Focus on tragedy

Isadora/Dances at a Gathering
Royal Opera House

Dance scholars have long banged on about Isadora Duncan’s revolutionary artistry and ground-breaking — for her time, that is — thinking, thus overlooking some less overt, yet highly significant aspects of her unique, if larger than life persona. Beyond the depths of her feminist ideas, art philosophy and fervent socialism, lurked a cunningly clever, no-nonsense American woman, who knew how to play the system and get the most out of it. But her tongue-in-cheek ingeniousness has been frequently left out in many of the tributes to her memory, whether they be written, filmed or choreographed — the sole two exceptions, in my view, being Frederick Ashton’s ballet Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora, and Martin Sherman’s play When She Danced.

I never clearly understood what motivated Kenneth MacMillan to create a stage celebration of the divine mother of modern dance, but what I remember clearly is that his 1981 work, the première of which I attended, was not one of his best. Twenty-eight years later, Deborah MacMillan, following the suggestion of Royal Ballet’s artistic director Monica Mason, has reworked Isadora in line with her late husband’s aesthetics. Alas, the new multimedia one-act production is no better than the old three-acter. Here, the interaction between filmed images and danced ones provides the historical background needed to appreciate the famous artist and her context. Yet the overabundance of film clips — some of which are also historically inaccurate — turns the whole thing into a pedantic TV-like documentary. Moreover, some atypically naïve choreography, which, against MacMillan’s distinctive traits, never delves deeply into the psychological depths of the characters or of given events, adds greatly to the indigestible ‘docu-ballet’ feeling. At times, the movement vocabulary is so frequently unimpressive and literal that the ‘docu-ballet’ turns frequently into an even more disappointing ‘docu-pantomime’ — and I am not referring to the traditional Christmas genre here, but to mere silent acting.