St. Denis, Ruth (1877–1968)

One of the greatest figures in the dance world in the first half of the 20th century and a founder of modern dance. Name variations: Mrs. Edwin Shawn. Born Ruth Dennis on January 20, 1877, in Newark, NewJersey; died on July 21, 1968; eldest child of Thomas L. Dennis (an inventor) and Ruth Emma (Hull) Dennis (one of the first licensed woman doctors in the U.S.); married Ted Shawn, on August 13, 1914 (separated, 1928).

Began theatrical career (1893); made New York debut (January 1906); went on European tour (1906–09), American tour (1909–10), H.B. Harris coast-to-coast tour (1910–11), southern tour (1914), cross-country concert tour (1914–15); helped found Denishawn (summer 1915); went on Denishawn concert and vaudeville tours (1915–17), vaudeville tours (1918–19); went on cross-country tour (1921), Mayer tours (1922–25), Asian tour (1925–26), Judson tour (1926–27), Ziegfeld Follies tour (1927–28); gave concerts, especially at Lewisohn Stadium (1928–32); closed Denishawn (1931); published Lotus Light, a book of poetry (1932); appeared as part of Dance International at Radio City Music Hall, New York (1937); published autobiography, An Unfinished Life (1939); founded School of Natya with La Meri (1940–42); gave last public performance, at Jacob's Pillow (August 1964).

Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan , though they never worked together, were the two founders of what is now known as modern dance. In 1890s America, there was no serious dance form of any kind except for the corps de ballet at the Metropolitan Opera and an occasional solo performer visiting from Europe. Yet this was the era when women first began to think seriously of emancipation from traditional women's roles, and both of these dancers, as much by their free-wheeling ways of life as by their art, inspired a generation of young women as perhaps no women had ever done before. Thanks to their efforts and their example, dancing became rampant in America, and barefoot college girls were romping on lawns in tunics, striking poses and forming "Grecian urns." More important, however, they created a new medium of human expression that revolutionized the art of the dance, molding a dance idiom for the 20th century, as Stravinsky did for 20th-century music and Picasso for 20th-century art.

Ruth St. Denis was born Ruth Dennis in Newark, New Jersey, in 1877, the eldest of two children. Her father T.L. Dennis, a Civil War veteran, inventor, and impractical dreamer, eventually drifted into alcoholism. Her mother Ruth Hull Dennis , one of the first licensed woman doctors in the United States, was, in the words of the day, "a woman of advanced views." Because her husband was irresponsible, Ruth Hull Dennis was the sole provider for the family, and it was she who had the greatest influence upon the lives of her daughter and her son "Buzz" (he was never given a proper name), who was born in 1887. A suffragist and free-thinker who campaigned against corsets and long dresses, Ruth Hull Dennis was a possessive woman responsible for driving off all her daughter's suitors until St. Denis was nearly 40.

Ruth grew up on a farm at Pin Oaks, near Newark, where she was able to run and felt the inspiration of nature, and where she received her first religious instruction from her mother who read to her from the Bible at the end of each day. She attended public school, but her regular education was supplemented by lessons at a dance school in Somerville, New Jersey, at night, as well as by the teachings of Delsart on movement taught to her by her mother. Her parents both recognized her talents and encouraged her to develop them. With a flair for acrobatics and mimicry, St. Denis soon decided that she wanted a career in show business. At 16, she went on the stage as a dancer at Worth's Museum in Manhattan. From then on, she worked continuously in cheap music halls, variety shows, and touring road companies, occasionally modeling for a department store and briefly attempting classical ballet.

In 1898, St. Denis had a bit part in a play produced by Austin Daly. After Daly's sudden death, she danced in David Belasco's London production of Zaza, starring the famed Leslie Carter . She then returned to New York and was hired by Belasco, for whom she worked for the next five years. During this period, she attracted numerous suitors, including the famous architect Stanford White (later murdered by Harry K. Thaw) and even Belasco himself. Urged on by her mother, Ruth rejected them all. It was Belasco who nicknamed her "Saint Dennis," because of her resistance to his charms. From this, the stage name Ruth St. Denis was born.

While on tour in 1903 with the Belasco production of Madame DuBarry, she saw an Egyptian scene in an ad for Egyptian Deities cigarettes in Buffalo, New York, and in that moment divined her mission in life: the propagation of dance as a universal medium. She began to steep herself in the cultures of the East, eventually coming under the influence of Hindu dance. She then devised several "oriental" dances, setting them to the music from Delibe's opera Lakmé. Gathering together a motley company, she succeeded in getting an engagement in New York, where she opened at the Hudson Theater in

Manhattan in January 1906. Using the surname St. Denis for the first time, she performed Incense, The Cobra and, finally, Radha, her solo interpretation of a classical Indian temple dance (she would dance The Cobra as late as 1966, when she was 89). Purity of form or authenticity were not concerns to St. Denis at that moment, nor would they ever be; she was an interpreter and an artist, not an ethnographer.

In physical appearance, St. Denis was tall and lanky, with long arms and legs, and a face that was pretty in her youth. Her dances were characterized by deep backbends, graceful spins, and great extensions of her long limbs. Though lacking in energy and force, they were nevertheless beautiful because she was a born, instinctive dancer. Her first audience, comprised of some of the cream of New York society (patrons of the arts who were in a position to launch the careers of anyone they admired), was spellbound, and the theater was sold out for each performance. In this way, Ruth St. Denis became a name in the world of dance. She was soon invited to perform at luxurious homes and private clubs by some of the wealthiest patrons of the arts in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. The money earned allowed her to establish some financial security.

Meanwhile, after her success in New York, St. Denis chose as her manager the promoter Henry B. Harris, who immediately booked her in London. From there, she went to France and then to Germany, where she had her greatest triumph, then on to Prague, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Brussels, Budapest, Nürnberg, Graz, Monte Carlo, Munich, and Breslau. As a rule, she performed in variety theaters or music halls, but in time she also appeared in major theaters and opera houses. Her recitals were always solo performances, and during this period she devised the cycle of Indian dances that were to make her famous. (In performing alone, St. Denis was not unique; Isadora Duncan and Mata Hari also gave solo recitals.) Elegant and graceful, St. Denis had great style and early introduced into her dances a rippling effect with the movement of her arms that was totally original.

While in France, she saw and learned from the American dancer Loie Fuller , who pioneered in the use of theatrical lighting and who had mastered the art of performing with fabrics designed to illuminate the movements of her body. St. Denis spent nearly three years in Europe, returning to the United States in 1909, where she immediately embarked on two American tours sponsored by Harris (1909–10, 1910–11). On December 12, 1910, she finally succeeded in staging her first full-length dance, Egypta. Harris lost money on this production, as well as on her last tour, and St. Denis was forced to return to vaudeville to enable him to recoup. Harris perished in the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. Without him, St. Denis toured in vaudeville for three years but found it a meager living, and she augmented her income by once again giving private performances for society groups. By now, she had become as interested in Japanese dance as she had been in that of Egypt and India. To this period belong several of her dances on Japanese themes, especially O-mika.

There was a furious dance craze in America in the years immediately prior to the First World War, and St. Denis thought that she might do better if, like Irene Castle , she had a partner. In the spring of 1914, she advertised for someone to fill the role. The turning point in both her life and career occurred when she first met her future husband and dance partner, Ted Shawn. Edwin Myers Shawn was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on October 21, 1891, and was raised in Denver, Colorado. He attended the University of Denver where he first saw St. Denis perform on her coast-to-coast tour in March 1911. Originally planning to become a minister, Shawn was so struck by St. Denis that he turned to a career in dance. By 1913, he had begun to make a reputation for himself in Los Angeles with a partner named Norma Gould . Together, they introduced the then-fashionable "Tango Teas" to the West Coast, where Shawn produced the first dance film, Dance of the Ages, for the Edison Company. He then went on a tour with Gould that took them to New York. There, Shawn taught dance, eventually meeting St. Denis through one of his pupils. When Shawn went to see his idol at her home in New York, they chatted for hours, the first of many such conversations. St. Denis later remarked that this first discourse never really ceased for the rest of their lives.

In the spring of 1914, St. Denis, "assisted by Ted Shawn with Hilda Beyer ," toured the southeast. Ruth did her Indian and Japanese dances. Shawn did his own solos (Dagger Dance, Dance Russe, Pipes of Pan, etc.) and lightened the program by dancing the latest ballroom crazes (Argentine tango, fox trot, maxixe) with Beyer. That summer, St. Denis and Shawn were married in New York. She was 37; he was 23. Years later, referring to her husband in a journal, St. Denis would write: "He is easily the greatest male dancer in the world today." Nijinsky, of course, was no longer dancing; Nureyev was yet to come. While there seems to be no doubt that she was in love with the young, handsome dancer (at least in the beginning), Shawn, although certainly captivated by St. Denis and dazzled by her artistry, was attracted to other men. Ultimately, this soured the marriage, though it was never legally terminated.

Once married, St. Denis and Shawn launched the Ruth St. Denis School of Dancing and the Related Arts, soon called simply Denishawn, which opened in the summer of 1915 in Los Angeles. The school, largely Shawn's brainchild, could not survive on tuitions alone, so the couple closed it in the fall and arranged a concert at the Hudson Theater in New York. The concert was a huge success and led to a strenuous vaudeville engagement that took them across the entire country, giving two performances a day. A Denishawn tour followed in 1916–17, this time consisting of a proper company. St. Denis and Shawn were accompanied by 11 of their students, billed as the "Denishawn Dancers."

Throughout the 16 years of its existence (1915–31), Denishawn would be the most important, most original, and most interesting dance company in America. Above all, it would school some 75 dancers, including such future luminaries as Doris Humphrey , Charles Weidman and the incomparable Martha Graham . By her own admission, St. Denis was not a very good teacher and never hid the fact that the teaching system at Denishawn was developed largely by Shawn. Since much of what she did was improvised and then simply repeated, there wasn't much technique involved in her dance and thus not that much that she could really teach. Two years or so with her company made one sufficiently a disciple to be able to teach the newcomers, so much so that Doris Humphrey, already a dance instructor before joining Denishawn, was immediately set to teaching, and Martha Graham was given her first classes after only two years with the company. Graham had first seen St. Denis dance in Los Angeles in 1911, an experience that changed her life. She joined the company in 1916, remaining until 1923, when she went on to forge a career that made her arguably the greatest American dancer and choreographer of the 20th century. The tribute to what Martha Graham learned at Denishawn is enshrined in the first five chapters of Agnes de Mille 's biography of her, chapters that are virtually a biography of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn and a capsule history and appreciation of their company. As the fame of Denishawn grew, many stars of stage and screen would come to study there, among them Ina Claire , Colleen Moore , Lenore Ulric , Mabel Normand , Ruth Chatterton and Myrna Loy . When the National Geographic Magazine printed its first color photograph, it was of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn dancing.

In 1917, during World War I, Shawn entered the army, and St. Denis reorganized the company so as to continue touring in vaudeville without him. It was at this time that the company was joined by Doris Humphrey, who had been teaching at her own school in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, but yearned to give up teaching in order to actually dance. After Shawn returned from the war, Denishawn toured for a second year in vaudeville, after which St. Denis again reorganized the company for concert appearances. The new company launched its career with a tour of the Western states, performing several new dances—Soaring, Valse Caprice—choreographed both by St. Denis and her dancers and set to music ranging from Bach through Chopin.

At the end of this tour, the Shawns purchased a home in Eagle Rock, a suburb of Los Angeles, where they also rented a suitable building to house their company. Three tours in vaudeville followed under the aegis of Daniel Mayer; they also toured England in 1922. These concert tours lasted for four years and were both theatrical and highly eclectic, including square dances, American Indian dances, and Spanish dances, as well as the usual oriental or pseudo-oriental numbers that the company's audiences had learned to expect. An excellent singer, St. Denis did not hesitate to introduce vocals and even dialogue into her compositions. She created what she called "Rhythmic Choirs" to execute religious dances, which she hoped would later be performed in churches and other houses of worship. The programs were strenuous and the touring exhausting, but St. Denis, with her endless energy, good humor, and enthusiasm, kept the company alert and on its toes.

Denishawn was a large company as dance ensembles go. Besides St. Denis, Ted Shawn, and Louis Horst as musical director, it included some 15 dancers in the company at any one time, and it offered a full season of engagements. Dancers were allowed not only to teach but to choreograph dances for the company which were then performed. Nothing like that was to exist in dance companies in later years. Denishawn provided its dancers with food, shelter, and business management, so that they could devote themselves almost totally to their art, an advantage that no longer existed anywhere in the United States after Denishawn closed.

St. Denis had her dancers attempt virtually every type of dance known, from American Indian to East Indian, from Japanese to Javanese, from Spanish to Russian to Greek. She believed that all dance was the property of all dancers and refused to allow herself to be limited by national considerations. For this reason, she saw no need to develop what might be considered an "American dance." Whether with pseudo-Hindu (Radha, 1906), pseudo-Egyptian (Egypta, 1910), pseudo-Japanese (O-mika, 1913), pseudo-Arab (Ouled Nail, 1914) or pseudo-Aztec (Xochitl, 1921), St. Denis cloaked the essential inauthenticity of her dances in artistic and religious vision. Shawn was no more interested in authenticity than she; if anything, he was less interested. Staging "good theater" and producing "what worked" was his forte. Inordinately proud of his physique, he flaunted himself in ever skimpier costumes, fought for more solo time, and was adept at staging dances designed to show himself to best advantage. In the end, there were many both inside the company and out who felt that Shawn was St. Denis' evil genius in this regard and that he had abased her art.

In 1925, Denishawn set off on the now-famous tour of the Orient, departing from Seattle for Japan, China, Singapore, Malaya, Rangoon, India (where the company spent five months), Ceylon, Java, and Cambodia. Everywhere, the couple cooked up publicity stunts to attract audiences, and St. Denis visited temples, palaces and bazaars, gathering inspiration for costumes and bits and pieces of oriental dances for future reference. The tour concluded with a return trip to Japan and then the voyage to San Francisco in December 1926. Denishawn then went on a four-month cross-country tour to New York under the management of Arthur Judson.

In the winter of 1927, the Shawns began a tour with the Ziegfeld Follies, the annual musical extravaganza designed to imitate the Folies Bergère in Paris. With the money thus earned, they were able to purchase a property near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx as the home of what was to be called "Greater Denishawn." Strict rules applied there, among them a limit on the number of Jewish students to 10% of the total and a strict supervision of morals. It was these restrictions along with artistic disagreements that led Doris Humphrey to leave the company. Despite their differences, however, Humphrey always spoke well of St. Denis.

By the late 1920s, it became clear to St. Denis (as it had long been to those around her) that Shawn's influence was damaging her artistic career. She had compromised, sold out. In 1928, their marriage, though never legally terminated, came to an end in what was tactfully referred to as an "artistic separation." Much that is negative has been written about Shawn, his ruthlessness, his ambition, the way he used St. Denis to build a career that otherwise would not likely have gotten off the ground. Though he was a homosexual, it is probable that he was genuinely stifling this side of his nature at the time he married St. Denis. On the other hand, there seems little doubt that St. Denis, by her own account a virgin at 37 when she met him, feared physical sexuality, so much so that their marriage may well have been a practical union for both partners. As her marriage turned sour, St. Denis began taking up with young men among her students. In a letter written nearly 30 years before she died and only published after her death, she called herself a "stupid, blind, egotist … attracting defenseless boys who need a friend and mother and instead find an impossible lover," and spoke ruefully of the harm that she had done to her husband, blaming him for nothing. In any case, there is no question that Shawn had a major influence on the direction of St. Denis' career and, through Denishawn which was his idea, on the development of modern dance.

Denishawn did not long survive the separation of its founders. Ted Shawn made his first trip to Europe in the spring of 1930, dancing alone in Germany and Switzerland before returning to join St. Denis and the company for its fourth annual appearance at Lewisohn Stadium that summer. The following season, 1930–31, he returned to Europe and then came back to New York for the Lewisohn engagement where, for the last time, he danced with St. Denis. That fall, he toured as "Ted Shawn and His Dancers." Thus, in 1931, the Denishawn Company was dissolved, its dancers going their separate ways. Louis Horst, who was its pianist from 1915 to 1925, went on to become the musical director for Martha Graham as well as a teacher and the founding editor and critic of Dance Observer.

After the closing of Denishawn, "the dark years" closed in on St. Denis. No longer young, without funds, her school and company gone and the Great Depression in full swing, she not only found it difficult to secure bookings but suffered the artistic indignity of seeing her life's work suddenly pass out of style, replaced by the harsher dance forms of the 1930s, many of them choreographed and performed by her former pupils. She reformed her rhythmic choir, designing programs for its performances; she developed masques and pageants for church groups. Occasionally, she appeared in what was left of vaudeville and did a little teaching. In 1932, she published a book of poetry and in 1939 completed an autobiography, An Unfinished Life.

As St. Denis grew older, her religious impulses grew more pronounced. In her spiritual life, she was eclectic. A Christian Scientist and a believer in reincarnation, she passed through several religious phases and dabbled in Hinduism and Theosophy. "There was a god in her," said Charles Weidman. Wrote de Mille: "If her dances were a sham, they nevertheless evoked great emotions in her audience, and she projected an aura of mysticism and importance." In her later years, St. Denis dreamed of establishing a temple-school for the development of sacred dance, "a place," she said, "which had the motivations of a church with the instrumentation of the stage." Although she was able to attract a number of ministers and priests to her idea, and she did create great religious ballets such as The White Madonna, The Blue Madonna of St. Marks, and the Gregorian Chants, performing them in many major churches, she was never to found a church-theater of her own. Instead, for several years she passed from the realm of the theater into that of academia. In 1938, she was invited to establish the dance department at Adelphi College in Long Island, New York.

The revival of St. Denis' theatrical career began in 1937, when, at nearly 60, she appeared as part of a great two-month-long dance festival at Radio City Music Hall in New York entitled Dance International. There she had a triumph performing the "oriental" dances that had made her famous, and there she met the famed ethnic dancer La Meri , who had invented the very term "ethnic dance." Quickly becoming friends, the two women founded the School of Natya in New York City in 1940. Their partnership was crowned with success, both teaching students and occasionally performing together.

On July 11, 1941, St. Denis was invited to perform her original Hudson Theater program of 1906 at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival founded by Ted Shawn, a historic event at which she not only had an artistic triumph but achieved the status of a certified legend. Her Radha was filmed on this occasion. St. Denis' career then resumed almost at full throttle with appearances at Carnegie Hall, Adelphi College, Jacob's Pillow and on tour. For several years, she

made her home in an apartment on East 59th St. in New York that had once housed Isadora Duncan, and she often danced at the Duncan Studio on the same street. In 1942, the School of Natya was merged with the Ethnologic Dance Center. When the United States entered the Second World War, St. Denis briefly worked as a riveter in a California war plant and thereafter made Hollywood her home for the rest of her life.

Although St. Denis was concertizing in New York City as late as 1952 (when she was 75), she spent her last years teaching at colleges, traveling about the country giving lectures, and showing films of herself and of her beloved Denishawn. Although no motion pictures are known to exist of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis was too keen a showwoman to allow her art to go unrecorded. She and Shawn had made their motion picture debut in 1916 (doing a "Babylonian dance" in D.W. Griffith's famed spectacle Intolerance) and were filmed several times dancing alone, together, and with the whole of Denishawn. As she grew older, she also tried her hand at acting, most notably giving a creditable performance in The Madwoman of Chaillot.

A disorganized person, St. Denis relied on those around her to keep her life in order, and she was never free from assorted lackeys whose services were usually rendered in the hope of getting something more in return. Vibrant, vivacious, witty, irreverent and wonderful company, she never lacked for real friends, however, and she was anything but lonely in her last years. Her home-cum-studio on Cahuenga Boulevard was both school and theater to her and also the seat of the Ruth St. Denis Foundation, which was the business end of her plans for her temple-theater. In time, she had what amounted to a complete reconciliation with Ted Shawn and frequently appeared at Jacob's Pillow until she was deep into her 80s.

While busy with plans at age 91, among them a dancing choir of women past 50 and a television series based on the psalms, Ruth St. Denis died on July 28, 1968, after a short illness. Ted Shawn died in 1972. By all accounts, St. Denis' early dances were colorless and her music banal, but everything she did was imbued with her own presence and character that made whatever she did on stage seem more than it was. Deeply religious, she considered her new dance to be a religious exercise, and, throughout her life, she was able to convey this to her audiences. To see Ruth St. Denis was an experience meant to be more than an entertainment. Her audiences knew this, and she never let them down.

sources:

Cohen, Selma Jean, ed. and comp. Doris Humphrey: An Artist First. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 1972.

de Mille, Agnes. The Life and Work of Martha Graham. NY: Random House, 1956, 1991.

St. Denis, Ruth. An Unfinished Life: An Autobiography. London: George G. Harrap, 1939.

Terry, Walter. Miss Ruth: The "More Living" Life of Ruth St. Denis. NY: Dodd, Mead, 1969.

suggested reading:

Shawn, Ted. Ruth St. Denis: Pioneer and Prophet. 2 vols. New York, 1920.

Terry, Walker. Ted Shawn: Father of American Dance. NY: Dial, 1976.

collections:

The journals of Ruth St. Denis are on deposit at the library of the University of California, Los Angeles; the Denishawn archives are in the Dance Collection of the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York.

Robert H. Hewsen , Professor of History, Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey