The Color of Isadora

The Ukrainian Home Art Gallery displays ISADORA: The Dance, a one woman show by Kyiv artist Tetiana Voloshyna. Diverging from the great dancer’s biography is obviously an indispensable condition. Isadora Duncan is portrayed on the shores of Nice, wearing a mock Greek tunic and scarf. No mention of the children killed in an accident or Sergei Yesenin. And any reference in this context would be highly irrelevant. The only thing borrowed from real life is the blue screen against which she always danced. In fact, blue is the predominant color of the display. It was Isadora’s color. The rest of the colors, the rhythm, plasticity are strange, unreal, yet creating incredibly realistic images, like the masked unicorn dancing around (a symbol of purity and solitude, and a sacred animal) on St. Mark Square in Venice, a far cry from the real place. All this is because Tatiana focuses on the Dance and her Isadora embodied it, rather than an earthly woman.

“Dancing is a most subtle art. Lines beget themselves and born of themselves are sounds, silence, emptiness, a minute, a second, a flight, and immobility. Speed and slowness. Fabric and pas. Portraying a dance is one thing and sensing it is something altogether different. The exposition is dedicated precisely to this idea, this sense of dancing. The project is a series of meditations on Isadora’s dances. From these meditations emerges an image, a metaphor. My works are intended to give rise to this sensation. It is inimitable, it can be excruciating, perhaps inspiring. But color is the main thing,” says the artist. Perfection that cannot be achieved is perhaps the essence of all her creative reveries.