This Girl Is On Fire: Isadora Duncan Dancing

1910
This Girl is on Fire
Woman as Goddess
Curated by Emma Krasnopoler


Abraham Walkowitz, Isadora Duncan, 1910


The face of change in the world of dance, Isadora Duncan faced her fair share of hatred for doing things her own way. While ballet was popular, Duncan felt it was too rigid and constricting. She preferred to move freely and naturally, without the restrictions of rules or form. She was untamed, primitive, a force of nature. She chose to dance barefoot and wore silk that flowed with the movements of her body. Her dancing was beautiful, but it was also savage and shocking. A Duncan dance was far different than the fixed and composed exercises of ballet dancing. She was an accidental innovator, creating modern dance only by following her instincts and discovering her purpose.

Abraham Walkowitz painted thousands of times throughout the early 20th century. Drawing Duncan was an experience in itself, freezing thousands of moments in time throughout the course of a dance. Each drawing flows and leaps and bounds and twirls. Duncan's face is always left blank, for the expression of her body is more than enough to compensate. Each drawing is beautiful and unique, capturing a different movement each time. The drawings convey the freedom of modern dance that Duncan practiced and taught. No dance, nor drawing, is the same.
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Freaks and Geeks and Street Light

1910
Giacomo Balla, Street Light, 1910-11

Freaks and Geeks debuted in 1999 and only lasted one season. However, in just 18 episodes it defined a generation and became a cult hit. It now features as a regular on most end-of-decade and in-retrospect TV best-of lists. The show, set in Michigan in 1980, deals with the lives of two groups of high school students: the wild, party-loving freaks and the socially awkward freshman geeks. The show embodies everything good about television for teenagers. It’s lovable, it discusses real issues, and most importantly, it’s intelligent enough that the audience can sit through an entire episode without cringing at a contrived plot point or a scene that sounds like it was written by a third grader.

In addition to exploring themes of isolation and coming-of-age, one of the most important recurring elements in the show is the generational gap between the kids and their parents and teachers. 1980 was a time of rapid change for the American cultural landscape; the cultural gap between a 16-year old and a 45-year old has perhaps never been wider than it was then. In Freaks and Geeks, this quickly becomes apparent over the main character Lindsay’s father’s views on music, feminism, and youth culture. For a man born in the great depression, the cultural landscape his son and daughter exist in could not be more alien. On the opposite end of the spectrum is McKinley High School's slightly younger counselor, whose hippie appearance and attitude serve to alienate him from the students and make him at best a type of comic relief. Just like Lindsay’s father, he has been left behind by a rapidly moving generational culture.

Just as a new generation was sweeping through music, film, and the general national mindset in the early 1980s, futurism accompanied the coming of a new unbridled optimism in turn of the century Europe. Before the physical and psychological destruction of World War I, the advent of machinery and increased international integration seemed poised to solve many of the problems that had plagued the world for millennia. And out of this mindset, futurism was born. Artists like Giacomo Balla created out of this spirit of optimism an innovative new art form, which idealized and espoused technology as an exciting new tool for good. Their rejection of all things outdated in favor of a completely new method of interacting with the world parallels—although perhaps with more intensity—the mindset of every new generation taking over its elders. The coming Great War would of course serve to dispel any rosy notions about what the near future might hold in terms of technology, but futurism in itself still serves as an example of the unbridled optimism each generation feels as it begins to shape its world.

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