Raymond Duncan

Raymond Duncan wore a homespun Greek tunic and sandals every day for sixty years, ran a commune and an academy in Paris, and was the brother of Isadora. The family were San Franciscans of no money and considerable self-belief, and Raymond went to Greece with his sister in 1903 intending to live as the ancients had; he stayed with it after she moved on, building a house at Kopanos on Hymettus, learning to weave, and adopting the tunic permanently. He was arrested in several countries for indecency over the sandals and bare legs. His Akademia Raymond Duncan in Paris taught weaving, printing, dance and Greek philosophy, sold hand-woven cloth and hand-printed books, and ran on the labour of its members, which is either a craft commune or an exploitation depending on the account. He wrote and lectured constantly on a doctrine he called actionalism, and printed his own pamphlets on his own presses. To the Paris expatriates he was a joke and a fixture at once - Lucia Joyce studied dance in his orbit, and he turns up in a dozen memoirs of the period as the man in the toga. He outlived his sister by thirty-nine years, kept the Akademia going into the 1960s, and died at ninety-two, still in the tunic. He claimed to have introduced the word actionalism into English and nobody else used it. His first wife Penelope Sikelianos was Greek and the sister of the poet Angelos. The Akademia s premises on the rue de Seine are now a gallery. He gave a lecture the week before he died.

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