Ruth St. Denis

Dancer

• Born: January 20, 1879
• Birthplace: Somerville, New Jersey
• Died: July 21, 1968
• Place of death: Hollywood, California

American dancer

One of the pioneers of American modern dance, St. Denis helped to popularize the art form in its infancy with exotic and lavish productions based on Asian and religious themes.

Area of achievement Dance

Early Life

Ruth St. Denis (saynt DEH-nihs) was born to Ruth Emma Hull Dennis and Thomas Dennis while they were residents of the Eagleswood artists’ and intellectuals’ commune near Newark, New Jersey. Thomas Dennis was a British inventor and machinist, an alcoholic whose effect on the family was negligible. Ruth Dennis was a determined and resourceful woman who was instrumental in shaping the patterns and direction of her daughter’s life.

A practicing physician until a mental breakdown ended her career, Ruth Dennis was an advocate for the women’s health and hygiene reform movements that swept the country in the late 1800’s. Determined that her daughter would not suffer from the same conditions that afflicted many of the young women of her generation, she reared young Ruth in accordance with the precepts of the dress reformers and proponents of physical culture. She taught her daughter the exercise system of François Delsarte, as popularized by Genevieve Stebbins, a New York Delsartean and author of exercise manuals.

Delsarte’s system, while incorporating physical exercises and body postures, also claimed a spiritual philosophy each part of the body had its counterpart zone; the head corresponded to “mind,” the heart to “soul,” and the limbs to “life.” Beyond its attraction as a method of simultaneously improving one’s physical and spiritual conditions, the Delsarte system appealed to the elder Dennis as a connection between her commitment to health reform and her religious ideals. Young Ruth grew up with wholesome food; plain, loose clothing; religious tracts; and “aesthetic gymnastics.”

Pivotal experiences during her childhood were seeing the theatrical spectacle Nero and the Destruction of Rome (P. T. Barnum’s circus extravaganza) in 1886, reading Mabel Cook’s Theosophist allegory The Idyll of the White Lotus, and attending a Delsarte performance given by Genevieve Stebbins in the 1890’s. These experiences, combined with having seen Egypt Through the Centuries at the Palisades Amusement Park when she was thirteen, convinced St. Denis that she would be an actor and dancer. Theatrical spectacle, self-expression, spiritual themes, and the lure of exotic Asian cultures were the ingredients that she would later embody in her dancing. Undaunted by her lack of training, blessed with natural grace and athletic abilities, and beset by financial difficulties at home, St. Denis, with her mother, set off to conquer vaudeville.

Life’s Work

St. Denis’s first job was “skirt dancing” for twenty dollars a week at Worth’s “dime” museum. She soon advanced to playing small vaudeville houses, but she quit in 1893 for a job as a cloak model to support her family. Her desire to perform was not extinguished, however, and after doing specialty spots in musical comedies such as The Ballet Girl and The Runaway Girl, in 1899 she landed a job with the famous impresario David Belasco, in his production of Zaza.

In the six years that she spent touring with Belasco’s company, St. Denis discovered the powers of a lavish and large-scale dramatic fusion of design, movement, and expression. It is Belasco who is credited with popularizing her name, and his European tour of 1900 brought St. Denis in contact with Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller. Under Belasco’s tutelage, St. Denis learned stagecraft, acting, and other skills: how to construct a physical basis for dramatic action, how nuances in timing affect an audience, and how to connect sound, color, movement, and theme into a unified dramatic production.

St. Denis was also influenced by the writings of Mary Baker Eddy. Ever her mother’s daughter, she wanted her work in the theater to be spiritually uplifting and self-expressive, as well as profitable. On tour in Buffalo, New York, in 1904, St. Denis saw a poster for Egyptian Deities cigarettes, which changed the course of her life. Fascinated by the exotic and remote Isis of the poster, St. Denis left Belasco’s company when the tour ended, and began to compose her first dance/drama, Egypta.

To raise money for the grandiose concept of Egypta, St. Denis began to create short, exotic dance solos that could be performed in vaudeville houses. In 1905, Radha was born, the first of many dances that combined Asian themes, Delsarte poses, skirt dancing, sensuous costumes, and a flair for the dramatic. For St. Denis, Radha was “a jumble of everything I was aware of in Indian art.” Her information came from library books, Coney Island Hindus, photographs, sideshows, and her mother’s religious tracts.

Radha received its formal public premiere at the New York Theater, New York, on January 28, 1906. The reviews were unequivocal: Radha and St. Denis’s accompanying dance dramas Incense and The Cobras were sensational. Her career as a solo dancer was launched.

Seeking to widen her audience, St. Denis began a three-year European tour, beginning in London in 1906. By 1908, an enthusiasm for solo dancers was at its peak: St. Denis and her contemporaries Duncan, Fuller, and Maud Allan were all performing to full houses in Europe. All four were shaped by an American aesthetic of self-expression, liberation, and unconventional beliefs. While they shared a conviction that movement could be expressive, they also embodied unique approaches to the art they were creating. Of the four, St. Denis was the least affected by European culture. By the summer of 1909, she had achieved her goals; now a glamorous dancer with Europe’s stamp of approval, she returned home, famous and fashionable.

St. Denis was a rarity in American theater: A “class act” in vaudeville and a box-office bonanza in “legitimate” theater, she bridged the public conceptions of high and low art. More than any other American dancer, St. Denis popularized the new art of modern dance (then called aesthetic, barefoot, or interpretive dancing) and made it accessible to American audiences during her cross-country tours of 1909 through 1912.

By 1914, solo dances were no longer fashionable. Partner dancing, as exemplified by Vernon Castle and Irene Castle, was the vogue. As her audience eroded, St. Denis sought to include partner dancing in her act. What she got was more than she bargained for: a partnership with Ted Shawn that was to last decades.

Shawn, twelve years her junior, had seen St. Denis perform in Denver when he was a divinity student at the University of Denver. Her performance captivated him and began to connect for him his unfulfilled yearnings toward the arts, religion, self-expression, and the body. Their rapport was instant and mutual: A few months after meeting, Shawn and St. Denis were married at the Aeolian Hall in New York City, on August 13, 1914.

Marriage to Shawn provided St. Denis with new venues and new audiences. In the spring of 1915, they opened Denishawn, a utopian school of dance on an idyllic Los Angeles estate. The curriculum included technique classes taught by Ted, inspirational lectures on religion, history, and philosophy by “Miss Ruth,” and an emphasis on fresh air, unhampered bodies, and healthful living. Students performed choreography by St. Denis and Shawn in annual pageants and concerts. Hollywood studios sent their actors and actresses to Denishawn; students from all over the country flocked to the school.

Most important, Denishawn became the training ground for the next generation of American dancers. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and others studied at the school and performed with the company. Although they ultimately rebelled against their mentors, each took from Denishawn the belief in the validity of dance as a legitimate art form.

The Denishawn partnership was turbulent. St. Denis felt trapped by the demands of the institution and deeply divided as a wife. Terrified by sexual intimacy and the possibility of becoming pregnant, possessive of her public reputation and star billing, and worn down by the constant touring needed to support the school financially, St. Denis grew increasingly unhappy. Annoyed by his second billing on the program and lack of recognition for his work, Shawn became discontented and was increasingly attracted to men. However, no matter how destructive their personal life, they upheld the public image of a devoted couple.

The 1930’s brought the dissolution of the Denishawn enterprise. St. Denis had never completely shared Shawn’s vision for a Greater Denishawn, with branch schools and multiple companies; she wanted to concentrate on her art, to create dances that were expressive of the divine. In 1934, when the Denishawn House mortgage was foreclosed, St. Denis moved into a tiny loft offered by a friend, and Shawn retreated to Massachusetts, where he had formed an all-male troupe of dancers.

Shortly before the end of Denishawn, St. Denis founded the Society of Spiritual Arts, a discussion group that included poets, artists, dancers, and religious leaders. In 1934, St. Denis presented her first “Rhythmic Choir,” a liturgical dance pageant called Masque of Mary. St. Denis portrayed the Madonna, and scenes were acted out through mime and plastique by a small group of dancers. With these works, St. Denis felt that she was uniting the dance and her spiritual life.

In 1939, her autobiography Ruth St. Denis: An Unfinished Life elevated her to a new status, dancer emeritus, the “First Lady of American Dance.” Titular head of a new dance program at Adelphi College, St. Denis received a second career boost when she joined Shawn at his Jacob’s Pillow dance school in the summer of 1941 to perform revivals of her early solos. Although she moved to California in 1942, she continued her association with Adelphi and occasionally rejoined Shawn in fund-raising concerts. They celebrated their golden wedding anniversary together at Jacob’s Pillow in 1964 amid great publicity and public adoration.

Ruth St. Denis spent the last years of her life in California, performing and lecturing on dance. The recipient of many awards attesting her accomplishments in dance, including the Capezio Award (1960), Dance Teachers of America (1964), and the Harper’s Bazaar list of “100 Women of Accomplishment,” St. Denis died on July 21, 1968, after suffering a heart attack.

Significance

St. Denis lived to see the art she pioneered flourish and diversify. The emergence of American modern dance at the beginning of the twentieth century would not have been possible without the trailblazing determination, creativity, and courage of St. Denis and her contemporaries, Fuller and Duncan. Of the three, it was St. Denis who established an American audience for modern dance and made dance both legitimate and popular.

A lifelong feminist, St. Denis reflected her mother’s social reform ideals and spiritual questing, and combined them with the independence, physicality, and brashness of the “new” American woman. A charismatic performer, St. Denis inspired countless young women and men to seek dancing as a career. St. Denis and the Denishawn touring companies brought dance to thousands of Americans, who developed a respect and admiration for this new art form, while the Denishawn schools nurtured the next generation of dance pioneers.

Bibliography

Brown, Jean Morrison, ed. The Vision of Modern Dance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Book Company, 1979. A collection of essays by leading figures in modern dance, including “The Dance as Life Experience” by Ruth St. Denis. St. Denis’s philosophy of the dance as spiritual communication is evident; Brown’s book contextualizes St. Denis’s accomplishments.

Kendall, Elizabeth. Where She Danced. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. An exploration of the pioneers of modern dance with a special emphasis on the life and career of St. Denis. It offers important insights into the social, political, and artistic climate that existed in the United States when St. Denis forged her art.

Mazo, Joseph. Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America. 2d ed. Hightstown, N.J.: Princeton Book Company, 2000. An entertaining history of modern dance and its founders. Mazo’s chapter on St. Denis, “Salvation Through Spectacle,” discusses St. Denis’s choreography, influences, and impact. Several photographs convey the glamour and charisma of St. Denis, while the text incorporates reviews, social history, and analysis of her contributions.

Roseman, Janet Lynn. Dance Was Her Religion: The Spiritual Choreography of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Martha Graham. Prescott, Ariz.: Hohm Press, 2004. Examines the three choreographers’ pioneering approach to dance and finds several commonalities among the women’s work and lives.

St. Denis, Ruth. Ruth St. Denis: An Unfinished Life. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939. St. Denis’s autobiography details her life from childhood through her fifties. Often self-aggrandizing, the book offers insights into how St. Denis perceived her art, and the spiritual connection she constantly sought between her art and life.

Shelton, Suzanne. Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981. This thorough biography of St. Denis as person, artist, and woman focuses on the influences that shaped her beliefs, the connections between her personal life and her stage persona, and her accomplishments. Includes photographs and an extensive listing of additional source materials.

Sherman, Jane. The Drama of Denishawn Dance. 2d ed. New York: M. Mathesius, 2005. Sherman, a former member of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn’s dance company, describes some of the dances created by the two choreographers.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Soaring: The Diary and Letters of a Denishawn Dancer in the Far East, 1925-1926. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976. A personal, behind-the-scenes look at the Denishawn era by a young dancer in the company. Her perspective on “Miss Ruth” is critical and reverential; the book gives the reader a clear sense of what it was like to be a Denishawn dancer in the 1920’s.

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