Ruth St. Denis
St. Denis, Ruth (20 Jan. 1879-21 July 1968), dancer, choreographer, and teacher, was born Ruth Dennis in Newark, New Jersey, the daughter of Thomas Laban Dennis and Ruth Emma Hullo. Her mother, the second woman to receive a medical diploma from the University of Michigan Medical School, was an advocate of dress reform. Her father was a machinist by trade and an inventor by inclination. The pair had met at Eagleswood, a colony near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where artists and freethinkers congregated. Their "marriage" was a matter of agreement, solemnized in a ceremony with neither clergyman nor justice of the peace officiating.
Because Ruth's mother was sickly and her father could neither keep a job nor achieve success with his inventions, Pin Oaks farm in Somerville, New Jersey, where the family moved in 1884, was turned into a boardinghouse. It drew a clientele with intellectual or artistic leanings. Through these paying guests little Ruth was exposed to Christian Science and to Theosophy, doctrines that were to influence how she lived and how she framed her dances. From her mother she learned physical exercises devised by American disciples of the French theoretician François Delsarte.
Delsarte, originally interested in freeing the voices of singers and orators and making them more expressive, related posture and gesture to corresponding emotions and thoughts. His American students systematized his theories into exercises that entered many areas of the culture, from acting schools to schoolchildren's recitations to classes promoting grace and good health among society women. Delsartean principles--also inspiring to St. Denis's contemporary Isadora Duncan--linked physical action with spiritual states and thus elevated dancing above its connotations of titillating entertainment. In her autobiography, An Unfinished Life (1939), St. Denis recalls the excitement she felt as a stagestruck thirteen-year-old on seeing a Delsarte matinee given by Genevieve Stebbins, one of the leading Delsarte teachers and theorists. Stebbins's beauty and grace gave St. Denis her first inkling that idealism and dance could be linked, and she commemorated the performance years later: "The image of her white Grecian figure became so indelibly printed on my mind that everything I subsequently did stemmed from this performance" (p. 16).
With her family's approval and support, Ruth Dennis made her debut at Worth's Dime Museum in Manhattan in 1894, performing dance routines of her own devising larded with splits and other mild acrobatics. She spent the next four years performing in revues and variety shows as one of many skirt dancers--making much of flourishing a skirt, kicking a shapely leg, or bending backward in flirtatious abandon--while finishing her high school education at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn. In 1898 she toured with a musical comedy and the following year was taken by the impresario Augustin Daly into one of the several casts of A Runaway Girl. It was in 1904, during a highly educational four-year stint dancing and acting in various plays (Zaza, Madame DuBarry, and The Auctioneer) mounted by the producer-director David Belasco, that she seized on the images and themes that guided her later career as an independent artist.
Stimulated by readings in Eastern philosophy and mysticism, by a mix of Christian Science and Theosophy, by manifestations of orientalism, and by a cigarette poster in a Buffalo drugstore that showed the goddess Isis serenely enthroned, Dennis premiered her first important solo dance in 1906. Belasco had urged her to change her name, and it was as Ruth St. Denis that she premiered Radha on the variety bill of a Sunday night smokers concert on 28 January 1906.
Despite the influence of the cigarette poster, Radha was set in India, not Egypt; but it incorporated some of St. Denis's plans for a more ambitious solo, Egypta, which was not presented until 1910. In Radha, St. Denis, a barefoot goddess in filmy veils, descended from her shrine to give her priests (hired extras) lessons in renunciation of the senses. Her alluring solos, to music from Léo Delibes's opera Lakmé, illustrated the charms of each sense before she returned, transfigured, to her niche. Radha baffled vaudeville critics by blending theatrical savvy and physical allure with spirituality. The performer's feet were bare, her attire flimsy, yet this was clearly no hootchy-kootch. Some found Radha too slow and serious for vaudeville.
St. Denis, beautiful, earnest, and high-minded, had already performed in salons of New York society, and she gave many interviews in which she preached the innate spirituality of dance. The year of her debut with Radha, the wives of prominent New York businessmen and artists launched her in a setting more dignified than that of a variety bill: a matinee of her own at the Hudson Theatre, featuring Radha and two new dances, The Incense and Cobras.
Some critics were still condescending: "Barefoot Wriggler Delights Society" was the headline of a review in the New York World on 23 March 1906. Yet many of the press and the public were able to see St. Denis as she wished to be seen. As her husband, Ted Shawn, wrote in 1920 in his Ruth St. Denis: Pioneer and Prophet, "But so intense in her concentration was Ruth St. Denis that she banished prudery from the mind of the beholder and he left the theatre conscious only of a revelation of great beauty and harmonious art, a pure intense fervor, and a profound peace" (p. v). Like Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis pioneered the notion that dancing could reflect serious, even spiritual ideas.
Common themes emerge in the first dances of St. Denis as well as in those that she composed during her European appearances of 1907-1909 and for subsequent concert and vaudeville appearances throughout America. The dances were essentially solos--even when, as in the full-length dance drama Egypta, she was backed by supporting actors, dancers, and musicians. (St. Denis's younger brother, Brother, or Buzz, was often among them, using the stage name of René St. Denis.) Most of her dances dealt in some measure with transformation. In numbers like Cobras and The Nautch (1908), St. Denis simply assumed an exotic persona: in the first, she was a snake charmer, her gloved hands the snakes; in the second, she was an Indian street performer soliciting money. But in dances like Radha, The Incense, Bakawali (1913), and O-mika (1913), the heroine, whether mortal or a goddess, underwent purification or stripped off layers of mortality to discover and reveal her essential self. In The Incense, as an Indian woman, performing the ceremony of puja, St. Denis, swaying beatifically, rippled her remarkably flexible arms as if she had become one with the upward spirals of smoke. She knew little of Indian or Japanese dance but, fortified by her Delsartean training, drew her ideas from poetry, her postures and gestures from books of sculpture and painting. Her music was by Western composers working in the "à la orientale" mode. Very occasionally, as in The Scherzo Waltz (1914), she performed as herself, simply dancing to music in the manner of Isadora Duncan.
In 1914 St. Denis hired Ted Shawn and his partner to perform as a ballroom dance team on her programs. Shawn, who had begun as a student of theology and turned to dance as a way of reviving muscles disabled by diphtheria, made an immediate impression on St. Denis. Concerned with redefining dancing to a puritanical America as a "manly art," he could speak eloquently on the nobility of dance and its high status in antiquity. He soon became St. Denis's partner, and shortly thereafter they married and in 1915 established in Los Angeles a school, Denishawn, that attracted girls from "respectable" families as well as movie stars. A prospectus for 1918 lists courses in "basic technique, Delsarte, oriental dance, Egyptian dance, ballet, Greek dance, creative dance, music visualizations, plastique, geisha, piano, French, crafts, Red Cross."
Shawn was a shrewd businessman: for $50, a student could procure two dances, with sheet music and costume designs. He was also an enthusiastic teacher; St. Denis was, admittedly, better at inspiring. Both felt a sense of mission about Denishawn. They gave inspirational talks to the students and held classes out of doors to secure the uplifting effect of nature. Denishawn, St. Denis later wrote in her autobiography, was to be a "school of life" (p. 178). The school almost instantly spawned a company. Until 1929, with few breaks, St. Denis and Shawn toured the country (and, in 1925-1926, Asia) at the head of a group drawn from their students, among whom were Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. They performed items from the repertory on the vaudeville circuit as well as on more desirable concert tours where Denishawn was the sole attraction.
Shawn extended St. Denis's repertory of colorful locales to Siam, Java, Mexico, Spain, North Africa, and the American past. In Denishawn genre pieces like Shawn's Ourieda--A Romance of the Desert (1914) and Cuadro Flamenco (1923), St. Denis's Ishtar of the Seven Gates (1923), and the joint The Garden of Kama (1915), he played prince consort to his wife's queen, worshipper to her goddess, fiery wooer to her glamorous maiden. Both continued to perform solos, and Shawn set numbers on various of the company dancers.
Around 1917, St. Denis began to experiment with "music visualizations," inspired by Isadora Duncan and the ideas of the Swiss Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, which correlated movement not just with the rhythm of music but also with its pitch and instrumentation. In these, the dancers assumed no disguises and wore simple tunics or flowing dresses. Notable among these are her solos Brahms Waltz and Liebestraum (both 1922). Her protégée, Doris Humphrey, assisted her in some of these dances, collaborating on Soaring (1919), which featured Art Nouveau images of young women making an immense sheet of china silk billow above them or twist into a lily bud around the central figure. In 1919 and 1920, during a difficult period in the Shawn-St. Denis marriage, St. Denis toured a program of music visualizations on the concert circuit with an all-female group billed as the Ruth St. Denis Concert Dancers.
Although Shawn and St. Denis were reunited for subsequent tours--including a stint in 1927-1928 in which Denishawn was a featured attraction in the Ziegfeld Follies--the marriage (which was childless) finally fell apart in 1931, after a last duet tour in 1930. Shawn then began to tour with his successful Men Dancers and in 1941 turned "Jacob's Pillow," a farm he had bought in 1930 near Becket, Massachusetts, into a summer school and dance festival. However, he frequently invited St. Denis to perform at Jacob's Pillow, and both enjoyed presenting themselves to the press and the public as "great lovers."
Despite the success of Denishawn, bad luck and unwise financial management left St. Denis in straitened circumstances after the split. Compared to the powerful, austere, socially conscious dances being made by the "modern" dancers, St. Denis's work struck many as passé. During this last part of her career, she began dancing in Christian churches, adding the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene to her repertory of heroines with veils and spiritual transformations (e.g., The Masque of Mary [1934]). Connected to the Society of Spiritual Arts that she founded was a rhythmic choir to support her in church pageants. Almost up to her death her stamina was remarkable, her charisma indestructible. In her seventies, she was still radiant in the simple steps and fluid arm ripples of one of her first solos, The Incense. At the age of eighty-seven, she performed it one last time, at Orange Coast College in California, where she lived with her brother and his family. She died in Hollywood, California.
St. Denis was not a "modern dancer," but, as her major biographer, Suzanne Shelton, writes (Divine Dancer [1981], p. xv), she was "dedicated to the belief that behind each physical gesture was an emotional or spiritual motivation." That idea, as well as her sense of theater, her exploration of the female psyche, and the free body attitudes of her more abstract music visualizations, gave American modern dancers like Graham and Humphrey a base on which to develop their harsher, more contemporary work.
Bibliography
Two hundred bound volumes of St. Denis's handwritten journals are located in the Ruth St. Denis Collection, Department of Special Collections, Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles. The same collection includes programs, letters, costumes, and other important items. Extensive archival material, including films, is also to be found in the Ruth St. Denis Collection and the Denishawn Collection, Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The major biography is Suzanne Shelton, Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis (1981), which was reissued in paperback in 1990 as Ruth St. Denis: A Biography of the Divine Dancer. See also Christena L. Schlundt, The Professional Appearances of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn (1962) and Into the Mystic with Miss Ruth, vol. 46 of Dance Perspectives (1971); and Jane Sherman, The Drama of Denishawn Dance (1979). A front-page obituary is in the New York Times, 22 July 1968.
Deborah Jowitt
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