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Images of Isadora

“Wild Hearts: Sappho and Isadora”
Word / Dance / Theater
Greenberg Theater
Washington, DC
November 10, 2006

by George Jackson
copyright 2006 by George Jackson

Nowhere is it more difficult to tell dance from dancer than in the solo, particularly the modern dance solo with its free movement vocabulary. The two women who portrayed Isadora Duncan on this program are quite distinct in terms of body and buoyancy. Cynthia Word is tall, angular and light boned whereas Jeanne Bresciani is rounded, firm and forceful. What they share is intensity and meticulous attention to detail, and these abilities made it possible for them to do more than execute choreography “by” or “after” Duncan. They impersonated (in the best sense) the artist that was Isadora.

Bresciani, a guest performer with Word’s group on this occasion, looks more like photographs of Isadora. Having trained for most of her career to dance Isadora, she now heads the Isadora Duncan International Institute. The facility with which Bresciani submerges herself in weighted movement is as remarkable as her capacity for expressing thrust. In the two studies to Scriabin music she presented — “Mother Etude” and “Revolutionary Etude”, performed by Isadora in 1921 and reconstructed by Julia Levien —  the dance was spare, and dance and dancer were smooth and strong in quality.

Word controlled her body’s readiness to flex and fold by driving herself continuously and focusing her emotion sharply as she danced Isadora. The choreographies were Bresciani’s reconstructions of earlier Duncan, the 1902 impulses and retards to Chopin’s “Prelude Opus 28 #7” and “Mazurka Opus 33 #3” — music familiar from subsequent ballet usage.

There is no point in quibbling which was the truer Isadora — the one of 1902, the one of 1920, Bresciani’s embodiment, Word’s or impressions we carry from elsewhere. At least, though, to be Isadora what the dance and dancer must have is passion.

The evening had opened with Word as Ruth St. Denis in “The Incense”, reconstructed by Mino Nicolas — a closer physical fit for her than Isadora (see www.danceviewtimes.com, October 2, 2006). Also on the bill was Word’s own “Suite Sappho” in which maidens loosely attired skipped, traipsed and dallied to music by Vasily Tsabropoulos and translations of Sappho poems. Vanessa Carmichael-Elder, Sophie Mitrisin and Sarah Stoodley were the maidens led by emphatic Ingrid Zimmer. Jenifer Deal appeared as Sappho reciting.

Marcia Daft was pianist for Harvey Worthington Loomis’s “Incense” music and the Chopin scores.

The past was fresh on this program. 

Photo, of Cynthia Word, by Howard Davis

Volume 4, No. 40
November 13, 2006

copyright ©2006 George Jackson
www.danceviewtimes.com

 

 

©2006 DanceView