When she danced, Isadora Duncan wore very thin clothing. She wanted people to see her body as she ran across the stage.

Isadora spent most of her teen-aged years in the San Francisco area. She continued to teach dancing classes, mostly to young girls.

She also visited local libraries to read the works of Shakespeare and to study about the ancient Greeks.

When she was eighteen years old, Isadora urged her mother to move to Chicago and then to New York. She thought dancing in these two large cities would help her career. She found work in several dance companies or groups of dancers. But she had to dance as she was directed to do. She did not dance alone on the stage and could not become the “star” of the show.

Sometimes Isadora Duncan was paid to dance in the homes of wealthy people or at parties they gave in their gardens. But soon it was hard to find jobs that paid her enough money just to survive. In a short time, she was out of work and poor once again. Using her last dollars, she bought a ticket on a cattle boat and sailed to Europe in eighteen ninety-nine.

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Isadora Duncan arrived in London. She visited the British Museum every day for several months. She studied Greek vases and sculpture with their images of ancient Greek women dancing. In nineteen hundred, she danced for a large audience at London’s Lyceum Theater. The people liked what they saw. Soon art lovers in the city were talking about this new dancer from the United States.