificent party following the performance,
a soirée that ended in an expensive and scandalous debácle. Isadora sold
her jewels piece by piece, and succeeded in establishing her school at
Long Beach. Quickly the money disappeared, and Gordon Selfridge, the
London equivalent of Marshall Field, paid her passage to London. The
“children,” now grown up into the “Isadorables,” remained behind to make
themselves American careers.
It was after Isadora’s departure for London, in 1917, that I undertook
to help the six “children” to attain their desires. They were a
half-dozen of the loveliest children imaginable.
For their American debut as an independent group, we first engaged
George Copeland, specialist in the works of contemporary French and
Spanish composers, and an artist of the first rank, and later, Beryl
Rubinstein, American composer and teacher, and until his recent death
director of the Cleveland Institute, as accompanists.
Smart New York had adopted the “Isadorables.” The fashionable magazines
had taken them up and had spread Dr. Arnold Genthe’s photographs of
Anna, Lysel, Gretl, Thérése, Erica, and Irma over their pages. Frank
Crowninshield championed them. During a hot June they sold out a
half-dozen performances in Carnegie Hall, which takes some doing at any
time of the year. Following a successful tour, I presented them at the
Metropolitan Opera House, this time with an orchestra.
The girls, charming, delightful, fresh, were a direct product of
Isadora, for which she used herself as model. Theirs was a reproduction
of Isadora’s art. One of them functions actively today, Maria Thérésa,
giving out a fine, strong, sturdy reflection of Isadora’s training and
ideas. Basically, as an individualist, Isadora was a solo artist. She
made no great effort to build up group dances into a series of linked
dances that result in some form of dance drama. Such mass dances as she
arranged were in imitation of the Greek chorus. Broken down into simple
elements, they were nothing more than lines of girls, all of whom
repeated the same simple movements. Her own creative gifts, which were
magnificent, found their expression in her solo dances, and it is in
this respect Maria Thérésa splendidly carries on.
It was in Germany that Isadora’s ideas made the deepest impression, and
any legacy she may have left finds its expression in the “free” school
that comes out of that country. If she had no abiding place, Berlin saw
more of her when she was at her best than any other country. It was
there that the term “goddess” was attached to her. Even the sick were
brought to see the performances of the _Göttliche Heilige_ Isadora in
order that they might be cured. The serious German writers were greatly
impressed. Isadora expressed it thus: “The weekly receptions at our
house in Victoria Strasse became the centre of artistic and literary
enthusiasm. Here took place many learned discussions on the dance as a
fine art; for the Germans take every art discussion most seriously, and
give the deepest consideration to it. My dance became the subject of
violent and even fiery debates. Whole columns constantly appeared in all
the papers, sometimes hailing me as a genius of a newly discovered art,
sometimes denouncing me as a destroyer of the real classic dance, i.e.,
the ballet.”
In _Impresario_ I have written about Isadora’s last American tour,
under my management, in all its more lurid aspects. In February, 1923,
she returned to France, and in 1924 went back to Russia with her
poet-husband, Essenin. Not long after, Essenin hanged himself to a hook
on the wall of his room in the Hotel Angleterre, in Leningrad. In 1927,
Isadora returned to Paris, and on 8th July gave her last concert at the
Théâtre Mogador.
Her last conversation with me in Paris was of the “children.” This time
she was referring to the pupils at her school in Russia. As I listened,
I could only feel that these “children” were to her but symbols of her
own two children wastefully drowned in the Seine. She wanted me to bring
her Russian “children” to America--a visit, as it were, of her own
spirit to her native land which had refused to accept her.
I promised.
In 1928, I was able to fulfill that promise by bringing fifteen of them,
chosen by Irma of the “Isadorables,” for a tour. Irma came with them,
presided over them; brought them back for a second tour. Irma now lives
quietly in the Connecticut countryside.
A twisting scarf, caught in the wheels of the car in which she was
riding, ended the earthly career of a misunderstood American genius. Was
the end deliberate? I only know she longed to die, she with the
passionate love for life.
A tremendous freedom-loving American, she may, I feel, be called the
first American dancer, in the sense that she brought a new style and a
new manner, away from the accepted form of ballet. I, for one, believe
that Isadora did more than any one else I know for the dance in America,
and received less gratitude and recognition for her contribution.
Now that she is dead, I feel for her exactly as I always felt. Though we
do not love our friends for one particular quality but as a whole, there
is usually an element which, while the friend is still with us,
especially appeals to us, and the memory of which we most cherish when
he or she is absent for a while or for ever. For me that element in
Isadora was and is the extreme gentleness hidden in her heart of hearts.
Those who knew her only as a combative spirit in the world of the dance
may be astonished at that statement. Yet I hold that gentleness to have
been absolutely fundamental in her character and that not a few of her
troubles were attributable to continuing and exasperating outrage of it.
There was a superficial side of her that may seem to contradict that
gentleness. She had exasperating eccentricities, stupid affectations.
Her childishness and capriciousness, her downright wilfulness could
drive me nearly to distraction. She could, and often did waste infinite
hours of my time, and her own and others’ money. She lacked discipline
in herself, her life, her work. She could have been less arbitrary in
many things, including her condemnation of ballet. On the other hand,
she had a quality of communication rare indeed in the theatre. Her
faults were, as I have said, superficialities. At base she was a
genuinely gentle person.
Just because she was gentle she could, her sympathy being aroused, exert
herself to an extraordinary degree and after no gentle fashion on behalf
of those things in which she believed, and of others, particularly
artists. For the same reason, she frequently could not properly exert
herself on her own behalf. She was weary (weary unto death at the last)
when that spring of gentleness, in which some of her best work had its
origin, failed her. Hers was an intellect, in my opinion, of wider
range, of sterner mettle, of tougher integrity, of more persistent
energy and of more imaginative quality than those of her detractors. I
hold because of Isadora’s innate gentleness, and the fact it was so
fundamental a thing in her, being exasperated both by the events of her
life and by her intellect’s persistent commentary upon those events, she
became towards the close so utterly weary and exhausted that any
capacity for a rational synthesis was lost. Hers was a romantic nature,
and a rational synthesis usually proceeds by the tenderness of the heart
working upon the intellect to urge upon it some suspension of judgment,
and not by the hardness of the intellect working upon the heart and
bidding it, in reason’s name, to cease expecting to find things other
and better than they are: the hearts of other humans more tender and
their heads one whit less dense.
A few words on what has been criticized by many as her “free living.”
Today an unthinking license prevails in many circles. If Isadora’s life
displayed “license” in this sense, it certainly was not an unthinking
“license.” Isadora strongly held theories about personal freedom of
thought and behavior and dared to act according to them. Those theories
may be wrong. That is a problem I have not here space to discuss. But
that, believing in those theories, Isadora acted upon them and did not
reserve them merely for academic discussion, I hold to her eternal
credit. That Isadora did others and herself damage in the process must
be admitted. But I have observed that many “conventional” persons do
others and themselves a great deal of damage without displaying a tithe
of Isadora’s integrity and courage, since they act crudely upon theories
in which they no longer in their heart of hearts believe, or contradict
their theories in captious action for lack of courage to discover new
theories. Let us not forget that “few know the use of life before ’tis
past.” Isadora died before she was fifty, endowed with a temperament
little calculated to make easy the paths of true wisdom, paths which, I
venture to suggest, often contradict the stereotyped notions of them
entertained by those who are unable or unwilling too closely to consider
the matter. To her personal tragedies must be added the depressing
influence of the unfathomable indifference of her countrymen to art and
artists and to herself.
I take it I have said enough to indicate that such “conventional”
solutions as may occur to some readers were inadmissible in Isadora’s
case, just as inadmissible in fact as they would be in a novel by
Dostoievsky. In any event, she paid to the end for any mistakes she may
have made, and it is not our duty to sit in judgment on her, whether one
theoretically disapproves of her use of what sometimes has been called
the “escape-road.” It is one’s duty to understand, and by understanding
to forgive.
I have heard it remarked that there was a streak of cruelty in Isadora.
Gentle natures of acute sensibility and strong intelligence, long
exasperated by indifference and opposition to what they hold of
sovereign importance in art and life, are apt to turn cruel and even
vindictive at times. I never witnessed her alleged cruelty or
vindictiveness to any one and I will not go on hearsay.
One of the great satisfactions of a long career in the world of dance is
that I was able to be of some service to this neglected genius. I can
think of no finer summation of her than the words of that strange, aloof
genius of the British theatre, Gordon Craig, when he wrote:
“ ... She springs from the Great Race----
From the line of Sovereigns, who
Maintain the world and make it move,
From the Courageous Giants,
The Guardians of Beauty----
The Solver of all Riddles.”
_B. COLORED LIGHTS AND FLUTTERING SCARVES_
It is a far cry from Isadora to another American dancer, whose
“children” I toured across America and back, in 1926.
Loie Fuller, “the lady with the scarf,” was at that period championed by
her friend, the late Queen Marie of Roumania, when that royal lady
embarked upon a lecture tour of the United States that same year. Loie
Fuller was loosely attached to the royal entourage.
“La Loie” had established a school in Paris, and wanted to exhibit the
prowess of her pupils. I was inveigled into bringing them quite as much
by Loie Fuller’s dynamic, active manager, Mrs. Bloch, as I was by the
aging dancer herself.
Loie Fuller was something of a phenomenon. Born in Chicago, in 1862, her
first fame was gained as a child temperance lecturer in the mid-west.
According to her biographers, she took some dancing lessons, but found
the lessons too difficult and abandoned them after a short time.
Switching to the study of voice, she gave up her youthful Carrie Nation
attacks on alcohol and obtained a singing part in a stage production. As
the story goes, while she was appearing in this stage role, a friend in
India made her a gift of a long scarf of very light weight silk. Playing
with her present, watching it float through the air with the greatest of
ease, she found her vocation. It was as simple as that.
Here was something new: a dance in which a great amount of fluttering
silk was kept aloft, the while upon it there constantly played
variegated lights, projected by what in the profession is known as a
“color-wheel,” a circular device containing various colored media,
rotated before an arc-lamp. Thus was born the _Serpentine Dance_.
Here was no struggle on the part of the artist to find her medium of
expression, no seeking for a new technique or slogging effort perfecting
an old one; no hours spent sweating at the _barre_; no heartache. Loie
Fuller was not concerned with steps, with style, with a unique and
individual quality of movement. Loie Fuller had a scarf. Loie Fuller had
an instantaneous success. Her career was made on the _Serpentine Dance_.
But she also had one other inspiration. A “sunrise” stage effect that
she used was mistaken by the audience as a dance of fire, as the light
rays touched her flowing scarves and draperies. “La Loie” was not one to
miss a chance. She gathered her electricians about her--for in the early
days of stage lighting with electricity nothing was impossible. The
revolving “light-wheels” were increased in number, as were the
spot-lights.
Since all this happened in Paris, Loie Fuller’s _Danse de Feu_ became to
France what the _Serpentine Dance_ had been to America. The French
adopted her as their own. Widely loved, she became “La Loie.” Her stage
arrangements were often startling; they could not always be called
dancing. The arms and feet of her “children” were always subordinated to
the movements of the draperies. So tricky was the business of the
draperies that it is said that none of her designers or seamstresses
were permitted to know more than a small part of their actual
construction.
Her imitators were many, with the result that, for a time, the musical
comedy stages of both Europe and America had an inundation of
illuminated dry goods. It was the “children” who kept “La Loie’s”
serpentine and fire dances alive.
When Loie Fuller suggested the American tour, the idea interested me
because of the novelty involved. It was, incidentally, my only
“incognito” tour. I accepted an invitation from Queen Marie of Roumania
to visit her at the Royal Palace in Bucharest to discuss the proposed
tour with Her Majesty and Loie Fuller, who was a close friend and
confidante of the Queen. The tour was in the interest of one of the
Queen’s pet charities and, moreover, it had diplomatic overtones.
Naturally, under the circumstances, no managerial auspices were credited
on the programmes.
In addition to the purely Loie Fuller characteristic numbers, the Loie
Fuller Dancers, on this tour, offered _Some Dance Scenes from the Fairy
Tale of Her Majesty Queen Marie’s_ “_The Lilly of Life_,” as _presented
at the Grand Opera, Paris_.
Apart from this, the “children” had all the old Loie Fuller tricks, and
a few new ones. Their dance vocabulary was far from extensive, but there
was a pleasant enough quality about it.
When I made the tour, in association with Queen Marie, the “children”
were, to put it kindly, on the mature side; and it took a great deal of
their dramatic, vital and dynamic managers drive to keep the silks
fluttering aloft. Mrs. Bloch was a remarkable woman, who had handled the
“children” for Loie Fuller a long time.
The tour of the Loie Fuller Dancers is not one of my proudest
achievements; but I know the gay colours, the changing lights brought
pleasure to many.
Years later, on a visit to Paris, I received a telephone call from Mrs.
Bloch, requesting an appointment. It was arranged for the following day.
At the appointed hour I went down to the foyer of the Hotel Meurice to
await her coming.
Some minutes later, I observed an elderly lady, supported by a cane,
enter and cross the foyer, walking slowly as the aged do, and using her
cane noticeably to assist her. I paid scant attention until, from where
I sat near the desk, I overheard her explaining to the _conciérge_ that
she had a “rendezvous” with Monsieur Hurok.
I simply did not recognize the human dynamo of 1926. A quarter of a
century had slipped by. Much of that time, she told me, she had spent in
Africa. Despite the change in her physical appearance, despite the toll
of the years, the flame still burned within her.
Her mission? To try to get me to bring the Loie Fuller Dancers to
America for another tour.
As I observed the changes that had taken place in their manager, I could
not help visualizing what twenty-five years must have done to the
“children.”
C. _A TEUTONIC PRIESTESS_
My dance associations in what I may call my “early middle” period led me
into excursions far afield from that form of dance expression which is
to me the most completely satisfying form of theatrical experience.
For the sake of the record, let us set the date of this period as 1930.
Surely there have been few in the history of the dance whose approach to
the medium was so foreign to and so different from the classical ballet,
where lie my deepest interests and my chief delight, than that Teutonic
priestess, Mary Wigman.
When I brought Wigman to America, shortly after the Great Crash, she was
no longer young. She had been born in Germany, in 1886, and could hardly
have been called a “baby ballerina.” Originally a pupil of Emile Jacques
Dalcroze, the father of Eurhythmics, whose pupils in a “demonstration”
had kindled Wigman’s interest in the dance, she did not remain long with
him. Dalcroze himself, at this stage, apparently had little interest in
dancing. However, he established certain methods which proved of
interest to certain gifted dancers. The Dalcroze basis was musical, and
his chief function was to foster a feeling for music in his pupils.
Music frustrated, handicapped, restricted her, Wigman felt.
Individualist that she was, she left her teacher in order to work out
her own dance destiny. There followed a period of some uncertainty on
her part, and, for a time, she became a pupil of the Hungarian teacher,
Rudolf von Laban, who laid down in pre-war Germany the foundations for
modern dance. Unlike Isadora Duncan, Laban had no aversion to ballet. As
a matter of fact, he liked much of it, was influenced by it; was
impressed by the Diaghileff Ballet, was friendly with Diaghileff, and
became an intimate of Michel Fokine. His later violent reaction from
ballet was certainly not based on lack of knowledge of it.
At the Laban school, Wigman collaborated with him, and having a streak
of choreographic genius, was able to put some of Laban’s theories into
practical form. However, Mary Wigman’s forceful personality was greater
than any school and, in 1919, she broke away from Laban, and formed a
school of her own. She abandoned what were to her the restricting
influences of formal music, as Isadora had abandoned clothing
restrictions. A dancer of tremendous power, like Isadora she had an
overwhelming personality. Again, like Isadora, all this had a tendency
to make her pupils only pale imitations of herself. Wigman’s public
career, a secondary matter with her, actually began in Dresden, in 1918,
with her _Seven Dances of Life_. Dresden was her temple. Here the
Teutonic Priestess of the Dance presided over her personal religion of
movement. German girls were joined by Americans. The disciples grew in
number and spread out through Germany like proselyting missionaries.
Wigman groups radiated the gospel until one found schools and factories
and societies turning out _en masse_ for “demonstrations” of the Wigman
method. I have said that Wigman found music a deterrent to her method.
On the other hand, one of the most important features of her “school”
was a serious, thorough, Germanic research into the question of what she
felt was the proper musical accompaniment for dance. Her pupils learned
to devise their own rhythmic accompaniment. In her show pieces, at any
rate, Wigman’s technique was to have the music for the dance composed
simultaneously with the creation of the dance movements--certainly a new
type of collaboration.
In addition to forming a “_schule_,” where great emphasis was laid on
“_spannungen_,” perhaps best explained as tensions and relaxations, she
also created a philosophical cult in that strange hot-house that was
pre-war Germany, with an intellectualized approach to sex.
I had known about her and her work long before I signed a contract with
her for the 1930-1931 season. Pavlova had talked to me about her and had
aroused my curiosity and interest; but I was unable to imagine what
might be America’s reaction to her. I was turning the idea over in my
mind, when there appeared at my office,--in those days in West
Forty-second Street, overlooking Bryant Park,--a young and earnest
enthusiast to plead her case. His name was John Martin.
In an earlier chapter I have pointed out the low estate of dance
criticism of that period. In its wisdom, the _New York Times_ had,
shortly before the period of which I now write, taken tentative steps to
correct this deficiency by creating a dance department on the paper,
with John Martin engaged to report the dance. Martin’s earnest and
special pleading on behalf of Mary Wigman moved me and, as always, eager
to experiment and present something new and fresh, I decided to cast the
die.
The effect of my first announcement of her coming was a bit
disconcerting. The first to react were the devotees. There was a
fanaticism about them that was disturbing. It is one thing to have a
handful of vociferous idolaters, and quite another to be able to fill
houses with paying customers night after night.