April 1913: the world enjoys the prosperity of modern days. Though the Great War is only a matter of months away, Europe blossoms with invention, artistic achievement, and social change. With little sense that a world conflict lies just around the corner, the growing middle class savors the feelings of peace, prosperity, and optimism.

Isadora Duncan has situated herself at the center of it all. Born in California, she convinced her mother and three siblings to join her in Europe at the age of twenty-two: the year was 1899, eve of the twentieth century. The Duncans arrived in London the same year the RMS Oceanic made its maiden voyage and Marconi transmitted a radio signal over the English Channel.

In a time when dancers laced themselves into corsets and audiences worshiped the rigid precision of ballet, Isadora made her life’s work a theory of dance which claimed that if the ideal of beauty could be found in nature, then the ideal dancer moved naturally. At twenty-six she gave a lecture in Berlin called “The Dance of the Future,” which derided the “deformed” muscles and bones of the world’s finest ballet dancers and decried the tragedy of restriction at the core of the genre. She urged her growing audience to consider the art and ideas of the Greeks, whose concept of Platonic form underscored Isadora’s assertion that art must strive for the emulation of nature. Her dances, appearing outwardly to be simple waltzes and mazurkas, sought to capture in their ease of movement the vital, visceral expression of beauty’s purest form.

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Isadora was an instant sensation, reveling in sensational press, and she rode her reputation to glory. Barred from some theaters for performing in a tunic and bare feet, her intuitive, innovative skill found her an early audience in Vienna and Paris, London, Moscow, and New York.

Her acquisition of lovers was equally prolific, and quietly remarked upon in polite society. In 1906 she gave birth to Deirdre. The father was Gordon Craig, a director and stage designer she called Ted; four years later, she gave birth to her son, Patrick, with Paris Singer. A relentless capitalist, Paris was buoyed by the Singer sewing machine fortune yet haunted by his father’s success, a reminder of which could be found advertising nine hundred stitches a minute in every shopwindow in the modern world. Paris offered Isadora the possibility of reconciling her ambitious ideas with her fiscal reality, and although their partnership was marked with explosive arguments, they were happy together in the years after Patrick was born.

In the early days of the twentieth century Paris and Isadora gallivanted around Europe, children in tow. She worked tirelessly, giving performances and lectures and throwing parties that went on for weeks. With her long-suffering sister, Elizabeth, she created her first schools, which would instruct a generation of dancers in the type of natural movement that grew into modern dance. With that, the family took on the arduous task of building an artistic movement.

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April 1913: Isadora Duncan is at the height of her power. She finds herself teetering on the cusp of a great change, both in her own life and in the world. An energy builds around her, a feeling that fascinates her and informs her work. She anticipates that an artistic revolution will emerge from that energy, and that she will stand at the forefront of an era devoted to the sublime.

Unfortunately, she is mistaken.