![]() It seems that Isadora Duncan has been searching for the right movements, positions and spatial constellations the same way a poet would be searching for suitable and reduced words-compositions. However, these gestures are so clear and above all so reduced that they are never redundant. The communist fights by strongly stretching her fist forward. She says goodbye to him with a raised hand. The images that arise from this process are sometimes very obvious in Duncan’s pieces. Behind every motion is an idea that can be expressed with words. ![]() And these words are translated into gestures. Isadora Duncan’s dances are sentences: They consist of words whose associations and specific arrangement make sense and trigger feelings. This refers to a mode of representation and a way of thinking in which every movement stands for a feeling or an idea. It is precisely from these fundamental, newly asked questions that an aesthetic of the reduction arises. How is the sea perceived by a human body? How can this perception be translated into motion? What is music and how does it move the body? And there is almost no need to tell that density and constancy are much more significant qualities in a space of freedom than when thoughts and motions are restricted in fixed forms or codes.īy distancing her work from academic dance, Isadora Duncan questions the relationship of the body to fundamental elements. In this sense, precision is not reduced despite the renunciation of academic rigour. The positions of each part of the body are always the same. The last time, the audience knows the intentions behind the gestures, and notices that every movement is exactly identical every time. One time with or without music, one time without music but with keywords that explain the meaning or impulse of each movement, and one last time with music. In Jérôme Bel’s production, almost every dance is performed three times. The break with the academic classical dance mentioned here is by no means a renunciation of grace and precision. This kind of dance tends to reject gravity. The academic ballet, on the other hand, depicts the dancers as light, airy bodies that almost fly. Waves and in a broader sense dancing was for her nothing but a game with gravity. A leitmotif of her dances is the wave, which she often used as a symbol of attraction or simply as the embodiment of waves. a tension between strong impulses and gravity. As she describes it herself in a radio programme, Isadora Duncan’s dance is about a kind of suspension, i.e. Even more than 100 years after their creation. Through the liberation of the dancing female body, the movements interpreted by Elisabeth Schwartz appear new and modern. Waltz by Schubert, Préludes by Chopin and studies by Scriabin. The choice of music was also fundamental. Her airy dresses gave her the freedom of movement she needed to develop her dances far from the conventions of the time, quoting ancient ideals of beauty and translating them into her modern expressive dances. So it wasn’t only Isadora Duncan’s dances that radiated lightness and were emotionally guided. In those days, these cuts, which gave deep insights onto the body, were still considered very revealing, even scandalous. Isadora Duncan was also oriented towards the style of classic tunics, with light, waving fabrics. Buildings were built in the historicist, neoclassical style and the fashions, which were still very corset-heavy, were inspired on the dresses of Greek goddesses through so-called „Empire“ cuts. Greek mythology and ancient architecture experienced a new revival in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Born in San Francisco in 1877, the dancer was fascinated by Greek aesthetics, which she first encountered in the form of paintings on antique vases. We get to know Isadora Duncan’s biography through her choreographies. Since Jérôme Bel presents dance as a medium of interpretation and translation that is always in motion, it seems appropriate to us to write a two-voice text about it. The dancer Elisabeth Schwartz interprets six dances by Isadora Duncan as faithfully as possible by performing them, and she turns these interpretations into an object of interpretation for the audience itself. ![]() What is special about Jérôme Bel’s production Isadora Duncan is that it does not understand Isadora Duncan’s dances as an object of exchange, but rather their interpretations. These two levels of communication must always arise because they guarantee the uniqueness of a performance. In all live performances, there is an exchange between the performers on stage and there is a exchange between the performers and the audience. ON THE DISPOSITIVE OF MEDIATION: JÉRÔME BEL AND ISADORA DUNCAN
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