Ruth St. Denis

Ruth St. Denis (January 20, 1879 – July 21, 1968) was an early modern dance pioneer.

St. Denis founded Adelphi University's dance program in 1938 which was the one of the first dance departments in an American university. It has since become a cornerstone of Adelphi's Department of Performing Arts.

She and her husband, Ted Shawn, founded the famous, but short-lived dance school, Denishawn. One of her more famous pupils was Martha Graham. Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman also studied at Denishawn. Graham, Humphrey, Weidman and the future silent film star Louise Brooks all performed as dancers with the Denishawn company.

For many years, Denis taught dance at a studio in Hollywood, California just north of the Hollywood Bowl. In 1963 she teamed with Raymond DeArmond Bowman to bring the first full-length Balinese Shadow Puppet play to the United States. The performance was held at her studio and lasted more than 8 hours.

Biography

Born Ruth Dennis on a farm in rural New Jersey in 1879, St. Denis was the daughter of a strong-willed and highly educated woman. Her mother, Ruth Emma Dennis, was a physician by training. St. Denis was encouraged to study dance from an early age. Her early training included Delsarte technique, ballet lessons with the Italian ballerina Maria Bonfante, and popular social dance forms. Ruth began her professional career in New York City in 1892, where she worked in a dime museum and in vaudeville houses as a "skirt dancer," a female dancer whose legs were visible under her short skirt. St. Denis was probably required to perform her dance routine as many as eleven times a day.

In 1898, the young dancer was noticed by David Belasco, a well-known and highly successful Broadway producer and director. He hired her to perform with his large company as a featured dancer and was also responsible for giving her the stage name "St. Denis." She toured with Belasco’s company around the United States and in Europe, and was exposed to the work of several important European artists, including the Japanese dancer Sado Yacco and the great French actress, Sarah Bernhardt.

St. Denis’ artistic imagination was ignited by these artists. She became enthralled by the dance and drama of Eastern cultures, including those of Japan, India, and Egypt. She was also influenced by Bernhardt’s melodramatic acting style, in which the tragic fate of her characters took center stage. After 1900, St. Denis began formulating her own theory of dance/drama based on the techniques of her early training, her readings into philosophy, scientology, and the history of ancient cultures, and the work of artists like Yacco and Bernhardt.

Eastern-influenced Dance Brings Stardom

In 1904, during one of her tours with Belasco, she saw a poster of the goddess Isis in an ad for Egyptian Deities cigarettes. The image of the goddess sparked her imagination and resulted in the creation of a solo dance, Radha, telling the story of a mortal maid who was loved by the god Krishna. St. Denis designed her own elaborate and exotic costume, and performed the dance with three extras from the then flourishing Coney Island Hindi community.

In Radha’s staging, St. Denis surrounded her Indian maiden with symbols of the five senses: bells for hearing; flowers for smelling; wine for tasting; jewels for seeing; and kisses of the palm for touching. St. Denis danced barefoot, which was unheard of at the time and considered quite risqué. At the conclusion of one of these early performances, the audience sat in stunned silence for nearly twenty minutes before finally bursting into thunderous applause. Radha was the first of many creations by St. Denis translating her understanding of Eastern culture and mythology to the dance stage.

Rhada catapulted St. Denis into international stardom. She and her mother went to Europe and traveled the continent performing her "dance translations," which by then included The Cobra, Incense, The Nautch, and The Yogi. She was declared a sensation and was particularly successful in Vienna, Austria, and in Germany, where a bronze nude of her is still part of the permanent collection of the Museum Ludwig in Köln.

In 1909, she returned to the U.S. and gave a series of well-received concerts in New York and other major cities. During the next five years she continued to tour, building her reputation as an exotic dancer with an artistic bent, in the still-emerging genre of modern dance which she helped to create and define. It is during this period that "Professor Inayat Khan" and his group of classical Indian musicians were the opening act for one of her performances.

While in New York, Ruth St. Denis had her first meeting with Ted Shawn, a dancer at the time with a Los Angeles troupe. He had seen her perform in Denver and was convinced that they should work together. During this meeting, they discussed their artistic ideas and ambitions, and Shawn returned the next day to demonstrate his dancing. He was then hired by St. Denis' brother and manager to be her partner. On April 13, 1914, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn began a tour of the southern United States. In August of the same year they were married.

Denishawn Dance School

The next year, the couple founded the Denishawn Dance school and Company in Los Angeles. Among St. Denis’ students were future dance pioneers Martha Graham, Doris Humphreys, and Charles Weidman. St. Denis’ choreographic style broadened to include group numbers occasionally derived from Occidental as well as Oriental sources. Among her choreographic innovations was "music visualization," a style that called for movement equivalents to the timbres, dynamics, rhythm, and structural shapes of music.

In 1930, she and Shawn separated. In addition, the couple had to dissolve the Denishawn School and Company because of the hit the business took as a result of the Depression.

In 1931, St. Denis retired briefly from public performance, and founded the Society of Spiritual Arts. She devoted much of the rest of her life to promoting the use of dance in religion. In 1940, with La Meri (Russell M. Hughes), she founded the School of Natya to continue the teaching of Oriental dance. She also resumed performing in 1940 with an appearance at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival founded in 1933 by Ted Shawn. She continued to appear there nearly every year until 1964. Shawn directed the activities at Jacob's Pillow until his passing in 1972, and the 10-week festival is now the longest-running dance festival in the US, drawing over 80,000 visitors a year. The Jacob's Pillow Archives contain photos, film, audiotapes, costumes, and music from St. Denis' later performances, and although St. Denis and Shawn destroyed many Denishawn sets and props when they dissolved the company, some remnants were transported to Jacob's Pillow and remain in the archives. There is no official inventory of sets and props, but there are recognizable elements from Cosmic Dance of Siva, Feather of the Dawn, and White Jade, as well as many unidentified materials.

Later in life, St. Denis formed a church, St. Denis Religious Art Church, whose mission was the realization of the Divine through the Arts. In 1954, the Hindu mystic Swami Papa Ramdas visited Los Angeles on his world tour, and was Ruth’s guest speaker. He describes her devotional dance which closed the meeting: "She went in and dressed herself for the occasion and came out dancing. Her dance exhibited serpentine movements of an ethereal type. There was perfect silence in the church. The slow movements of her dance created waves of peace that rose and fell in cadence. For us, who have never witnessed such dances, it was indeed a revelation. The impression left on our minds was a combination of surprise and elevation."

St. Denis was often called the "First Lady of American Dance" and the "Queen of American Dance". She remained active into the 1960s, when many of her better-known solos were recorded on film. Although St. Denis has been compared to her contemporary Isadora Duncan, these two artists were inherently different in their approach to the solo dance. According to St. Denis’ biographer Suzanne Shelton, Duncan sought "the Self in the Universe", and St. Denis sought "the Universe in the Self". For St. Denis, exotic worlds could be explored from the vantage point of one’s own body. In her dances, she embodied a vision of perfection inspired by the figures of divinity that she chose to portray – Radha, Mary, Kwan Yin, the Yogi, O-Mika, and others. By choosing figures from many different cultures, she presented a wordless show of spiritual/material unity before thousands of audiences all over the world throughout her life. She passed on July 21, 1968.

Her early works are indicative of her interests in exotic mysticism and spirituality. Many companies currently include a collection of her signature solos in their repertoires, including the programme, “The Art of the Solo,” a showcase of famous solos of modern dance pioneers. Several early St. Denis solos (including “Incense” and ”The Legend of the Peacock”) were presented on September 29, 2006, at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A centennial salute was scheduled with the revival premiere of St. Denis' "Radha," commissioned by Countess Anastasia Thamakis of Greece. The program's director, Mino Nicolas, has been instrumental in the revival of these key solos.

Credits

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