Advertisements
“A tour de force”
—New York Times
“Bob Sanchez is a consummate writer.”
—Kaye Trout’s
Book Reviews
A readable and well-told tale filled with color, sensitivity, humor and plenty of research.
—Midwest Book Review
Showing the mother of modern dance
ISADORA DUNCAN:
A Graphic Biography
Written and Illustrated by Sabrina Jones
129 pp. Hill and Wang $18.95
Reviewed by Alice Folkart
Isadora Duncan, often called the “Mother of Modern Dance,” would have liked Sabrina Jones’s story of her life. She would have applauded its daring. What? A biography that at first glance looks like a comic book? Yes! She would have liked the way Jones has lovingly drawn her and put her on every page. She would have liked the bits of history and witty asides, and, most of all, she would have appreciated seeing her own words, her truth, in print. Don’t let the comic book look fool you. This is a serious biography. For readers who are a bit curious about Isadora, but not enough to read a conventional biography, this is a gift.
Jones’s background in drawing and writing for political and non-fiction comics has developed in her a special skill for knowing how to harvest the most important aspects of a story, boldly illustrate them, and enhance them with concise and often sharply pointed captions. She can express in a few drawings and even fewer words what it usually takes many pages of text to convey in conventional biographies.
For instance, Jones encapsulates Isadora’s disappointing reception in Paris in 1927, followed by her retreat to the Riviera, in a single page. A theatrical poster dominates, featuring a triumphant Isadora, arms raised to heaven, dark robes swirling. Below the poster the word “ADIEU” is writ large, and below that sits Isadora, a palm tree and casino in the background, looking nonplussed, holding up a wineglass, saying, “I’m never sure where my next bottle of Champagne is coming from.” A simple sketch and a handful of words tell us that Isadora has grown fond of the good life, but things have gone sour. She has made a quick exit from Paris, is broke, but not worried. A conventional biography might spend a whole chapter on the episode.
Jones begins with a short graphic introduction to Isadora and her world—her roots, inspiration, morals, politics, enthusiasms, and her place in history as a feminist-dreamer-social reformer-revolutionary-voluptuary-entrepreneur. Tongue-in-cheek, Jones includes herself, in modern dress with long dark hair and reading glasses, in some of the drawings. One, perhaps a comment on her experiences researching Isadora, shows two Sabrina Joneses, back to back, one reading a copy of Isadora’s memoir, My Life, saying to herself, “You go girl!” and the other, fist raised in anger, reading a biography, and shouting, “She lied!” The panel’s title is: “But if you read her alongside other sources . . . .” Enough said. Isadora’s version of her life, her memoir, and versions presented by her biographers often differ drastically. One picture tells it all.
Jones’s drawings dance us through Isadora Duncan’s life. We meet the teenage Irish-American girl and her impoverished but cultured family in the mid-1880s. Young Isadora is captivated by dancing figures on ancient Greek vases and dedicates herself to discovering how to dance as they did. But America is not ready for her—her uncorseted body barely covered by a fluttering Greek tunic, her homemade sandals. The Yankees are uninterested (except for the shocking thrill of gaping at her exposed flesh) in her seemingly random poses and odd leapings. So off she goes on a cattle boat, mother, sisters, and brothers—the Clan Duncan, they called themselves—in tow, to Europe, where she plans to establish schools to teach this new dance. She is warmly welcomed.
Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography literally “shows” us an impulsive, strong-minded creative artist. We crisscross Europe with her. We’re off to Russia to support the Revolution—dirty barracks and bad food cool our ardor, so we move to Germany, where adoring students mob her, and on to Hungary, where handsome young men with titles send Champagne backstage, and eventually, only to be disappointed, to Athens. Everywhere, composers, artists, writers and royalty pay homage.
A serial monogamist opposed to the very institution of marriage, Isadora eventually weds a Russian poet half her age, a cute freeloader who knows even less English than Isadora knows Russian. Through all this, she single-handedly supports a large entourage, bears and loses children, wears down lovers, exhausts promoters, alienates managers, befuddles kings and millionaires, and goes from penury to stardom and back again several times. Her too-short life ends on the Riviera in an operatically bizarre accident.
This book honors Isadora Duncan’s spirit, the paradoxes and contradictions of her stranger-than-fiction life, the unfailing optimism of this visionary who laid the foundations for many of the social and artistic freedoms we enjoy today. As Sabrina Jones points out on the book jacket, “. . . Isadora became a great liberator to some, an extravagant libertine to others. In fact, she was both.” In this biography, Jones shines her light on it all.
Alice Folkart lives and writes poetry and short fiction in Hawaii. She has found that sand is OK for ukuleles, but not for laptops.
Mail this page