Ruth St Denis

Ruth St Denis built a career out of an Egyptian goddess on a cigarette poster and, with Ted Shawn, trained the generation that invented American modern dance. She was a New Jersey farm girl who learned Delsarte exercises from her mother, worked in vaudeville, and in 1904 saw an advertisement for Egyptian Deities cigarettes showing the goddess Isis on a throne. What followed was Radha in 1906 and a decade of solos drawn from Indian, Egyptian and Japanese sources - devotional in intention, orientalist in fact, and researched from books, museums and world fairs rather than from the cultures themselves. She toured Europe to enormous success. In 1915 she and Shawn founded Denishawn in Los Angeles, the first serious school of its kind in America, and its students included Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, all three of whom left to repudiate it. That is the honest measure of her: the technique did not last, the exoticism has not aged, and almost every important American modern dancer of the next generation passed through her studio. She and Shawn separated in 1931 and never divorced. She performed into her eighties and worked on religious dance in churches for her last thirty years. She and Shawn founded the magazine Denishawn and toured Asia for over a year in 1925-26, performing to audiences in the countries whose dance she had been improvising for twenty years, which she found chastening. Denishawn closed in the 1930s under the Depression and the separation. She founded the Society of Spiritual Arts and worked with churches on liturgical dance for the rest of her life. Graham later said that St Denis had shown her that dance could be about something, and that everything else she had to unlearn.

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