Isadora Duncan profile

[kfw]

The New Yorker has put online a 1927 profile of Isadora Duncan by Janet Flanner. It's very short by current New Yorker profile standards (and if memory serves those often used to be longer), and is mostly just a capsule history of her career, but of course it's typically reflective, and the prose is a pleasure.

All her life Isadora has been a practical idealist. She has put into practice certain ideals of art, maternity and political liberty which people prefer to read as theories on paper. Her ideals of human liberty are not unsimilar to those of Plato, to those of Shelley, to those of Lord Byron which led him to die dramatically in Greece. All they gained for Isadora was the loss of her passport and the presence of the constabulary on the stage of the Indianapolis Opera House where the chief of police watched for sedition in the movement of Isadora’s knees.

[sandik]

Oh thank you -- as you say, the prose is indeed a pleasure.

Going off to contemplate the possibility of knees.