Isadora Duncan: How a Great Dancer Changed the World and Why Her Own Scarf Killed Her

September 1927. Nice. A warm evening on the Promenade des Anglais. A stout, but still majestic woman is sitting in an open-top Amilcar sports car. Around her neck is a long red silk scarf painted with yellow birds. She waves goodbye to those seeing her off. According to legend, her last words were: "Goodbye, my friends! I am going to glory."

The driver depresses the clutch. The car lurches forward. And that's all.

The end.

The heavy silk got wound around the spokes of the rear wheel. The jerk was so strong that her neck broke instantly, and her body was thrown onto the cobblestones. Isadora Duncan died. Absurd. Terrible. Too theatrical even for her life, which was filled to the brim with drama.

Barefoot on the broken glass of traditions

Have you ever had to wear shoes that deform your bones? Classical ballet of the late nineteenth century was exactly like that - impeccably beautiful on the outside and physically agonizing on the inside. Stiff corsets that cut off your breath. Pointe shoes that rubbed your toes into a bloody mess. Strictly learned, mechanical movements. One step to the right, one step to the left - execution by ballet critics.

Isadora hated it all. She called pointe shoes orthopedic instruments of torture.

She wanted to dance the way a person breathes. The way trees bend in the wind. The way waves crash on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, near which she grew up in San Francisco. And she took off her shoes. Literally. She went on stage barefoot, dressed only in a light, translucent Greek tunic. No tights. No scenery.

The audience initially froze in outrage - it bordered on indecency. And then erupted in applause. Isadora didn't just dance. She lived every note on stage. Her dance was improvisation, pure emotion, breaking out of the cage of Victorian morality. This is how what we call modern dance today was born.

The curse of motors and the dark waters of the Seine

We remember her death because of the cinematic nature of the scarf moment. But the truth is that cars had become her personal curse long before that evening in Nice.

Paris. April 1913. Isadora is at the peak of her fame. She has two beautiful children - seven-year-old Deirdre and three-year-old Patrick. On that rainy day, they were riding in a car with their nanny. The engine suddenly stalled on the embankment. The driver got out to start the car with a crank handle, but forgot to put it in the hand brake.

The heavy car rolled downhill. Straight into the cold, muddy waters of the Seine.

The children and the nanny drowned. How does a mother survive this? Honestly, she doesn't. She did not survive. That Isadora who danced spring and joy died on the riverbank with them. Only the shell remained. A woman who kept moving because only in dance did the pain become even slightly bearable.

Hooligan and Goddess

And then there was Russia. Hungry, cold, post-revolutionary Moscow in 1921. The Soviet government invited her to open a dance school. She agreed, hoping to find a new, free world. Instead, she found Sergei Yesenin.

He is twenty-six. She is forty-four. He is a golden-haired peasant poet and brawler. She is a world star, tired of life. It was a disaster from the first second. They did not speak each other's languages. At all. He knew a couple of swear words in English, she knew the words "golden head" and "love" in Russian.

But they didn't need words. Their romance consisted of broken mirrors in European hotels, drunken brawls, public scandals, and desperate, morbid tenderness. Yesenin was jealous of her fame. Abroad, he was only "the husband of the great Duncan," which drove him crazy. He beat her, left, returned, groveled at her feet. She forgave everything. Perhaps in his destructive energy, she saw the same element that she had been trying to express in dance all her life.

The marriage did not last long. Yesenin returned to Russia, to meet his noose in the Angleterre. Isadora remained in Europe. Even more lonely. Even more devastated.

The last dance

In the last years of her life, she changed a lot. She got fat. She drank a lot. The money she once earned in the thousands slipped through her fingers - she gave it to friends, spent it on maintaining her students, whom she adopted. Creditors were on her heels.

Journalists ruthlessly wrote about her withering. But you know what happened when she went on stage? A heavy, tired woman with a swollen face disappeared. As soon as Chopin or Beethoven sounded, her body remembered the language of the gods. The audience cried. There was no longer the frivolity of youth in her movements - there was the heaviness of all the pain she had experienced, the depth of loss, and the incredible, unsubdued strength of spirit.

That very fatal scarf was given to her by a friend, Mary Desti. Isadora loved such things - long, flowing, spectacular. They were an extension of her dance. An extension of herself.

The irony is that she was killed by what she loved most. Cars - a symbol of speed and modernity. And flowing silk - a symbol of her art and freedom. Isadora Duncan could not live halfway. She loved to the point of tearing, danced until she fainted, and left so loudly that the echo of the screech of brakes of that Amilcar has been sounding for almost a hundred years.