Durante was due to dance in the triple bill but - frustratingly - was injured and could not dance for any of the week's performances; however she was able to take a bow with her company which must have been bittersweet but good that she was there to acknowledge the ovation for the relatively short but impressive programme.
Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco in 1877 and was encouraged to dance from an early age, but was frustrated by both the constrained ballet training and the accepted professional dancing in music halls. She moved with her mother and siblings to London aged 21 and started to dance for wealthy clients' salons to make money, usually dancing in flowing draped shifts to a solo pianist, using her own free-form style of movement based on the Grecian images found at the British Museum. A later move to Paris gave her further inspiration by her visits to the Louvre. She became the talk of European dance with her tours and artists of the calibre of Rodin attempted to capture her unique movement in art.
Isadora once mused that she would like to be remembered for her breakthroughs in modern dance but would probably be remembered for her love life and so it transpired: unconventional relationships which resulted in two children by theatre designer Gordon Craig and American businessman Paris Singer, the subsequent tragedy of the children drowning when their car toppled into the Seine, her move to Soviet Russia in 1921 when the Russians offered to build her schools which led to a violent year-long marriage to the poet Sergei Yesenin who later shot himself, the mid-1920s found her aimlessly drifting from hotel to hotel on the Riviera one step ahead of her creditors until her now-legendary death on the 14th September 1927 when her trailing silk scarf caught in the spokes of the sports car she was being driven in and broke her neck.
The blazing individuality of her life - and death - means she was ever-present throughout the 20th Century: her autobiography MY LIFE was published the year she died and has been followed by countless biographies - I have, um, six!, in Ken Russell's tv film and Karel Reisz' big screen biopic with Vanessa Redgrave and the two Royal Ballet productions featuring her. Isadora was particularly lauded in the 1960s and 70s when her proto-feminism made her an icon.
ISADORA NOW went one step further and Durante recreated with Duncan expert Barbara Kane one of Isadora's own ballets: DANCE OF THE FURIES danced to a passage from Gluck's "Orfeo ed Eurydice" was originally danced by Isadora in 1911 as a solo but was later expanded to include a number of her pupils. In this staging it was wonderfully atmospheric, lit by shafts of light and burning flames in a large urn as five dancers ran, cowered, threatened and whirled around the urn; it was haunting and wonderfully vivid despite lasting only 10 minutes.
The dancer Begona Cao had no time to rest after that as, after a few moments, she appeared lying on the stage in a pink diaphanous shift to dance - in place of Viviana Durante - Frederick Ashton's short but beautiful FIVE BRAHMS WALTZES IN THE MANNER OF ISADORA DUNCAN which he choreographed in 1976.
Sir Fred had seen Isadora dance in 1921 when he was a teenager and had been totally captivated by her unique quality - he remembered a run she did across the stage when he felt "she left herself behind" - so when called upon to do a short piece for the Ballet Rambert's 50th Birthday gala he choreographed FIVE BRAHMS WALTZES for the wonderful Lynn Seymour. His Isadora runs, skips, pivots, and strikes attitudes, all the time with her arms caressing the air and the music, when she is not whirling a silk scarf behind her or fluttering silk pink petals around her for her final waltz. I suspect Durante would have made it more of a 'moment' but Begona Cao was captivating.
The final piece was called UNDA and was choreographed by Joy Alpuerto Ritter who also joined the indefatigable Bergona Cao and four other dancers in a Duncanesque work which melded her techniques to a more Akram Khan style. It was performed by cellist and vocalist Lih Qun Hong who sat at the side of the stage and provided the other-wordly score for them to dance to.
Again the urns were featured including a lengthy phrase where the dancers soaked their long hair in the water-filled ones and threw their heads back amid a spray of droplets which made a great visual. At 40 minutes it did eventually outstay it's welcome but certainly proved that Isadora lives on in modern dance techniques.
Two quotes from Isadora to close:
"I hate dancing; I am an expressioniste of beauty. I use my body as my medium, just as the writer uses his words. Do not call me a dancer."
"No pose, no movement, no gesture is beautiful in itself. Every movement is beautiful only when it is expressed truthfully and sincerely. The phrase "the beauty of the line" is - by itself - absurd. A line is beautiful only when it is directed towards a beautiful end."I think she would have approved of the truth in Viviana Durante's company.
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