Isadora
Amelia Gray
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Isadora Duncan, accompanied by her mother and three siblings, once moved to the mountains outside Athens. The family wore flowing ancient Greek tunics and leather sandals, built a stone temple and began sacrificing cockerels to the gods. The locals were, understandably, alarmed by this hammy enactment of Greek roots. And the episode was hardly a one-off. Throughout her life and work, Isadora Duncan played with the lines that separate authenticity from performance, dancing in the space in between. Rejecting the discipline of classical dance – a “school of affected grace and toe walking” – Isadora created a new form based on staging and adapting natural gestures, swapping ballet’s restrictive costumes and techniques for a choreography of ecstatic liberation that laid the foundation for modern dance. Duncan’s intuitively gestural, radically unrestrained displays – meticulously rehearsed and executed, of course – extended to her extravagant persona.
This new book by Amelia Gray, a fictional account of the real events Duncan experienced between 1913 and 1914, excels at examining the performed life. The novel comprises chapters narrated in the first person by Isadora, with third-person interludes by her lover Paris, sister Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s partner Max. Isadora’s sections, unsurprisingly, compel most. Gray has found a singular, strange voice for Isadora. Infused with an exquisite sensitivity to her surroundings, she is a perspicacious narrator, endlessly curious about the qualities of the people, ghosts and inert objects in her world. If this vision occasionally leads to ponderous, slow descriptions of miscellaneous mundanities, at its best, it builds to a sublime lyricism, that charts both personal and social pain.
The novel opens with the harrowing accident in which Isadora’s two children, Deirdre and Patrick, drowned along with their nanny when their car rolled downhill into the Seine. The cast of characters mourn in different ways. Paris hardens into pragmatism, and develops an obsession with a painting of Napoleon’s son, who died aged four; he hopes Napoleon Charles might mentor his dead children in the afterlife. Elizabeth pores over gruesome news stories, equally repelled and fascinated by “the simple realization that her entire world could be flung from its axis, that she could find herself stunned into a new state of being”. Max concerns himself with establishing the first Isadora Duncan dance school in Germany. And Isadora lives her grief in flamboyantly vulnerable ways, communing with her children’s spirits, eating their ashes, and dreaming of staging classical Greek plays that straddle the divide between real and fictional loss; in one fantasy, the audience are so affected by the actress’s dramatised bereavement that they ‘rush the stage’ and pull her down.
Gray unleashes great masses of creative license, but she has clearly thoroughly researched Duncan and her age. The language used is of the era, rigorously shorn of anachronisms, and perhaps most interestingly, Gray is careful to invoke contemporaneous, primarily pre-Freudian models for understanding the psychology of grief and human development; notions of fate, of superstition and mythology become structuring forces. Isadora is about eighty pages too long, and sometimes uneven, but it is an accomplished work. The novel impresses most in its captivating portrait of an astonishingly unconventional woman who sought control of her art, her circumstances and her flesh: “she was cruel with the power she held over her own body, the despotic ruler of a nation constantly on the brink of civil war”.
Words: Gill Moore
