Angela Isadora Duncan May 26, , or May 27, [ a ] — September 14, was an American-born dancer and choreographer, who was a pioneer of modern contemporary dance and performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and the United States.
Born and raised in California, she lived and danced in Western Europe, the U. She died when her scarf became entangled in the wheel and axle of the car in which she was travelling in Nice , France.
Angela Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, the youngest of the four children of Joseph Charles Duncan — , a banker, mining engineer and connoisseur of the arts, and Mary Isadora Gray — Although he avoided prison time, Isadora's mother angered over his infidelities as well as the financial scandal divorced him, and from then on the family struggled with poverty.
After her parents' divorce, [ 7 ] Isadora's mother moved with her family to Oakland, California , where she worked as a seamstress and piano teacher. Isadora attended school from the ages of six to ten, but she dropped out, having found it constricting. She and her three siblings earned money by teaching dance to local children.
In , Duncan became part of Augustin Daly 's theater company in New York, but she soon became disillusioned with the form and craved a different environment with less of a hierarchy. Duncan's novel approach to dance had been evident since the classes she had taught as a teenager, where she "followed [her] fantasy and improvised, teaching any pretty thing that came into [her] head".
