著者
北原 まり子
出版者
舞踊学会
雑誌
舞踊學 (ISSN:09114017)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.2017, no.40, pp.35-40, 2017 (Released:2019-12-05)

In 1904, Michel Fokine attended Isadora Duncan’s Russian debut, and his reform of the art of ballet, which occurred a year later, was realized under the influence of her art. This narration received a very wide currency during the choreographer’s triumphal European tours with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the 1910s, after which Fokine was forced to struggle to detach his reform from her art and dispel his disgrace as Duncan’s “follower” or “imitator.” To defend this discourse, published texts on the choreographer have principally depended on the following two references written in the 1920s: Duncan’s posthumous autobiography My Life, in which she reminisces about a dinner with Diaghilev’s circle after her first appearance in St. Petersburg, and a letter written by Diaghilev wherein he recalls attending Duncan’s Russian debut with Fokine. However, these two sources are dubious with regard to their dates if we weigh them against some contemporary accounts, Fokine’s recollection, or the date of Léon Bakst’s portrait of Duncan. Indeed, according to Vladimir Teliakovsky’s diaries, it was during her Russian sojourn from the end of 1907 to the spring of 1908 that Duncan was closely associated with the Imperial Theatre and their ballet company as she visited the Imperial School and gave a demonstration in the Mariinsky Theatre with her German school students.