Revolutionary dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) was born on this day in San Francisco and changed the art of dance forever. She introduced a new “free” style where emotion guided movement, and improvisation became performance.

Duncan danced barefoot and bare-legged, flowing in filmy scarves. She broke every convention—liberated before liberation was allowed—and danced solo when few women dared to take the stage alone.

Passionate and provocative, she drew inspiration from the Pacific Ocean and the Sierra Nevada pines. Nature moved her. In her memoir My Life, she wrote: “I was born under the star of Aphrodite, who was also born of the sea.”

Her choreography was fluid and wild—walking, skipping, leaping in spontaneous expressions of joy. “If my art is symbolic of anything,” she said, “it is symbolic of the freedom of woman and her emancipation.”

Duncan believed the soul resided in the solar plexus—the source of movement and truth. “It is not for us to arrive at knowledge,” she wrote. “We know, as we love, by instinct, faith, emotion.”