Excerpt -
Isadora Duncan in the 21st Century: The Art and Soul of the Dancer’s Legacy
“Female identity, as conceptualized in Duncan’s Bacchanal, is rooted in an ancient notion of “sacred sexuality,” where sexuality is connected to the primal, creative forces and to the fertility that sustains all life. Ultimately, these ancient fertility rites symbolized the yearning of mortals for cosmic union and connection with the creator gods. In a world stripped of mutually shared and agreed upon sacred rituals and myths, with few role models of healthy female identity, young women in the contemporary world are left adrift to discover and construct their identities from a massive sea of commoditized, commercialized, and objectified body images….The great challenge for me as a director was how to convey an elevated sense of the feminine, woman as a contemporary embodiment of a Grecian goddess, possessed of radiant sensuality and dignity.”
Books
Isadora Duncan in the 21st Century:
Capturing the Art and Spirit of the Dancer’s Legacy, McFarland, 2015
…the book is not just for dancers. It is for all movers, all bodies seeking the sacred. It is a lesson in how to move through this world authentically, fully attuned to the possibility of a Higher Self. Leigh Dolan, Ballet to the People
Book Reviews
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…this book speaks to academics, dancers, psychologists, historians, choreographers and artists. The book reminds the reader that Duncan’s work is a timeless beauty that constantly reinvents itself.
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… engaging and enlightening exploration of Duncan Dance….As entertaining as it is informative, it is a must-read for dance history teachers, artists researching Duncan and her influence on art, and anyone who enjoys a good storyteller.
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…the book is easy to read and is highly enjoyable…To my mind, Seidel is the first one to acknowledge deep and spiritual aspects of Duncan's practice, which openly connects with the acting method of the great Russian actor and theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky…. The true innovative aspect of this book is its direct engagement with Duncan's Russian years.
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…theoretical and practical, poetic and realistic, Seidel’s work reveals positive and negative aspects of Duncan’s seminal work, as well as the joy of giving this art to the audience. The contribution of this book to the preservation of the original dances and to Duncan studies in general is hard to overestimate.
Purchase Books
Isadora Duncan in the 21st Century: Capturing the Art and Spirit of the Dancer’s Legacy is available through the following vendors:
Forthcoming -
Dancing into Stillness:
A Spiritual Memoir
After a long period of existential meaningless, at 24 years old, the author was thrust into a sudden, ego-shattering experience of both blissful and terrifying cosmic consciousness. Although she had never danced previously, the art of the dance was spontaneously awakened within her as creative potential. The memoir narrates her struggle to become a professional dancer at a relatively late age battling the tyranny of the body image. Her career and quest take her to the Candomblé possession dances in Bahia, Brazil; backstage in the hallowed mirror rooms of the Noh theater in Japan; on an ill-fated Peyote vision quest with an unholy Ute medicine man; into the underground sacred Kiva at Hopi mesa during the Powamu ritual; and to intimate encounters with a Maya folkloric dance community in Guatemala. Dancing into Stillness is a pilgrimage through the landscapes of the soul, a quest for divine love through the universal language of dance.
To Dance is to Live
Excerpt from the forthcoming spiritual memoir, Dancing into Stillness.
“It is a strange irony that I chose to pursue a professional dance career where the body IS the instrument of one's art. Until the age of twenty-one, my cheeks would flush bright red with painful embarrassment at least once a day and I rarely spoke in social situations. Bodily self-consciousness plagued me for most of my adult life thereafter. As a dancer, the body is constantly on display for teachers, peers, audience, and critics to dissect, analyze, and critique. Somehow, being onstage, blinded by stage lights, I learned to immerse myself in the music, emotion, and act of dancing and to forget the audience. However, it was a constant struggle to separate the "me" from the dancing self and to remember that a bad dance review or criticism is not a negation of one's being. Nonetheless, I became obsessed. For the next three and 1/2 decades, it became impossible not to dance. I craved dance, to stave off the nameless floating anxiety, masquerading as endless energy, that constantly plagued me. I craved dance to feel every emotion of pain or joy that I could not easily feel in my life. In essence, I danced to live. On some unconscious level, perhaps I danced to survive the fear of death and annihilation that plagues us all at the core of our existence. I suppose my obsession was much like that of a mountain climber, a scientist, an Olympic runner, a poet, a painter, or a composer who claws his/her way up a ladder to an elusive goal called ‘success’, pursuing his/her passions because they must. Perhaps, we are all trying to escape from the wounds of childhood and the ultimate fear of death and annihilation. How blissful it must have been to float in the warm, amniotic fluid of the womb intimately connected to the mother and the Creator. Small wonder that upon exiting the womb, babies cry out from the pain of separation. In this dualistic world of love and hate, warmth and cold, goodness and evil, are we not all wounded children trying to heal?”
