Duncan Dancers

Love--"one great surging, longing, unmistakable urge"--came to Isadora Duncan in Budapest in springtime. She met an actor whom in her later memoirs she called "Romeo."* Out of this awakening came a dance she improvised to Franz Schubert's gentle, tripping Moment Musical. Isadora Duncan has been dead five years, but a Manhattan audience last week gave its lustiest applause to her memory when the Moment Musical was danced once more by her adopted daughter Irma.

U. S. concertgoers have seen many "Duncan Dancers." New to the Lewisohn Stadium was the group which performed last week: large-legged Irma Duncan and her Isadora Duncan dancers, known simply as Ruth, Sima, Julia, Hortense, Minna and Raya. For them a stage was built in the Stadium, a lattice set up to conceal the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra. Barefoot, clad in flowing Greek garments, they performed Tchaikovsky's "Pathetic" Symphony, two Slavonic Dances of Dvorak, the rollicking Dance of the Apprentices from Wagner's Die Meister singer. Then Irma Duncan, most active exponent of Isadora's tradition. danced as an encore the Moment Musical.

Out of Isadora Duncan's many loves came three children, all of whom died before she did. Her theories on dancing-- the classic, plastic picture, the lively interpretation of non-ballet music, the accomplished foot-work--she handed on to her six adopted daughters. Of these. Margot is dead. Erica retired. Therese married Manhattan Art Dealer Stephan Bourgeois. Lisa of the pretty blonde curls has turned modernist, dances in Paris. Dark, classic-featured Anna was once the leader of the group, toured the U. S. some ten years ago with Lisa and Margot. Because of stories about Isadora's Communistic leanings they found themselves in frequent trouble. Currently Anna is having her voice trained; from her ranch near Santa Fe she looks with hopeful eyes at Hollywood.

Born in Germany, Irma Duncan went with Isadora to Russia in 1920. They had had a telegram: "The Russian Government alone can understand you. Come to us: we will make your School.'' Irma helped with the school, stayed seven years. After Isadora's death she took to the U. S. a troupe of ten bewildered Soviet girls. The Soviet school still flourishes, the Dun can tradition is there more lively than anywhere else.

Last year Irma Duncan established the "first American Isadora Duncan School of the Dance," for adults and children. She has ten girls who help her in Manhattan, teaching also in schools and camps. Eventually ambitious Irma Duncan hopes to establish a Teachers' College of the Dance.

If interpretative dancing is currently in low repute after years of twitting for its fat women in Greek robes and coy postures; if it is being hard pressed by such modernist schools as that of Mary Wigman, it is at least more alive than it was before the great Isadora began to teach. Last week's Stadium audience seemed aware of this when it gave its greatest applause not to the elaborate group dances but to the simple little one which Irma Duncan had got from her foster mother.

*Paris Eugene Singer, her "Lohengrin," died last June (TIME, July 4). Still living is Pianist Walter Rumniel, "Archangel."

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