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Isadora Duncan Biography

Dancer / Choreographer

Isadora Duncan was a pioneer of 20th-century American dance. She is often credited with moving dance away from strict formal structures and toward more free-flowing forms of personal expression. She wore Grecian-style gowns, often performed barefoot, and startled audiences by employing such everyday human movements as skipping and running. Duncan is also remembered as an early feminist; among other things, she did not believe in marriage and bore two children out of wedlock by two different men. She was killed in a freak 1927 accident when her scarf became tangled in the rear axle of her automobile.

Duncan appears with Jayne Mansfield in the loop Death by Car.

Other 20th-century dancers included Bob Fosse, Gwen Verdon, Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis, Jr.