Isadora

2012, 2 channel video installation, hd, loop(10min,8min), colour, sound, 2012

voice: katharina-sara huhn

The work ‘Isadora’ is about the dance pioneer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), the so called mother of modern dance. She was the first one who put away the ballet shoes and danced barefoot in front of the audience. Isadora had great success in Vienna, although, as she put it, the audience was more interested in her naked legs than her art. Her interpretation of Richard Strauss’ ‘Blue Danube’ was one of her most successful pieces.

Her own writings, as well as general ideas about her mythologies and contemporary photographies inspired the video work ‘Isadora’. The ten chapters:

1 / With her incredibly long legs, she emerged from behind the curtains and leaped out at the audience, as if she wanted to tear them to pieces.

2 / Her arms were bare, as were her legs and knees. Such an exposure of the body was genuinely shocking to a late 19th-century audience.

3 / She was always looking for signs.

4 / Isadora stretched out on the sofa. She called for her beloved Jessenin. He came, sat down next to the sofa. She gently started caressing his head.

5 / After her children’s tragic death, her heart hardened. But she carried on somehow, and continued to travel and perform.

6 /People never really understood what her art was all about.

7 / Loïe Fuller represents the ‘moving ornament’ in the tradition of the ‘skirt dancers’, while Isadora stands for the opposite, the ‘non-ornamental’ dancing.

8 / She went to the museum on a daily basis.

9 / A woman once asked me why I was dancing barefooted, and I told her: «Madam, I do it because I have a religious admiration for the beauty of human feet». The woman answered, she did not feel such admiration. I said to her: «But that is something inevitable, madam, because the form and the expressiveness of the human foot means a great triumph in human evolution».

10 / In 1999, all of Isadora Duncan´s extensive estate is destroyed by a fire in a private New York apartment.»

exhibition:

Osztrák Kulturális Fórum/ Austrian Cultural Forum Budapest, 2012

Diploma exhibition. Heiligenkreuzerhof, Vienna, 2012

Katharina Swoboda und Thea Moeller. Friday Exit, Vienna 2013

award:

Recognition award. City of Vienna, 2012

publication:

Burka. Exhibition catalogue. Austrian Cultural Forum Budapest 2012