ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on critical responses in Paris and New York to Isadora Duncan’s performance of her solo La Marseillaise. In Paris it was performed whilst the battle of Verdun was in progress just 150 miles away, and in New York a few weeks before the United States entered the First World War. In each case Duncan found herself lending her support to the war effort. Critical reception of these performances shows the extent to which Duncan was caught between nationalistic politics and the precariousness and vulnerability of life on the battlefield; and between conservative, nineteenth-century ideologies of woman as superior moral being, and progressive era aspirations for women’s liberation.
