Isadora Duncan International Institute

FREE EVENT! The 'Delphic Preview' Festival of the Muses: On the Sacred Way
2025-08-22 10:00 - 2025-08-23 21:00 (America/New_York) | The Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University, 3100 Whitehaven St NW, Washington, DC, DC, 20008, United States
Festival of the Muses: On the Sacred Way

Friday, August 22nd through Saturday, August 23rd, 2025

Hosted by Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D.C.Free of charge

Join us for this two-day gathering that celebrates the living spirit of the ancient Delphic Games through a contemporary lens—where myth breathes, music resounds, and the Muses rise anew. Presented by Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in collaboration with the Isadora Duncan International Institute, the Ecumenical Delphic Union, and the Committee for the Reinstatement of the Delphic Games, the Festival marks a vital step in the international movement to restore these sacred traditions globally.
Through lectures, performances, workshops, and discussions, participants engage with ancient Greek culture in vibrant, modern forms—poetry, dance, theater, sport, song, and ritual—culminating thematically in an experiential procession along the “Sacred Way.”
This “Delphic Preview” serves as a practicum for the upcoming full five-day Festival for the Reinstatement of the Delphic Games, to be held in Delphi, Greece, in Summer 2027, and extends into the Garden of the Muses, a growing archive of creative offerings in word, sound, and movement.
Scholars, artists, and the public are warmly invited to attend. We welcome proposals from academics and enthusiasts alike—whether presentations, performances, or workshops—on themes relating to Delphi, the Delphic Games, Apollo, the Muses, mythology, and their unique ties to the Delphic tradition in sport, art, music, dance, poetry, theater, and song.

This event is free to the public and will culminate in a festive performance at 7pm on Saturday the 23rd

Click here for more information and registration!

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Presented by
Panos Kaltsis, Founder and President, Ecumenical Delphic Union
Jeanne Bresciani, Festival Founding Chair, Artistic Director, Isadora Duncan International Institute
with Committee Members
Rosemary Cooper, Isadora Duncan International Institute
Mary DiSanto-Rose, Skidmore College
Cynthia Word, Word Dance Theater

PERFORMANCE | Isadora Duncan in the Theater of Love & War
2025-09-06 19:00 - 21:00
Isadora Duncan in the Theater of Love and War
Saturday, September 6th, 2025 | 7pm
Jeanne Bresciani & The Isadora Duncan International Institute Dancers

Written & Directed by Jeanne Bresciani, Artist in Residence
Assistant Directed by Rosemary Cooper
Rehearsal Direction by Celeste Royo
Costumes by Janine Stockin, Karen Sanders & Alicia Mugetti
Original Choreographies by Isadora Duncan
Original Choreographies and Reconstructions by Jeanne Bresciani

Tickets Available Now!

On Saturday, September 6th, 2025, Jeanne Bresciani & the Isadora Duncan International Institute Dancers premier a dance-theater production, entitled Isadora Duncan in the Theater of Love and War at the historic Woodstock Playhouse, honoring Isadora and the Isadorables’ profound legacy in the iconic artists’ colony and the greater Hudson Valley during WWI. Featuring a rare reconstruction of Duncan choreography to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, Allegretto, alongside new works, the performance evokes impassioned mission with an urgency surrounding themes of exile, resilience and the coming of age within nature as sanctuary. Set to music by Schubert, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and contemporary composers, this theater of love and war conjures Duncan’s experimental vision—where art and spirited movement unite to become a language of hope and liberation. In that very landscape and moment of time that once inspired inconsolable and ecstatic Duncan raptures, the IDII celebrates the timeless power of dance to transcend and transform.

History:
Many do not know the history of Isadora and the six Isadorables in the States and of their prolonged stays in New York City and within the Hudson Valley during WWI. With Isadora, better received in Europe than at home, early in WWI six teenaged girls became her officially adopted children, along with emergency wartime care of many other homeless, refugee children from her school in Europe. The Duncan tenure in the States was sustained by the remarkable support and bountiful spirit of American entrepreneurs and their families along the Hudson River.
Through this production, many shall learn of Isadora’s extraordinary force as inspiratrix of an epoch, iconic in originality and oceanic in scope. She was equally incredible in giving all she possessed, including her precious long-sought school in France as a hospital for the wounded, never to be reclaimed. However, greater still was her leadership drawing forth the United States into WWI with every fiber of her being through startling performances and vivid proclamations to save Europe and civilization itself. From this intense and stirring legacy, the IDII was founded in 1977 by Maria Theresa Duncan and Kay Bardsley, of which you are all a vital part, persisting in its goals educational, cultural, philosophical and theatrical.

Tickets Available Now!
This project is made possible with funds from the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.

Help Us Bring the Vision to Life!

The Isadora Duncan International Institute is actively seeking sponsors to support the upcoming premiere of Isadora Duncan in the Theater of Love & War, taking place on September 6, 2025, at the Woodstock Playhouse. We welcome both financial contributions and in-kind donations—such as bubbly, lodging, catering, printing, or services—to help bring this powerful production to life. All sponsors will be recognized in printed programs, digital materials, and pre-show acknowledgments. Your support, at any level, helps sustain the arts in the Hudson Valley and honors Isadora Duncan’s enduring legacy through beauty, movement, and community.

Learn More About Sponsorship Here!

A Winter Garden Festival of Light 🌲 Isadora Festival Class - Free Offering
2025-12-16 19:00 - 20:00 | Zoom
Winter Garden Festival Class
Tuesday, December 16th, 2025 – 7pm Eastern
Join Jeanne Bresciani for our annual Winter Garden Festival Class, a luminous seasonal gathering that invites participants to light the way through the Winter Festive Season and journey the evergreen spiral in our symbolic garden of midwinter.
Participants are encouraged to prepare a circle of boughs, garlands, or silks and to keep a candle or faux candle close at hand. Jeanne will guide a thematic progression of movement, music, dance, and verse, leading us along a gentle labyrinthine path toward the birth of the sun—a ritual of renewal, reflection, and quiet radiance.
A cherished tradition, the Winter Garden offers a moment of beauty and communal warmth as the year draws to a close.
Offered Freely
Register to Attend

Venice Carnevale 2026 | Guided Luxury Travel
2026-02-10 - 2026-02-16 | Venezia, Venice, Italy
Step into Venice as into a living myth, led by Jeanne Bresciani, Ph.D., assisted by Rosemary Cooper —where water mirrors heaven, marble breathes, and beauty arises not only from opulence but from the hand of devotion. Art at the Heart of the Festival invites travelers to ascend and descend from the lofty vantage points of princes and princesses into sanctuaries of Venetian splendor within the palaces, workshops, and ateliers – where art is still born of patience, love, and tradition.
Here, we do not merely gaze upon masterpieces—we enter into their making. Through myth-based movement sessions, ceremonial processions, and encounters with artisans, we awaken to the pulse of a city that remains, in all its fragility, eternal.

Click here to learn more

CPI Workshop | Maria Theresa Duncan: The Autobiographical as Revelation
2026-08-13 16:00 - 2026-08-16 19:00 | Tempio di Danza, 20 Clovewood Road, High Falls, NY, 12440
Maria Theresa Duncan: The Autobiographical as Revelation

Thursday, August 13th to Sunday, August 16th, 2026

In-Person and Live Via Zoom with Jeanne Bresciani, Ph.D.
Open to all General Students and Candidates in
The Certificate Program in Isadora Studies I: The Training

To the Isadorian Philosophy, Movement and Memory of Embodied Creation
Autobiography is understood not as recollection alone, but as a generative force through which life, memory, ancestry, encounter, and history become artistic purpose. The stories we live and those entrusted to us by earlier generations form reservoirs of meaning that shape vocation, identity, and cultural continuity. Together, we shall center upon the extraordinary legacy of Maria Theresa Duncan — Isadora Duncan’s adopted daughter — whose artistic life extended half a century beyond her sister-spirits to preserve masterworks, teachings, and transmissions that might otherwise have vanished. Through her example, participants examine how lived experience, myth, devotion, place, and historical consciousness become embodied creation. Study unfolds through movement, theatrical exploration, music, literature, reconstruction, choreography, improvisation, imagery, and poetic inquiry, where personal history and artistic imagination merge into a living practice.
Tracing Maria Theresa Duncan’s journey from the Duncan Schools to Greece and Steichen, New York studios, galleries of art, great stages, major projects, and later honors, the course investigates the continuum between ancient ritual and modern expression. At its center lies the Isadorian vision: the artist does not merely invent but discovers, receives, transforms, and transmits. We consider our intergenerational stewardship and responsibility to perpetuate an art. Through the lens of Maria Theresa’s life and artistic journey, participants encounter the artist and the self as oracle, witness, devotee, rebel, force of nature and living bridge between eras. It is an inquiry into artistic inheritance beyond bounds — and what it means to listen, learn, and stand within a trajectory greater than oneself. We ask what memories spark the individual vessel and the cultural repository, what unfinished visions seek embodiment, and how tradition remains vital, opening to futurity. Autobiography emerges here as individual creative agency — spoken, written, and danced — through which revelation shows itself not simply as art but a “merging of arts” wholly luminous, evolving, and enduring.

Register Here!

$500 – In-Person | $300 – Zoom only

Schedule
Thursday, August 13th | 4:00pm – 7:00pm (Hybrid)

Friday, August 14th | 10:00 am – 1:00pm (Hybrid)

4:00pm – 7:00pm (In-Person Only)

Saturday, August 15th | 9:00am – 1:00pm (Hybrid)

3:00pm – 7:00pm (In-Person Only)

Sunday, August 16th | 9:00am – 1:00pm (Hybrid)

3:00pm – 6:00pm (In-Person Only)

6:00pm – 7:00pm (Performance)
