Myth and image in the dance of Isadora Duncan

The cultural inheritance of Isadora Duncan undergoes 're-vision' via the imaginal theory of archetypal psychology, in contrast to 'revision' via deconstructionist thinking. Findings are based on new documentation from Duncan's library, from data provided by primary figures known to Duncan and through this researcher's intimacy with Duncan's masterworks. Discoveries led to definitive inclusion of Duncan within, both an 'archaeological' and an 'imaginal' Greece. Translations from a panoply of the ancients are among the mother lode of works, which validate Duncan's scholarly immersion in an 'archaeological' Greece. A comprehensive reading of varied sources attest to Duncan's lifelong operation within an 'imaginal' Greece: Duncan's writings, referential to antiquity; the apprehension of testimony by those close to Duncan's inspired, actualized sense of classicism; and participation in the mythopoetic material within the dancer's choreographic oeuvre.; Duncan's contributions, endowed with the perceptivity of a philosophy, the depth of a psychology and the beauty of a poetics, place Duncan pivotally in the live enactment and generic description of material antecedent to numerous theories paramount in importance to C. G. Jung. From the perspective of a history of ideas, the legacies of Duncan and Jung share affinity: (1) in mutual influences, ancient, Renaissance and modern; (2) in the cross-fertilization at the physical locus of Ascona, Switzerland; (3) and in the psyche's reliance on myth and image as rooted in both Duncan and Jung's investigations and realizations on the centricity of the soul, on the solar plexus as the body center, and on the intrinsic goal of wholeness in lieu of perfection.; An orientation emergent from Jung within James Hillman's archetypal psychology provides a context sufficiently broad to encompass Duncan's theory and practice today. Viewed as a proto-imaginal theorist, Duncan's art and life are described in light of imaginal theory's basic operations: (1) personifying or 'imagining things'; (2) pathologizing or 'falling apart'; (3) psychologizing or 'seeing through'; (4) dehumanizing or 'soul-making'.; Conclusively, Duncan's legacy merits this comparison to Jung's psychoanalytical paradigm and to Hillman's imaginal model. Both approaches afford Duncan's 'movement of the soul', a view as a 'psychosynthetical' genre of experience in order for its future understanding and replication to be non-literal, non-interpretive and, instead, mythopoetic.