Unusual, striking, innovative, and controversial...

Born Dora Angela Duncan on this day in San Francisco, Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) revolutionized American Modern Dance, introducing a new free style in which emotion fueled movement and improvisation.

She defied Victorian convention by dancing barefoot and bare-legged, in flowing scarves and simple Greek robes—without corsets. A radiant free spirit, she was liberated before the world was ready, dancing solo when few dared to move alone.

In 1904, Duncan founded her first dance school in Germany, where she nurtured and supported underprivileged children. There, she began to form her celebrated troupe—the Isadorables.

Inspired by Walt Whitman and William Shakespeare, she inspired others in return. President Theodore Roosevelt once wrote, “Isadora... seems to me as innocent as a child dancing through the garden in the morning sunshine and picking the beautiful flowers of her fantasy.”

Passionate and poetic, she credited the Pacific Ocean and the waving Sierra pines as the force behind her dynamic expression. In her memoir My Life, she wrote, “I was born under the star of Aphrodite who was also born of the sea.”

Her movement honored the fluidity of Greek art and the Renaissance. She danced with spontaneity—walking, skipping, leaping—with grace and strength. It was freedom, choreographed with intention, a living prayer of motion.

“If my art is symbolic of any one thing,” she said, “it is symbolic of the freedom of woman and her emancipation.” Duncan believed the soul lived in the solar plexus. “To dance is to live,” she taught. “Dance the way I dance and you will live to be 100.” Her art was a heartbeat in motion—a life moved by the breath of spirit.