Educational Media Reviews Online

Isadora Duncan is one of the iconic figures of the early Twentieth Century Modernist movement, setting out as she did to figuratively and literally uncorset dance from the stylized constrictions of the classical ballet. Then again, her flamboyant personality and her premature death (she was strangled when the shawl she wore caught in the wheels of the car she sat in) assured a kind of cult following that in some ways complemented and sometimes undermined her significant accomplishments. Cut to Lori Belilove, dancer, founder, and director of the Isadora Duncan Foundation in New York City. Belilove early on was so inspired by Duncan as to virtually devote her life to the continuation of Duncan’s work, this at a time when the work itself was seen as honored more for what it wrought than for itself. Reincarnation – given the fervor of Belilove’s attachment to the task, the title is more than apt – tells her story. We see Belilove at the seashore, seeking inspiration from the same waves that inspired Duncan herself. We see Belilove in her studio with her students. Not unexpectedly, the company has attracted some unusual Duncan devotees. We get to hear their transformative stories of how they came to Belilove’s classes, many of the stories tinged with quasi-mystical overtones that hark all the way back to Duncan. Belilove also conceived and appeared in a dance drama production about Duncan’s life entitled Isadora … No Apologies, from which we see a number of scenes. Belilove’s dancing, it needs be said, aspires to be the real thing, but doesn’t always for one reason or another quite achieve it. As it happens, two of the most moving segments of the film invoke the past on the one hand, the future on the other. Julia Levien is a sculptor (she died in December 2006) who in the 1940s danced in a company called the Isadorables, and who recounts on camera a visit to her mother’s Bronx apartment by Isadora and her then husband, Russian poet, Sergei Esenin. Levien is a memorable personality, she steals the show…. The second scene stealer is a young dancer, Hayley Brasher, perhaps the most impressive dancer in the film, who at age 12 is already an accomplished Duncan dancer. Her mother describes how Hayley, bitten from a very young age by the bug, has given up her ballet classes in order to pursue the Duncan technique. She clearly is a very gifted performer, and it’s deeply touching to watch her at the film’s end wade in the beckoning waves…