Common Shade: Catherine Gallant on Isadora Duncan’s Dances of Mourning

In the early 20th century, Isadora Duncan’s innovative dances changed the art world forever. But it was the sudden death of her children that most influenced her life and work. After losing her two young children to drowning, Duncan poured her grief into dance. She created her Grande Marche and other dances expressing grief, mortality, and mourning, as well as remembrance and rebirth. Catherine Gallant is a student of Duncan, and regularly performs these dances. She’ll perform these emotional dances to live music, before discussing Duncan’s process, her relationship to her children’s death, and how Gallant connects to Duncan and her artistic outpouring of grief.

Morbid Anatomy Museum and Green-Wood present Common Shade – a dialogue existing on the borderlands between the living and the dead. Hosted in Green-Wood’s intimate Historic Chapel, Common Shade will cultivate a social space for death – a place to examine death’s prevalence in our lives, and its shifting place in history, art, culture, and society. Drawing from Green-Wood’s bucolic setting and using history as our anchor, each night’s presentations will include dialogue and interviews with guests. Together with artists, practitioners, scholars, and peers, Common Shade discussions will explore our humble acknowledgments of and engagements with death.

$25 for non-members / $20 for members of Green-Wood, BHS and the Morbid Anatomy Museum. Cash bar (free for Green-Wood Key Holders) available at each event.

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