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Home Identity Construction Political Economy Orientalism Language Borders Religion Annotated Bibliography	back to orientalism Dance in America March 20, 2004 Authentic Ruth In the 1920s Ruth St. Denis introduced Indian style dance to the United States. The movement and spiritual conversation in St. Denis’ Indian dances portrayed a long tradition of dance in India, despite having never seen an Indian performance herself. Regardless of her inauthentic notions of Indian culture and dance, St. Denis never intended to replicate an existing style. Her own style of dance drew from the beauty she imagined in Indian culture yet revealed her personal feminist and spiritual beliefs. She layered a lifetime of muses into her individual creative style that earned St. Denis a respected seat founding American modern dance. In her Indian dances St. Denis “orientalizes” the orient, paints it different from the “West,” yet her lasting impact on American dance expresses her personal history and identity as a progressive female American. Ruth’s mother raised her daughter to disregard social norms that governed most girls’ identities in the late 19th Century. Raised in Canandaigua, New York, a town known for “intense religious revivalism”, her mother Ruth Emma Hull grew up surrounded by Methodism, Utopian Socialism, Swedenborgianaism, phrenology, and mesmerism. The diversity of accepting religions in her surrounding community inspired a sense of individuality in Hull. She became the second female graduate of University of Michigan’s Medical School in 1872, and later became involved in dress reform and dance as therapy. Hull expected her daughter to maintain her legacy as a “freethinker and feminist” (“St. Denis,” 490). Hull taught her daughter tools that Ruth employed later in her independent career. She introduced Ruth to Delsarte theory and technique of poses, attending classes with her daughter in different areas in New York. When Ruth’s parents divorced, her mother boarded visitors in their farmhouse in rural New York for extra income. Visitors composed of “an assortment of Christian Scientists, Theosophists, and vacationing artists and actors from New York City regularly gathered on the farmhouse veranda to watch the antics of the talented Dennis daughter, Ruth” (“St. Denis,” 490). Ruth learned to perform before audiences that praised individuality in spiritual expression, which became a trademark of her contribution to modern dance. After Ruth moved out of her mother’s farmhouse, she continued to draw inspiration from her surroundings. On a visit to the Jersey Palisades an outdoor spectacle called “Egypt through the Centuries” mesmerized Ruth. On a tour with Belasco Company in Paris, St. Denis visited the World’s Exhibition assembling international spectacles like Egyptian belly dancers and Japanese pantomimes, as well as fellow American Loie Fuller’s art-nouveau style (“St. Denis,” 491). The Orientalist productions that abounded at the World’s Fair motivated St. Denis to learn about ‘Oriental’ spirituality. On her European tour Ruth intensified a lifelong search to find her individual spirituality. She peppered her Christian Science beliefs with Buddhist, Vedantic, and Christian theology. St. Denis yearned to bridge the two aspects that motivated her life, “she longed to create a spiritually significant art” (“St. Denis,” 492). On a tour around the U.S. she happened upon a Turkish cigarette poster of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Inspiration struck St. Denis at the sight of the mystical Isis, “St. Denis suddenly envisioned an artistic form for her spiritual quest” (“St. Denis,” 492). She melded her fascination with expressing her spirituality with a sumptuous image of the “Orient” to create a blended dance form. The Egyptian Isis inspired St. Denis’ breakout solo creation Radha, though she abandoned Egypt and developed it into an Indian dance. She continued to create “Oriental” dances and felt especially inspired by Indian culture and religion. Her costumes and scenery captivated audiences with their exotic beauty. St. Denis mirrored the trend in America that glamorized India and its neighbors. A Boston journalist commented that in the 1920s “the US had become infected with “the somewhat prevalent microbe of Orientalism” (“St. Denis” 493). St. Denis’ glamorous depictions fed into the contemporary image of a spiritual, mysterious, and romantic India. St Denis’ emphasis on the dress and theatrical effects of her dances exemplifies the Orientalist inclination to represent the “Orient” in its exteriority. In Orientalism Edward Said criticized European scholarship and artists beginning in the 17th century that created an exotic image of the “Orient” to demonstrate an innate difference that created a division between East and West. That distinction that Orientalism created presupposed a cultural superiority since the “mystical orient” resided outside Europe’s conception of “rational” civilization. European nations used this theory to assume colonial authority. In the early 20th century Orientalism continued to support Imperialism. St. Denis was “surrounded by the popular media of America and Europe that portrayed the East as primitive, exotic, and often as a mute visual spectacle” (Whitmer 497). The scholar or artist in Europe and the United States created a distinct culture for its American audiences through: “The voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text [dance]—all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the [audience], containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking on its behalf” (Said 20). St. Denis created a parallel world of lush fabrics and vibrant colors for her audiences to fall in love with that emphasized an Orientalist exotic image of India. Ruth St. Denis exercised responsibility over representing India to Americans and Indians on her tours around the United States and India. She danced in small towns and cities in the United States that had never seen modern dance or Indian culture before. “Unacquainted audiences may have viewed St. Denis’s cultural appropriation as a true representation of Eastern ritual and religious practices,” reliant on her representation to learn about a colony on the opposite side of the world (Whitmer 500). Her performances introduced a glamorous rendition of a mystical culture that St. Denis assumed from pictures and statues of Hindu gods, not real life. Made to Move dance company recently commemorated Ruth St. Denis in a dance that recognized her unrealistic portrayal of Indian dance. The reviewer commends the show for being “ravishingly costumed and danced with wonderful sexuality,” theatrical components emphasized in Ruth’s own dances (Sagolla). Though the dance did not adequately replicate Ruth’s spiritual connection with her dances, “Carella's solo dances accurately represent[ed] St. Denis' naïve understanding of the ethnic styles she appropriated” (Sagolla). According to Sagollo, the Made to Move dance presented a surface approach to St. Denis inauthentic and “naïve” dance style. St. Denis had relied only on her spiritual readings, cultural images, and statues of dancers from India to inform the notion of India that she presented in the United States. After she finally toured India, St. Denis learned that her image and India’s reality drastically diverged. She expected to find magic, and instead saw disease: “She walked down the long avenue that led to the bathing ghats on the river, where a festival of the goddess Saraswati had attracted throughs of Hindus. On either side of the avenue stretched a queue of lepers, cripples, the poor and the diseased, their bony hands thrust forward in hopes of baksheesh. Ruth was deeply horrified.” (Shelton 1981, 198) St. Denis recognized that the India she dreamed of existed only in her imagination. She admitted that “If 20 years before I had seen any such sight, there would have been no Radha, perhaps no career” ( Shelton 1981, 198). Yet she had built a career that relied on the inexistent glamour of India. She did not relent after seeing the inaccuracy of her representation of her dances, “rather it exists now for me much more intensely in the depth of my own spirit than in the poor huddled beggars lining the roadside” (Shelton 1981, 198). She saw the reality and decided she liked her image more. Ruth’s response reveals her Orientalist representation of the “other” yet rejects her responsibility to symbolize Indian culture. Performance always changes the original action according to the “restored behavior” theory. Though celebrated, “the ‘truth’ or ‘source’ of the behavior is often lost, forgotten, or challenged” in performance (Whitmer 498). Rather than performing authentic Indian dance, St. Denis capitalized on her Orientalist approach to address American culture. Within the exotic sphere she created on stage St. Denis portrayed a sensual woman worshiping her body. St. Denis’ dances responded to the Victorian guilt attached to bodies by eliminating herself from the expectation. In her dances “sexuality was distanced from the female body through a sort of “mediation by the culturally exotic stereotype”” (Whitmer 502). St. Denis found an expression for her spiritual notion that “the natural language of [the] soul will have become the movement of the body” (Cohen 128). In her dance school Miss Ruth (as the students called her) taught the dancers to incorporate the movements she demonstrated into their bodies, rejecting ballet’s rigid movements that strives for a single image of perfection. St. Denis believed that individuals speak through dance, an idea that shaped Modern dance into a form that expresses emotion through interactions between human and natural forces. St. Denis used Indian exotic charm to explain to Americans that the soul could not be extricated from the body. Ruth St. Denis employed “exotic” dances to get away with an idea previously considered morally deficient. She functioned poorly as a representative of Indian culture, however her dance exemplified a cultural movement that began to accept a connection between body and soul within the United States. St. Denis’ Indian dances prove that Orientalism “has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world” (Said 12). Through her exotic dances St. Denis melded the body and spirit, which functions as the heart of current American modern dance. back to top Bibliography Sagolla, Lisa Jo. In Search of a Goddess. “Review of dance by Back Stage.” Vol. 45, Issue 30, p40, 1p Business Source Premier, 23 July 2004. International Index to the Performing Arts. 6 March 2006. http://sas.epnet.com/citation. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York; Vintage Books,1979. Shelton, Suzanne. Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis. New York; Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1981. Sherman, Jane. Soaring: The diary and letters of a Denishawn dancer in the Far East, 1925-1926. Middletown, Connecticut; Wesleyan University Press, 1976. “St. Denis, Ruth.” The International Encyclopedia of Dance. 5th Volume, 1998. I use the quotes because discourse often takes for granted the difference between the Eastern and Western worlds, as if it has been established that they are inherently different. There seems to be a large geographic obstacle to this supposition, however, since the world is round. I think it is problematic to maintain a vocabulary that distinguishes one part of the world from the other, it maintains a division in our societies that need not exist in our globalizing society.
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Dance in America

March 20, 2004

Authentic Ruth

In the 1920s Ruth St. Denis introduced Indian style dance to the United States. The movement and spiritual conversation in St. Denis’ Indian dances portrayed a long tradition of dance in India, despite having never seen an Indian performance herself. Regardless of her inauthentic notions of Indian culture and dance, St. Denis never intended to replicate an existing style. Her own style of dance drew from the beauty she imagined in Indian culture yet revealed her personal feminist and spiritual beliefs. She layered a lifetime of muses into her individual creative style that earned St. Denis a respected seat founding American modern dance. In her Indian dances St. Denis “orientalizes” the orient, paints it different from the “West,” yet her lasting impact on American dance expresses her personal history and identity as a progressive female American.

Ruth’s mother raised her daughter to disregard social norms that governed most girls’ identities in the late 19th Century. Raised in Canandaigua, New York, a town known for “intense religious revivalism”, her mother Ruth Emma Hull grew up surrounded by Methodism, Utopian Socialism, Swedenborgianaism, phrenology, and mesmerism. The diversity of accepting religions in her surrounding community inspired a sense of individuality in Hull. She became the second female graduate of University of Michigan’s Medical School in 1872, and later became involved in dress reform and dance as therapy. Hull expected her daughter to maintain her legacy as a “freethinker and feminist” (“St. Denis,” 490).

Hull taught her daughter tools that Ruth employed later in her independent career. She introduced Ruth to Delsarte theory and technique of poses, attending classes with her daughter in different areas in New York. When Ruth’s parents divorced, her mother boarded visitors in their farmhouse in rural New York for extra income. Visitors composed of “an assortment of Christian Scientists, Theosophists, and vacationing artists and actors from New York City regularly gathered on the farmhouse veranda to watch the antics of the talented Dennis daughter, Ruth” (“St. Denis,” 490). Ruth learned to perform before audiences that praised individuality in spiritual expression, which became a trademark of her contribution to modern dance.

After Ruth moved out of her mother’s farmhouse, she continued to draw inspiration from her surroundings. On a visit to the Jersey Palisades an outdoor spectacle called “Egypt through the Centuries” mesmerized Ruth. On a tour with Belasco Company in Paris, St. Denis visited the World’s Exhibition assembling international spectacles like Egyptian belly dancers and Japanese pantomimes, as well as fellow American Loie Fuller’s art-nouveau style (“St. Denis,” 491). The Orientalist productions that abounded at the World’s Fair motivated St. Denis to learn about ‘Oriental’ spirituality.

On her European tour Ruth intensified a lifelong search to find her individual spirituality. She peppered her Christian Science beliefs with Buddhist, Vedantic, and Christian theology. St. Denis yearned to bridge the two aspects that motivated her life, “she longed to create a spiritually significant art” (“St. Denis,” 492). On a tour around the U.S. she happened upon a Turkish cigarette poster of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Inspiration struck St. Denis at the sight of the mystical Isis, “St. Denis suddenly envisioned an artistic form for her spiritual quest” (“St. Denis,” 492). She melded her fascination with expressing her spirituality with a sumptuous image of the “Orient” to create a blended dance form.

The Egyptian Isis inspired St. Denis’ breakout solo creation Radha, though she abandoned Egypt and developed it into an Indian dance. She continued to create “Oriental” dances and felt especially inspired by Indian culture and religion. Her costumes and scenery captivated audiences with their exotic beauty. St. Denis mirrored the trend in America that glamorized India and its neighbors. A Boston journalist commented that in the 1920s “the US had become infected with “the somewhat prevalent microbe of Orientalism” (“St. Denis” 493). St. Denis’ glamorous depictions fed into the contemporary image of a spiritual, mysterious, and romantic India.

St Denis’ emphasis on the dress and theatrical effects of her dances exemplifies the Orientalist inclination to represent the “Orient” in its exteriority. In Orientalism Edward Said criticized European scholarship and artists beginning in the 17th century that created an exotic image of the “Orient” to demonstrate an innate difference that created a division between East and West. That distinction that Orientalism created presupposed a cultural superiority since the “mystical orient” resided outside Europe’s conception of “rational” civilization. European nations used this theory to assume colonial authority. In the early 20th century Orientalism continued to support Imperialism. St. Denis was “surrounded by the popular media of America and Europe that portrayed the East as primitive, exotic, and often as a mute visual spectacle” (Whitmer 497). The scholar or artist in Europe and the United States created a distinct culture for its American audiences through:

“The voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text [dance]—all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the [audience], containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking on its behalf” (Said 20).

St. Denis created a parallel world of lush fabrics and vibrant colors for her audiences to fall in love with that emphasized an Orientalist exotic image of India.

Ruth St. Denis exercised responsibility over representing India to Americans and Indians on her tours around the United States and India. She danced in small towns and cities in the United States that had never seen modern dance or Indian culture before. “Unacquainted audiences may have viewed St. Denis’s cultural appropriation as a true representation of Eastern ritual and religious practices,” reliant on her representation to learn about a colony on the opposite side of the world (Whitmer 500). Her performances introduced a glamorous rendition of a mystical culture that St. Denis assumed from pictures and statues of Hindu gods, not real life.

Made to Move dance company recently commemorated Ruth St. Denis in a dance that recognized her unrealistic portrayal of Indian dance. The reviewer commends the show for being “ravishingly costumed and danced with wonderful sexuality,” theatrical components emphasized in Ruth’s own dances (Sagolla). Though the dance did not adequately replicate Ruth’s spiritual connection with her dances, “Carella's solo dances accurately represent[ed] St. Denis' naïve understanding of the ethnic styles she appropriated” (Sagolla). According to Sagollo, the Made to Move dance presented a surface approach to St. Denis inauthentic and “naïve” dance style.

St. Denis had relied only on her spiritual readings, cultural images, and statues of dancers from India to inform the notion of India that she presented in the United States. After she finally toured India, St. Denis learned that her image and India’s reality drastically diverged. She expected to find magic, and instead saw disease:

“She walked down the long avenue that led to the bathing ghats on the river, where a festival of the goddess Saraswati had attracted throughs of Hindus. On either side of the avenue stretched a queue of lepers, cripples, the poor and the diseased, their bony hands thrust forward in hopes of baksheesh. Ruth was deeply horrified.” (Shelton 1981, 198)

St. Denis recognized that the India she dreamed of existed only in her imagination. She admitted that “If 20 years before I had seen any such sight, there would have been no Radha, perhaps no career” ( Shelton 1981, 198). Yet she had built a career that relied on the inexistent glamour of India. She did not relent after seeing the inaccuracy of her representation of her dances, “rather it exists now for me much more intensely in the depth of my own spirit than in the poor huddled beggars lining the roadside” (Shelton 1981, 198). She saw the reality and decided she liked her image more.

Ruth’s response reveals her Orientalist representation of the “other” yet rejects her responsibility to symbolize Indian culture. Performance always changes the original action according to the “restored behavior” theory. Though celebrated, “the ‘truth’ or ‘source’ of the behavior is often lost, forgotten, or challenged” in performance (Whitmer 498). Rather than performing authentic Indian dance, St. Denis capitalized on her Orientalist approach to address American culture.

Within the exotic sphere she created on stage St. Denis portrayed a sensual woman worshiping her body. St. Denis’ dances responded to the Victorian guilt attached to bodies by eliminating herself from the expectation. In her dances “sexuality was distanced from the female body through a sort of “mediation by the culturally exotic stereotype”” (Whitmer 502). St. Denis found an expression for her spiritual notion that “the natural language of [the] soul will have become the movement of the body” (Cohen 128). In her dance school Miss Ruth (as the students called her) taught the dancers to incorporate the movements she demonstrated into their bodies, rejecting ballet’s rigid movements that strives for a single image of perfection. St. Denis believed that individuals speak through dance, an idea that shaped Modern dance into a form that expresses emotion through interactions between human and natural forces. St. Denis used Indian exotic charm to explain to Americans that the soul could not be extricated from the body.

Ruth St. Denis employed “exotic” dances to get away with an idea previously considered morally deficient. She functioned poorly as a representative of Indian culture, however her dance exemplified a cultural movement that began to accept a connection between body and soul within the United States. St. Denis’ Indian dances prove that Orientalism “has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world” (Said 12). Through her exotic dances St. Denis melded the body and spirit, which functions as the heart of current American modern dance.

Bibliography

Sagolla, Lisa Jo. In Search of a Goddess. “Review of dance by Back Stage.” Vol. 45, Issue 30, p40, 1p Business Source Premier, 23 July 2004. International Index to the Performing Arts. 6 March 2006. http://sas.epnet.com/citation.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York; Vintage Books,1979.

Shelton, Suzanne. Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis. New York; Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1981.

Sherman, Jane. Soaring: The diary and letters of a Denishawn dancer in the Far East, 1925-1926. Middletown, Connecticut; Wesleyan University Press, 1976.

“St. Denis, Ruth.” The International Encyclopedia of Dance. 5th Volume, 1998.

I use the quotes because discourse often takes for granted the difference between the Eastern and Western worlds, as if it has been established that they are inherently different. There seems to be a large geographic obstacle to this supposition, however, since the world is round. I think it is problematic to maintain a vocabulary that distinguishes one part of the world from the other, it maintains a division in our societies that need not exist in our globalizing society.

home CIS website