Search Results

This chapter examines the formation and early years of Denishawn, the first American modern dance company and school. It argues that the newlywed Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn harnessed the cultural fascination with eugenics—the science of race betterment—to catapult their unique brand of theatrical dancing into public renown. A cultural phenomenon, Denishawn appeared in magazines from National Geographic to Vogue, fast becoming a sensation among Hollywood directors, vaudeville producers, and high society elites. Denishawn’s meteoric rise was curtailed by World War I and Shawn’s enlistment in the army as well as the interpersonal conflicts between St. Denis and Shawn, which led the couple to seek marriage counseling from Havelock Ellis, a pioneer of the British eugenics movement, while in London in 1922 with their company.

This chapter examines how Ted Shawn’s attempts to fulfill his vision of a “Greater Denishawn”—a physical and artistic expansion of the company and dance school into a full-fledged arts colony and dance guild—was thwarted by a number of personal, artistic, and financial factors, most especially the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic crisis. It also elucidates Shawn’s first serious relationship with a man as well as the unraveling of his marriage to Ruth St. Denis and the parallel dissolution of Denishawn, the company and school that they had founded together. It then follows Shawn to Germany where he attempted to rebuild his career as a solo artist with the financial and artistic support of Katherine S. Dreier, modern visual artist, philanthropist, and the founder of the Société Anonyme, as well as his return to the United States where he laid the groundwork for what became his all-male dance company.

Chapter 2 examines La Meri’s controversial legacy in American concert dance. An Anglo-American dance artist who specialized in Asian and Latin American dance practices, La Meri fashioned herself as a dance polyglot, having studied with instructors at stops along the way of her worldwide performance tours in the 1920s and 1930s. When World War II commenced in Europe, La Meri settled in New York City in 1940 and established herself as one of the world’s foremost ethnologic performers. This chapter investigates debates that surrounded La Meri in the 1940s to illuminate the tensions that developed between so-called ethnic dance and modern dance, on the one hand, and cultural formations of whiteness, on the other.

This chapter shifts the focus to Jack Smith, particularly to The Beautiful Book, his only known photography book. The chapter offers the first sustained analysis of Smith’s photographic practice, which is key to understanding the later film and performance work for which he became known. Picking up the thread of an alternative through-line of 1960s culture, this chapter considers Smith’s unorthodox mining of early modern dance, especially Ruth St. Denis, silent film, orientalist imagery, and the plastique, a now forgotten performance genre. Rather than framing Smith’s interests as an anachronism or anomaly, I show how Smith’s relationship with dance history is part of a larger story of how dance culture and queer culture were (and are) deeply intertwined as they nourish each other, drawing on queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s framework of reparative reading. Through a reparative lens, I also shed new light on Smith’s orientalism, moving from good/bad critical judgment toward its performative and reparative value for the artist, his milieu, and the broader historical queer culture, then and now.

This chapter recounts Loïe Fuller’s pursuit of intellectual property rights in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the 1892 case Fuller v. Bemis, it approaches Fuller’s lawsuit as a gendered struggle to attain proprietary rights in whiteness. First situating Fuller’s practice in the context of the patriarchal economy that governed the late nineteenth-century theater, the chapter then examines the lineage of her Serpentine Dance, including the Asian Indian dance sources to which it was indebted. It also shows how the “theft” of her Serpentine Dance occasioned a crisis of subjecthood for Fuller, and how her assertion of copyright was an attempt to (re)establish herself as a property-holding subject. The chapter ends by considering the copyright bids of two dancers who followed in Fuller’s wake, Ida Fuller and Ruth St. Denis, as well as the counter-claims of one of St. Denis’s South Asian dancers, Mohammed Ismail.

Chapter 4 examines American Delsarteism as a form of harmonialism, positioning it between harmonial breath and movement practices being advocated within the broader New Thought movement and the development of modern dance. It focuses on the work of Genevieve Stebbins, whose use of esotericism closely connects her to prominent proponents of New Thought such as Warren Felt Evans, but whose influence on women such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis makes her something of a grandmother of modern dance. It then traces the innovations within American Delsarteism exemplified by Stebbins into Duncan’s work, which exhibits a strong esotericist influence and a harmonial subcurrent. In this context, it points out the lack of Asian content in these formulations as they culminate in Duncan’s strong Hellenic neoclassicism. Finally, it positions St. Denis as a contrast to Duncan’s Hellenism by focusing on her engagement with a resurgent and popularly explosive Orientalism.

This chapter introduces the reader to Ted Shawn and to the reasons his life deserves a critical reappraisal. It examines how a narrative of his life was constructed over his more than fifty years in the public eye, including the compromising depictions of him in the biographies of his wife Ruth St. Denis and his most famous student Martha Graham. It also considers his many own attempts to write about his life, especially his memoir One Thousand and One Night Stands (1960). The chapter argues that homophobia (including Shawn’s own) clouded the narrative of Shawn’s life and obscured his place in dance history and thus proposes a reconsideration of his life, writings, and dances based on sources that had thus far not been given full consideration.

In his efforts to reclaim human experience as the locus of God's ongoing action, David Brown argues that Christians should consider dance as a medium capable of expressing Christian beliefs. As Brown relates, the practice of dance is evident in every other world religion; the Bible embraces dance as a forum for mediating the human relationship to the divine, and examples abound of western ‘secular’ dancers who were both inspired by religious themes or stories and motivated by religious convictions and intent.However, in making an argument with such wide-ranging historical sweep, Brown moves too quickly over the critiques that many of the dancers he celebrates pose to Christian values. As a result, he misses some of the resources and insights they also offer to his project. Drawing on the dances and writings of American modern dancers Ruth St. Denis, Isadora Duncan, and Martha Graham, this chapter develops a notion of dance as theopraxis that carries theological implications for earth-friendly Christian understandings of transcendence and incarnation.

This chapter explores the formative influences on Shawn’s decision to become a professional male dancer. In particular, it examines how a serious, paralyzing illness during his adolescence led him to study dance, thus derailing his plans to become a minister. It also considers how his early sexual experiences and the premature death of his parents and brother fueled his determination to become an artist. The chapter also details Shawn’s early appearances on stage (including his debut as a cross-dressing “Oriental sissy,” his move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film, and his experience choreographing the “first all-dance film,” Dances of the Ages (1913), for the Thomas C. Edison Company, which gave him the confidence and finances to travel to the East Coast in pursuit of becoming a professional dancer.

As a historical context for La Meri’s work, this is a short discussion of Western cultural borrowings and fusions from the Renaissance to the 20^th century. After considering the early developments, this chapter mentions Maud Allan and Loie Fuller—two early 20^th century dance artists who presented themes from non-Western cultures in their performances—and the later creations of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, who also drew on international sources for their creative choreographies. It then briefly discusses how La Meri’s work gradually came to include the study and performance of authentic dances from various world cultures.