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Isadora Duncan and Edward Gordon Craig', Mime Journal, Vol Edinburgh Research Explorer The dancer and the ubermarionette Citation for published version: Taxidou, O 2017, 'The dancer and the ubermarionette: Isadora Duncan and Edward Gordon Craig', Mime Journal, vol. 26, pp. 6-16. https://doi.org/10.5642/mimejournal.20172601.03 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.5642/mimejournal.20172601.03 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Published In: Mime Journal General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 04. Oct. 2021 Mime Journal Volume 26 Action, Scene, and Voice: 21st-Century Article 3 Dialogues with Edward Gordon Craig 2-28-2017 The aD ncer And The bÜ ermarionette: Isadora Duncan and Edward Gordon Craig Olga Taxidou The University of Edinburgh Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/mimejournal Part of the Acting Commons, Dance Commons, Other Theatre and Performance Studies Commons, and the Theatre History Commons Recommended Citation Taxidou, Olga (2017) "The aD ncer And The Übermarionette: Isadora Duncan and Edward Gordon Craig," Mime Journal: Vol. 26, Article 3. DOI: 10.5642/mimejournal.20172601.03 Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/mimejournal/vol26/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Claremont at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mime Journal by an authorized editor of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ACTION, SCENE, AND VOICE: 21ST-CENTURY DIALOGUES WITH EDWARD GORDON CRAIG 6 scholarship.claremont.edu/mimejournal • Mime Journal February 2017. pp. 6–16. ISSN 2327–5650 online The Dancer and the Übermarionette: Isadora Duncan and Edward Gordon Craig Olga Taxidou For hours I would stand completely still, my two hands folded between my breasts, covering the solar plexus. My mother often became alarmed to see me remain for such long intervals quite motionless as if in a trance—but I was searching, and finally discovered the central spring of all movement, the crater of motor power. (Duncan, My Life 58) The above quotation from Isadora Duncan’s autobiography brings together some of the concepts explored in this essay: movement and stasis, the human body and the automaton, potentiality and impossibility, presence and absence—all concepts that I propose to explore through the intricate relationships between Duncan’s dancer and Edward Gordon Craig’s übermarionette. Craig’s and Duncan’s conceptions of the performing body have sometimes been read in opposition: complete absence of physical and psychological embodiment at one extreme and absolute expressiveness at the other. Where Craig’s übermarionette might be read as a mechanized puppet or an automaton, Duncan’s experiments could be said to lack technique or even form. Arnold Rood’s claim that “Craig expected the actor to be an Isadora Duncan with discipline” comes to mind (Rood xvii). However, throughout this essay I will try to problematize these binaries and the ways that they have respectively been read as undiluted anti-theatricality at one extreme, and as pure theatricality at the other. Reading them as folding into each other—in addressing similar issues, and in the ways they present themselves both as ancient and modern—may again help us to see them as doubles rather than opposites. On March 16, 1900, at the New Gallery, Duncan made her London début orchestrated by the gallery owner Charles Hallé. The guest list reads like a roll call of leading British writers, artists and academics— all of whom were to play a crucial role in that significant transitional period from aestheticism to modernism—but Hallé’s coup was to invite the classicist Jane Harrison to recite extracts from Homer and Theocritus to accompany Duncan’s dance. A few nights later Duncan was taken to Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre to watch him perform in the celebrated production of The Bells. There she also watched a performance of Cymbeline with Ellen Terry, a production that included Terry’s son Edward Gordon Craig. Craig and Duncan’s tumultuous relationship has been well documented. I would like to analyze these two events as emblematic of both the historical contexts that helped to create these two defining figures of modernist performance and of the complex, often contradictory and conflicting ways in which they influenced each other. In hindsight, the pairing of Harrison and Duncan, two formidable women, seems too good to be true, utterly staged and theatrical, acting as a constellation of a moment in time; a moment that brings together the visionary scholar/theorist and the equally visionary dancer/practitioner. The presence of © 2017 Olga Taxidou. This open access article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License which allows distribution and copying of the article for non-commercial purposes and inclusion in a collective work, provided the article is not altered or modified, and the original author and source are credited. TAXIDOU · THE DANCER AND THE ÜBERMARIONETTE: ISADORA DUNCAN AND EDWARD GORDON CRAIG 7 Andrew Lang, the pioneer of the so-called British School of Anthropology is also crucial. He was part of a group of charismatic and radical thinkers, who according to Robert Ackerman, “made possible the work of Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists” (Ackerman 29–30). This was a project that merged classicism, sociology and anthropology in a heady cocktail that proposed an evolutionary model for the study of human culture. Opposed to reading myth and religion simply through philology and narrative, the principles of ritual and rhythm became central. Indeed, it was these very principles that seem to have been embodied by Duncan’s dance and punctuated by Harrison’s text. This fusion of textuality, visuality, and movement through the figures of the two iconic women brings together the scholarly and the aesthetic in a manner that at once pays homage to the past and points towards the future. This “past” for both scholar and dancer is, of course, Greek. In the words of a reviewer of that emblematic performance: Ropes of roses wind about the body and the feet are shod with golden sandals. Not a single stock step is taken, and the whole dance seems like something that might have happened in ancient Greece … Most of the time she has spent in the British Museum, analyzing and memorizing the steps and attitudes of the classic nymphs of antique art. Her work is thus the result of the application of poetic intelligence to the art of dancing, and her aim is to study nature and the classics and abjure the conventional. (quoted in Blair 35) Duncan’s art at this stage was, of course, fueled more by “poetic intelligence” than museum-style authenticity. However, this “Greek” aspect of her quest becomes a type of shorthand throughout her life, work, and writing. From her account of her own family drama (“Like the family of the Atrides,” she claimed), through her early training in the Delsarte system, to her later stay in and engagement with modern and ancient Greece, this Hellenic dimension of her art and her identity as a dancer, is at once historicizing but also radical (Blair 1). It helps to “free” her as a dancing woman, but also to ground her in a tradition that she sees as ancient. It fuses romance, archaeology, travel narratives, philosophy, and gender politics in a gesture that could have come straight from her choreographies, remaining elusive and contradictory, almost impossible to notate. I am less concerned with defining the type of Hellenism that informed Duncan’s work—its philological or archaeological correctness or accuracy—and more interested in the “license” that her view of the “Greeks” gave her. This attitude towards the “Greeks” allowed her to radically rework her medium and prepare the ground for the revolution of modern dance (her aphorism “do not call me a dancer” comes to mind). And this “license” could be read as at once part of the “New Woman” movement in the performing arts of the period—where the female performer is given presence and validated, changing the discourses of representation in the process—but also part and parcel of the period’s anthropological and philosophical take on performance. Duncan’s presence in London was possibly more successful than it had been in New York as there was already a context that could accommodate her work. The staging of Greek plays at Oxford and Cambridge, E. W. Godwin’s productions influenced primarily by Schliemann’s archaeological discoveries, and the work of the Cambridge scholars themselves provided Duncan’s experiments with an aesthetic context and with a critical language that could engage with her work. More often than not, that language had recourse to models of Hellenic art and sensibility, that provided both the authenticating stamp of classicism, but also and crucially created an evolutionary trajectory that could conceptualize her work, making it simultaneously “Greek” and modern. This “license” that Duncan took with the Greeks is in many ways characteristic and possibly pioneering of a broader modernist stance or gestus towards archaeology. Rather than approaching the “Greeks” as part of a nostalgic quest for unity and eternal beauty, this turn towards the past allows for formal experimentation and risk.
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