Village Voice
February 5-11, 2003

Three Generations of Women Tackle Diverse Passions
Once and Future Dancers
By DEBORAH JOWITT


Big Mama: Lori Belilove as Isadora Duncan.

For years, Lori Belilove has been teaching and performing Isadora Duncan’s dances with fervor and dedication, bringing to life the lovely, simple solos that were so radical in the early 20th century when the strong-minded young woman from California enchanted and alarmed the European intelligentsia. Belilove’s latest project (shown in January at the Duke on 42nd Street) is a captivating dance-play, Isadora... no apologies, conceived by her, written and directed by Andrew Frank, and produced by Fran Kirmser. Two actors—Hope Garland as Isadora and Daryl Boling as various men in her life—give the essentials of the dancer's career, aided by voice-overs representing newspaper critics, irate ladies, and so on. The spare text introduces and sets off the many Duncan solos performed by Belilove. She is assisted by Cherlyn Smith, Beth Disharoon (beautiful arms!), Michelle Concha, and Julia Pond, who represent the six star pupils who took Duncan's name (they also double as ballet students, variety-show chorines, and society ladies), and by a clutch of little girls ranging from tiny to mid-size, who, in a class with “Isadora,” skip about and pass an imaginary gift to one another with sweet graciousness.

The work looked handsome on Maruti Evans’s ovoid white floor and backdrop. If Garland’s Duncan at first seems annoyingly superior, it’s because the author has her speak ideas Isadora wrote. It’s strange to hear her, in the middle of taking a ballet class, denounce the teacher for this terrible, deforming technique. Isadora was very serious, but also merry, and Garland gets more winning as the evening progresses— jumping into the arms of designer Edward Gordon Craig and swigging vodka with her loutish Russian husband, poet Sergei Esenin (Boling manages all the male roles— and the costume changes—with aplomb). However, in the end, Isadora emerges as the thoughtful artist and down-to-earth person she was, rather than as she has been portrayed on film and video—the sex-mad free spirit, running on impulses and champagne.

Belilove, the dancing Isadora, shows the range and progression of Duncan’s style: the rapt, idyllic skipping of early dances to the music of Chopin and Schubert; the twisting torments of the Furies in Gluck’s opera Orfeo; and the weightier, starker gestures of works made in the years after her two children drowned. At the final performance, Belilove’s concentration in the first two dances seemed uncharacteristic- ally erratic, her arms a bit tense. But by Duncan’s most popular number, Blue Danube, she was all generosity, resilience, and wonderful nuanced musicality. And she has enriched her performing of the darker, weightier dances, making them immensely moving. When the four fine young women in filmy tunics joined her in Gluck’s beautiful Dance of the Blessed Spirits, and a voice recited Duncan's great Whitman esque words about “The Dancer of the Future,” we could see that dream of freedom before us.