The Isadora Duncan Dance Awards

The Isadora Duncan Dance Awards celebrates the unique richness, diversity, and excellence of Bay Area Dance, to foster a supportive environment for its growth and development. To accomplish this mission, the Awards seek to:

1. honor and enhance the visibility of a diverse range of Bay Area dance artists and practices.

2. acknowledge the role of visiting artists in enriching our community through their collaborations with resident artists.

3. celebrate the highest levels of artistic capacity and expression in order to contribute to fostering an environment where we acknowledge that systemic racism, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and associated aesthetic biases exist in our society and in the dance field at large.

4. view and attend dance events in the Bay Area from every tradition, genre, and culture.

5. continue the ongoing work to cultivate a more equitable future in dance.

The Isadora Duncan Dance Awards recognizes that the Bay Area dance ecosystem includes but is not limited to:

1. dancers, choreographers, and other dance artists including visual, musical, and sound collaborators and other technical personnel active in dance;

2. dance educators, scholars, historians, and dance department faculty members;

3. dance writers, critics, reviewers, and journalists;

4. dance executives and administrators;

5. those who contribute to dance with the goal of community service;

6. private philanthropists, agencies, and foundations who support dance;

7. producers, presenters, and curators of dance working in every aspect of movement, dance, and performance art.

Isadora Duncan Dance Awards Committee Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access Statement

The Isadora Duncan Dance Awards Committee continues its commitment to fostering an environment where committee members are encouraged and supported to view dance events in the Bay Area from every tradition, genre, and culture. We acknowledge that systemic racism, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and associated aesthetic biases exist in our society and in the dance field at large. The committee is working to understand how entrenched societal systems and personal bias affect our choices in selecting what work to view, nominate, and award. We are initiating an Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access review of our structure and strategies with involvement by the entire committee and board of directors as a means of deepening our commitment to a more equitable future in dance.

Who is Isadora Duncan?

"Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) was an American pioneer of dance and is an important figure in both the arts and history. Known as the “Mother of Modern Dance,” Isadora Duncan was a self-styled revolutionary whose influence spread from American to Europe and Russia, creating a sensation everywhere she performed. Her style of dancing eschewed the rigidity of ballet and she championed the notion of free-spiritedness coupled with the high ideals of ancient Greece: beauty, philosophy, and humanity. She brought into being a totally new way to dance.

Dancer, adventurer, and ardent defender of the free spirit, Isadora Duncan is one of the most enduring influences on contemporary culture and can be credited with inventing what came to be known as Modern Dance. With free-flowing costumes, bare feet, and loose hair, she took to the stage inspired by the ancient Greeks, the music of classical composers, the wind and the sea. Isadora elevated the dance to a high place among the arts, returning the discipline to its roots as a sacred art. Duncan shed the restrictive corsets of the Victorian era and broke away from the vocabulary of the ballet. Stepping out of the dance studio with a vision of the dance of the future, Isadora embraced artists, philosophers, and writers as her teachers and guides.

According to Isadora, the development of her dance was a natural phenomenon – not an invention, but a rediscovery of the classical principles of beauty, motion, and form. Her dances were born of the impulse to embrace life’s bittersweet challenges, meeting destiny and fate head-on in her own whirlwind journey, filled with both tragedy and ecstasy. She was determined to “dance a different dance,” telling her own life story through abstract, universal expressions of the human condition.

Shocking some audience members and inspiring others, Isadora posed a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxies of her time. Isadora was a champion in the struggle for women‘s rights. Many saw a glorious vision for the future in Isadora’s choreography. Her influence upon the development of progressive ideas and culture from her time to our own has yet to be measured. She has inspired artists, thinkers, and idealists everywhere."

Check out isadoraduncan.org for more information!