Rhythms of resurrection: The comebacks of Ruth St. Denis
Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) had one of the first and longest careers as a professional modern dancer. At age 62, she embarked on a “comeback” that lasted nearly three decades, appearing on stage and screen in the dances that had made her an international star earlier in her career. This essay examines the relationship between her well-known “Orientalism,” her feminism, her spirituality, and her perspective on aging and ageism. In particular, it brings into relief her innovative efforts to redefine dance as a feminist project at the intersection of aging and modern dance history. St. Denis converted “oriental tradition” into a feminist dance praxis, thus, staking a claim for the aging dancer under the banner of feminist politics.
When Good Adjectives Go Bad: The Case of So-called Lyrical Dance
One afternoon in 1995 as I interviewed a young dancer for a research project, I stumbled on an unknown dance form. It was unknown to me and most of my dance studies colleagues, that is, so I counted it a fascinating first encounter with a curious subculture. I had come to a dance studio in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., where I was studying the sociocultural aspects of an annual Nutcracker. Most traditions of this and other Nutcracker communities were known to me—ballet training, casting, volunteering backstage, rehearsing, performing, socializing. But when I asked a twelve-year-old “party girl” from act 1 about her favorite kind of dance class, she named the dance form I had not heard of. It seemed she loved “lyrical” best. “Lyrical what?” I asked. She looked at me quizzically. “Just lyrical,” she said. I was puzzled. I gathered from her attempts at description that “lyrical” was sort of like ballet but more fun, sort of like jazz, but more emotional—it was “just lyrical,” she repeated. I would run across many such attempted explanations of “lyrical” after that, mostly from the undergraduate dance majors I taught in university history classes and the children of friends who took dance classes. It took some time for me to realize that so-called lyrical dance was known only in competition dance culture, which had become “a primary site of dance training for many amateur dancers, across many backgrounds and experiences, throughout the United States.”1 My involvement with dance had always been in the realm of dance as an art form, from my training, to a brief performing career (in ballet and musicals), to dance writing and scholarship. Once working in a university dance department or two, I found out that many, if not most, young dancers did train at “competition dance” studios and participated in the contests and ethos of that world. It could be that the popularity of competition dance and “dance teams” (I found that high schools often have those, separate from the private studio system) results from their resemblance to the sports world and the familiarity and appeal of working with team spirit. The team can be celebrated as a democratic learning tool, and the idea of staying fit and winning prizes perhaps is more easily explained than is “art”—both to young students and to parents.
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":