American dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan, performing in Paris, London, and across Europe and Russia from the early 1900s, made the uncorseted, freely moving female body the centrepiece of a new performance aesthetic. Duncan danced barefoot in loose Grecian tunics, explicitly rejecting the structured femininity of ballet (with its corsets, pointe shoes, and rigid bodily discipline) in favour of a Romantic naturalism derived from ancient Greece. Her performances were received as both scandalous and liberating, and she became one of the most influential performance artists of the century.

Duncan's embodied vision of female freedom was directly connected to the literary modernism developing around her: Yeats, Rilke, and Ezra Pound were all profoundly affected by her performances and incorporated the language of free-flowing feminine movement into their verse. Her autobiography My Life (1927) became a classic document of female artistic liberation. Duncan remains a touchstone for poets writing about dance, the body, and the rejection of conventional femininity.