fashion Girls: Famous Ballet Dancers

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Famous Ballet Dancers

Hi! I've spent the majority of today recovering from a "wild" night out...translated simply as drinking a shitload and far more than your body is capable of keeping inside you, hence the need for recovery :S. But anyway! Onto a cheerier topic...or atleast more interesting. Somewhat in the same vein as my last post:

Famous Ballet Dancers

I only know of a couple and am far too tired to want to bother doing any research into more, but i've noticed how Isadore Duncan and Anna Pavlova seem to have inspired artists and photographers and the results of this inspiration are really beautiful. First - Anna Pavlova

Anna Pavlova (Unable to find name of Photographer)

Anna Pavlova - John Lavery

Anna Pavlova in Dragonfly - Ira L Hill

Anna Pavlova - Ine Veen


Anna Pavlova - Oleg Shtyhno? Sorry if i'm wrong about this one, i put Олег Штыхно into a translator


Anna Pavlova (Unable to find name of Photographer)

Isadora Duncan. Bit of a gruesome story behind this one. It was well known that she had a love of scarves and the way they flowed, however this proved to be the death of her. When in a moving open top car, her long scarf became tangled in one of the wheels, breaking her neck. The New York Times' obituary for her contains a summary of the incident:

"Isadora Duncan, the American dancer, tonight met a tragic death at Nice on the Riviera. According to dispatches from Nice, Miss Duncan was hurled in an extraordinary manner from an open automobile in which she was riding and instantly killed by the force of her fall to the stone pavement."

Other sources described her death as resulting from strangulation, noting that she was almost decapitated by the sudden tightening of the scarf around her neck. But anyway! She is apparently considered by many to be the creator of modern dance. According to Wikipedia, she rejected traditional ballet steps to stress improvisation, emotion and the human form. Duncan believed that classical ballet, with its strict rules of posture and formation, was "ugly and against nature"; she gained a wide following that allowed her to set up a school to teach. Whilst in Brazil, writer and journalist Paulo Barreto, known as João do Rio, claimed to have seen her dance "naked" in the forest of Tijuca, in front of Rio's most famous waterfall. Doesn't that conjure up such a magical image in your mind? She seems to have been a woman really passionate about her art. Headstrong, yet all in order to be such an innovative fugure in the history of dance. In Isadora Duncan's own words, "Yes, I am a revolutionist. All true artists are revolutionists."