Done into dance : Isadora Duncan in America /

"Ann Daly... breaks through the tradition of hagiography and pens the first truly critical study of Duncan's career.... Done into Dance outdoes all its competitors." --Susan Manning

"[Done into Dance] is a cultural study that brings the dancer fully within the mainstream of American thought, politics, and artmaking of her time." --Lynn Garafola [checking for permission to use quote]

In this innovative study, Ann Daly looks beyond the anecdotal history surrounding American legend Isadora Duncan to examine the evolution of Duncan's theory and practice. Daly eleaborates the complexity of Duncan's practice as a dancer during her thirty-year career and situates that practice within the cultural contexts of late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. This is a cultural study that reveals Duncan to be enmeshed in social and cultural currents of her time--the moralism of the Progressive Era, the artistic radicalism of prewar Greenwich Village, the xenophobia of the 1920s. Daly also examines Duncan's debt to contemporary ideas about nature, beauty, and expression; her shift from a politics of personal liberation to the idea of social revolution; her association with feminism; and her racial notion of "Americanness." Ann Daly is also able to render Ducan's dancing, and its visual record, with skill and sensitivity.

Done into Dance pushes beyond the layers of anecdote and legend that surround Duncan, and reaches toward the reasons for her enormous impact on American cultural history.