Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [47]
In 1913, the American dancer Isadora Duncan was scandalizing Europe. Her uninhibitedly sensual emphasis upon the expression of emotion and physical improvisation was revolutionary, and deeply shocked many of her contemporaries who were still convinced that the body was a shameful thing. Duncan believed intensely in the idea that we are mind and body; her body was not external to her, it was her. She rejected formal dancing, including ballet, with its strict rules of posture and formation, because they were “ugly and against nature.” Her following was huge. Whatever Isadora Duncan’s pretentiousness and however justified her critics, this woman had responded to the emotional and physical alienation emerging as a side effect of life in the first machine age. She touched many of those who flocked to see her in revealing the very unmachinelike possibility of an unself-conscious relationship with one’s body. When the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was completed in 1913, Duncan’s reputation was such that her likeness was carved by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle over the entrance, while inside the theater, Duncan appeared in Maurice Denis’s murals of the nine muses.
Gabrielle was in search of a means to express something in herself as yet undefined, and now believed that she, too, wanted to be a dancer. Contriving an invitation with a friend to a private performance at Duncan’s house, she was game enough to be unimpressed and would remain caustic in her criticism of the great muse. Rejecting such a distinguished teacher, she found instead Elise Toulemon (stage name Caryathis), an early devotee of the dance methods of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze.
In about 1905, while attempting to improve his music students’ abilities, Jaques-Dalcroze had created a system of musical education. Naming his “harmonious bodily movement as a form of artistic expression” eurythmics, his intention had neither been an end in itself nor a form of dance. However, the timing was propitious and his ideas had spread quickly across Europe. Suggesting as they did nonballetic dance techniques, the principles of eurythmics would soon be used to develop radically new dance forms. At the same time, by 1912, eurythmics as a form of dance-exercise had become something of a Parisian fashion.
The health-giving aspects of sport, and Isadora Duncan’s and Jaques-Dalcroze’s philosophies of self-expression, encouraged a small number of young women to take up these ideas as a form of self-development as well as a means of maintaining lithe and exercised bodies. Such attitudes were seen by most contemporaries as distastefully antifeminine, and the young women were regarded as more or less outrageous. They themselves saw their exercising as a kind of emancipation. Reacting against the flaccidness of middle-aged women, made taut by nothing more taxing than a corset, Gabrielle diverted herself with the unconventional idea that physical perfection could be gained only via exercise.
Her dance teacher Elise was most definitely unconventional. Having escaped from a background as impoverished and defective as Gabrielle’s, Elise ended up in Montmartre, where her flamboyance had given her a wild reputation. Later, she would make a tempestuous marriage to the troubled homosexual writer Marcel Jouhandeau, but for now, she was one of the dancers at the Théâtre des Arts. In the period when Gabrielle met her—about 1912–13—while Elise’s talents as a dancer and choreographer were becoming recognized, to make ends meet she also gave classes in expressive dance. Her extrovert sensuality