cover image The Search for Isadora: The Legend and Legacy of Isadora Duncan

The Search for Isadora: The Legend and Legacy of Isadora Duncan

Lillian Loewenthal. Princeton Book Company Publishers, $26.95 (225pp) ISBN 978-0-87127-179-2

The myths of Isadora Duncan, some of which she helped to popularize, have survived the decades better than the pioneering dances she composed and performed. For, with few traces of her modernist work notated or preserved on film, Duncan, who freed dancing from balletic constraints, lives on largely in accounts of her dramatic bohemian life--artistically, politically, and sexually eventful. Here Loewenthal, having spent 30 years in pursuit of her erratic subject, calls upon various sources: witnesses of Duncan's work, followers of her creed in dance, archives and research conducted in France, where the American-born dancer found a more sympathetic climate than at home. In this book, her first, Loewenthal addresses Duncan's contributions to dance; discusses Duncan's use of music; her ideas about stagecraft, costume and dance education; her reception in the press and by colleagues; and the fulfillment of her work by dancers and students, who are presented in a series of profiles. The result is a useful chronicle offering the general reader a range of pertinent information on a 20th-century luminary. Loewenthal served as archivist for the Isadora Duncan Centennial in 1977. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)