Isadora Duncan by Rubén Darío. Reflections on the argentine reception of Duncan

Abstract

The article is a comparative analysis of writer Rubén Darío and dancer Isadora Duncan. Taking Darío as a representative figure of the Buenos Aires intellectuality of the time, this study is based on texts of both figures and their artistic and ideological ideas, and makes an emphasis on the notion of modernism. This is an initial work on the conformation of a “modernist taste” in the Argentine dance audience of the early twentieth century. To reconstruct the reception of the dancer by the local audience, the article analyzes Duncan’s performances in Buenos Aires and its repercussion in the written press of the time. The research traces the way in which the historiography of the Argentine dance has taken up the press statements of the moment, and even Darío’s sayings about Duncan, and has uncritically reproduced them. This way, Duncan image was held as “rare” and irreverent, although by 1916, her aesthetic was no longer so rebelllious, and for that reason the audience and the local press, who deeply knew her poetics, described Duncan’s dance as an art that “it no longer moves anyone”.