Ruth L. Bohan: the connection between Isadora Duncan and Whitman

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Ruth L. Bohan on Isadora Duncan and Whitman:

As we have mentioned before, there is an essay on Isadora Duncan in The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, “‘I Sing the Body Electric’: Isadora Duncan, Whitman and the Dance”, by Ruth L. Bohan (GREENSPAN, 1997, pp.166-193). This essay provides a short account of Duncan’s life and works, emphasizing her connection with Whitman, her “spiritual father”, and how her dance was linked to Whitman’s vision of the human body: sacred, without shame, open, electric, free, natural, harmonious. She even advised an audience, after a performance, to go home and read the works of Walt Whitman (p.178), after they had objected to her bared breast. Actually, later in life she had acquired a way of teasing audiences in a Whitmanesque style, as a daring way of questioning traditional values; furthermore, she associated her dances publicly with Whitman’s poetry. There is another curious link between Duncan and Whitman: her mother, Dora Duncan, was “a piano teacher and a follower of the radical free thinker Robert Ingersoll” (p.167), who was “a friend of Whitman’s in his later years and spoke at his funeral. It is not known whether Dora Duncan knew of this connection” (p.190).