Isadora duncan body9/5/2023 ![]() 3 In “Whitman and Modern Dance,” Joann Krieg delineates how Whitman’s vision of the body, his views on questions of class and race, and his conception of American democracy resonated for the choreographers of the 1930s, particularly Helen Tamiris (who created her Walt Whitman Suite, inspired by Leaves of Grass, in 1934). 2 Whitman’s celebration of the organic truth of the body found a particularly vibrant echo in the Denishawn school of dance, and in the works of all the founders of American modern dance, from the New Dance Group to Martha Graham, for whom the body was the ultimate locus of individual and collective truth. Isadora Duncan, one of the greatest reformers of dance in the twentieth century, famously listed Walt Whitman as one of her “dance masters,” along with Rousseau and Nietzsche, and defined herself as his “spiritual daughter.” 1 His poetry appears as a symbol of Americanness and a template for bold formal innovation in Ted Shawn’s manifesto The American Ballet, published in 1926, as well as in Lincoln Kirstein’s Dance, A Short History of Theatrical Dancing, published in 1970. Krieg, “Whitman and Modern Dance,” p. 208-216.ġ When reading what the pioneers of American dance wrote about their vision and plans for the renewal and rejuvenation of the art form, it is striking to see how omnipresent Walt Whitman, the self-professed “poet of the body” ( LG, p. 43), is. 3 The Denishawn school of dance was founded by Ted Shawn and Ruth St Denis in 1915. ![]()
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