The Isadora Project: Reinscribing Dance History

Presentation abstract

Abstract

I am in the studio and I am learning the choreography of Isadora Duncan’s opening to Act II scene 2 of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, known as ‘The Dance of the Blessed Spirits’.

I have known the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice since I was very little, when it was, oddly perhaps, one of my favourite stories. I remember a Channel 4 TV adaptation of the myth that I watched again and again until the videotape wore out. I was maybe nine or ten years old.

I have known about Isadora since I was about the same age, perhaps a little older. My local dance school used to put us in for dance competitions and there was always a classical Greek dance category. I liked this category because it meant I got to dance barefoot. I also really liked Mercury skips; I mean, really liked them. One time, I did a little solo called ‘The Sea’ – I was particularly proud of the long strips of blue and green chiffon that my Mum had assiduously stitched onto my leotard so that when I danced, I felt like a strip of seaweed floating in the ocean. I remember I came third with that solo, and the adjudicator said it had reminded her of Duncan. In the car home afterwards, I clutched my bronze medal and asked my Mum about who this Duncan was. Isadora, she said, Isadora Duncan.

This work in progress is part of a choreographic practice research project, The Isadora Project, which reimagines Isadora Duncan’s choreography of Act II scene 2 of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1903). The practice research builds on my work around dance as a form of ‘radical historiography’ (Crawley 2020) and ‘kinaesthetic heritage’ (Crawley 2025) which can open new ways of thinking about underrepresented female histories through the body. The work blends choreographic practice together with theoretical underpinnings around dance as feminist historiography (Crawley 2020, Cooper Albright 2010, Thomas 2003) and dance’s relationship to kinaesthetic memory (Schiller 2022), along with more personal accounts of various encounters with the figure of Isadora Duncan – as a young child learning classical Greek dance and ‘incarnating’ Isadora at a dance competition, as an apprentice performer in Paris chancing upon Isadora’s autobiography in a second-hand bookshop, and as a dancer in her early forties reimagining this short piece of Duncan’s repertoire. The work aims to ask questions about how my body carries the histories and memories of these dances, past and present. How do Duncan’s repertory, history and memories become re-inscribed differently on my body in the performing present? How might I dismember history (dance history, Duncan’s, my own) in order to remember, and reimagine, it differently?

This work is generously supported by a Society for Theatre Research Practitioner Grant 2026.