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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2005 as a Project of the Early Modern Avant-Garde Elizabeth M. Drake-Boyt

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF AND SCIENCES

Dance as a Project of the Early Modern Avant-garde

By

Elizabeth M. Drake-Boyt

A Dissertation submitted to the Program in the In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2005

Copyright © 2005 Elizabeth M. Drake-Boyt All Rights Reserved

The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Elizabeth M. Drake-Boyt defended on the 28th of February, 2005.

Anita Gonzalez Professor Co-directing Dissertation

Tricia Young Professor Co-directing Disseration

Ray Fleming Committee Member

Approved:

David Johnson Chair, Program in the Humanities

Donald Foss Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

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This Labor is dedicated to my Beloved Charly in deep reverence for his contributions of wit, humor and above all humanity

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to commend the support and encouragement for this that was extended to me by the Committee Members of my dissertation; co-directors Dr. Anita Gonzalez and Dr. Tricia Young, and Humanities Representative Dr. Raymond Fleming. Dr. Sally Sommer additionally offered valuable commentary and guidance. Professors Jack Clark and Patty Philips of the Dance Department at Florida State University assisted with the movement analysis discussion, and Professor Clark was directly responsible for access to and commentaries on, his video reconstructions of Incense and Gnossenne used in this study. Mr. Norton Owen made available to me invaluable access to the archives at Jacob’s Pillow. The first-hand recollections of Denishawn dancer and writer, Jane Sherman, enriched this discussion of the artistic developments of Ruth St. Denis and . On more than one occasion, the interlibrary loan staff members of the Daviss County Public Library of Owensboro, , went out of their way to see to it that books and articles needed for this work were speedily sent to me. Finally, I would most like to acknowledge the contributions of friends and family who kept me on track through difficult times, and celebrated with me in accomplishment. To one and all, my grateful thanks are offered.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………iv

INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………..1

CHAPTER ONE Elements of the Avant-garde: European Beginnings……...... 25

CHAPTER TWO Ruth St. Denis and Incense……………………………………….69

CHAPTER THREE Ted Shawn and Gnossienne……………………………………..116

CHAPTER FOUR and L’Après-Midi d’un Faune…..…………….168

CHAPTER FIVE Arts and Popular : American Developments…..214

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………260

APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………..274

GLOSSARY OF TERMS………………………………………………………………286

REFERENCES……….………………………………………………………………...302

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH….………………………………………………………..312

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ABSTRACT

This investigation presents an analysis of three expressive dance works created between 1900 and 1920 as projects of the Early Modern avant-garde. The chosen were Incense (1906) by Ruth St. Denis, Gnossienne (1919) by Ted Shawn, and L’Après-Midi d’un Faune by Vaslav Nijinsky. While Shawn and St. Denis were American dance artists at the forefront of development, Nijinsky presented both a European cultural and tradition response to the avant-garde. These dances were chosen from the standpoint of their similarities. All three are short, emotionally intense, and referent to internal conditions significant to the artist-. Each dance centrally features the artist-creator as the intermediary between the work and the audiences and addresses avant-garde concerns in Early . And these dances were formed as self- contained modular units capable of packaging and marketing in context with both popular entertainments and serious concert works. Five issues engaged in the avant-garde response to Modernism are delineated for the purposes of this study. These issues are exoticism, spiritualism, distortions of time and space, naturalism, and responses to technological advances. Each of the three dances is discussed in relation to these issues, bringing them into theoretical discussion with other mediums. This scope of analysis facilitates discussion of dance as a culturally expressive behavior, and the close relationships between European and American developments in decorative design ( and ). The treatment of the definition of Modernism permits comparison of the similarities and differences among a wide range of avant-garde expressions and clarifies the dynamics of exchange between popular and serious performing art venues.

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INTRODUCTION

“Why, even the dances seen in our father’s time were unlike those of today and it will always be so because men are such lovers of novelty.” Arbeau: Orchesography, 1589.

This study undertakes a close, analytical examination of three early Twentieth Century Euro-American dances as cultural indicators of the avant-garde in Early Modernism1. Ruth St. Denis’ (1880-1968) The Incense (1906), Ted Shawn’s (1891-1972) Gnossienne (1919), and Vaslav Nijinsky’s (1885-1950) Afternoon of a Faun (1912) are examples of expressive art dance in this broad cultural project. These dances address Western social indicators such as gender (the dances were created by two men and one woman), stylistic form (ballet and modern dance) and nationality (two artists are American, and one is European2). Beyond differences of gender, training, cultural background, and creative processes, it is the intent of this investigation to examine how meaning is conveyed through the dances. To facilitate an understanding of how these dances contribute to the on-going process of the avant-garde, they are presented as texts carrying symbolic meaning relative to other contemporary (1900-1920) performing and visual arts. Painting and sculpture (Chapter One), and film and stage venues of , theatre, and (Chapter Five) frame considerations on the creation and reception of these dances. Incense, Gnossienne, and Faune draw upon traditional artistic conventions as a source of validation for their separation from the dictates of those conventions. As avant-garde works they also represent culturally-signifying events in the process of restructuring relationships between power and meaning. This examination attempts an understanding of how these three innovative dance works resonate with the avant-garde impetus of Early Modernism to reveal coded social meanings which might otherwise remain hidden. This type of broad, interdisciplinary approach is not without risk; not only must the terminology be used with precision and consistency, but the manner of interpreting the dances in the search for meaning must be clear. Dance writing that attempts to bring the art in conceptual or ideological comparison with other modern arts confronts elusive reference: Establishing precise parallels between modern dance and modern painting, modern music, and modern literature proves difficult because Modern dancers have tended to use “modern” as a synonym for “new” or “creative” and they have prized experimentation. Yet they have never subscribed for long to any (Anderson: 4).

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But the effort proves useful because avant-garde aspects of Early Modernism appeared with some consistency in a broad range of venues. As will be argued in this study, similar avant- garde characteristics appeared in both art and (Glossary) venues across the . Collectively, these arts influenced—and were influenced by—each other and the larger cultural milieu in which they were created. While some aspects of Early Modernism (Glossary) clung to a conservative response to the challenges of the Twentieth Century, the avant-garde criticized3 traditional structures in an attempt to find new responses to new conditions. These dances provide a rich source of discourse in the effort to understand these conflicting perspectives. The term avant-garde refers to “the foremost position, or vanguard” of an attack (Glossary). In this case, the attack is against entrenched middle-class expectations on the order and place of works of art. In the act of disrupting the cultural construction of that order, avant- garde art draws its public—often grudgingly and with initially hostile or dismissive reactions— into new relationships with experiential performance. The results of these experiments were reflected in a continual flow of ideas between artistic mediums, and between entertainments and classical arts. Although multitudes of “isms” describe many different art movements actively participating in avant-garde projects, such designations are presented in this study to frame rather than define Early Modernism. The focus falls upon five integrated concerns in which all avant-garde works of Early Modernism engage, including the dances Gnossienne, Incense and Faune. The first and perhaps most obvious of these elements is the way in which avant-garde works at this time utilized traditional tropes of exotic themes (Glossary). Ruth St. Denis created The Incense based on a Hindu East-Indian of worship, establishing herself as an Orientalist (Glossary) in dance. Ted Shawn’s4 Gnossienne and Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun both drew inspiration from ancient Minoan/Greek5 depictive styles. In each case, the exotic framework presented the artist/character in the dance to the audience as a well-informed guide into unfamiliar (exotic) expressive realms. The “never-where/never-when” ambiguity of exotic fantasy removed both audience and artist from everyday concerns and mundane expectations. Instead, they entered a rarified state of theatrical representation in which new constructions of self, time, and space could be explored.

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The second factor of avant-garde works appears in the distortion of time and space that exotic themes facilitated. This aspect takes several forms; for example, rather than offering audiences an elaborate spectacle (as was the case of traditional performing arts6) these dances condensed exoticism into deeply-personal and intimate evocations lasting a few minutes. The ephemeral qualities of experiential expression are suggested in St. Denis’ smoking, scented incense and filmy costume; in the impression of a static, ancient fresco come to momentary life in Gnossienne; and in Nijinsky’s dance reference to Debussy’s Impressionistic music and Mallarmé’s Symbolist poem. The act of performing this temporal and spatial impermanence becomes simultaneously intimate and all-encompassing of a universal human condition. It is in this juncture between personal expression and an idea of “universal truth and beauty” that these dances also express a search for spiritual transformation; the third avant-garde element. All three dances present the artists’ ideas about meaning and movement in dance, and how they perceived that their dances communicated universal qualities that applied not only to them, but to everyone who saw them. Fundamental human truths derived from a personal and artistic spiritual orientation were conveyed through the agency of ritual; for example, St. Denis’ Hindu worshipper invoked her deity through the action of burning incense. An enacted ritual to force subjugation of the self to the deity of the Snake Goddess informs the special kind of humor with which Shawn infused Gnossienne. And the unfathomable mystery of the feminine self is reverentially ritualized in the iconic movements of Nijinsky’s Faune. All three artists projected a persona that referred to these roles because this kind of transformative experience required the close alignment of the audience to a merging of the spiritual message with the artist-messenger. The dances were also part of individual and cultural processes of discovering natural, direct expressions underlying human experience. These expressions, codified by the French music teacher and theoretician François Delsarte (1811-1871), were studied by performing artists in venues throughout and the . They referred to, without slavishly following, traditional stage and social conventions bound up in modern life. For example, the early American dance pioneer (1877-1927) demonstrated the artificiality of ballet convention to Russian artists by dancing in flowing “Greek” robes, evoking a romantic nostalgia for the “natural purity” of an ancient (therefore non-existent) Greek . This element of naturalism (Glossary) in the avant-garde is perhaps the most complicated because it doesn’t mean exactly what it says. Gestures perceived as “natural and

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therefore real” by audiences had more to do with cultural distinctions between country/urban, European/non-European, and modern/ancient than iconic, ritualistic poses struck by performing artists. It is in this area that dance comes to the forefront of discussion, for natural gesture was “real and true” because it came directly from the physical body in obedience to an elevated spiritual association, a relationship intrinsic to the self revealed only under the artifice of performing art. Finally, the dances exhibit ways in which each artist, and by association their audiences, came to terms with the challenges of technology and commercial consumerism. St. Denis learned the effectiveness of complete technical stage control pioneered by (1862- 1928) to create the illusion of a unique experience for each audience. St. Denis had the reputation of never quite performing the same dance twice, and responded to insistence that she “set” her dance with rebellious anger, stating that she was “not a machine” (St. Denis, et. al.). Both Gnossienne and Faune are, by comparison, less changeable over the course of many performances than Incense. While Shawn’s Gnostic priest struggles with the imperatives of predetermined ritual to the demanding Snake Goddess in conflict with spontaneous self-will, Nijinsky’s Faun flattens two-dimensionally into a concentrated search for sexual identity with movements evoking his previous role as a mechanical puppet (Petroushka). In all three works, the dancer’s expressive desire is supported by the form of movement in time and space instead of the other way around. Stripped of all extraneous gesture down to the bare essentials of expression, these dances became microcosms of a larger whole of which the creator was the binding factor. They can be examined as units of presentational experience among other similar units easily rearranged and adapted to the demands of global tours without disturbing the integrity of the dance itself. This flexibility of modular construction (Glossary) enhanced the central position of each dancer within the dance as the identifying factor for the audience. It also made marketing and distributing the dances easier in the same way vaudeville acts and early film shorts reached their audiences. As experiments of Early Modernism, these dances illustrate ways in which their creators negotiated changing social perspectives in these five concerns of the avant-garde. The combined analysis of the three dances in which the dancer/ choreographers are presented centrally offers an opportunity to compare their similarities and differences.

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A study of the broad range of expressive experimentation characteristic of this aspect of Modernism reveals fundamental shifts in culturally-constructed relationships among the artist, the artistic process and product, and audience expectations. In the process of defying middle- class expectations (a distinctive element of the avant-garde), the dances empowered their creators with the means to manipulate fundamental relationships between themselves, their art, and their audiences. Individual artistic objectives of the avant-garde gained an authenticity of expression by challenging previously-established tenants of representation. Dance—and these three dances in particular—also responded to avant-garde indicators by altering the stance of the artist relative to the work and developing the movement vocabulary needed to support a coherent communication of that alteration. It is the premise of this study that a balanced reading of these five interlocking factors of the avant-garde is best served with a broad informative base. In order to attempt a balanced perspective of the complex, interdependent features of dance and (Glossary), this investigation makes use of an interdisciplinary approach. The kind of analytical task designed in this investigation offers an opportunity to think of dance as an integral facet of a larger cultural infrastructure during this particularly fertile period of artistic experimentation. If dance is placed in context with the culture in which it is produced; if it is to be considered as one of several culturally-expressive behaviors, then the intersections of dance with other arts and its cultural positioning become clear. The way in which dance acts as one kind of voice in a concert of expressive behaviors opens new avenues by which to examine the nature of that culture which produces them. In their multilayered negotiations of time, space, identity, and authority of presentation, these dances offer a unique opportunity to expand understanding of the Western tradition. Dance scholarship in the past has concentrated on the chronological developments of dance in a historically linear fashion. But dance studies in the last decade have brought considerations of the art into a larger, multiply-investigative framework that promises to open new insights on the exchange of culture and art. As part of an on-going academic discussion, this study constitutes one response to a call for new7 investigations in that apply methods of critical analysis among diverse artistic mediums sharing expressive, aesthetic, or procedural bases. The tactic is particularly effective in analyzing modern works because it is in Modernism—regardless of medium or style—that art defies any singular,

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comprehensive interpretation of meaning. Instead, a cluster of related yet distinct interpretations emanating from one work addresses a set of psychological, emotional, symbolic or perceptual issues. This study explores the dynamics of exchange between dance art and culture as part of a larger cross-disciplinary discussion. The advantage of this approach is that it then becomes possible to discern common elements of meaning and signification. Dance scholar Jane Desmond8 suggests that this kind of dance study contributes significantly to the general area of “cultural studies”: Driving these analyses is a commitment to uncover the ideological workings of representation, that is, how symbolic systems are imbued with issues of power . . .how social subjects (the individuals who make up collectives) are constituted by, and in turn, manipulate these representations and their meanings (43).

Scholarly projects examining Modernism in the humanistic tradition (Glossary) often make comparisons between several closely-related works of a single artist, or a cluster of similarly-themed, chronologically close works by several artists from diverse perspectives. On occasion, a single work from the past is analyzed through several different perspectives. These perspectives might include a feminist interpretation, a Marxist reading, and a critical cultural analysis, such as was applied in the study of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein9 in the literature study series, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (1992). A similar kind of investigation takes place when contextual meaning in film is comparatively explored with those in literature or visual arts relative to issues of race, class, gender, disabilities, or sexuality. Multiple perspectives presented in these studies may not agree but they often converge—or suggest points of convergence—to provide a comprehensive view of the work (or works) in question not otherwise possible. This method of analysis is effective as long as no single perspective is presented as the sole “correct” or “comprehensive” one in itself. More accurately, they collectively and interactively serve to present a concert of related meanings out of which a common expressive basis and superficial differences appear. Furthermore, if this procedure is applied to several works, an even greater expansion of understanding is possible, for then points of convergence and divergence indicate not only the process and production of the piece in question, but also resonant cultural balances of meaning and power under which that art has been created.

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Dance research has applied this approach relatively recently in a variety of configurations. An excellent example is Jane Desmond’s article, “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural and Ruth St. Denis’ Radha of 1906”. In other discussions of a similar nature, Nijinsky’s Faune is placed vis-à-vis the Art Deco movement (Wood, Jeschke). Comparisons among works in diverse mediums by one artist provide other kinds of considerations. They illuminate not only the artist’s position in a larger cultural milieu, but bring into focus the conceptual connections between different kinds of art works by any given artist. This kind of analysis is evident in Margaret Harris’ book, Löie Fuller: Magician of Light, which brings into cultural context not only Fuller’s dance activities in relation to Art Nouveau, but demonstrates the connections between her dances and her film-making ventures as experiments in movement and light. Thus, St. Denis’ expression of divine beauty in Incense is given a human depth because her other dances in the Hindu series—of which Incense was the first—also explored sensuality (Radha), the degradation of cheap street entertainment (Cobras), and material renunciation (Yogi). Shawn’s perception of the human form as a mechanism of expression in Gnossienne continued expression in his hobby of wood carving (Mumaw). And Nijinsky, despite observations to the contrary10, discovered inspiring influences in paintings, music, and dances that could lead him forward into control of his own expressive goals (Buckles, Nijinska). While these analytical procedures are useful in understanding interlinked cultural meanings implicit in individual or closely-related works, this study takes a broader approach. It examines three dances by three different artists during a twenty-year time span within a broad cultural and artistic milieu. The process initially views the Early Modern avant-garde as a representational practice that carries symbolic meaning for artists and audiences across several dance forms. Thus, in choosing one European (Nijinsky) and two Americans (Shawn and St. Denis) innovative dance parallels broader cultural movements in both societies. According to this frame of reference, dance includes not only the European-based ballet (as represented in Nijinsky’s Faune) in the process of reinterpreting classical traditions but also the new dance form (Incense and Gnossienne) that eventually evolved into what is currently known as “modern dance”. The term used in this study to efficiently express the unity of aesthetic perception between the United States and Europe is “Euro-American” (Glossary). Thematic origins, cultural and artistic influences, procedures of creative effort, and audience dynamics become visible not

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only in terms of dance, but also in terms of dance as part of a larger cultural and artistic shift characteristic of Modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. Then, this investigation engages a multi-faceted examination of movements and performance contexts for a close reading of three works created between 1900 and 1920 by three Euro-American dance artists. This brief period represents a particularly vigorous creative episode in Western performance activities including concert dance development. European ballet traditions experienced significant revisions of expressive and thematic content. Compelled by the powerful example of Isadora Duncan’s freely expressive dances, Russian choreographer Mikail Fokine (1880-1942), who created many of Nijinsky’s most successful roles in Serge Diaghilev’s (1872-1929) Russes (1909-1929), set about a systematic revision of the ballet lexicon. His modern ballets were designed to incorporate Duncan’s naturalism without upsetting traditional time/space and audience/performance relationships. Building on that impetus, Nijinsky pushed the limits of performance convention with Faune by abolishing illusions of stage depth and disrupting the kinesthetic flow through time upon which ballet depended. At the same time, he constantly referred to fundamental ballet movements and positions with wry humor11 in a way that called attention to the constructed meanings in art dance (new and old) for the audience. At the same time, other arts and entertainments in Europe and the United States were in the process of undergoing comparable revisions. Relationships between form and aesthetic sensibilities, or between spiritualism and utility underwent profound conceptual shifts as evidenced in Art Nouveau (1890-1910) and the later Art Deco (1914-1940) styles12. While European aesthetics struggled with its legacy of and (Glossary) in defiance of the bourgeoisie-directed Academie in La Belle Epoque (1890-1900), American expression was in the process of defining itself as separate and distinct. Confronted with the excesses and abuses of “The Gilded Age”13, a period of Progressive Era (Glossary) social reform opened the option of American arts (including dance) to participate (Tomko: 1-35). St. Denis and Shawn responded to this evolving American ethos by establishing the and performing company (1914-1931) that was highly flexible to the demands of vaudeville tours, film dances, and educating the general public in the spiritual and moral advantagegs of . Taken in combination, innovations in ballet and modern dance during this period engaged in a particularly vigorous dialogue with developments of Early Modernism in the

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experiments of the avant-garde. Today we continue to deal with the consequences of those developments in all levels of social structure and art14. The works chosen as case studies were selected according to the following criteria. Each dance was originally created and danced by a European or American dancer/choreographer, and constituted a significant point of artistic development for each creator fairly early in his or her performance and choreographic careers. As such, these dances also mark a continued progression of development for modern concert dance styles and the expectations of audiences attending them. In addition, the three dances are striking examples of negotiations between past traditions and the pressing needs of the avant-garde to frame new relationships between the artist and work, and between the artist and audience. The narrow time frame is particularly important in this study. Performing venues underwent remarkable transformations from 1900 to 192015, making this period of Early Modernism a nexus of experimentation with form and content. Boundaries of gender identification, altered perceptions of distortion/displacement of time and space, permanent/ ephemeral, individual/society, fantasy/real, presentation/representation, and tensions between the and the exotic were tested. In response to these intense experimentations, the dances explore a rich cultural dialogue with other contemporary works. These works include popular entertainments (such as film and vaudeville) and traditionally-“high” arts (painting, sculpture, theatre, and opera). Consistent with the directions of early in this time frame, these dances represent a vision that is at once profoundly personal and relevant to the culture at large. The choreographers employed different bases of creative choices, a factor that makes comparisons among them an effective tactic of analysis in this study. While St. Denis drew upon inspiration and intuition, both Nijinsky and Shawn16 analyzed the choreographic structures of their pieces, approaches that deeply influenced the artistic choices in each case. St. Denis’ and Shawn’s dances are solos; in Nijinsky's Faun, the interaction between the Faun and nymphs17 is physically minimal. All three retain the choreographer/dancer as centrally staged18, a feature that makes it possible to undertake a reasonable, if limited, analysis of the movement from film and video reconstructions. These dances are presented as personal expressions of their creators, especially since each dance was originally created to be performed by its choreographer19 rather than by another dancer. This attribute suggests an intimate co-creative relationship between the dance and the

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person who created it. Each dance expressed a harmonic correlation among the identities of the artist as creator not only of works of art, but also of self as a work of art. This trait of mutual construction between artist and work of art begun in Romanticism that is both private and public finds intriguing revision in modern works that follow. The artist presents a self as person, persona, and icon engaged in an on-going reflexive critical examination, inviting the audience to participate in the creation of meaning through the direct agency of the artist. The clearly-focused centrality of presentation in these dances further implies a close, circular dialogue between the artist and the audience as a mutually- transformative experiential event. This quality implies that the dances were designed to covey messages of both personal and public significance. Video and film records of the dances were consulted, and it is understood that each reconstruction is interpretive in its own right. Holdings at Florida State University include all three dances in reliable reconstructions, though none are of the original artist in performance. These archival records combined with photos and eye-witness accounts of the earliest performances make it possible to examine the artists’ processes of creation and estimate ways in which these dances have changed over time. In addition to videos, it becomes pertinent to also study photographic records of the artists in each dance, because all three works depend upon posed, still positions in sequence20 with movements to impart meaning. Each dance has its own distinct movement style and form, displaying specific features of Modernism. Its creator made movement choices designed to support intensely personal expressive goals related to—yet independent of—the agendas of larger agencies21. On one level, all three are based on exotic themes coded through attitudes of distinction between European and non-European societies found in many arts and entertainments of the time. The dances also exhibit a unification of life and art in which the artist becomes in some degree inseparable from the work produced. This merging of private self with public display in an exotic context is a defining characteristic of avant-garde art and continues as a feature of mass media culture today. However, the manipulation of time and space in these dances evidences the constructed nature of performance in a way that engages the audience in the act of creating meaning, instead of simply telling the audience authoritatively what the work is supposed to mean. Concurrent with the posed centrality of the dancer in them, the dances comment on the relationships between humans and rapidly developing technology. This gesture of the dances includes both defiance of expectation and (particularly in the case of Gnossienne) a wry humor in the futility of that

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defiance. Finally, the search for fundamental, natural expressive movement free of—or in active defiance of—social connotations brings these dances into dialogue with abstract and , while at the same time providing a basis of spiritual transcendence. While the artists themselves may or may not have been aware of how interrelated gestures cumulatively acquire meanings at once social and individual, they still manipulated sets of gestures at the most basic level of creative selection. They supported these core meanings with every other feature of the performance, suggesting a constructed cohesiveness of view indicating parallels in the larger social construct. The process of this investigation leads to a discussion of how first the artist, and then the audience perceived those meanings as part of the emergence of modern aesthetics and the social fabric that supported them. Specific works of dance art constitute the core point of examination in this study, and the layout of its chapters reflects the central position of the dance first to its creator, then to its audiences. Chapter One describes the avant-garde aspect of Early Modernism in visual arts to set the European (primarily French) cultural and artistic framework in which the dances were created. While it is not possible to give a detailed account of all the “isms” of art in this time frame, a focus is made on the developments and expressions of Art Nouveau and Art Deco. These two movements not only present perspectives of Early Modernism, but demonstrate a direct correlation to the ephemeral, exotic, spiritual, and philosophical directives indicated in these dances as examples of the avant-garde. Chapter Five resumes the discussion from the standpoint of an American response through vaudeville and film. Marketing and packaging strategies designed to reach far-flung audiences were greatly enhanced by structuring experiential commodities (i. e. film, dance, music, etc.) according to the principles of modular organization. This approach greatly favored works that were short, programmatic, and self-contained in a way that referenced larger, less mobile agencies. Each of the five key elements of avant-garde Modernism is presented in these chapters to establish the foundations upon which the expressive elements of the dances may be understood. Whether they appear in the “high arts” of European theatre and visual arts or in “low art” American entertainments, similar tactics of avant-garde defiance are evident. Like the dances analyzed in this study, these genres explored exotic themes, experimented with expressive constructs of time and space in performance, suggested spiritualism as a unity of gestural meaning between audience and performer, and found natural movement to convey direct

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meaning. Collectively, they also commented on the position of the human body and mind confronted with rapid technological advancements and the Machine Age. Despite obvious differences in dance training, all three artists referred (in varying degrees) to the principles of expressive movement analyses developed by Delsarte and subsequent, related studies on the relationships between movement and rhythm in music by Swiss composer Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950). Delsarte’s detailed observations on the between movement and emotion further suggested ways in which speech (oration) and movement combine to impart meaning. Based in part upon Delsarte’s work, Dalcroze developed his system of eurhythmics, by which musical responsiveness could be effectively taught, first to musicians and composers, then later for dance training in both ballet and modern dance schools22. These compatible systems of movement meaning and musical responsiveness influenced training and creations in a broad range of Euro-American venues, from popular entertainment to classical concert stage and film presentations of the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s. But they had a particular influence upon the dances in question here that is important to the subsequent chapters. St. Denis and Shawn both studied with several American teachers of Delsarte and based the gestural meanings of their respective dances23 upon Delsarte’s meticulous analysis of movement and meaning. They later incorporated Dalcroze training in their dance school curriculum. Based on available documented evidence, Nijinsky speculatively encountered American Delsartism through contact with Isadora Duncan, who visited Russia while he was a student of the Imperial Theatre. Dalcroze eurhythmics had already been introduced into the school at the time Count Volkonsky was appointed Director. Given the evidence that these systems of correlating meaning between movement and music impacted the creation of the dances, the work of Delsarte and Dalcroze is touched upon in Chapter One by way of laying a foundation upon which to build an analysis of the dances in subsequent chapters. With that in mind, the following three chapters in this investigation frame analyses of each dance. Chapter Two presents St. Denis’ Incense. Chapter Three develops a perspective on Shawn’s creation of Gnossienne. And Chapter Four explores Nijinsky’s relationship to the character of his Faune. The dance training and approach to expressive movement for all three artists is, at first glance quite different. As the son of dance performers, Nijinsky entered the Imperial Theatrical School in 1898, where his extensive dance training24 concentrated on

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traditional Russian . St. Denis and Shawn, however, had had both formal and informal dance training intermittent with performing that included, but was not limited to, ballet. And while Nijinsky and St. Denis had strong family support to enter into a dancing profession, the former seminary student Shawn did not. He took dance class in order to overcome physical weakness due to illness. In the process of learning, Shawn merged his ideas of the “self-made man” with American . He discovered within the expressive potential of dance a utopic idealism for American society and education that included a redefinition of American masculinity. A description of key movements chosen for discussion of the dance in question follows each segment of training and dance experiences. Video reconstructions of Incense and Gnossienne by Professor Jack Clark of Florida State University Dance Department, and the video reconstruction of Faune by Elizabeth Schooling and Chappell for the 1980 PBS production, Nureyev and the in Tribute to Nijinsky, were consulted. An examination of how the movements interrelate to create meaning is undertaken, based on a detailed word description of each dance in Appendix I. This area of investigation constitutes the core of the study. All three dances present various negotiations between movement, meaning, and non-movement factors such as music costume, and stage sets. These negotiations are set in the larger context of the five aspects of the avant-garde. It is in consideration of how music was matched with movement in these dances that expressive goals are further clarified. St. Denis first conceptualized the idea of Incense, then went in search of music appropriate to that idea. She then arranged the order of the dance to correspond to the musical dynamics of the piece so that movement and music would be in emotional alignment. Her expressive goal was to draw together the collection of performing factors—of which music was one—into a harmonic unity which St. Denis believed communicated a universal truth and beauty. By contrast, Shawn first choreographed the movements of Gnossienne for a Denishawn dance class. The original purpose of the sequence of movements was designed to teach dance students how to render their bodies in complete and total control for the expressive purposes of their art. Later perceiving the potential for wry humor and a comment on gender relations in the movements of this classroom sequence, Shawn found the suggestion of an appropriate narrative and Cretan theme in the title of the piano work by the French composer (1866-1925)

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that he had chosen. In the process of tracing the meaning of the word “gnossienne”, he found the image of the “Cup-bearer” fresco from the ancient ruins of the Palace of Knossos and incorporated the stylized stance and suggested movement potential of this image into the dance. Both Shawn and St. Denis incorporated the dynamics of their respective music choices closely to their expressive gestures. But Nijinsky’s abrupt, angular, and flat only subtly refers to the languid, dream-like dynamics of the music by the French Impressionist composer (1862-1918). And Debussy’s composition was in turn inspired by the poem of the same title by Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898). Movement and music in Nijinsky’s Faune cohabit the same temporal frame with key connections to one another, instead of matching in a close parallel between visual and audible elements. Nijinsky had the idea for the ballet, a conception of its characteristic movements, and had chosen its music well before beginning to choreograph. Taking only his sister (1891-1972) into his confidence, he meticulously worked out the complex relationship between music and movement he wanted before rehearsals (Nijinska: 316). Added to movement and music relationships in Chapters Two, Three and Four is a brief description of production elements such as costumes, makeup, props, lighting, and stage setting in terms of how they provide specific points of reference in each dance. Such elements are crucial, because it is only through them that specific movement meanings can be understood in context with a coherent performing experience. This consideration is important because movement and non-movement factors in combination are fundamental to each dance as an experiential communication. The writhing swirls of St. Denis’ arm movements in Incense are accentuated by her flowing, filmy robes that both define and conceal her body. Nijinsky’s mottled, skin-tight costume with his head topped by horns emphasizes the character of this half- man, half-beast engaged in sexual awakening. The dropped veil of one of the in Faune is invested with a density of ambiguous connotations summed up in the “absent feminine” and incomplete experience for the Faun. And the heavy coils of fabric wrapped around Shawn’s arms, thighs, waist, and head confine his movements into the direct, iconographic lines of his priest’s ritual as well as suggesting a sexual reference to the (implied presence of) his snake goddess (Sherman: letter 6 September 2003).

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Finally, Chapters Two, Three, and Four include discussions about the positions of the dances relative to other works by the same artist and works of other artists influenced by them. While Shawn created Gnossienne in the midst of his early Denishawn phase as an instruction tool for his dance classes, both St. Denis and Nijinsky began their choreographic efforts with Incense and Faune, respectively. The expressive potential begun in Incense was quickly developed in the same year through St. Denis’ series on Hindu themes, culminating in the sensuous Radha. Her central position, use of fabric and props, and exotic themes in all these dances impacted the development of the younger Shawn and their Denishawn student, Graham (1893-1991). Shawn often returned to themes of ancient gods in his prolific choreographic output, but in this direction he seemed merely to shadow St. Denis’ prior fame. However, the abstract iconography and display of masculine physical articulation characteristic of Gnossienne makes appearances in some of his later works for his all-male troupe. In addition to fostering the talents of , Shawn’s quirky humor in Gnossienne helped Denishawn student (1901-1975)25 define his own unique performance style. Although he choreographed a total of only four ballets, Nijinsky utilized some of the expressive potential of abstract movement in ritual and sexual searching suggested in Faune in his following works even though by that time he had begun to succumb to the insanity that would cut short his creative career. The impetus of his artistic goals as understood by his sister Bronislava Nijinska was sensitively carried forward in her performing, choreographic, and teaching career. Nijinska’s ecole de movement (1919-1921) was designed not only to train dancers capable of performing in the new ballets, but also to prepare stage and film performers in a new movement lexicon appropriate to the expressions of the new century. A number of Euro- American ballet dancers and choreographers subsequently inherited Nijinsky’s innovations26 through the efforts of his sister. The process of exchange and dialogue between various art media and popular entertainments was particularly fluid and vital during this period, and as such needs to be examined. Chapter Five returns to the larger perspective of Chapter One, placing the dances in context with other performing arts of the time. While Chapter One emphasizes visual arts in Europe, this chapter follows popular entertainment from a primarily-American perspective of stage and screen representations. This is because American vaudeville (1890-1920)27 and its extension into film was an American project of packaging and marketing. Obviously, only a

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very cursory overview of works in opera, theatre, vaudeville, and film can be presented here. However, key examples from each venue are chosen as points of reference from which to discuss how these dances negotiate the five identified elements of Modern avant-garde arts. An idea of how the dances were marketed to, and perceived by, audiences is also presented in this chapter out of information gained from available written records. In a study of this scope, it is important to establish limitations and restrictions on the range of investigation. The first point is that that the three dances are not examined in equal relativity. St. Denis’ dances have come under particular scrutiny in regard to feminist critical study, cultural imperialism, and the ramifications of gender in performance. Therefore, it becomes more effective for this investigation to use the scholarship available on St. Denis as a lens focused on related issues in the works of Nijinsky and Shawn. While some excellent articles discuss the male body and concepts of masculinity in performance28, the majority of critical analyses in this field appear in film studies. Rather than undertake a detailed description of the influences of non-Euro-American dances, spirituality, or cultural on Western concert dance, the task of this study focuses its view of these dances as part of a larger Euro-American cultural infrastructure. The processes of exploring the organic and symbiotic exchanges between artist, work, and culture these dances represent are emphasized with exotic contexts29 as a common thread in which non-European are performed as a Western construct. The works are also not presented as representative of the dances or cultural practices from which they are derived. Instead, as examples of Early Modernism, the dances invoke a spiritual/expressive condition inspired by non-Euro-American cultures. It is also outside the scope of this investigation to include non- Euro-American artists who worked through connotations of ethnic exoticism in order to gain comparable artistic authority on Western stages. This study also does not propose to discuss the effect these dances might have had upon audiences of the cultures which inspired their themes. These three dance works represent in varying degrees a Euro-American social construct of non-Euro-American culture. As such, they comment on an impression of exoticism invoked through remote geographies and/or time frames30. While St. Denis reported31 an enthusiastic response to her Oriental dances in and Japan, this study examines the impact of presentation only on Euro-American audiences.

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This study also does not imply that these dances represent the majority of dance works produced within the time frame indicated. On the contrary, each was received with some surprise (or shock, as was the case with Faune). However, it is in examining the similarities and differences among them that some estimation of how Incense, Gnossienne, and Faune both affected and represented facets of the culture in which they were produced can be discussed. In this sense, European and American art dance aesthetics are considered in concert with these dances, given the understanding that they are not at all the same. A vast body of scholarship already exists in many areas of critical analysis in literature. While this informs the current study, the range of examination required to include samples of literature from the same time period is beyond the scope of this investigation. However, some issues explored in the critical analysis of literature have bearing on the performances of these dances. For example, feminist issues in performance are presented here from the standpoint of St. Denis’ contrasting example to parallel negotiations of gender and identity for the male performing body required of Nijinsky and Shawn. Female and male bodies in performance different yet related considerations in reading the dances as cultural texts. However, the basic relationship between power and meaning in Western culture breaks down, as John Berger succinctly notes in his book, Ways of Seeing as a gendered position of perspective that permeates society and thereby fundamentally affects the basic premise of performance: . . . men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male; the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision; a sight (47).

While women in performance constitute a topic of critical analysis from the standpoint of women’s studies and feminist theory, the lack of extensive study in the area of masculine performance on stage is noted, and merits a study of greater depth than is possible here. Outside a very narrow and brief discussion of a few pertinent play texts and opera designed for stage or screen performance, written works that do not impact directly on the dances, are not included. Finally it is important to state that only one reconstruction recorded on video for each dance provides the basis for analysis32. The criteria for this choice includes availability, reliability of reconstruction, clarity of video recording, and accuracy of performing intent33 in

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view of how the original dance artist conceived the dance. Some spatial relationships in video recordings are difficult to ascertain; however, the stage centrality of the performer in all these dances makes the task34 somewhat easier. St. Denis, Shawn, and Nijinsky had different obstacles to surmount in the process of becoming expressive dancer/creators. The choreographic project of their dances represented a serious artistic/economic risk reflecting the sense in which they constructed themselves as artists at the same time as they constructed their dances. Gender certainly plays a part in this consideration. While St. Denis as an alluring young woman had no difficulty attracting an audience, the traditional role of (from popular entertainments to the ballet) inherited from Nineteenth Century Euro-American conventions was that women performed dances created by men to be seen by men. By the time St. Denis began to choreograph, a few women—notably Duncan and Fuller—had broken this convention. Nevertheless, St. Denis’ work and public persona acknowledged in some fashion this previously established relationship between a (largely masculine) audience and (predominantly female) dancers. Because they were men, Shawn and Nijinsky did not have this particular performing advantage. Nijinsky at least had the reputation and fame of the through which to promote his experimentations. The Euro-Russian dancing male had an accepted position associated with the ballet, especially since the first performances of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Europe restored the deteriorating position of the professional male dancer. But in America there was only a barely grudging acceptance of the male presence in European ballet imports, and that acceptance certainly did not extend to American male dancers. Shawn drew choreographic authority mainly from his association with St. Denis and Denishawn. This granted him a mutually developmental relationship because he served as teacher and co- founder of Denishawn, and performed and choreographed in partnership with St. Denis. Prior to this base of associations and on his own, Shawn was faced with an ongoing struggle against deeply-rooted American prejudices against men who take up the profession of dance; a struggle which may explain in part why his artistic and educative roles were so closely related. Shawn’s and Nijinsky’s works feature precise, analytic approaches to movement dynamics and corresponding meaning. Their dances were meticulously choreographed to be performed the same way every time and it is in part due to this precision that both dances carry elements of humor. In contrast, St. Denis’ approach was more intuitive and spontaneous; the

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details of the movements of her dance varied from one performance to the next according to whim. The spiritual expression in Incense is tempered with an attitude of gentle feminine compassion rather than the humor found in both Faune and Gnossienne. , the gender of the creator/dancer in each case indicates one possible reason for these differences. St. Denis took the creative prerogative directly from herself; she embodied the feminine divine without intermediary or intervention. While it was St. Denis’ point to create a seamless entity with the character of her own dance, Shawn and Nijinsky both refer either to an unseen, inscrutable feminine divine (Gnossienne’s Snake Goddess) or to a frustratingly elusive, escaping feminine that leaves behind as its only physical relic a diaphanous veil (as Faune’s ). Each artist incorporated the prevailing nature expressed in the respective dances into a performing persona, an attribute of that period of Early Modernism in which the performing self was as much the icon of audience recognition as the character exhibited in the work of art. Despite Nijinsky’s public popularity in his previous roles, he desired an escape from his sentimental ballet association with “perfumed flowers”(Buckles: 259). Instead, he declared that the character of the half-man half-beast Faun, which initially shocked and outraged the moral sensibilities of its first audiences, was himself (Jonas: 216). St. Denis, by contrast, remained constant to the goals expressed in Incense throughout her creating and performing career. Incense established a tone of introspective removal from the mundane, ordinary world and fed that rarified illusion of spiritual transformation she steadfastly maintained for herself long after audiences had moved on to other novelties. Gnossienne opened an opportunity for the former divinity student Shawn to explore an integration of manly and spiritual dance expressions to which he returned from time to time. Its quirky humor acknowledges and comments on a public masculine display in the service of , figuratively and literally providing Shawn with educational material. The three dances are staged with related yet different orientations of audience and dancer that inform the establishment of gendered space. St. Denis’ Incense places the audience in the privileged position of the deity being worshipped, and yet the dancer is also the entity on display in an acknowledgement of the traditional female dancer performing for the male gaze. Shawn’s dance places the (absent feminine) Snake Goddess off stage right, directly opposite his priest’s stage left position of willful pride so that the audience for Gnossienne is positioned between the “horns of his dilemma”.

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Faune’s utilization of gendered space is more complicated. His nymphs (both present as props and “absent” as characters) enter and exit exclusively on and off stage right, but the Faun never enters or leaves the stage. These nymphs, while not actual deities, are the focus of the Faune’s interest and transformation analogous to the deities implied in Incense and Gnossienne. Entrances and exits in the flat plane of the dance segregate feminine from masculine zones of habitation, just as the upper and lower stage zones designate a private and public space for the Faun. The spectator of Nijinsky’s dance is positioned as an outside, unrecognized observer of a fleeting panorama of movement, rather than a privileged (royal) guest welcomed into the lush treasures of the ballet. St. Denis and Shawn performed their respective dances throughout their long performing careers, but Nijinsky performed as the Faun only from its premiere in 1912 until the collapse of his ill-fated Saison Nijinsky in 1914. Faune and Incense represented the first formal choreographic works for public performance of their creators, but Gnossienne35 was created after Shawn had choreographed and performed many of his own solos. And while Gnossienne and Faune certainly had some landmark influences on subsequent works by Shawn and Nijinsky, respectively, Incense can be more accurately considered as the first in a series of five, closely- related solos for St. Denis, all designed after variations East Indian motifs and often performed in thematic sequence in the same evening. Incense clearly influenced Shawn’s career in dance, of which Gnossienne was a part. Through Faune Nijinsky recognized the expressive potential of Duncan’s “Greek” dancing. Without imitating her spontaneous contempt of the “artificial discipline” in ballet training, Nijinsky instigated significant revisions of the exotic base in ballet tradition that his predecessor36 Fokine did not quite dare to pursue (S. J. Cohen). Interestingly, Faune may have at least indirectly influenced the later Gnossienne, for Shawn was certainly aware of Nijinsky’s work whether or not he actually saw Faune before creating his own archaic- evocative dance. All three artists had some prior performing experience in the works of others, and had achieved fame as dancers from which the authority to choreograph was derived. St. Denis and Nijinsky focused their careers on performing, a fact reflected in their subsequent choreography. But Shawn’s Gnossienne presents a different relationship between the acts of performance and choreography because it grew out of a classroom exercise Shawn had created to teach dance. Thus, Gnossienne was part of a continuing process of self-education that included instructing.

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The evolution of choreography for Shawn grew in conjunction with, as opposed to arising as a result of, his development as a dancer. Each artist formulated a different, yet related method of retaining the dance in question. Shawn and St. Denis wrote profusely on their performing relationships with their dance works, but Nijinsky did not. While St. Denis recorded only general movement information on Incense, both Shawn and Nijinsky wrote out detailed movement directions for their pieces. In 1922 Nijinska, who had helped her brother create Faune performed Nijinsky’s role. Incense was long performed by St. Denis herself in a variety of stage conditions well into her eighties. Shawn, however, taught Gnossienne to his student Barton Mumaw (1912-2000) then Mumaw taught it to Professor Jack Clark (Florida State University) in a line of succession closely associated with Shawn’s goals for dance as an educational tool. At the same time, both Gnossienne and Incense were offered in Denishawn pamphlets as dances that could be purchased, or franchised out for a fee to students who would come to St. Denis or Shawn to properly learn them, take advice on costuming, and perform them with the same intent as their creators (Cohen: 7). Overall, this project is not designed to encompass a single, definitive perspective on dance scholarship, or to replace other avenues of study. Instead, it demonstrates how an analysis of dance as one of many cultural indicators contributes to the body of dance scholarship in dialogue with provocative studies ongoing in other cultural studies. Rather than duplicate previous scholarship concentrating on single dance works or artists, this study undertakes an examination of three different dances in tandem. Components of performance are examined for similarities and differences among these dances. And those components are also compared with other art texts of Early Modernism expressing five specific key tropes of the avant-garde; exoticism, spiritualism, distortions of time and space, nature versus social construct, and a response to the challenges of technology. Considered in tandem, these dances, containing both conservative and innovative properties, take an active part in the avant-garde force during the time period in question. Issues raised at the close of the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century just prior to the First World War continue to inform our current aesthetic and cultural expressive behaviors into the Twenty-First Century. In this context, the avant-garde aspect of Early Modernism is part of an on-going process of cultural development examined more closely in Chapter One.

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END NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1 A Glossary of terms and the way in which they are used in this interdisciplinary study is provided after the Appendix and before the Bibilography.

2 Although Nijinsky was born of Polish parents and trained in the Russian Imperial Theatre, a strong European (Parisian) artistic influence was ascendant during the time he was choreographing. Much of his creative impetus appeared during his residence in France.

3 It is the approach of this study to examine the avant-garde at some distance from its usually inflammatory rhetoric. Although avant-garde artists present their works as a “totally new and revolutionary” approach to art, this study takes the view that in practice the avant-garde founds itself on a frame of reference to, rather than a complete break with, the traditional conventions of which it is contemptuous. It is in this sense the word “criticize” is used.

4 In this study a correlation of masculine gender issues in performance between Nijinsky and Shawn is attempted with St. Denis as a feminist point of reference. The choice of Gnossienne, a study of abstract movement framed on an ancient Minoan/Greek theme is directly comparable to Nijinksy's Faun. And The Incense is also discussed as having stylistic relationships with Delsarte (American version) “statue posing”, exercises drawing direct reference from classical Greek and Roman statuary.

5 A more complete discussion of artistic influences and interpretations relating to these archives will be undertaken throughout this dissertation.

6 This feature also applies to several of St. Denis’ later works, such as Egypta.

7 Examinations of traditional approaches to dance history and scholarship were undertaken beginning in the late 1980's and early 1990's in response to critical studies in other disciplines such as literature, music, theatre, and film.

8 The thrust of Desmond’s article in the Summer 2000 issue of Dance Research Journal, “Terra Incognita: Mapping New Territory in Dance and ‘Cultural Studies’” (43-62) calls for a cross-disciplinary approach to ethnographic dance studies. An expansion of dance studies from this perspective is part of a larger movement to bring dance scholarship in dialogue with other, related disciplines; the direction is urged also in the writings of other dance scholars, notably Gay Morris, Susan Foster, Ann Daly and , among others.

9 This publication included not only the usual preface and introduction to the novel and the text of the novel, but was followed by a series of inclusive analytical essays. This edition of Frankenstein was edited by Johanna M. Smith and published by Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press (1992).

10 Comments of people who met Nijinsky in social settings found him, as stated by Levin, to be strangely mute and inattentive. They supposed that, based on this impression, Nijinsky was not very bright; however, descriptions of his activities by his sister and others who knew him well indicate that he was in fact simply “selective” in discriminating between what either did, or did not interest him. Social graces were, to Nijinsky, a waste of time; art, life, and spirituality were, according to his diary, of the utmost importance.

11 The sense of humor implied in both Gnossienne and Faune is detailed in depth in their respective chapters. An ironic self-referentiality on the “artificiality” of display in performance contrasts in both dances with a serious, reverential, and even religious mein.

12 It is no coincidence that these movements, first taking hold in Europe and then in the United States, often took figures and images from ballet and modern dance to express dichotomies and harmonies among art, nature, humanity, and technology.

13 The term “Gilded Age” was first coined by Mark Twain to express American society’s showy surfaces covering corrupt practices in the late 1800s. The period was characterized by a carefree playfulness on the part of the wealthy few despite widespread destitution of the masses leading to progressive era reform movements of the first decade of

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the Twentieth Century. Lavish display of American wealth appalled Europeans; French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau remarked upon his visit to the United States that Americans had managed to progress from barbarians to decadence without achieving civilization in the process. As will be discussed in this chapter, La Belle Epoque, or “Beautiful Age” (1890-1900) in Europe was characterized by a similar attitude of playfulness and social license with its own dark corners under the gaity.

14 An example is Coco Fusco’s wonderful museum joke, “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Buenos Aries, 1994”.

15 This delimitation is in no way meant to imply that significant alterations had not previously occurred. In fact, changes were underway in the early eighteen hundreds that profoundly affected art and culture in this time frame. In addition, it is important to also recognize that these developments did not cease after 1920, but continue to intimately inform developments of the Twenty-First Century.

16 St. Denis’ approach to her early choreography, particularly for her own solos, is recorded in Shelton’s biography, Divine Dancer. Shawn describes briefly that he first choreographed the movements of Gnossienne for a Denishawn class exercise in his book, One Thousand and One Night Stands, and the piece appears as an example in his book, Fundamentals of Dance. Nijinsky’s choreographic approach is detailed in Bronislava Nijinska’s Early Memoirs.

17 With the exception of a brief and strangely remote exchange between the Faun and the Nymph who drops her veil, the ballet might be described as a solo for the Faun with a kind of “horizontally sliding background” of the nymphs. In any case, the impetus of expression is almost exclusively focused on the Faun.

18 The dance begins and ends with the who is always the central focus of the piece; other dancers or non- dance presence (as is the case with St. Denis’ Radha) on the stage either serve only to frame the soloist or present a kind of stage prop background. The point of view in mood and narrative is entirely that of the soloist.

19 The fact that these dances were recorded and eventually passed on to other dancers makes it possible for them to be examined through video reconstructions. The nature of these different transitions is discussed in more detail in those chapters centering on the dances.

20 Shortly after the first performances of Faune, Nijinsky paid to have a photography folio of the piece done by De Meyer. These photographs have become invaluable to reconstructions of the dance (Guest) and when compared to photographs taken later of Nijinsky dancing the same role, make evident the encroachment of a very different frame of mind; the onset of insanity that haunted his last public performances.

21 St. Denis created Incense as an independent artist, having left the aegis of Belasco to pursue a spiritual rather than a commercial dance direction. While Shawn was deeply involved in teaching for Denishawn, Gnossienne was transformed from a difficult classroom exercise into a personal solo for him. And Nijinsky developed Faune in secret; he and his sister showed it to Diaghilev and began rehearsals with the company only after the choreography had been set.

22 Records of curriculums show that both Delsarte and Dalcroze exercises were incorporated into Denishawn programs of instruction as well as later programs individually presented by St. Denis and Shawn. Dalcroze eurhythmics had been introduced into the Imperial Theatre schools by Count Volkonsky when he was Director from 1899 to 1901 (www.russianballet.ru: 6 February 2003). Although Volkonsky later published a work on Delsarte in 1913, the author was unable to definitely determine whether or not Nijinsky, as a student of those schools or later as a member of the Ballets Russes had had any instruction in Delsarte. It is likely that he at least was introduced to their basics precepts, however intuitively, through contact with Isadora Duncan (Reuter: email 16 December 2002).

23 According to their biographies and autobiographies discussing choreographic process, St. Denis and Shawn went about this process of correlating movement and meaning from Delsarte training quite differently; while St. Denis seemed to “feel” her way to precisely the right movements, Shawn took a typically conscious and analytical approach. The combination of these two artistic perspectives provided their school with a particularly fertile basis of dance art experimentation, as evidenced through their illustrious students.

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24 Nijinsky’s parents were Polish, but his training in dance and early performing experience was at the Imperial Russian School. His sister records that he was not accepted as Russian while there in part due to his speaking accent and his “exotic” looks; high cheekbones and slanted eyes earned him the nickname of “little Jap” among the other students. After 1909 Nijinsky stayed in Europe and spoke and wrote in French. In this sense, Nijinsky had a cosmopolitan European life as an adult with Russian roots to his early ballet training. This arrangement emphasizes his ambiguous status as an expatriate artist whose “home” is at once anywhere and nowhere.

25 Weidman’s partner, (1895-1958) is not included here because specific issues of masculinity in Gnossienne apply to the choreographic developments of Shawn’s male student, Weidman.

26 Not least among them Léonide Massine (1895-1979), who served as Diaghilev’s third choreographer after Fokine left and Nijinsky could no longer continue his artistic work.

27 These dates for vaudeville are approximate, since historians are unclear when vaudeville actually began. The last vaudeville house closed its doors in 1932.

28 It is interesting that investigations of the male in performance overwhelmingly appear centered in film studies. Of these, Cohen and Hark’s book, Screening the Male is comprehensive with a number of articles on the topic, and Gary Wills’ article, “John Wayne’s Body” appeared in The New Yorker.

29 An excellent source of discussion on the relationship between Western culture and exoticisim is found in Edward Said's books, and Culture and Imperialism (see bibliography).

30 A kind of opening for reinvention of artistic authority and persona for the dance artist is created by setting the dance in a “far away” location (India, for example) and/or a distant time frame (i. e. Archaic rather than modern or Hellenic, the latter having been extensively referred to in ballet). The tactic has the effect of investing the dance artist with the ability to guide the audience through new, unfamiliar territory.

31 In journal entries, as discussed by Shelton and in her autobiography, St. Denis even suggested that her dance performed in India stimulated a renewed interest in, and resurrection of indigenous folk and temple dance styles. But there was in fact already a sturdy movement directed toward preservation of Hindu dance (which had indeed suffered due to British colonial and Christian missionary pressures) at work through the efforts of Rukhmini Devi, among others.

32 This is not to say that other reconstructions will not be consulted; any movements not clearly shown in the main examples must be referred to through other sources for accuracy.

33 Again, speculative, but to be deduced on the basis of all available information.

34 It has been suggested that the investigator also mimic some of the simple movements of the dances to gain a kinesthetic understanding of them: assistance in this direction has been kindly offered by movement analysis specialists Philips and Clark in the FSU dance department.

35 Shawn’s first choreography is listed by Dreier as “incidental dances” for his 1911 play, The Female of the Species. Between that and Gnossienne in 1919 Shawn had choreographed no less than fifty-five pieces, not counting those he created in collaboration with St. Denis or Gould.

36 Fokine had been Nijinsky’s teacher in the Imperial Russian Schools and when Diaghilev began touring Europe with his Ballets Russes, Fokine was his primary choreographer of the “new” type of ballet. While Fokine’s declared goals of revision in ballet rejuvenated the art, they did not go as far as Nijinsky’s did. Fokine choreographed a number of influential ballets with Nijinsky, including Schéhérazade (1910), and Petrouska, , and Narcisse (1911). When Nijinsky’s Faune garnered so much attention in 1912, Fokine left and Nijinsky took the position of choreographer for a short time before his mental condition made it impossible for him to continue work.

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CHAPTER ONE

Dance as a Project of Early Modern Avant-Garde

This chapter presents the groundwork upon which these dances participate in vigorous exchange with visual, decorative, and performing arts1 of the time. Some idea of this exchange makes it possible to delve with greater depth into the factors of performance over the course of the next three chapters; Incense in Chapter Two, Gnossienne in Chapter Three, and Faune in Chapter Four. While the three dances under consideration were created between 1900 and 1920, the artistic developments that influenced them reach back into issues raised by Nineteenth Century Romanticism, explored through Symbolism, and continued in the avant-garde movements of the early years in the Twentieth Century. Whereas Chapter Five deals with American responses to—and reinterpretations of—the European artistic vanguard, this chapter sets the stage with a discussion of how the period of La Belle Epoque (approximately from 1885 to 1900) in Europe generally (and Paris specifically) made it possible for those changes to define the nature of the avant-garde in Modernism. Collaborations and exchanges among artists of all mediums in the earliest stages of the European avant-garde suggest how the dances analyzed in subsequent chapters can be placed in conceptual context with that impetus. As will be discussed in greater depth in their respective chapters, the dances took shape according to a network of influences and collaborations2 supporting each artist’s new vision of self in art. As presented in the Introduction, components of the avant-garde (spiritualism, exoticism, naturalism, technology, and distortion of time and space) suggest a basis of exchange between dance and the larger cultural and artistic milieu. In this chapter, dance innovations by Duncan and Fuller are examined relative to visual and decorative arts ongoing in Europe. With performance careers that began before the turn of the century, these artists found it worthwhile to first claim their artistic territory in Paris3, where the novelty of American artistic dancers brought them to the attention of European artists. Later, Fuller and Duncan toured the United States and gained a somewhat better

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acceptance resulting from their success in Europe. This acceptance was also encouraged through the introduction of European avant-garde visual art works into American galleries, suggesting a conceptual correlation between dance and visual arts. Only a few years later, Ruth St. Denis also followed this pattern. As American women dance artists, Duncan, Fuller and St. Denis provided a cultural/artistic bridge between Europe and the United States with reconsiderations of gender and power in signification. These early experimental dance artists bridged conceptual concerns such as; self and community, the mutual responsibilities of art and society, and reinterpretations of relationships among artists, art works, and audience/viewers. In Europe they were viewed as “exotic” novelties; events which well suited Parisian art/intellectual circles and prepared them to accept other new arts of, for example, Nijinsky’s and Shawn’s expressive male dances. Nijinsky’s role as a phenomenal male dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes also took advantage of his national and personal “exoticism” in a way that influenced reception of Faune. And it could be argued that Shawn, as an American expressive male dancer, inhabited a category so “rare” as to be an exotic event of his own. In any case, Faune effectively premiered in Paris, while St. Denis and Shawn found in this same place a more general respect for, and acceptance of, their dances than in the United States. Two styles displaying components of the avant-garde and bringing them into daily context were Art Nouveau (or “new art” lasting between 1890 and 1910) and Art Deco (broadly influential from 1914 to 1940). These styles provided an aesthetic continuity between the United States and Europe just prior to the onset of war. Artists in all fields stimulated and encouraged one another in an unprecedented exchange of creative effort. And their creations were offered to the public at large amid technological and scientific advancements in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 and 1900 (which featured Fuller4 as the iconographic image of Art Nouveau), and the 1925 Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris that gave its name to Art Deco. While both styles encompassed a broad range of fine and decorative arts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco expressed different agendas in the Modernist construct. Art Nouveau, which appeared first, stressed an “organic”, asymmetrical flow of line and melded motifs of feminine grace, nature, and exoticism. This style presented surfaces of

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playfulness and carefree fantasy; whimsical humor in which an iron wrought table lamp is cast in the shape of Fuller caught mid-dance: Although the product of an urban culture, Art Nouveau proclaimed the importance of nature by favoring sinuous, flowing lines and shapes inspired by vines, flowers, tendrils, windblown grass, and swirling waves. Its artistic products were often fanciful and extravagant (Anderson: 10).

Art Deco, with its streamlined, efficient, and functional surfaces presented a more utilitarian image of nature and the human expressive body5 brought together in artful, symmetrical . Rather than appearing to arrest movement (as did Art Nouveau), Art Deco captured an iconographic moment of pose6. This style, which appeared after Art Nouveau, constituted a more conscious response to the technological progress of the Machine Age, reflected often in the depiction of animals and people. While some Art Deco objects were one-of-a-kind, others (with the same attention to the aesthetics of utility) could be mass-produced and distributed anywhere at minimal cost. Shawn and St. Denis attempted a comparable pattern in franchising their dances (Cohen). As will be presented in their respective chapters, St. Denis’ Incense presents an aesthetic referring to both styles, while Faune and Gnossienne express an affinity with Art Deco. Together, both styles suggested a combination of social and artistic activities as a series of self- critical, reflective modern issues. In the context of this study, Art Nouveau and Art Deco highlight ways in which experimental dance thwarted traditional expectations of by appealing to the consumer’s appetite for anything “new”. It is precisely this appetite that the avant-garde seeks to appease while at the same time regenerate. Despite avant-garde rhetoric that each new development owes nothing to its predecessors, in practice the opposite is more accurate; transitions from one movement to the next were not abrupt changes of direction, but developments of a logical continuity. Even in its origins, the avant-garde rose from its European beginnings in La Belle Epoque to reinvent itself in an American setting at the close of the “Gilded Age”7. On both sides of the Atlantic, Romaticism’s heroic striving against insurmountable odds resurfaced in avant-garde’s criticism of the conditions of mercantilism, middle-class morality, and industrialization against which it was heroically defiant:

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. . .its [avant-garde] ability to come before the public not only as an arbiter of taste but as an example of moral heroism—is peculiarly dependent on the fiction of its extreme vulnerability. . .Central to its doctrine of embattled and threatened virtue is the notion of. . .the avant-garde’s “adversary” relation to the larger (bourgeois) culture in which it functions (Kramer: 4-5).

The same relationship holds true in broader perspectives; if the aesthetics of avant-garde art are considered as a philosophical topic alongside ethics, , religion, economics, etc., then art had some kind of mutually-interpretive relationship with these concerns. One expression of this relationship appeared in artistic manifestos attached to calls for social and/or political change. Even so simple a slogan as “art for art’s sake” indicated a culturally and philosophically identifiable position consistent with an aesthetic one by which art was categorized in a series of “-isms” too numerous to go into here8. The ramifications of this application are far-reaching: And from about 1863 on, with Manet and with the collapse of the authority of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the was the history of movements, each of which carried. . .its own philosophy of what art was and what art should do (Danto: 14).

In an extended investigation9 of artistic and cultural developments of the 1800’s it was found that just as Europe and the United States arrived at stages in different decades, the visual arts, theatre, literature, music and dance responded to these stages also at different times. For example, the first vampire story by Dr. John Polidori that appeared in print in 181910 was followed by Marshner’s opera, Der Vampyr11 in 1828. And the Russian Imperial choreographer Petipa’s ballet appeared in Russia in 1869, fully 94 years after the original story by Cervantes had been translated into English. The early German Romantic poem/play, Goethe’s published in 1790 included droves of fantasy feminine figures, but it wasn’t until 1821 that pointe slippers made possible the the triumph of Marie Taglioni in the 1832 fantasy, . In a similar fashion, Early Modernism in visual arts often appeared in the vanguard, sometimes concurrently with music. However, opera and concert dance (which, in the 1800’s meant the ballet closely connected to opera) as conservative vessels of tradition tended to pass through the same stage somewhat later. It is therefore

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appropriate to discuss in painting appearing in the 1880’s in the same context with comparable issues in St. Denis’ 1906 Incense. Recognition of that relationship suggests that expressive arts—regardless of medium—created between 1900 and 1920 exerted an understandable influence on subsequent developments of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. This kind of fluidity of time relative to issues is well in keeping with the nature of Modernism itself. Questions raised at the turn of the century continue to inform the production of expressive modern works even today. As Christos Joachimides states in his commentary for The Age of Modernism: The Age of Modernism is not over and done with: it is still in progress and still surprising us with new impulses, unexpected suggestions and daring surmises (9).

The position of the avant-garde (literally meaning, “front guard”, or at the foremost station in a group moving in a given direction) in Modernism was first mapped out among participants—primarily artists—of La Belle Epoque centered in Paris12 during the last decade of the Nineteenth Century. In his book, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France 1885 to , Roger Shattuck emphasizes the concentration of time and place with “an artistic tradition of defiance” peculiar to the French. He is quick to point out however, that this defiance was more accurately an attitude of rebellion on the part of a younger, sophisticated crowd13 directed against sober, conservative elements of middle-class society in general. The tone of this rebellion ranged from playful and witty to violent and destructive. For example, ’s “aesthetic nilhism” in (1896) was, as Kramer puts it, “. . .not only an assault upon the audience but an assault on art itself” (8). Later inheritors of this nilhism, Futurists, for example; “acted out dreams of revenge. . . and [advocated] street riots” (Kramer 10-1). The attitude of subversive anarchy led to the creation of nonsense prose and , atonal “opera” (Such as Schoenberg’s 1913 Luniere) and teacups lined with fur14; in short, any act that could possibly outrage or drive crazy anyone dependent on linear time or assumed correlations of form and utility. In order to remain active, the avant-garde needed the constant irritant of the ignorant middle-classes in order to define itself as superior. In this, avant-garde art was elitist in the mode of Romantic irony; those few on the “inside” maintained themselves

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against the many on the “outside”. Art and its lexicon of conceptual references took on an esoteric sacredness; a realm of besieged minority in which meaning unified a small but passionate group in perpetual danger of being overwhelmed by the clueless majority. Paris was certainly a logical center for this kind of activity to begin. Parisians from all walks of life enjoyed a veritable cornucopia of entertainment and presentational displays in which dichotomies of science and spiritualism; technology and arts; familiar and exotic representations; existed side by side. The largest presentations of this type were the Paris Expositions Universelle in which European culture in general (and French society in particular), was stationed as the paradigm of civilized progress to which the rest of the world flocked in homage and admiration15. These Expositions were also a kind of public expansion of small, privately-owned “wonder cabinets”16 once owned by the aristocracy, now enlarged for the general public. And they awed visitors with their tremendous size and scope of exhibits: [At the 1889] exposition. . .scientific exhibits filled several buildings. . .a Cairo street scene was constructed with authentic imported Egyptians to live in it and perform the danse du ventre. The Javanese dancers became the rage of Paris, influenced music-hall routines for twenty years, and confirmed Debussy in his tendency toward Oriental harmonies (Shattuck: 18).

The Expositions projected an assumption of global progress with European civilization at its apex. They juxtaposed in a single, gigantic venue the exotic wealth and beauties of distant lands with promises of a better, technologically-enhanced future. In this gesture, a kind of unification of disparate elements and peoples was implied, and the effect expressed an attitude of optimistic display in the broadest sense of the term. But this was only one aspect of the variety of performing venues available. The light of Offenbach played next to three permanent and a new Hippodrome near the Montmartre community of Paris. In addition, café patrons were treated to the first 1895 ventures into film, as the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, set up their cinematograph (a combination of camera and projector which they had patented) and projected moving images against the white walls of the cafés.

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There were plenty of informal “performances”, too; from the posing of elaborately-decorated horizontales (courtesans) to passionate duels which threatened— though rarely resulted—in murder. Everyone who was “anyone” of the demi-monde (to off-set the designated haute-monde of an aristocracy beleaguered by newly-monied industrialists) set was on display and performing for everyone else. The sense in which the modern Parisian performed and posed is commented on by Shattuck, who states that: “Paris was a stage where the excitement of performance gave every deed the double significance of private gesture and public action”(6). And the ease of flow between and opera; play and street drama; prostitute and painting was enhanced by the movement of vital discourse out of affluent salons and into the subversive egalitarianism of the public cafés and . The most famous café/ in Paris was Le Chat Noir, a small, intimate venue that was, as Shattuck colorfully puts it, “. . .a salon stood on its head” (22). The weirdly- Oriental piano music of Erik Satie (who composed the music Shawn chose for his Gnossienne) could be heard at Chat Noir, while misfits, malcontents, dreamers, artists, and thinkers of all class backgrounds met to thumb their noses at the middle-class17. But the scene wasn’t just talk. There was singing and dancing, too; grown in part from the earlier notion of Romanticism that the simple folk tales, dances, and songs of the countryside were more “natural and genuine” expressions of national character than the elite ballet and opera. The urban interpretation of this “natural” expressiveness exploded into cultural anarchy where the Bohemian nightlife of the Elysée Montmartre gathered and public decency was roundly ridiculed. In his book, The Dance Through the Ages, Walter Sorell describes the dance action: . . .The Elysée-Montmartre was the center of cheap dance-hall entertainment. . .[with] noise, gaity, the feverish music and lively dancing. In those days, the quadrille réaliste, a variation of the chahut or cancan, enjoyed the greatest popularity. . . faster than the cancan, with dramatic accents. . .it was climaxed by the rivalry of the women to see who could kick the highest and display the most leg (152-3).

When the Elysée Montmartre lost its edge because the quadrille became too intricate for amateurs to perform, the scene moved to the famous . There gentleman tourists from England or the Continent with plenty of money in their pockets

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could buy seats or stand close to wild, high-kicking dancers like La Goulue (The Greedy) or La Formage (The Cheese Kid) partnered by the fabulously agile, “boneless” Valentin de Désossé (Sorrell: 154). These female dancers were not demure, pseudo-modest exhibitionists coyly flirting with a masculine gaze. Rather, they confronted the viewer with a direct assertion of their sexuality, thereby making a comment upon the long- standing18 power relationship between those who look (men) and those who are looked at (women). This spontaneous, uninhibited display of feminine power had in it none of the submissiveness implied by their contemporary sisters19 in the ballet. The women were on display, all right, but they defined the conditions of that display in their own terms. In this context, these cabaret dancers had more in common with the savage figures of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), or Manet’s frankly unembarrassed , (1863/5). But not all dances at the Moulin Rouge were wild and sexually-suggestive. Patrons were also astonished by the strangely spiritual, improvised purity of Jane Avril’s trance-like dances, for there, “. . . was a conveniently short distance from esoteric to cabaret gaiety” (Shattuck: 120). La Goulue and Jane Avril, though quite different in tone, exhibited an unrestrained, untamed human expression; the allure of a kind of romantic naturalism that found in children, women, and exotic non-Europeans an innocence and intuitive wit the European man had forsaken. These were beings beyond social norms and control; the frenzy of La Goulue’s shrieks and kicks suggested affinity with an uncaged20 exotic animal free of inhibitions. And Avril’s trance-like compulsion to movement suggested that in renouncing analytical, rational and cognitive thought valued in the external everyday and material world she had accessed a deeper, internal spiritual sense of truth of self. The dances of both women—although carefully-constructed displays—appeared to be spontaneous to the moment of performance. They were accepted as natural because they didn’t convey the artificial mannerisms of women obedient to social order. Their bodies spoke as true, bypassing the treachery of verbal or written word. People who lived beyond the confines of society were privileged in the avant- garde construct because they did not conform to its narrow confines. Brigands, gypsies, and a “. . .preoccupation with the exotic East and the domains of the imagination, dreams, drugs, and non-rational mental states” (Platt and Matthews: 477) were also held in high

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esteem during the previous period of Romanticism. The “Byronic Hero” celebrated in literature and painting was one who defied tradition on the higher order of his own “true” inner vision, a path endorsed for those privileged few by the avant-garde: They [modern artists] constituted what we have come to call the avant- garde, a tradition of heterodoxy and opposition which defied civilized values in the name of individual consciousness. . .the avant-garde was not radically new, for it grew out of the romantic movement (Shattuck: 24).

Certainly the exotic in dance was never very far beneath the surface, whether directly or indirectly invoked in the ballet or cabaret. And feminine display of the exotic in dance was captured by the Impressionist painters. (1834-1917) often portrayed ballet dancers performing movement in unself-conscious repose by way of studying attitudes of the human body. And at the other end of the spectrum, Henri Lautrec (1864-1901) immortalized cabaret dancers and audiences in brightly- colored, flat-perspective lithography posters that clearly reflect the stylistic influences of Japanese prints. In short, the cabarets and cafés of Paris at this time came to be known as places where categories of social order broke down. Given such a fluid social and artistic milieu, Paris set a tone of cultural sophistication for other European and American urban cultures to emulate and shocked moralists to decry. The informal forum of change found in the cafés challenged salon notions of stability in a way that particularly attracted artists. “More than the salon, the café came to provide a free marketplace of ideas and helped France produce its steady succession of artistic schools” (Shattuck: 10-11). Artists of all disciplines traded, competed, and above all collaborated to a remarkable degree. At the same time, there was in this eclectic ambiance room to explore not only social idealism but also liberating paths of personal self re-creation as essential to the process of making art. The trend of “self-as-art and art-as-self” was not exactly a new phenomenon in this epoch. The persona of the individual artist as a respected visionary of social and cultural progress beginning with the Romantic and Symbolist Movements expanded during this period beyond literature, music, and visual arts into architecture, decorative arts, and fashion. These earlier movements, encompassing civic, historical, nationalistic and artistic concerns, ran approximately from the late Eighteenth- to early Nineteenth-

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Century. But the effects of their quest for spiritual and aesthetic meaning in the face of rapid industrialization continue well into our own time; Romanticism, as Danto observes, presents humanity with many more questions than it answers. The idea of the Symbolists (of whom the poet Mallarmé21 was a founding member) was that somewhere between the rational formality of words and irrational feelings evoked by dream-like imagery in painting, meaning could be accessed. Symbolists were concerned with the fleeting, mutable nature of beauty; the ineffable transience of flowers, scent, innocence, and memory. And they also had the idea that the best way to present these elusive attributes was to allow meaning itself a corresponding flexibility, so that a work of art might evoke for the artist who created it one impression and for each person who views it other, quite different impressions; all of which could be equally valid. Nijinsky aimed to fulfill Mallarmé’s vision that “the ballerina is not a girl dancing. . .She is not a girl but rather a metaphor. She does not dance but rather, writing with her body, she suggests things.” Proust again attended The Afternoon of a Faun and noted that Nijinsky’s choreography achieved a clarity that did not banish all mystery—a good description of modernist performance art. “My own inclinations are ‘primitive’”, Nijinsky replied to a reporter’s queries about his choreography (Cantor and Cantor: 76).

The capacity for constructing the self in this framework made it possible for expressive experimentation and reinvention to reach into the most unlikely places, particularly in expressive human gesture. Nowhere was the ideal state of mutability between self-invention and spiritual truth more possible than in dance, an art much admired by the Symbolists because it required the immediate engagement of the artists’ body and mind, and its experiential basis was so transient. But in order for dance to be “true” to these artistic goals, it had to be immediate; to have the innocent, natural-self spontaneity expressed by La Goulue or Jane Avril without the intercessions of the academic, hierarchal training or choreography of the ballet22. The dancer of the avant- garde appeared bravely alone on the stage, unadorned by all the trappings of wealth and prepared to impart directly through her mind and body without the intermediation of outside influences her spiritual vision to an audience. In this construct, identities of

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personage, artist, and art converge into a visionary unity to incorporate the experiential interpretations of the audience as co-creator of meanings. The women who created modern dance were asserting for themselves . . .the right to follow personal inspiration without catering to the tastes of some private or institutional patron. This prerogative was inherent in the cultural phenomenon known as Romanticism (Jonas: 191).

Given this expressive opening in Paris of 1900, it is no accident that the Grand Exposition that year provided a point of convergence for three American experimental dancers to answer the visionary call; Löie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis. While Fuller and Duncan had already launched their own tours of Europe in order to establish an artistic legitimacy that would confirm them in the United States23, the younger St. Denis was still on tour with the Belasco Company and had not yet begun her individual dance work. Even though she did not synthesize her ideas into her first dance until six years later, the seeds of what St. Denis could become began to take root when she saw not only Fuller’s presentation but also the Japanese dancer, Sada Yacco24. All three dance artists found in the cultural milieu of this place and time an opportunity to transform themselves from humble, obscure beginnings into goddess prophets25 of the new Twentieth Century dance. All three worked individually, as soloists or soloists supported by a framing cast that highlighted their central position throughout every dance, and though details of non-dance factors were carefully worked out beforehand, all three dancer/creators relied heavily upon intuition, inspiration, and feeling. Above all, St. Denis, Duncan, and Fuller shared a Romantic self-confidence and sense of sacred mission; “. . .an almost mystical faith in the ability of an inspired artist to perceive universal truths and to communicate those truths to others” (Jonas: 192). Because their medium was dance, a vehicle that revealed a kind of “sharing of the internal self” open with audiences it is in keeping with Symbolism, and represents the transition from symbolism into Art Nouveau. Fuller best embodied this shift. She arrived in Paris first to become La Belle Américaine during her term with the Paris Follies Bergère (the rejected her). This forum, although not known for serious dance, placed her in a unique category all her own. Set apart as a single performer26, Fuller seized the opportunity to reconstruct

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herself as an artist concurrently with her art. She was not a particularly attractive woman, nor did she display movements requiring formal dance training. When she moved, she walked, ran or skipped. For some “dances” she stood in the center of the stage. Employing the aid of colored lights (made possible by electricity) and yards of manipulated silk, Fuller transformed herself on stage into a fantastic series of inhuman images in nature; a butterfly, a flower, or a flame: Fuller performed her Fire Dance standing on a pane of glass that was lighted from below, giving the impression that flames were rising upward . . .enraptured audiences dubbed her, “The Painter with Light,” “The of Light”, and “The Magic Princess of Pearly Tints.” (Anderson: 10).

The combination of a single, centrally-focused feminine form able to evoke a phantasm of beauty proved irresistible, and by the time of the Exposition Universelle, Fuller had become the ideal of the Art Nouveau style, with her own pavilion in the Paris Exposition: Art Nouveau was a symbolic rendering of the forces of dynamism, an organic style that emphasized evocative line and decorative surface. The latest mode, Art Nouveau dominated the Paris fair. . .The living embodiment of Art Nouveau, Loïe Fuller, performed her Dance at the exposition in a tiny theatre equipped with its own electric dynamo. . . (Sheldon: 42).

Fuller and Duncan saw and admired each other’s performances, but were so different in artistic approach that collaboration between them might have compromised them both. Fuller extended to Duncan the option of joining her but Duncan declined, perhaps in part due to the possibility she could be distracted from her own sternly demanding and highly individualistic dance development27. Both Duncan and Fuller traded upon the perception of being one-of-a-kind; of providing a unique experience to their audiences that no other performer could offer. While Fuller relied on lighting and drapery in a stage area which she could control, Duncan sought out the salons and patronage of the wealthy or danced outdoors in grueling, two-hour concerts. And though Fuller’s draperies hid her in an exaggeration of “skirt dancing”28, Duncan’s draped “Greek” costumes presented a purity and simplicity of line that did not obscure her body or obstruct her freedom of movement. Their drape often invoked Greek statuary, inspired in part by artistic statue-posing which was popular at the time. But neither dance artist behaved on stage or off as “normal” women, an attribute St. Denis seriously took to heart.

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St. Denis does not appear to have seen Isadora Duncan; if she did, there is no record of it even though the two women shared a common interest in the analysis of expressive movement pioneered by Delsarte. But St. Denis’ European tour and seeing exotic dances—notably those from the Far East at the Exposition—may have suggested to the New Jersey farm girl-turned-professional dancer the means by which she could transform herself into something extraordinary. As evidenced by her choreographic progression, that transformation moved her first into the personification of feminine spiritual devotion (Incense) and then by extension into the goddess to be worshipped (Radha: 1906, following Incense). St. Denis was aware of her personal needs in this spiritual/artistic mission when she noted in her autobiography, An Unfinished Life: I find a real escape from the limited sense of life I ordinarily have. . .I feel that I am a link between the invisible world of vision and the visible world of art form . . .(St. Denis: 277).

St. Denis’ success in achieving this metamorphosis of self, persona, and art into a unified vision on stage and off certainly influenced the stirrings of similar artistic dance objectives in Ted Shawn. When Shawn and St. Denis married and partnered in the Denishawn venture of school and performing company in 1914, the acclaimed example of St. Denis’self-recreation and public recognition guided both Denishawn and Shawn. The obstacles Shawn faced to make dance his life’s work were tremendous, and it is difficult today to imagine them. There was hardly such a thing as an expressive American dancer in the decade following turn of the century; much less one that was male. Shawn literally had no models to follow except those of Duncan, Fuller, or St. Denis. Fortunately, he was able to adapt their methods of negotiation for public acceptance to his own unique American case. The avant-garde conditions that had worked for these women artists made it possible for Shawn to also succeed in his own solo dances. Polish born and Russian-trained, the immensely talented dancer Vaslav Nijinsky underwent a related, yet somewhat different condition of artistic transformation partly influenced by Duncan’s 1905 visit to Russia and the impact she made on Fokine. Nijinsky first came to Paris from the Russian Imperial schools as part of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909, when he made a sensation in both classical heroic and exotic

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roles created for him by Fokine. But merely achieving fame in the of others; as a tragically-strung puppet (Petroushka in 1911), a sensual golden slave (Schéhérazade in 1910) or the spirit of a perfumed flower (Spectre de la Rose in 1911) was not enough. Building upon his -draw performing persona in the dazzling that took Paris by storm, Nijinsky spring-boarded himself into an avant-garde sensibility with his first choreography in which he also performed, L’Après-midi d’un Faune. This ballet of the 1912 Paris season, more than any other single work, has been cited as the emergence of ballet into the age of Modernism. And Nijinsky’s half-human, half-beast creature became not only his most deeply self-identifying role, but the image of modern man tragically caught between a longing for a simpler time and place and a compulsive thrust into the Machine Age (Gesmer). As soon as they are brought into examination together, the three dance works of Gnossienne, Incense, and Faune display a number of characteristics in common with avant-garde forces in Modernism. Certainly the effort of self-creation concurrent with art-making has its resonances with the strong sense of spiritualism that permeates all three dances. As avant-garde artists, Shawn, St. Denis, and Nijinsky sought to impart a vision of personal spiritualism and transcendence throughout all factors of their performances. They offered themselves in their dances as if unified into a whole expressive and organic entity by a single, fundamental (if hidden) truth. The singularity through which this “universal truth” was to be expressed and made visible was the individual performing artist, a prominent factor of all three dances. This component brought into focus the visionary goals of Romanticism, in which the artist becomes a guide into the realms of feeling harmoniously melded with rational thought. While the arts which came under the categories of “mystic or visionary” Abstract Cubism or Symbolism reached for this unity, it was in dance, which cannot exist independently without the body and soul of the dancer, that this impetus of the avant-garde found immediate experiential expression29. This acknowledgement is most prominent in those works of art which invoked the tensions of movement and stasis in dance30. The iconic pose is a staple characteristic in the performance of exoticism. An artistic and cultural convention of long-standing, exoticism is a European construct closely associated with cultural and political Imperialism. The network of interrelated

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factors between Cultural Imperialism and exoticism in Euro-American traditional arts are too complex to discuss here31. On stage and in visual arts, exoticism depicts non- European features by European artists for European audiences that supported European nationalism, nostalgia, and the pleasure of an escape from the banalities of modern life. As with all stereotypical projects, exoticism is more telling upon European agendas of representation than it is of that culture being exoticized. In this perspective of Modernism, avant-garde expressions paralleled long-established tropes in traditional performing arts32, just as revolutionary and conservative visual arts commented on one another within the same time frame. However, in this context a complete reversal of message is conveyed. For example, exotic feminine allure appears in two paintings of one year with radically different impact. Both paintings depict women in the nude surrounded by exotic servants, fabrics, and other riches in which the masculine gaze can assume any motivation or characterization as would be pleasant to contemplate, for as exotic items, they are additionally available to the European male: Women [in Orientalist paintings] were repeatedly pictured as dancers and harem odalisques—icons of sensuality and sexual availability that conjured for a Western (male) audience an Orient of unlimited pleasure . . . (Small: 25-6). Seeming to accommodate this pre-established relationship between viewer and painting, the French painter, Edouard Manet (1832-1883) presented the viewer with a photographically-rendered nude, Olympia (1863). However, the arrogant effrontery of this woman evoked the disturbing self-assurance of a Greek goddess, as she is attended by an African servant and directly returns the stare of the viewer with a cool, calculating expression. Her gaze suggested an equality of judgment and evaluation, instead of assuming an attitude of submission for approval. This woman who returned the gaze for her own purposes could be, by some stretch of the imagination, the very goddess to whom Shawn’s Gnostic priest addresses his ritual; unique, divine, and mysteriously endowed with her own ambiguous agenda beyond the petty concerns of mortal men:

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Parisian bourgeoisie expected to see nudes in the official Salon, but they were shocked by the appearance of a notorious prostitute [Olympia], completely nude. . . a work that made a break with traditional art practices and opened the way for a modern art centered on the painter’s own theories (Matthews and Platt: 518)

Manet’s painting is in startling contrast to that rendered by Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Ingres presents to the viewer a lush panorama of equally-realistically rendered female nudes sensuously cavorting in The Turkish Bath (1863). In this latter painting, the women are generalized in shape and form; one of them is just as good as any other; in fact, they are all as individually interchangeable and expendable as Broadway chorines: “The nudes [in The Turkish Bath]. . .are portrayed in typical Classical manner, suggesting studio models rather than sensual human beings” (Matthews and Platt: 512). The same attitude of availability expressed in paintings on exotic themes permeated the performing arts of opera and the ballet. A good example of exoticism in classical dance is the popular 1892 ballet spectacular, (Petipa/Ivanov, with music composed by Tchaikovsky). Based upon a short story of the same name by the Romantic/gothic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) this lavish Christmas treat presented a series of short associating various confections with exotic dances from Arabia, Russia, Spain and . The music and costumes sweetly invoked each foreign treasure while remaining firmly grounded in the Western tradition. In addition, the formality of traditional ballet by which each divertissment was danced en pointe and the “regal enthronement” of Clara and her prince (and by flattering implication, the audience) toward whom the dances were directed maintained a clear European separation from—and superiority over—these inventions of exotic fantasy. Similar components of exoticism informed Incense, Faune and Gnossienne, but with radically different agendas related to the issues of gender and performance in Western arts. With its white and gray veils, smoke, and slowly sinuous movements, Incense presented the image of a contemporary North Indian Hindu woman in private worship of a deity. This image invoked a distant, exotic locale and state of spiritual transformation unfamiliar to Western sensibilities. The image of an alluring female form in a diaphanous exotic costume (the drape of a sari, after all, is one that suggests

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imminent undrape) was not unfamiliar to the audience; there was an abundance of ballet, opera, and Salomés, Cleopatras, Chinese princesses, etc. at the time: . . .she is compellingly beautiful, trained in courtly arts, and clothed from head to toe in enticingly vivid and undeniably exotic jewels and garments. She shines in red, sparkles in gold and crystal, and smells enticingly of rare perfume (Austern: 38-9).

What was different about St. Denis’ Incense worshipper was that although visible and beyond question very attractive, she was also remote, locked into her own internal devotion in a way that made her unavailable. She did not give her audiences a feminine display of exotic illusions requiring masculine validation, but rather shared a feminine vision of the divine no less appealing in its circular, self-discovery because it comments on the exotic feminine mystery. Self-introspection, then, parallels and emphasizes artistic statements on the balance of power between “being looked at” and “being the one who looks” at work in combinations of the feminine and the exotic. Shawn’s and Nijinsky’s later choreography developed thematic experimentations with contemporary, psychological narratives (such as Nijinsky’s in 1913), or jazz, Native American, and Spanish flavors (as Shawn did in works like his 1922 American Sketches, and Invocation to the Thunderbird in 1917). But St. Denis remained closely connected to her persona as an exotic goddess throughout her career. Though she often chose themes of antiquity (Egytpa in 1910), she favored pale, statuesque images of the feminine divine swathed in white veils. Her goddesses inhabited an “eternal” or timeless frame and were drawn primarily from the Far East, as exemplified by her 1926 solo, White Jade. While Incense invoked a modern, Hindu ritual of worship, Gnossienne and Faune33 added dimensions of time past by bringing to fanciful life ancient Greek and Minoan images. Both Shawn and Nijinsky drew direct inspiration from archival objects that exhibited closely-related styles of depiction34, a factor which may have produced a similarity of movement choices in their respective dances. The exoticism of these dances combined a nostalgic longing for a time long past with a purity of authenticity untainted by modern corruptions.

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Neither Nijinsky nor Shawn had the benefit of an automatically-assumed correlation between their gender and exoticism that St. Denis was so well able to utilize. However, they nevertheless made use of the exotic and its connotations to urge acceptance of their respective goals; Nijinsky for the acceptance of a revision of ballet and Shawn for acceptance of a male figure dancing expressively. In any case, men in dance were arguably an exotic event because rare. Russia was exotic to Parisian audiences, a fact which made Diaghilev’s company “new”, and Shawn, as an American male dancing expressively, was in a category all his own. Nijinsky’s landmark piece suggested a ritualism of flattened gesture depicted in Archaic (as opposed to Hellenic or Classical) Greek ceramic figure art35. It derived its exotic impression largely from the intense formality of the movement vocabulary Nijinsky meticulously had fashioned for it (Nijinska, Buckles, et. al.). This vocabulary retained a relationship with the formalities of the ballet lexicon while at the same time defying them. Utilizing the ambiguities of form suggested in an exotic theme, Nijinsky indicated in his dance a consideration of how image is constructed, and therefore capable of being reconstructed to serve the expressive needs of the artist. In Faune, Nijinsky reversed the order of viewing by which the European collects and examines alien artifacts in museums, where a reverential attitude isolated such objects from their original purposes. That is, instead of taking the moving bodies of humans and indicating that movement by painting them in still poses on a flat ceramic surface, Nijinsky reversed the depictive process by taking the images on a flat ceramic surface and reinvesting movement into them through the living bodies of dancers. There is in this gesture the sense of bringing a long-dead culture back to life; as if suddenly Ancient Greek could be spoken and heard as in ancient times. By reflecting the almost magical powers required to do that, Nijinsky suggested that his artistic and personal range was beyond humanity, a concept repeated in his diary. But Nijinsky’s use of the exotic goes deeper than mere reconstruction. The choreographer is, in a sense, a modern man in a dialogue of meaning and visual relationships with the Archaic Greek in a way that highlights the constructed nature of art and the artist engaged in making art. By extension of that idea, Nijinsky also comments on the constructed nature of the art of the ballet and of himself as a well-known

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personage of ballet; exposing to the shocked audiences of Faune that ballet’s royal tenants and forms can be bent, reversed, flattened, or even suspended between movements while still retaining recognition of its origins. As will be argued in greater detail in Chapter Four, with Faune, Nijinsky thwarted the image of himself as a tool for others and asserted the needs of his artistic expression trained in service of a classical style. Faune additionally drew on exotic ambiguities in the character of human/beast, gender expectations, and sexuality associated with Nijinsky’s previous dance roles36. But unlike the characters of these former roles, Nijinsky’s Faun was a far more primal and powerfully earth-based being; at once unconsciously and carelessly innocent; alien to the niceties of society and capable of almost any unpredictable action through sudden, tensile movement. Such an exotic, strange being has—and demands respect for—his own internally-guided rules and orders. The formalities and rules confining or controlling civilized persons as a matter of course do not apply in his case. In a comparable fashion, Shawn’s choice of exotic theme for Gnossienne was also based on an artifact in the form of a fresco from the Palace of Knossos of a Cup-bearer. However, the sequences and stylization of movements that evolved into the dance had been originally designed by Shawn as a Denishawn dance class exercise to maximize the subjectivity of the student’s dancing body to choreographic demands. Instead of choosing an exotic theme and choreographing the movements around it, Shawn allowed the physical structure of a choreographic sequence suggest to him a theme that would suit it. The archaic past of ancient Crete suggested to Shawn a way to express with wry humor all-too-human and current conflicts of tradition, gender, and free will through his character of an arrogant, yet obedient priest. The distance of time and place suggested in the exoticism of Gnossienne served Shawn as a means to legitimize himself as an American male engaged in serious expressive dance comparably to Nijinsky’s legitimization of his revision of ballet. The audience did not see in Shawn’s priest a modern male trying to imitate his impressions of an ancient ritual, but rather a priest to whom the strange, unfamiliar movements appeared natural, or, as one might say, ritualistically logical. This impression of reality in Shawn’s

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priest was enhanced by an ironic subtext, in which it was subtly suggested that he was also engaged in a struggle to submit his will to the Snake Goddess (Shawn, Mumaw). In this sense, Shawn’s “Gnostic” priest is alien to Western audiences in worship of a goddess, yet also familiar as a modern man confused and perhaps even a little intimidated by the majestic psychological mysteries of the feminine. To serve and perform before the judgmental view of this feminine divinity is a curious reversal of the secular arrangement whereby the woman performs for a masculine judgmental view. And that reversal is emphasized in the change of gender; as awesome as the Father may be, even more so is the Mother; there is no fooling Her with empty symbols. It is one thing to perform the rituals of worship accurately as a matter of course, Shawn’s priest discovers, and quite another to fulfill their textual meaning through heart, soul, and body. Shawn’s personal goals were not so completely centered on the dancing self as was the case for St. Denis or Nijinsky; he first trained in the ministry then turned to dance that supported his spiritual directions. In this sense, Shawn could be described as a “minister and educator who dances”. Throughout his choreographic and performing life, he did not leave behind his sacred mission to educate American audiences about the expressive potential of the dancing male body37. Shawn danced Gnossienne as a priest of the formal cult of the Knossos Snake Goddess in wry commentary on the non-dancing Christian priest which a more traditional American line of work would have asked of him. Taken in context with his lectures on the which presented the American non-dancing male as the exception rather than the rule compared to ideals of masculinity in non-Western contemporary and ancient cultures, Shawn reinforces in this dance his lectures, in which he states that it is the American, not the alien culture that is peculiar. The Harold Sunday, May 17, 1936, ran an essay by Shawn titled, “Dancing Originally Occupation Limited to Men Alone”, in which he states that: A study of the dancing of primitive peoples and of the of the past proves. . .that it was largely, and sometimes exclusively, a man’s occupation. . .It is only in this western (European-American) civilization, . . . that dancing has ever been considered in any way more feminine than masculine.

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The education of a dancer is another contextual layer in this consideration, too. For just as the vain priest of Gnossienne must submit fully to his goddess, so must the student dancer’s body submit to the rigors of training in order to achieve an instrument of precise expressiveness. It is interesting that both Nijinsky and Shawn comment on the dancing body as a tool, and their method of choreography reflects this analytical stance. St. Denis, by contrast, had a far less cerebral approach, creating her dances out of feeling, impression, or an intuitive sense of aesthetics that made it difficult for her to communicate her dance-making procedures to students38. A more detailed discussion of choreographic methods is undertaken in each case in subsequent chapters. In addition to adapting conventions of exoticism entrenched in conventional arts, devotees of the avant-garde also vigorously experimented with representational constructs of time and space in ways that paralleled notions of realism entrenched in painting conventions inherited from past traditions. As with exoticism, the notion of realism in an absolute sense implied by traditional art styles is an illusion, a fact made more evident with the advent of still and cinema camera developments: The transparency of bodies, thanks to Röntgen’s X-Rays, was perceived as proof of the dematerialization of things, continuously subjected to universal dynamism. Graphic representations of shock waves, that Mach was studying, were used to create a symbolic image of speed, following the course of an object in space (Lista: 14).

Images invested with meaning—whether meticulously rendered in paint or chemically formed in a dark room—consequently underwent radical revisions in the hands of avant- garde artists. This is especially true in the ways images present a sense of time and place: “[An image is] . . .an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it made its first appearance” (Berger, Ways of Seeing: 9-10). This quality of displaced time and space in representation directly informs the three dances in question, for dance itself is made up of expressive arrangements of the human body in space and time. However, the art dance of ballet at this time supported the impression of being little more than a moving painting inside the frame of the theatre’s proscenium, in close relation to paintings framed and hung on the walls of museums. There was, in the act of presenting ballets and traditional paintings, a kind of

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reverence (even for those who came to the ballet primarily to view feminine charms) separating the viewer from an immediacy of time and place suggested in the work. Principles of perspective, composition, center of focus, and narrative patterns developed in the Renaissance applied to the ballet as well to pictorial arts of painting and sculpture. One entered the theatre to attend the ballet with the same regard for its cultural basis as one would enter the museum to view neo-classical paintings. And in both examples, there is the implication that what is on view is, temporarily in the imagination of the viewer, “owned”: To have a thing painted and put on a canvas is not unlike buying it and putting it in your house. If you buy a painting you also buy the look of the thing it represents (Berger: 83).

Given this basic shift of perception in Modernism, it is perhaps not surprising that the first cohesive art movement39 of the avant-garde— (1909-1914) and its concurrent partner Early Cubism (1907-1912)—had as their prime focus a concern with altering constructs of presentational space and time. These movements of the first few years of the Twentieth Century were intent upon disruption of continuities suggested by the emerging “techographies” of cinema and photography40. Collisions between perceptions of form and function expressed in Futurism directly influenced Art Deco and the outer fringes of aesthetic anarchy in the later (1915-1920s) and Surrealist (1922-1941) movements41. At the same time, concepts of realism and psychological interpretation in Cubism quickly took root in the Parisian remnants of La Belle Epoque and moved into Art Nouveau. Interestingly, Futurism started with a small band of Italian artists living in Paris (all men except for one woman, a dancer42 who joined them somewhat later) determined that the perception of realism in art set down ages past was not real in any absolute sense, but man-made; that it didn’t capture the immediacy of experiential time and space; that ultimately, classical art was and should be, dead. Their attack, which was part political and part aesthetic manifesto, settled firmly upon the presentational illusions of time and space in classical arts. Futurism especially had issues with time and its weight in reverence for tradition. The artistic movement arose among modern artists burdened with the illustrious works of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance pictorial traditions

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entrenched in Italian culture. The only valid response to this oppression of the past was, for these artists, to debunk with humor the of its hushed, museum-conferred sacredness, which they found so oppressive that current, relevant expressions were stifled by it: Futurism rid the Italian artist of his complex of being nothing but the heir of a tradition in ruins. The distance he thus established between modern times and the museum has allowed the contemporary artist to re- appropriate the prestigious works of the Italian past with impertinence and lightness. . .joining present and past. . .It [futurism]was and remains the archetype of every avant-garde work (Lista: 205).

Instead of attempting to present paintings that implied a comprehensive authority on how objects should “realistically” be represented, Futurists offered images that gestured in the midst of moving, rather than captured objects in stasis. The effect produced a quite different iconography, whereby the object represented is recognized only through familiarity with similar objects in “real life” time and space. Instead of insisting upon a representational accuracy to rival photography, for example, artists in this frame could concentrate on objects suggested or invoked as a means of expressing transient states of mind, appearances, or internal spiritual convictions in keeping with Symbolists, Impressionists and Abstract Impressionists (Kramer, et. al.). In other words, artists were able now to shake free of the last requirements of representational “accuracy”, and see how far they could go in expressive directions. Many Futurist paintings, such as Giacomo Balla’s 1913 painting, Abstract Speed (the Car has Passed) showed mechanical objects and living beings in the process of movement; blurred, and partially-repeated in a series of “stop-action” images across the canvas that evoked new developments in photography and cinema film. These technologies offered artists a new kind of “eye” with which to see and interpret the world. Futurists seized upon the evocative possibilities of these image-creating techniques because they captured movement in a way classical arts never could. Here was a new sense of “reality”; a revision of arrested movement suggested in the flowing lines in Art Nouveau objects. But in departing from the whimsy of fantasy in Art Nouveau, these artists went past the play of surface images and tried to convey the essence of movement in the process of moving in every day occurrence. Instead of attempting to depict a

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subject realistically, they imprinted an impression of it. In any case, technology had begun to record “real” images; for example, photography made it possible to conclusively determine that for a split-second all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground in a gallop43, or that the mechanism of the human body has a range of spontaneous expression far beyond the posed renderings of the Acadamie. Consequently, Futurists were essentially concerned with: . . .energy [as] the initiator of form. . .Futurist theories revealed to modern art. . .the dynamism, the kinetic rhythm and the transcribing of energy. . . the emphasis on the ephemeral nature of art and its involvement with society (Lista: 202).

In this context, Futurism presents a direct corollary to the nature of dance itself, as it presents the human body in motion. As has been previously discussed, both Duncan and Fuller took control of the stage conditions whereby they were viewed. They removed their experiential performances from “normal” time and space and placed both themselves44 and their audiences in an ambiguous temporal and physical state that only suggested, gestured toward, or indicated real-life experiences. Although these experimental dance artists referred to classicism in some ways, the transport into a kind of non-descript “timelessness” in their performances broke down pre-established relationships between viewer and performer. St. Denis was particularly quick to appreciate the value of this kind of environmental control as a means to remove her audiences from assumed, hidden codes of meaning associated with the figure of a woman performing on stage. Even when she appeared on vaudeville, her ever-devoted brother45 devised lighting conditions for her to inhabit as that rare being that was her on-stage character and off-stage persona. A characteristic example of how space and time can be reconstructed in the Futurist perspective in three-dimensional form comparable to dance is the 1913 sculpture Umerto Boccioni (1882-1916), Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. In this piece, the artist fragments the planes of physical form to suggest, rather than represent, a person in the process of striding forward. There is no distinction in the bronze sculpture between planes corresponding to and those corresponding to the human body. In addition, the face is as indistinct—that is, of equal value—as every other visual aspect of

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the whole. The impression is one of seeing movement supported by the human form, instead of the other way around. And just as Boccioni’s sculpture is a stationary representation of movement in process, Ruth St. Denis’ Incense, with its white, statuary- invoking drapery and centrality of pose (to be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Two) suggests a statue come to life; one that can be viewed from multiple perspectives of angles and expressive content not unlike a Cubist painting. The correlation is both conceptual and in execution; even the most cursory look at dance and art of the time suggests an aesthetic relationship between the two: . . . .during this century. . .Ruth St. Denis [has] invented really new dance movement, in the same way that Picasso invented new aesthetics and standards [Cubism] in painting (de Mille: 156).

Literal and interpretive collisions in Boccioni’s sculpture also recall a similar play of elements in Faune and Gnossienne. Of the two dances, Gnossienne is the more straightforward in distortions of time and space, for it takes one specific fresco of a cup- bearer from the Palace of Knossos as its point of departure. As will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Three, Shawn thematically developed the flat fresco image into the character of a human priest. The quirky, ritualistic movements paired with the music (the first Gnossienne piano composition by Erik Satie) suggests a fair sense of humor (i. e. the impression, especially early on in the dance that this is just an empty ritual disassociated with true spiritual meaning) designed to remove the audience from the usually somber connotations of being confronted with ancient, revered religious practices. The event takes place on a stage46, not in a museum or temple. But in the main, Gnossienne achieves this kind of effect of displacement in time and space through its exotic, educational evocation of an ancient Minoan culture. As will be explored in greater detail in Chapter Four, Faune’s manipulation of time and space is a little more complex. The dance suggests a comparable reversal of expressive meaning supported by an analytical physical structure as is expressed in Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. In this effort, Nijinsky mirrors composer Debussy’s ideas on the nature of music. And the dance also is, in its most comic and literal sense, an example of movement infused into stationary Archaic Greek figures carved or painted onto circular ceramic surfaces in bands, or zones of representational,

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gendered space. At the same time, the movements of the Faune dancers in locomotive and stationary conditions are as flat and two-dimensional as possible with no rounded, curved, circular, or spiral gestures whatsoever. This strange dance condition begs the question of why Nijinsky, who was intrigued with circular motifs as evidenced in his drawings would create a dance that uses no movements of a curved line. The answer may lie in the speculation that there is an implied circularity in Faune that goes beyond what can be actually seen of in on-stage designs. It is perhaps to be read as a figurative “band” through space and time. Memory serves to connect the beginning with its end, just as the ceramic vessels that inspired Faune must be turned around in order to view the bands of figures; the figure band is itself a ring. At no time can all the figures be seen simultaneously. They must be experienced successively, images joined into a whole integrity of form animated by feelings and understood only through the elusive agency of memory, just as the dance must be experienced. A fourth component in avant-garde art movements displayed in these dances is a combined search for nature and a naturalness of expression to convey meaning. It is in this context that art undertook its most direct defiance of the rules of realism set down by the Academie and the bourgeoisie mentality by which it was supported. The attitude of defiance against the artificiality of classical art in favor of a more Romantic alignment with the Sublime appeared well into the Nineteenth Century in the painting styles of (1860-1880), Expressionism (1860-1900), and various combinations thereof. As the turn of the new century got underway, a move toward Primitivism (an spanning the eighteen- to nineteen-hundreds, of which the painter was an example in both his subjects and in the flat, colorful renderings of his paintings47) reduced the essence of depiction and expression to its simplest, most essential—therefore natural—components. The impetus toward naturalism in this sense brings it in close alignment with spiritualism in art, for only by stripping away all sociological contexts of artificiality can the artist arrive at a core, essential spiritual self that is also a “natural” self from which true art is generated (Kandinsky).

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The issue of naturalism in the performance of art is problematic: as detailed in the Glossary for this study, the word is interpreted to mean “not artificial” and “close to nature”. In an effort to establish an organic artistic expression reflecting nature, and in a reaction against the encroachments of industrialism in urban life that fed a growing appetite for mass-produced objects, Art Nouveau artists embraced a perception of the feminine that was symbolically, abstractly, and concretely melded with nature. But it is an idealized “nature” refined for the parlor; the suggestions of flowers, vines, and water- sprites that fit into a civil agreement between urbanization and a nostalgia for nature with good manners; like any art, this style made an emotional, rather than rational appeal to its viewers: “. . .everything in Art Nouveau was directed toward changing not only the décor and the environment, but above all, the emotions” (Kramer: 68). At the same time, this style was applied to every kind of decorative accessory; from hair combs, jewelry, and table lamps to wrought iron banisters and china cabinets. This pervasively popular style, which emphasized a flowing, sinuous line, organic asymmetry, and floral motifs also endowed every object—whether mass-produced or uniquely created by hand—with a pronounced sense of feminine mystery fused with nature. Duncan and Fuller evoked natural forces in keeping with the general framework of Art Nouveau, and both dancers were popular subjects, though in different ways. While Fuller’s focus in performance was to present an abstract image based on a force of nature such as fire, it was Duncan’s mission to rediscover the natural basis of human movement. Their staged dances were so carefully designed as to appear utterly spontaneous, artless, and natural48; this is in fact, “the natural” constructed and selectively-arranged for consumption (Chapter Five). Neither Duncan nor Fuller had much formal dance training, reinforcing the impression that their dances were unlearned. But although neither studied formal dance technique to any great degree49, their staged effects were laboriously worked out and painstakingly designed. Fuller was described in “The Architectural Record”, March, 1903, in the following terms: Suddenly a stream of light issued apparently from the woman herself, while around her the folds of gauze rose and fell in phosphorescent waves, which seemed to have assumed, one knew not how, a subtle materiality,

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taking the form of a golden drinking cup, a magnificent lily, or a huge glistening moth, wandering in obscurity (de Morinni: 209).

In this description it is significant that Fuller is described not as simply representing nature images through dance, but actually embodying a lily or a moth. The images she evoked suggest a balance between the search for natural expression and the exoticism of the feminine form. Furthermore, it is from the dancer herself that the magical effect seems to emanate. And yet, Fuller’s embodiment had as little to do with real lilies or moths as the exotic characters of Turkish Opera had to do with real Turks. In his essay, “’I’m an Indian Too’: Creating Native American Identities in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Music”, the statement Michael Pisani makes about authenticity and its implication of naturalness reflects on the dynamics of illusory exoticism suggested by Fuller’s fantasies in the Art Nouveau frame: Edward Everett Rice’s Hiawatha (1880) and others like it no more suggested believable Indians than Gilbert and Sullivan's roughly contemporary British types clad in kimonos suggested believable Japanese (222).

Duncan was also a subject for Art Nouveau objects. But other than expressing a latter-day, grandiose Romanticism (she danced to no less than Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and Brahms), and inspiring fresh artistic endeavors in other artists of her time, Duncan did not directly represent a decorative aesthetic the way Fuller did. Instead, Duncan set out with broad sweeps and declarations to gnostically discover ancient Greek dancing as a way of finding within her own body a natural human essence and origin of movement untainted by social restrictions. Since the details of ancient Greek dancing were (and still are) a matter of speculation, this openly vague forum of expression gave Duncan freedom to infuse her broadly-embracing universal image of humanity with her own highly- individual interpretation of what that meant. In his article titled “Isadora Duncan” in Chronicles of American Dance (191-201), William Bolitho says of her: Isadora’s idea, then. . .was that the artist should “return to nature” and especially to himself. No more rules, no more tradition; for which things she. . .usually [has] ready the word “artificial” (194).

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But Duncan’s real purpose was not (any more than it was Fuller’s) to realistically reproduce nature with all its flaws and pains. Rather, Duncan sought to re-envision the ideal of nature through romantic vision the way sculptors and painters in the finest classical tradition treated their nudes. Or, in the spirit of the Art Nouveau style, Duncan combined an idealization of nature with an idealization of the human (usually female) form. According to Bolitho, then, “This is the function of art: to make a world; not to imitate the natural [one]. . .To eke out her nature, she [Duncan] borrowed and adopted the attitudes of Greek vases” (196). In so doing, however, Duncan evoked another approach to naturalism in expressive movement pioneered by a French student of vocal and physical expressiveness early in the Nineteenth Century, François Delsarte. While Duncan evidently did not have the opportunity to formally study Delarte’s system50, she did have access to its imprint on performance art of the time. It is difficult to overemphasize the influence Delsarte’s analytical investigations into the correlation between natural human movement51 and expressive meaning had on performance arts and attitudes toward the body of the time. His ideas on the efficiency and truthfulness of natural movements in the human body (both male and female) freed of artificial social constraints had a deep cultural impact on fashion, exercise, health, and aesthetic, particularly as his observations guided the American version of his teachings. While Delsarte’s impact upon each of the three dances in this study is discussed in more detail in their respective chapters, and on stage and film works in Chapter Five, a brief summary of his work is offered here. Delsarte began his career as a singer. He was mentored at an early age and sent to the Conservatoire for musical instruction, but through faulty training lost his voice. He devoted his life thereafter to a study of (European) human expressiveness in voice and movement by acute, patient, and life-long observation of people in all walks of life, and in all possible conditions. His observations were meticulously recorded in notebooks. For example, he watched nannies in the park with babies under their care. Delsarte made note of even the smallest differences in the position of the thumb when the nannies picked up their charges, and made estimations of how close or distant the feelings of the nannies were toward them based on those thumb positions (Shawn, Every Little Movement: 43). While Delsarte believed the social positions of adults distorted their

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expressiveness of voice and movement in public, he favored to observe them when they thought they were alone. Otherwise, Delsarte liked to observe people who did not readily come under sociological restrictions: . . .in the most conventional lives when Nature breaks through the artificial barriers of custom and habit and speaks for herself. . .Little children he loved best to watch. . .Foreigners were interesting studies, for when unable to express themselves in words, they instinctively employ the language common to all nations52, namely, gesture (Bishop: 14).

In this systematic and accumulative manner, Delsarte assembled information and formed generalizations based upon that information about how natural expression manifests in movement. He categorized anatomical zones of the human body and shaped a reflective spiritual structure to correspond to those zones so that meaning was generated out of a trinity53synthesis of body, mind, and spirit. In forming student exercises that would move the different parts of the body separately and in kinetic concert, American Delsarte teachers drew upon the power of suggestion, state of mind, or thought so that the correct, or “true” quality of movement could be achieved: Imagine yourself an artist, your face the clay to be molded into an exalted expression; but as with the artist, a mere mechanical molding will not succeed—the form must come from a high ideal within (Stebbins: 55).

Delsarte’s methodical system binding the physical manifestation of movement that could be empirically demonstrated with non-physical communicative meanings of feeling, intent, spiritual orientation, and personality were enthusiastically taken up in America and Europe. For some, Delsarte’s topographic model bridged the gap between science and art that demystified the human being and offered, along with the ideas of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) a way to map and explain the intricacies of behavior. For performing artists, it provided a system of pose and movement which, if properly studied and applied, conveyed exact expressive meaning free of artificial distractions. But, although Delsarte claimed his system was universal to the human condition, it was specific to Euro-American body language, a fact that becomes most clear in melodramatic stagings that once were accepted as “realistic” but to audiences of today appear comic.

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In its popular American version, Delsartism offered a means by which the individual could help herself to a healthy mind and body. Advertisements of the benefits of Delsarte training rang with panacea promises on a par with Indian Snake Oil; for social poise, grace, harmony, domestic joy, long life, virtue, and that most prized feminine attribute of the time, “delicacy”. Schools of Delsarte training, exercise books, and teachers professing the authority to teach it sprang up in urban centers all over the United States as if overnight, and mothers and daughters together attended classes and practiced at home to achieve self-improvement and social poise. Particularly popular among women with leisure time were the Delsarte exercises of tableaux vivant, or statue posing54. In this practice, groups of women wore white Greek-drape robes à la Duncan and posed together in representations of famous Greco- Roman statuary. Sometimes they wore white wigs and also covered exposed skin with paint or powder to look more like marble55. But what is particularly interesting about this social performance activity is the fact that women took male as well as female roles in statue-posing, and represented such dark subjects as “The Death of the Gaul and His Wife”. Given the highly-restricted life of women in the upper classes of the time, the opportunity to “cut loose” and try on identities outside the narrow confines of society was probably a great psychological release (Kendall: 17-30). Anyone out for self-improvement could benefit from Delsarte training, including aspiring performers. Among them was the young Ruthie Dennis long before she became Ruth St. Denis. Ruthie first had rudimentary instruction in Delsarte movement principles from her mother. These exercises became so ingrained into her earliest performance presentations—whether vaudeville, concert stage, or even film—that it appeared to be instinctive and set her apart from other amateurs (Shelton: 22). This training was reinforced as a potent expressive tool when Ruthie was taken to see a performance by the prominent American Delsarte teacher and performance artist, Genevieve Stebbins (1857- 1915). Stebbins favored to perform in small-audience salons of the upper-classes before women who could afford her teaching fees. She exuded a dignified grace and serious demeanor in her presentations. Stebbins was a far cry from the flirtatious coquettery of regular vaudeville female performers:

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. . .who made an ineradicable impression on the girl. The dancer wore soft white robes and seemed to Ruth Dennis to gleam like a pearl against the green draperies she used. . .Mrs. Stebbins danced as Niobe and Terpichore and the incarnations of “the Hours of the Day.” She convinced Ruth Dennis that the dance could express the beauty and dignity of the human being (Maynard: 75).

Stebbins particularly emphasized the flow of movement between positions, a feature of her performance that profoundly influenced the way transitions in Incense occur seamlessly between moments of action and moments of inaction, or poses. In her biography of St. Denis, Shelton makes clear this visual connection between the dance and Delsarte’s principles of movement: “Nothing more than a Delsarte exercise refined by a keen artistic sensibility, The Incense became one of St. Denis’ most enduring dances” (Shelton: 57). Certainly the off-white draperies of the “smoke colored sari” St. Denis draped for herself in Incense recalls the white robes Stebbins wore in her presentations and the white, pure, incorruptible timelessness of a marble statue. Specifically, the degree to which Incense derives its movement style from Ruth St. Denis’ Delsarte training is directly stated in Shelton’s biography of her; as Shelton states: Art Nouveau in dance, The Incense explored the evocative meaning of line. The undulating arm movement at the heart of the dance typlified a Delsartian “successive movement” as described in Genevieve Stebbins’ arm drill, “The Serpentine Series” (Shelton: 57).

While St. Denis absorbed the expressive connotations of movement and meaning from the Delsarte structure, Shawn took Delsarte’s connections between gesture and expression in a more analytical way. Shawn had several teachers in Delsartism before joining St. Denis, and although most students and teachers of the system exercises were women, their expressive applications and binding of spiritual and physical components ideally suited Shawn’s goals as an expressive male dancer. Shawn’s approach to Delsarte detailed in his book on the subject, Every Little Movement, is discussed with more detail in relation to Gnossienne. But it is significant to note here that it is through a reading of Delsarte principles of movement that one can perceive some of the more subtle contexts and allusions in the dance.

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Nijinsky’s exposure to Delsarte theories of movement and expressive meaning is far more indeterminate than the training Shawn and St. Denis undertook. While Nijinsky was a student in the Imperial Theatre in 1899, the directorship fell upon one Prince Serge Volkonsky (son of Decemberist revolutionary Volkonsky; dates unobtainable) who was intent upon effecting artistic renovations in the Russian ballet. Volkonsky engaged the sophisticated and intelligent Serge Diaghilev in the project; to make the Russian ballet, as Elizabeth Kendall puts it: “. . .innovative, to be recognized, to make a connection with the wider art world in Russia and beyond”56 As part of this program, Volkonsky also instigated classes in Dalcroze training for the Russian ballet students, of whom Nijinsky was one. In his efforts to formulate an instructional system to improve the rhythmic response of musicians, Emile Dalcroze (with whom Volkonsky studied) was certainly influenced by the ideas of Delsarte, and taken together the two systems offer the avant-garde experimental dancer/choreographer a basis of movement, expression, and musical response touching on perceptions of naturalism in performance art. It is likely that if Nijinsky had any Delsarte training either in Russia or Europe, it was the American version, as Duncan certainly would have introduced (her own interpretation, anyway) it during one of her early visits to Russia. The connection between the two systems was recognized as valuable to Shawn’s teaching program when Dalcroze methodology was incorporated into the eclectic education of Denishawn dance students along with Delsarte training. The influences of this combined approach can be traced in the style of “authentic expression” that characterizes modern dance performed today. However, out of the hands of artists and applied to popular stage shows like melodramas or cinema narratives, methods of systematically-arrayed poses and poorly-transitioned movements between them were corrupted into mechanical, lifeless, and often comically-sentimental caricatures that had no relationship to a naturalism of portrayal whatsoever. Regardless of artistic purposes, mechanical, automaton-like exhibitions certainly emphasized the constructed nature of performance and for Nijinsky, St. Denis, and Shawn, the slip into that mode was a concern in different ways. While Nijinsky and Shawn embraced an analytical response to movement in the ritualism of their respective dances, they did so within an over-riding spiritual and emotional context that kept their

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dances from simply becoming a physical show. Although both Faune and Gnossienne could be notated and reconstructed to a high degree of accuracy from those notes, the sense of performing a precise ritual in these dances kept the organic tensions between mind and body in balance through repeated performances. St. Denis had a much more difficult time with this, however; she refused to precisely perform the same movements in the same way at the same moment in the dance each time it was performed. While this tactic gave St. Denis a wonderfully organic sense of connection to the specific audience for whom she was at that moment performing, the indefinite structure made well-timed technical support57 almost impossible. Finally, when her mother ordered her to “set” the dance, St. Denis is reputed to have completely lost her temper. At another time during which she was repeating performances of Incense several times every day on the vaudeville circuit, St. Denis simply refused to go on stage at all and wept that she was not a machine (Terry: 7). Given the rapidly-changing conditions of modern life following the turn of the century, St. Denis’ fears for her highly-prized individuality in dance are understandable. Helen Thomas, in her book, Dance, and Culture makes a telling remark about the problematic union of mind and body required for expressive dance at this time: In a rationalized and technocratic culture such as ours, the mind and the body stand in binary opposition, with the former being placed under the category of culture and the latter under that of nature (6).

Culture and nature viewed from the technological perspective could not at all combine the way Art Nouveau suggested they should, and in response, arts tackled issues of the anxieties and excitement of technology from another aesthetic basis. Futurism, previously discussed as one of the first art movements of the Twentieth Century, attempted to capture the visual and emotional impact of increased speed, essences of transient qualities, and personifications of abstract concepts. If it was “beautiful” or “ugly”, the designation was assigned by the viewer, not the artist. Futurism in this context became: . . .an anthropological project: a new vision of man faced with the world of machines, speed, and technology. . .a mental discipline. . .pursuing the

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perpetual regeneration of all things. . .seeking the utmost integration of human life with the logic of becoming (Lista: 10).

But these kinds of art works expressed a reaction to new pressures in modern living in a reflective sort of way; they allowed the viewer to stand back separated from the work of art in order to view it. Even though an impression of a speeding car is captured on a Futurist painter’s canvas, and gives an impression of what it would be like to stand on a street corner and see a speeding car rush past, the material entity of the painting is still static because it hangs up on a wall. As a movement, Futurism did not last long, perhaps due to this characteristic; something quite different was needed. The avant-garde impetus in Modernism also placed the human being in the midst of and intrinsically connected to, confusingly rapid advancements in science and technology very much in the same way Fuller placed herself in the midst of her illusory effects. The first aesthetic philosophy behind this synthesis and equality among the arts in harmony with new scientific discoveries and the industrial consequences of mass production in culture was Art Nouveau. But it was quickly followed by another pervasive art style that made an even more direct comment on the relationship of the human body to the mechanical devices rapidly coming into common use: Art Deco. Unlike Art Nouveau, Art Deco trimmed down all flourishes and decoration in a way that incorporated its emotional evocations of an object into the very structure of its form. It was “streamlined”, as if the rush of wind in rapid movement had etched the surface of the object leaving it smooth, clean, and “fast”. While the line of Art Nouveau was florid, graceful, and asymmetrical, Art Deco favored straight horizontal, diagonal and vertical lines. And while the organic flow of Art Nouveau suggested an illusory incorporation of human and nature, Art Deco tended to assemble related, divisible physical units into a composite that had as its very nature a particular style of line, very much in the same way a sky scraper could be assembled out of pre-designed parts into a unified whole.

This approach encouraged the aesthetic of the machine; its movement, usefulness in accomplishing a task, and efficiency of production was reflected in the lines and shapes of its form. Since modular structures coincide with mass culture, this aspect is

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discussed in greater depth in Chapter Five. However, it is important to bring out here the fact that all three dances in this study bear a relationship to Art Deco. A kind of static balance is imposed in Incense due to a preponderance of ; what appears to the left also appears to the right. Despite the tendency to compare the dance to elements of Art Nouveau, St. Denis the person, artist, and character always inhabits the center of the stage scene flanked by two large incense burners as the center from which all movement flows and to which it returns. There is in this structure an implication of classical pictorial perspective that applies to Art Deco objects such as radios, dressers, or cabinets that whimsically invoke the bicameral symmetries of the human face or body in the same way St. Denis referred to hers in her dance. Gnossienne, as will presently be discussed in Chapter Three, also refers to the solo priest in a central fashion, but with quite a different effect. Here, Shawn’s worshipper uses sweeping diagonals and gestures in curves and spirals ending in aggressively straight lines that were interpreted as “manly”. There is a soldierly precision to this priest, who places his body in submission to his devotion with bravery and no small dose of humor. But it is in Faune that the closest correlation with Art Deco appears. Poses from Faune in a flat, angular, iconic presentational appearance were etched into glass, shaped into bronzes, or painted on ceramic surfaces; the latter in ironic placement to the Archaic Greek pottery figures which inspired the ballet in the first place. Like the cultural art style that came before it, Art Deco, or “decorative art” encompassed a wide variety of arts and crafts; including wrought iron grilles, lamps, jewelry, fabric, wallpaper designs, lithographic posters, combs, staircase banisters, etc. Dancers, with the immediate evidence of the human body in inhuman conditions, also served Art Deco as popular subjects, along with flowers, deer, clouds, etc., all of which were rendered in highly-stylized geometric form. While some of these objects were one- of-a-kind, others could be mass-produced in the same design. This had a distinct advertising advantage because a car, a steamship, and a cigarette lighter existed almost interchangeably for use through a unifying characteristic of rounded edges and the application of “speed whiskers” (Wood) even if the object was not one that had been mechanized for movement:

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. . . transportation mediums like trains and automobiles became aerodynamic. . .[manufacturing design] introduced streamlined shapes into even the world of cocktail . . .the design of constant streamlining enables diverse furnishings to coexist seamlessly in a room. . .[displaying] influences of cubism. . .as reality is distorted by condensing the design to simple lines and angular shapes (www.collectics.com: 30 October 2003).

This aesthetic incorporated an avant-garde technological revision of spiritualism, and a naturalism controlled by the needs of sophisticated utility. Furthermore, Art Deco embraced exotic overtones in other-worldly, constructs of time and space that glamorized a sense of futuristic efficiency in paradoxical juxtaposition with ancient and archaic motifs: [Art Deco] Artists. . . were influenced by Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and far eastern themes and historical subjects. Art Deco also coupled these classical influences with modernism (“History of Art Deco Design”, http://www.collectics.com: 20 September 2003).

While Early Modernism in its avant-garde examples can be examined in terms of many pairs of opposing qualities (i.e. new/traditional, individual/national, ephemeral/eternal, material/spiritual, natural/artifice, organic/mechanic, etc.) these tensions provided rich creative results in the dances of this study. Authority of representation, identity (including, but not confined to, gender), and a reordering of narrative time and space played a part in the establishment of the avant-garde inclusive of social perceptions and needs of the time. Each of the three dances in this study conveys to varying degrees some form of spiritual communication associated with a process of transformation. Of these, Incense is the most directly experiential of an altered state of being. The dancer makes the transition from domestic humility to insubstantial smoke rising to meet the divine. In Faune, the half-beast, half-human creature undergoes a metamorphosis of gender; from a condition of solitude in which no gender is expressed, through interaction with the nymphs in which a masculine confusion surfaces. Finally, in appropriation and “consumption” of the nymph’s dropped veil, the Faun adds to his “incomplete” masculinity the unknowable feminine in an effort to become wholly human. And the dancing priest in Shawn’s Gnossienne negotiates ritual certainty and indefinite

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willfulness in the worship of his goddess; his all-too-human arrogance rendered comic by his equally-painful references to the dominating monstrosity of feminine power (Chapter Three). Turn of century expression at all levels of representation opened new aesthetic parameters amid rapid sociological changes. While inheriting pervasive attitudes of Euro-American cultural superiority from the Nineteenth Century, exoticism provided an accepted model of performance structure in which dichotomies of space, time, and identity orientation could be opened. A renewed prompting of spiritualism in art attempted to refresh Romantic notions of the artist as the mediator between physical and divine realms, engaging art not as product, but as process. In the performance of the exotic “other” as entertainment, dance presented a flattering image of Euro-American superiority. However, the two concurrent projects of Early Modernism avant-garde and exoticism were closely entwined. Just as attitudes of superiority and authority of representation had been presented as essentialist fact through Cultural Imperialism, various manifestations of Early Modernism negotiated parallel arenas to present the artist as an expressive authority in an equally-constructed landscape. In order to do that, artists recreated themselves out of the same materials as their art; to cast themselves as interchangeable with the characters they portrayed. This particular era produced remarkable artistic innovation and cross-influences between artistic disciplines and artists. Architecture, domestic design, and especially dance creators worked toward an expanded artistic expression that would reconcile the “real” world (as exposed and fixed through the eye of the camera) and the “imagined”, or the symbolic/psychological suggestions of ambiguous images first in Art Nouveau and then in Art Deco. Such an open arena permitted the transference of artistic authority from cultural assumptions to individual expression. At the same time, artistic authority was in the process of being redefined through dramatic cultural and scientific developments. This growth through art as a project of Early Modernism became as much an individual as a collective process. By negotiating previously established conventions supporting constructs of presentation, early modern artists of the avant-garde—including these dance creators—began to redefine how art and culture could interact.

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END NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1 The general categories of “performing”, “visual” and “decorative” arts in this study help define differences and similarities among movements in this time. Visual arts referred to painting and sculpture, or objects that are made with expressive purposes only. Decorative arts include objects that were both aesthetically and functionally designed in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles, such as architectural accessories, perfume bottles, jewelry, ironwork gates, lamps, etc. At the same time it is important to remember that visual, decorative, and performing arts vigorously interacted with each other and the society of the time.

2 As discussed in this study, collaborations represent conscious connections with the larger artistic and sociological milieu, and influences suggest more or less unrecognized ones. For example, St. Denis directly advised Shawn in the transformation of his classroom exercise into a stage solo by way of collaboration, but the influence Nijinsky’s 1912 Faune may have had on Shawn’s 1919 Gnossienne is speculative (Chapter Three). And it is recorded by Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava (among other credited biographers of Nijinsky), that Ballets Russes stage and décor artist Lèon Bakst directly suggested to Nijinsky the theme and movement basis for his Faune, while the paintings of Gauguin, the dancing of Duncan, and the choreographic exoticism of Fokine’s ballets speculatively influenced it.

3 Duncan first landed in with her family but evidently found the British “cold and unemotional”. In 1903 they pilgrimaged to Greece. She went on to Paris, where she quickly fit into the passion for originality in defiance of traditional disciplines (Bolitho: 197). Fuller landed briefly in London in 1889, but although she did well there, her vehicle did not and she returned to New York. Through a German circus tour she finally reached Paris, the Folies Bergère (the Opera rejected her) and enjoyed phenomenal acclaim (though not much in financial remuneration) in 1892 (de Morinni: 209). Neither Duncan nor Fuller returned to the United States except to tour their dances. St. Denis, on the other hand, retained her American identity. As will be discussed in greater depth in Chapter Two, St. Denis’ particular brand of Orientalism, spiritualism, and social conscience remained in conformity with American social and artistic directions of the time.

4 Fuller’s performance was greatly admired by the Symbolist poet, Mallarmé, and she may also have been the model of L. Frank Baum’s Oz character, Polychrome the Rainbow’s Daughter (Anderson: 11).

5 As in a cut-glass vase bearing the crouching image of Nijinsky in the role of the Faun.

6 This is not to mean that Art Deco fails to suggest movement; as will be discussed in this chapter, the applications of “speed whiskers”, diagonal lines, and smoothed angles invoke the results of the object (whether a steamship or a cigarette lighter) having moved at great speed in either water or air. However, figures (human and animal) favored in Art Deco posed in a moment of conscious physical stability, or stasis that is not true of Art Nouveau. The composition of most Art Deco objects is fastidiously symmetrical. It is in this feature that Art Deco often adopted an Ancient Egyptian depictive style and motif.

7 The term “Gilded Age” was first coined by Mark Twain to express American society’s showy surfaces covering corrupt practices in the late 1800s. The period was characterized by a carefree playfulness on the part of the wealthy few despite widespread destitution of the masses leading to progressive era reform movements of the first decade of the Twentieth Century. While one New York socialite threw a party for her dog to which the dog wore a $15,000 diamond collar, eleven million families earned less than $1,200 per year. Lavish display of American wealth appalled Europeans; French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau remarked upon his visit to the United States that Americans had managed to progress from barbarians to decadence without achieving civilization in the process. As will be discussed in this chapter, La Belle Epoque, or “Beautiful Age” (1890-1900) in Europe was characterized by a similar attitude of playfulness and social license with its own dark corners under the gaity.

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8 Forty more or less identifiable artistic/social/political movements rose, fragmented, and fell between the 1890 and 1940.

9 This investigation was undertaken by the author during the summer of 2001 as a research project under the direction of Dr. Tricia Young, Dance Department, Florida State University.

10 Written by Lord Byron’s physician/friend Dr. John Polydori in response to the same competition in which Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein.

11 The aristocratic vampire of the opera, Lord Ruthven, was based (as was the vampire in the original story) on Lord Byron.

12 This is not to imply that there was only one place for the avant-garde; however, the scene at Paris is the emphasis in this chapter.

13 This new group of people who provided the colorful, flamboyant display of La Belle Epoque was identified as Le demi-monde in the title of the younger Dumas’ play.

14 Breakfast in Fur (1936) by Meret Oppenheim; the film, (1929 by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, which begins with the tremendously shocking image of a woman’s eye being slashed by a razor blade) and ’s first “ready-made” artpiece, Bicycle Wheel (1913) are some of the varied examples of avant-garde “whimsy and violence” in rebellion against the middle-classes.

15 A long mural on prominent display at the 1900 Exposition featured a of stereotypically-portrayed people representing all the nations of the world marching with their gifts to France as if they were lords in presentation to their king. A similar kind of homage-bearing arrangement today exists in the Disneyland exhibit, “It’s a Small World”.

16 The “wonder cabinets” of the European aristocracy (one of which the author was privileged to examine in detail in an Uppsala University museum) were artfully crafted pieces of furniture decorated with shell, ivory, and exotic wood inlays. They had an array of little drawers and doors with a complexity of hidden compartments. In these receptacles could be placed small mementoes and curiosities from around the world: a shark’s tooth, for example, or a shrunken head. These items were displayed to amazed visitors, and symbolically also represented possession not only of the object itself, but the place or culture from which it had been collected. A parallel shift of ownership exists between fine arts and the wonder cabinets in that whereas before both were available to only the wealthy aristocracy as patrons, in this period both became available to the middle-class public in the form of museums, circuses, and world exhibitions. Further discussion of this trend in light of marketing and packaging performance is undertaken in Chapter Five.

17 A good proportion of the bohemian scene was made up of refugees from the middle-class; as is true today, the most passionate rebels had been born into the group against which they rebelled.

18 The long-standing power relationship between those who regard (men as owners) and those who are regarded (women as possessions) is frequently analyzed in the texts of many Western works of art, including dance and comprises a topic of greater complexity than can be adequately discussed here. The means by which objectified human beings are examined by other human beings to express relations of power was certainly in effect in Ancient Sparta, as Spartan citizens had for entertainment the drunken dances of helots. Such demonstrations were used as a means of clearly illustrating the difference between citizens and slaves and justifying the relationship by which one man had the right to own another.

19 Fin de siècle ballet in Europe and America (which emulated Europe in all styles of art) was in a state of degradation. The ballet was a despicable profession in which no self-respecting man would engage. Women who danced on any stage were of low repute and ballet dancers were subject to the attentions of Le Jockey Club (an unruly crowd of young men in the galleries who attended the ballets to contract sexual

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favors with the dancers and ogle as much female leg as possible). Male roles were often taken by young women en travestie, wearing costumes that amply showed their charms as well. Given this state of affairs, it was only the appearance of the Ballets Russes in Paris that arrested ballet’s trend toward becoming a high-class show (Jonas).

20 It might be argued that these dancers were indeed “confined” to nighttime performances in specific cabarets that kept them out of the city’s mainstream society. In any case, men who attended found themselves inside the “cage” at close proximity to the exotic beings.

21 The links connecting Mallarmé’s poem to the music of Debussy and Nijinsky’s choreography are undertaken in greater depth in Chapter Four.

22 Hierarchy in the ballet mirrored royal order in the Court of Louis XIV, by whom the art was first established. This was expressed in all levels of its system of operations from who was listed first in the programs, to off-stage privileges and salaries. The levels at which a dancer was cast were as rigid as the orders of a pyramidal feudal society, with the largest number of (female) supporting dancers at the bottom (Les Petit Rats) to the centrally-featured prima ballerina at the apex.

23 Essentially, if an artist could gain acclaim in Europe, audiences in the United States would at least attend performances with some degree of respect.

24 (1872-1946) was a rebel in her own Japanese performing culture, for she performed on the same stage as men. According to Jonas, Yacco was a sensation at the Paris Exposition in the role of a suicidal dancing girl in an adaptation of the Kabuki classic, The Dancing Maiden at Dojo Temple which Fuller sponsored (199). Interestingly, Suzanne Shelton records in her biography of St. Denis that St. Denis had had the idea of creating for herself a Madame Butterfly dance and proposed it to Balasco before her visit to Paris. Belasco approved the idea, but the dance never seems to have been realized (Shelton: 41).

25 Ted Shawn specifically uses this title in his book about the art of Ruth St. Denis.

26 Fuller had many imitators, both in Europe and abroad and persuaded the management of the Follies to dismiss some of them before she would join them. The secrets of her lighting techniques were closely kept by her mother, and she also took out a patent to protect them from being used by anyone else (de Morinni: 208).

27 It is recorded that Duncan might have been inclined to join Fuller had she not been put off by the fact the Fuller was constantly surrounded by a very close and affectionate group of women (Anderson: 20). Fuller, ever on the lookout for fresh talent, also later invited St. Denis to join her, but St. Denis recognized that this arrangement would likely impede or postpone her own directions (Shelton).

28 Vaudeville and European dance hall venues often featured a female dance act in which the soloist manipulated full skirts and petticoats in a way that attracted male audiences not unlike those who flocked to the Moulin Rouge. The “skirt dance” was performed by a pretty, young, and very agile girl. One famous artist of this type was Kate Vaughn. In her early vaudeville days, Ruthie Dennis (who later became Ruth St. Denis) broke into professional stage performance as a skirt dancer because she was both quite limber and energetic. Even into her eighties, St. Denis retained a physical flexibility that allowed her to perform high kicks and the splits every bit as effortlessly as any of the Moulin Rouge dancers in their prime.

29 Artists in the avant-garde frame frequently made reference to dance as the ideal expression of this reality of life.

30 While Art Nouveau pieces depicted the flowing lines characteristic of performances by Löie Fuller or Ruth St. Denis, Art Deco reflected the symmetrical poses of St. Denis’ Incense and the flattened angularities of Nijinsky’s Faune.

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31 Culture and Imperialism and Orientalism by Edward Said detail many complex connections between European cultural identity and the fantasies of alien cultures. He presents features of exoticism as social and artistic constructions that European (and later American) economic and political domination.

32 An excellent and thoroughgoing series of discussions on the exotic tradition in classical European performances is provided in Jonathan Bellman’s book, The Exotic in Western Music (Northern University Press, 1998).

33 It is possible that Shawn saw Nijinsky’s Faune, or at least photographs of it before Gnossienne, though he made no reference to Nijinsky’s dance in any of the archival documents available to the author. Any speculation on the idea that Shawn may have been influenced in Gnossienne by the earlier Faune may be inferred by the similarity of movements in both dances but cannot be conclusively stated.

34 According to art historians, there is sufficient reason to believe that both Archaic Greek and Minoan pictorial styles were much influenced by the earlier stylistic conventions of the Egyptians.

35 , who was a strong early supporter of the Ballets Russe in Paris reports that when Bakst arrived at the he found Nijinsky staring as if in a trance at the Egyptian artifacts. It is possible that the stylistic relationship between the Ancient Egyptian and Archaic Greek representational arts were what impressed Nijinsky; not just one set of ceramics.

36 Many of these roles were choreographed for Nijinsky by Fokine, who was also engaged in renovating traditional ballet tenets through exotic ballets. The stylistic and thematic relationships between the choreographies of Nijinsky and Fokine are discussed in greater detail in Chapter Four.

37 While on site at the Jacob’s Pillow Archives, the author was confronted with a daunting number of boxes containing materials on both St. Denis and Shawn. Most of these materials were articles, essays, lectures, letters and other documents written by Shawn in the general tone of sermons on the benefits of male dancing.

38 Both Jane Sherman and Walter Terry quote St. Denis in their books about her and Denishawn as crediting Shawn with the greater teaching skills, while it was her forte to “inspire” their students.

39 Designations of movements such as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism appeared retroactively; the Futurists were the first to call themselves “Futurists” and give the identification of avant-garde to artists in opposition to the Academie. Futurists were, in fact, imitators and adaptors of already-established attitudes in art that later came to be known as Cubism (Lista: 66).

40 The famous Cubist painter (1881-1973) made any number of jokes on literal perceptions of form, function, space, and time. His many variations of looking at women from multiple perspectives that characterize the style of Cubism can be reproduced by viewing someone at extreme close range (intimately, as a lover might) and trying to see their face first out of one eye, then another, a practice the womanizer- artist had ample opportunity to explore. Picasso demonstrated an almost “Busby Berkelean” sense of humor with literal codes of form and size when he met an American soldier and asked to see a photo of the soldier’s girlfriend. When the soldier produced the photo, Picasso quipped, “My, she is beautiful, but kinda small, isn’t she?” (From: Life With Picasso by Francoise Gilot. Avon, 1981).

41 Dada and have imprecise dates, because it could be argued that works supporting their anarchic principles are still being made. These dates are the approximate years the two movements were cohesively identified as such (Anderson: 24).

42 This unusual woman, Valentine Saint-Point (1875-1953), stood up to the general misogynistic feelings of her fellow Futurists and insisted that both feminine and masculine attributes attended the ideal human being. Her choreography reflected both a similar response to exoticism as St. Denis’ and a fascination with

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the body in geometric shapes (she performed her dances with a scarf covering her face, for example) that recalls the anatomical abstractionism of artist (Anderson: 91).

43 Controversy surrounded the photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) and his contention that the galloping gait of a horse includes an instant in which all four hooves leave the ground. Muybridge was able to photographically prove his theory in 1872 by creating a system of producing a rapid succession of dry plates. This system eventually made moving film production possible (Lista: 14 ).

44 The way in which stage performance conditions are arranged for the sake of the dancer is a study worthy of more discussion than is possible here. In her discourse on the use of other sensory stimuli for dance performances, dance historian Sally Banes has approached this issue, particularly the memory-invoking properties of scent in such dance props as incense, etc. Taiwanese dance-actress Mimi Chen told the author that the use of incense in her autobiographical dance about her father was to help her return to her own memories more than it had to do with its effect upon the audience.

45 “Brother Dennis” hardly even had his own name or identity as a person, growing up as he did in the overwhelmingly feminist household of his mother and sister following the abandonment of the family by his father. Faithfully, he trooped along with his mother and sister, supporting with stage management duties their fanciful projects from Incense on. It was primarily “Brother’s” job to see that the lighting and special effects cues (such as smoke for Incense) were done right. And as time for each performance came round, he was often heard to mutter, “Well, time to light up the Goddess again.” (courtesy misc. unpublished documents/letters, Jacob’s Pillow Archives).

46 Exact stage conditions when Shawn performed the piece could not very well be determined; it is speculated that when he toured Gnossienne, it was lighted in a general way with a simple cloth backdrop. The video reconstruction from which this study drew its primary information about the piece showed the dance being performed in a dance studio without any mitigating backdrop or more than a generally bright lighting system. This adaptability to space (it could be performed anywhere, even outdoors) placed the dance diegesis beyond any specific physical location, suggesting a metaphoric psychological or spiritual space.

47 It is possible that Bakst knew Nijinsky admired the paintings of Gauguin, and that he tried to give the ballet Faune an impression of the primary colors and flatness of perspective associated with primitivism in this artist by designing a backdrop in this mode. Nijinsky, however, did not like Bakst’s design (Nectroux: 24).

48 Although the Russian choreographer Fokine criticized Duncan’s undisciplined style, she designed her “artless, natural” (as opposed to “artificial”) dances with great care and forethought.

49 Duncan records that she did try ballet studies but quickly found the positions into which the body must be placed to train in this style were absolutely artificial to a normal human body. However, it is interesting to note that the exaggerations of position and movement through those positions that are essential to ballet were indeed based in part upon the unusual physical attributes (such as ligament laxity in the hip joint permitting turned-out legs) of the French king, Louis XIV.

50 Duncan records in her autobiography, My Life, that she made an attempt to study with Delsarte in Paris directly and was disappointed to learn he had died long before her time.

51 As Elizabeth Bishop explains in her biographic sketch of Delsarte in her book, Americanized Delsarte System, Delsarte particularly took to observing the actions of people who were not aware of being observed. The extent to which such movements constitute “natural” gesture is questionable, given that cultural training begins at birth. However, the term “natural” is taken in this study, like the word “spiritual” at its meaning in context with the individual using those words.

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52 It is important to note that Delsarte and his students assumed that their interpretations of meaning in gesture were universal regardless of culture or time. If a non-European were to interpret these movements, the meanings derived might be different.

53 Delsarte created grids of correspondence between the physical and the non-physical that almost obsessively framed every categorical level in interlocking sets of threes. This conception was consistent with his spiritual framework, and he applied the logic of correspondence to Christian belief. In this way Delsarte urged his authority to state his ideas by invoking established traditions. It is easy to see how compelling this frame of logic would be to the spiritual structures of St. Denis, Shawn, and Nijinsky. The mechanism recalls a firm belief in the “music of the spheres” that had such influence on the Medieval cosmos; because if it appears logically possible in the human mind, then it must be true at some spiritual level. While the dynamics of the logic of correspondence as a cultural and artistic impetus merits further study, suffice it to say here that its mechanism renders otherwise incompatible concepts (i. e. and science) into a conceptual harmony through which individuals construct meaning.

54 Among the reports of social events, balls, and assemblies of Boston society there is included a brief mention of one Dora Duncan who gave an interpretive salon performance of Narcisse. What is interesting about the report is that the writer in describing the performance switched back and forth between female and male designations. It is speculated the performer might have been Isadora’s mother.

55 In his play, An Ideal Husband, uses the motif of statue-posing as a corollary to the public illusion of being pure and incorruptible like a marble statue. Another popular play of the time by , Pygmalion, refers to the Greek story of a sculptor who falls in love with his creation. The white marble statue of a beautiful woman comes to life when the sculptor embraces it.

56 Kendall, Elizabeth. “1900: a Doorway to Revolution” (dance changes in the early ) (abstract). , January 1999. http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1083/l_73/53501127/print.jhtml 8 March 2004.

57 Terry points out that the stage hands and her brother (who handled the lighting) could not follow what she was doing every moment, and that this produced chaos at rehearsals (7).

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CHAPTER TWO

Ruth St. Denis and Incense

When Ruth St. Denis returned to her family in New York after a 1906 Belasco tour they surprised her, having moved into an apartment on Forty-second Street that had room in it for her to dance. She had her own surprise for them. Based upon a poster for Egyptian Deities cigarettes, St. Denis had, “. . . laid the foundations of what was to be my real career. . .I had found my work in life. . .and my Egyptian dance was to be the first manifestation” (St. Denis: 54). The Incense (also referred to as Incense) was her first step in realizing a goal to arise out of “. . .a jumble of everything I was aware of in Indian art. . .” (St. Denis: 56). It was also the first in a series of five solo dances St. Denis created in 1906 based on East Indian themes intended to pave the way to her Egyptian vision. St. Denis’ first art dance (in contrast to her vaudeville skits) precedes both Faune (1912) and Gnossienne (1919) making it an appropriate choice to begin this study. An avant-garde example of Early Modernism in dance according to the five features discussed in Chapter One, Incense is based on the exotic theme that provided the initial vehicle for St. Denis’ danced spiritualism. The intimate format and posed centrality for the solo dancer condensed time and space. Simple pedestrian locomotive movements invested with symbolic meaning were intended to convey a truthfulness of expression through their “natural” execution. And by placing the dance artist in a rarified condition of emotional transport, St. Denis comments through Incense on her perception of dance as a means to correct the ills of an American society absorbed in consumerism and technological advancement. The short piece (six minutes in the reconstruction for this study) introduced St. Denis’ desire to identities of herself as a “legitimate”1 artist and dancer in spiritual expression. In this first performance of her independent2 career as an American (woman) dance artist who both choreographed and danced her own material, St. Denis signaled a dramatic break with Western traditions of the only two theatrical dance forms available: ballet and popular dance (Clarke and Crisp: 217).

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In both these venues men taught the technique, directed, choreographed, produced, and managed the performance of women on stage. Women dominated performances under the direction of men. Starting with the Romantic era in ballet (1827- 18703) and the development of the esoteric technique of the en pointe ballerina, men (at least in Europe and the United States) gradually became less visible on stage. When they appeared it was usually to support and showcase feminine beauty; finally, by the 1890s men had all but vanished from the ballet stage. As will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Three, the same trend in which the main function of male partners was to showcase the female in popular dances mirrored that of the ballet (Tomko: Introduction). With Incense, St. Denis joined both Fuller and Duncan at the vanguard of women who developed and dominated modern dance starting around 1890 and continuing nearly to the Twenty-First Century. The act of creating the dance in which she was seen by her audiences brought St. Denis into a larger cultural movement in which women added other possibilities of expressive dance than those available in ballet and popular dance: Conceived as “artistic”—as expressing aesthetic values—such dance activity offered women a purchase on shaping American community and polity, a process through which to constitute a new art form, and a means by which to define themselves as women (Tomko: xii).

In essence, Incense is a studied based on an impression of a Hindu housewife in the act of performing puja4 (a simple ritual of worship performed by a single devotee) in a home shrine. The audience’s view is implicitly acknowledged in that the dancer’s movements always defer to it5 without overtly recognizing that anyone is present. Placed in a position of privileged observance of a ritual worship normally conducted in private, the audience encounters a suspension of ordinary, mundane public life in favor of an individualized and private desire for divine union. This desire was, however, only one aspect of her performing career; many of St. Denis’ dances also developed secular, sensational narratives in which she expressed an avant-garde irreverence toward middle-class conventions and humor6. While many were solos or dances for two with her partner Ted Shawn, still others were spectacular, two- hour productions co-choreographed with Shawn, incorporating elaborate sets, costumes, a symphony orchestra, and as many as one hundred and seventy dancers (Dreir: 43).

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What she did in all her dances was to imply the sacred in the sensual or vice versa, according to her idealization of dancing as both a physical and spiritual act. In this chapter it is understood that although Incense is primarily a St. Denis dance in her “sacred” vein, it also contained elements of secular entertainment: “Every [St. Denis] dance was a skillful wedding of a serious background of religious ritual and spectacular pictorialization on stage” (Sorell: 179). The way in which she combined these seemingly opposed elements in Incense permits us to examine it in terms of its distortions of time and space, exotic content, spiritual implications, naturalism of movement, and St. Denis’ ideas about the pressures of technology. St. Denis’ methods of dance making, beginning with Incense, seem at first glance haphazard and irregular. Her exoticism was eclectic; she took what she needed and left out what she didn’t. Particularly her solo dances, from Incense on, were never precisely set, and she often changed sets, costumes, and steps. However, as Walter Terry’s biography of St. Denis, Miss Ruth: The “More Living Life” of Ruth St. Denis states, the starting point of her creativity had a conceptual orientation that resulted in a dance, rather than a dance first created on movement later invested with a context (as was the case for Shawn’s Gnossienne): . . .although she was basically expressional, creating by impulse and instinct, there was a distinct pattern to her approach to choreography. The creative sequence in everything she did went something like this: first she had the idea, next the way of expressing it; and then, ultimately, the character, the scene, the civilization, the period or era in that specific culture. This was the evolution she followed throughout her career (Terry: 82).

This adherence to a core idea from which the whole of the performing experience derived was what melded St. Denis as a woman to her art, her life, and her spiritual beliefs as an intrinsic whole. It permitted St. Denis to inhabit the ambiguous territory of Orientalism and guide her audiences through the symbolic meanings she derived from it in dance. From the instant she stepped into the audiences’ view she transformed any stage space into her own sacred realm, even though moments before it had been inhabited by a vaudeville comic. At the same time, she transitioned without pause between exotic form and an American interpretation of spiritualism.

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The orientation of her sense of conceptual balance came from within herself, despite popular tastes; the draw of a display of feminine charm; or even her own perceptions of respectability—though she certainly took advantage of these points in every performance. Rather, form and context were arranged to serve the idea and how she was to express it, instead of trying to force the idea to serve any preset form and context. The result was an extraordinary combination of performative tensions suited to an avant-garde work: feminine (as opposed to masculine) authority that turned art ballet conventions “backwards”; art in a popular venue; movement in pose and vice versa; and an exoticism that became particularly American in its spirituality. St. Denis evidently had some fondness for Incense. She kept it in her repertoire of solos throughout her phenomenally-long performing career. A 1963 photograph of her performing the dance appears in Terry’s book with this caption7: “The Incense” was the first dance in her [St. Denis’] East Indian repertory and opened the historic program at the Hudson Theater, New York, in 1906. Five years before her death at 91, she was still dancing it (Terry: 50).

That she was readily identified with this dance is evidenced in the decorative border applied to an October 1928 Denishawn brochure in which a pose of Incense is depicted (among other well-known solos and partnerings with Shawn) (Cohen: 12). Closely following—or concurrent with—the initial success of Incense, St. Denis made several other short solos for herself on Indian themes suggesting a variety of scenes with corresponding narratives and moods. Nautch presented a greedy street dancer as enthusiastic in the pleasure of her swirling skirts as in cursing an imaginary admirer who won’t pay her enough for the show. Given St. Denis’ early career as a skirt dancer in low-paying, rowdy vaudeville halls, the dance takes on an autobiographic context. The Cobras, in which a snake charmer8 flirts with venomed death, capitalized on St. Denis’ ability to move her supple arms as if they had no bones9. In this dance, she wore a pair of large green glass rings (made for her by her father) on each hand to make the eyes of the snakes glitter ominously (Shelton: 57). The Yogi reflected the mystic search for the divine implied in Incense. Instead of a pre-dawn interior setting with a Hindu housewife, this dance suggests a remote jungle setting in which a ascetic performs “his”10

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solitary, intensely private rituals of meditation. In 1909 she added yet another meditative solo to the series, The Lotus Pond. The culmination of this Hindu series was the longer, thematically-more complex Radah, also completed in 1906. In this dance, St. Denis transitioned from the worshipper in search of communion with her deity in Incense, into a personification of the deity to be worshipped. In so doing she recognized that she was experimenting in an unusual—if not unique—performing condition. St. Denis remarks on this in her autobiography, An Unfinished Life: . . .there is a vast and psychological difference between a dancer, moving on an altar before the image of his god in propitiation or sacrifice of praise [as is true of Eastern religions distinct from Christianity which does not include liturgical dancing] , and the embodiment by the dancer of the elements which he conceives to belong to the godhead [or art dance as St. Denis was beginning to conceive it] (St. Denis: 57).

Flanked by a row of non-dancing extras11on either side of her, St. Denis as Radha stood posed on a centrally-placed dais. The temple statue of a goddess12 comes to life and dances her enjoyment of physical pleasures in the five senses of human experience. The premise was not unfamiliar to audiences in that it mirrored then-popular Delsarte-inspired exercises (tableaux vivant) in which middle- to upper-class women posed as Greco- Roman statuary (Chapter Five). As will be discussed in greater detail in this chapter, the posed imagery of Incense through which movement seamlessly passes provides the pattern of her subsequent dances. Although Radha marked the summation of her first series of dances inspired by Hindu India, Incense defined the meditative and solitary being as the quintessential dancer of St. Denis’ imagination. St. Denis describes herself as “faithless” in service to art, God, and physical love (Terry: 1). But she also adhered to a fusion of self with her persona as an exotic, spiritual dancer in every piece she created. Whether it was an intimate solo of spiritual transcendence such as Incense, or large, spectacular productions incorporating the full Denishawn company such as Through the Ages (1916), St. Denis’ dances placed her firmly at the focal point of the stage as surely as if she had been painted as a Renaissance . The image of self as exotic persona and dancer infused with a spiritual illumination into which St. Denis walked forward in the opening

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movements of Incense firmly informed all her dances, even during periods when she was no longer fashionable (Shelton: Preface, xvi). As part of her initial exotic dance series, Incense was usually performed first on the evening’s program. In it, St. Denis recognized she was also introducing herself as a serious artist. She immediately used the opportunity Incense provided to set forth what she required of her audiences. By placing it in the privileged, yet responsible position of the deity being worshipped, St. Denis the dancer and worshipper of Incense required an attentive respect. In so doing, she dictated the terms, not only upon which subsequent dances in the Indian series were to be understood, but also those on which St. Denis herself—the artist, the woman, and the dancer—was to be viewed and understood. The timing for this turn of exotic spiritualism was excellent, for America was in a period of fascination with Orientalism. Oriental motifs in the United States represented both; “. . .a serious pursuit and a popular culture phenomenon” (Shelton: 54-5). From kimono robes and tea-sets available for purchase as novelties in midde- to upper-class homes to travel brochures and Chautauqua lectures, Far East treasures and customs intrigued audiences. St. Denis’ dances were a commodity in this trade as “body-lectures” that inspired and informed an intellectually-curious, respectful (and respected) group sensitive to beauty: “. . .lecturers were especially popular with female audiences, and women were the major purveyors of orientalism in America (Shelton: 55). And St. Denis took her dances to these women, as had Duncan before her, performing them at intimate soirees and salons to the well-to-do who could—and did—augment her reputation as a serious Oriental artist. Even so, St. Denis took work wherever she could get it, and that meant vaudeville as well. Unstable conditions toughened the artist, and St. Denis found a refuge of stability within her own dancing body that kept her in balance despite distractions (including, but not limited to, a series of attractive, smitten men). The details of movement and non-dance elements supporting them in Incense changed slightly in subsequent performances, yet all her all the variations of her many dances adhered to a unified aesthetic regardless of inspirational source, performing conditions, or audience.

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St. Denis recognized that this artistic and personal bonding on a spiritual level was as essential to her as to her audiences. Although stage dancing of the time in America was: “. . .trivial, and it was supposed to be trivial” (Terry: 52), St. Denis used her exotic status in combination with its educational potential to bridge the conceptual distances between the secular and sacred in art dance, first for herself and then for her audiences. As Terry notes, St. Denis: “. . .made the stage her altar; the theater, her church” (52). She reflected on the commercial pressures Denishawn made on her solitary spiritual impetus and attempted to negotiate these opposing demands by way of a socially-corrective, educational measure: . . .the Orient was my personal art which audiences would expect me to give for some years to come. . .the still beauty of the East should be infiltrated into both the school and the company as compensation for the space-covering athleticism of our American life (St. Denis: 182).

Balancing opposites was a familiar task to St. Denis; to begin with, her dance development grew out of her position in a typically-American yet unusual family. Born Ruthie Dennis (she did not gain her stage name of St. Denis until later), she was the only girl in the family and the focus of her mother’s aspirations: Ruth Emma Dennis [Ruthie’s mother], whether consciously or unconsciously, planned to make her young daughter an embodiment of her theories about a better life on earth (Kendall: 25).

Neighbors of the Dennis farm in New Jersey evidently regarded its matriarch, Emma Dennis, an eccentric—possibly dangerous13—intellectual with a medical degree and utopian notions, including dress reform (she didn’t believe in corsets). Emma fashioned her home into a kind of homespun “salon” to which she invited bohemian artists in all mediums, and staged drama productions, for which: . . .she [Emma Dennis] cleverly used the talents of her brood. The males took a backseat. . .as the reigning star in a family constellation which included willful mother, dreamy father, nameless brother. . .Ruthie learned from childhood a role which her life and art came to serve (Shelton: 2).

Both Ruthie’s parents were from ordinary, humble backgrounds, but they responded to that condition in different ways. It is speculated that Tom Dennis met Emma at Eagleswood, a retreat where artists and intellectuals devoted to a mystic

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utopianism inspired by the theories of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) gathered. In work, Mr. Denis was a machinist and failed inventor: “An avid reader and confirmed agnostic. . .clever, charming, handsome roughneck who liked to swig whisky and play the violin” (Shelton: 6). By contrast, Emma turned from medical science to the solace of religion and the ideas of Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910). An ardent feminist who also suffered ill health, Emma determined that Ruthie would not be subject to the restrictions she had endured, and invested her daughter with the mission to correct those failings: “. . .to remake the world as a spiritual matriarchy, something her daughter found out how to accomplish years later on the stage” (Kendall: 26). Thwarted in her ambitions by the vague withdrawal from economic and social responsibilities of her common-law14 husband, Emma took matters into her own hands; taking in boarders, selling produce, and doling out folk medicine remedies from the farm (Shelton: 8). As a youngster, Ruthie had the run of twenty acres of in which she played, freely dressed in “tomboy” clothes. Deportment was her weakest subject in school, and it is recorded that she didn’t hesitate to answer a boy’s insults by hitting him with a shovel. She often escaped the escalating arguments between her parents over money troubles by “reading, roaming, or best of all, playacting” (Shelton: 9). The combination of a high-minded literary diet and physical freedom encouraged Ruthie to absorb and process for herself every experience that came her way. These experiences included not only caring for a variety of pets, but also listening in on discourses on Christian Science15, Theosophy, and women’s rights among the artists and intellectuals who rented rooms. And since was a short train trip from the farm, Ruthie also attended a variety of exotic performances there. In her book, American Modern Dance Pioneers, Olga Maynard suggests that St. Denis had already absorbed impressions during the course of her early education that would have a direct impact on her conceptions of expressive dance: Friends took her [the pre-teen Ruth Dennis] to [see]. . .the and Bailey circus’s Burning of , a colossal spectacle. . .Next she was taken to a performance of Egypt Through the Ages, another spectacular. . . (Maynard: 75).

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Later, on another trip to New York in the winter of 1892, Ruthie attended a Delsarte matinee given by Genevieve Stebbins, a performer/lecturer/teacher, who had transformed her of Delsarte exercises into a plastic art of “statue-posing” based on breathing and a “natural”16 kinesthetic flow of movement (Ruyter: 20-30). Although technically neither a dancer nor an actor, Stebbins distinguished herself from other “Delsartians” by transitioning from one pose to the next in a physiological manner, free of extraneous gestures. She presented her story-dances with simple directness, against a green drape background17 and wearing white “Greek” robes. Stebbins’ expressive gestures in a simple, almost austere setting impressed upon the young Ruthie Dennis a conjunction of expressive dance with exotica to impart the feeling of a ritual sacrament; “. . .the first spiritually, artistically, and socially acceptable dancer the young girl had ever seen” (Shelton: 15). These were qualities Ruthie was anxious to attain for herself; from a very young age, Ruthie was inclined to dance and enjoyed performing before an audience. Based upon an “expert” opinion that her daughter did indeed have dance talent, Emma organized a program of training and promotion that would give Ruthie the best opportunity possible for a lucrative stage career. If her daughter’s energy and leggy good looks attracted audiences, perhaps this was a means to lift the family out of the shame of bankruptcy. With this idea in mind, Mrs. Dennis made Ruthie the center and purpose of her life; expertly fending off suitors who threatened to end stage engagements with romance or proposals of marriage, and enlisting the unrecognized back-stage support of sons and husband in the task—or abandoned the men altogether (St. Denis and Shelton). Recognizing, as had Isadora Duncan’s family before, that a humble station dictates a humble start, Emma began by training Ruthie in the rudiments of Delsarte exercises. Once Ruthie had good management of them, they were applied to danced stories which the girl interpreted to the spoken narrative of her mother. The training was to become her foundation; so second nature to her performing action that she commanded and incorporated these principles into every dance she made: Details in her [St. Denis’] movement held audiences spellbound—a flick of a finger, a nod of the head, a hand on a hip. Her sense of timing to clinch a point was uncanny, no matter what stage she was on (Schlundt: 6).

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Desarte sessions were soon augmented with dancing classes at Maud Davenport’s nearby studio in which Ruthie quickly excelled. Finally, when the time seemed right and Ruthie looked of age to pass for an intriguing ingénue, mother and daughter made frequent trips to New York to connect with agents, producers, managers, etc. who had the power to launch new stage successes (Shelton: 16-7). The progress of this stage training program was interrupted only by one semester at Reed College in 1893, out of deference to Hull relatives horrified by Ruthie’s rush into the decadent world of the theatre where no proper Christian girl should go. Ruthie had no intention of turning into a proper Christian girl, and left the school by Christmas (Shelton: 17). A few weeks later, she made her first dance appearance at Worth’s Family Theatre and Museum as a skirt dancer in six performances per day. Dime museums such as Worth’s were popular entertainments of the time; they “. . .housed the first family-oriented performance spaces, menageries, and, in fact, nearly every type of entertainment available in 19th Century America. And all for only one dime. (http://www.dimemuseum.com/history/htm 9 December 2002)

The dime museums were also a venue of experimentation; the first “moving pictures” shown in America were viewed in dime museums as part of the range of novelties presented in an “experiential buffet” format. And the managers kept it clean, for the most part18. Even so, this venue was thought barely respectable, and skirt dancing remained on the outer edges of what even Emma considered moral. Despite the sensationalistic of physical anomalies, the museums kept up the appearance of having educational value in the person of a “professor” or “lecturer” who guided the crowds through the exhibits and explained them. The concert shows in the museums also implied an “uplifting theme”19, and when skirt dancing appeared there, it had more to do with chaste manipulations of the full skirt than a view of anything under it, which was not always the case on vaudeville or burlesque (dimemuseums.com). Later, when vaudeville took over the respectable family entertainment business from variety shows and dime museum concert shows, such dancers—including Ruthie Dennis—found they were also in demand:

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From the dime museums to the vaudeville stage, through musical comedies and serious melodrama, Ruth would slowly rise. Each of these genres would leave its mark on her unspoiled imagination. . . (Kendall: 30-1).

American vaudeville was a variety show venue consisting of a series of short (often three minutes or less), individual “acts”, which toured throughout the United States on five major “circuits”. Vaudeville offered a broad spectrum of entertainment experiences, none of which was directly related to any other. In an attempt to attract the broadest audiences possible to make a profit, vaudeville shows offered something for everyone even to the point of fragmentation: Broadly speaking, there were at first only two kinds of variety shows, those for men only and those for mixed audiences. . .Both forms contributed to what was to become standard vaudeville (Sobel: 22).

A serious rendition of ’s famous speech by an actor in full Elizabethan costume might, for example, be followed by a brother and sister contortionist act, or a talking dog. As will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Five, American vaudeville had its roots in the English music hall tradition and minstrelsy, but it also exchanged acts with dime museums, honky-tonks, beer hall concerts, circus acts, and . Almost anything could—and was—worked up into a vaudeville act and tested out “on the boards” before rowdy, demonstrative audiences. While some vaudeville theater managers20 worked to provide good, wholesome “family entertainment” by restricting acts to those that any woman of class would not be embarrassed to attend, it took a gutsy, determined survivor to endure the long hours, grueling tour schedules, and low pay. Vaudeville was a proving ground on which raw talent was either seasoned into audience- drawing attractions or dropped from the stage entirely (Sobel, et al). Conditions were hard, but vaudeville offered independence and the confidence of accounting to no one but the theater proprietor and the audience. A vaudevillian was his own manager, choreographer, agent, stage-hand and costumer; a learning experience many vaudevillians later put to good use on Broadway or Hollywood. Although vaudeville was a desperate measure for those with no other means of making a living, it also offered opportunities for advancement to people who had few other options:

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Whatever their origins, one factor united the vaudevillians: one way or another, all of them were beyond the pale of native-born, middle- class society. . .However hard and precarious such a life might be, it offered unique opportunities for one group: women. . .In vaudeville they could see the possibility of an independent career and wages that were virtually closed to them in other fields. . . (Snyder: 44-54)

As a young woman to gain financial independence and artistic recognition, Ruthie determined to stick it out in vaudeville until a better opportunity presented itself. Aside from a youthful appearance and an energetic athleticism, Ruthie Dennis developed the knack of emphasizing her physical strengths, including a flexible back. Spins and leaps in Ruthie’s dances were contrasted with a long slow kick and slide into the splits that vaudeville audiences found pleasing. As St. Denis herself explained to Terry: I was like thousands of other girls with lithe, quick bodies, who loved rhythm, who danced easily to whatever music was being played, and somebody told them they could earn a living by it, and so I tried it in vaudeville and this and that. It was most ordinary, I assure you (Miss Ruth: 21).

Long before she conceived of herself as the “divine” worshipper of Incense, St. Denis had been performing steadily with the sheer economic intent of supporting her family. By eighteen, she was a veteran dancer of vaudeville and dime museum acts. Finally, in 1900 St. Denis joined the more “legitimate” Balasco21 stage productions in which she toured both the United States and Europe for four years, taking dancing/acting roles in ZaZa, Madame DuBarr, and The Auctioneer. She was closely guided and accompanied in this by her mother in every detail from the arrangements of her routines to choice of costumes and the terms of contracts. Emma Dennis kept a close watch on Ruthie, well aware that: . . .her daughter entered a profession that was next to in the popular mind. A dancing girl depended for her livelihood on a network of powerful males. . .who could be ruthless in exploiting a young women financially if not sexually (Shelton: 23).

In 1904 St. Denis turned twenty-four, and found herself torn between acting and dancing, both of which seemed to be leading her down artistic dead ends. She had bit parts dancing and acting on the Belasco tour of his historical spectacle, Madame DuBarry

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(1902) a grueling string of performances that paid the bills but left her bored and unhappy. One spring evening, when the company arrived in Buffalo, Ruthie happened to pass a local drug store, the window of which featured a large poster advertising Egyptian Deities cigarettes: It [the poster] depicted the goddess , solemn and bare-breasted, seated beneath an imposing stone doorway. . . The cigarette poster, which became a permanent part of the St. Denis mythology, was but the catalyst in a long-simmering process. . . a catalytic icon. . .(Shelton: 46-7)

She bought the poster and kept it a long time, studying its imagery and dreaming herself into the image of the goddess; at one point St. Denis even posed for a photograph enthroned and costumed as if she were the Egyptian goddess in the poster (St. Denis: 54). And with this majesty in mind, St. Denis began to also imagine herself into a dance/ realization of it in an effort to reach through it her own as-yet unrealized performing idealism (Shelton: 49). In her autobiography, St. Denis chronicles the way in which her attention was drawn toward the poster’s image: . . .I saw a modernized and most un-Egyptian figure of the goddess. . . Here was an external image which stirred into instant consciousness all the latent capacity for wonder, that still and meditative beauty which lay at the deepest center of my spirit (St. Denis: 52).

At first, St. Denis formed the idea of an Egypta dance incorporating a vision of herself as a reinterpretation, rather than a literal embodiment of, a goddess: this “modernized and most un-Egyptian figure”. It is interesting that, like the modern paintings of women by Picasso and Manet discussed in Chapter One, this goddess looks directly and frankly at the viewer, thus returning the judging, evaluative gaze. At the same time, the deity is symmetrically seated in a classical frame of balance and simplicity. The poster suggests, or refers to by reinterpreting the image in a very modern, streamlined Art Deco style (Chapter One). If ancient and modern can be so harmoniously melded in a cigarette poster, then so could dance and spiritualism through St. Denis’ efforts. The narrative St. Denis conceived would present her as the focal point of an allegory on the state of humanity (regardless of era, nationality, or gender) between the physical and the spiritual joined in dance, incorporating an elaborate

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set, lighting, beautiful costumes, and a company of devotees22. In 1905, St. Denis took out a copyright on her idea (Shelton: 48-9). But a theatrical project of that magnitude would take resources far beyond her current means, and St. Denis was not yet so well known to persuade others to take the risk without also making some compromises in the content of the project—or herself. In any case, St. Denis and her mother closed the circuit of artistic and personal access to include only family and friends as a means to retain control. Besides, the rule of thumb to success was to work up an act that was like other acts that were popular, but also with that little something extra that made it different. At the time St. Denis found herself transfixed by the Egyptian cigarettes poster, Near East exoticism in dance—including “Egyptian” ancient and modern—was popular all across Europe and the United States. Ancient Egypt constituted a particular type of Near East Orientalism favored by dance of this period in part because accurate, “authentic” representation was not required, or even possible; any concoction that suggested a reference to Egyptian iconography was acceptable. Furthermore, distinctions between “modern” and “ancient” Egyptian dancing were vague; both came under the general heading of exotic, and that meant something of a fantasy loosely connected to some notion of foreign delights. Audiences in every stratum of society filled with curiosity and urban boredom flocked to view Egyptian dances; entertainments that telescoped the world’s bewildering array of cultures across time and space into a conceptually manageable form. And this form of display kept the theatre managers happy and “in the black”, because it attracted both men (hoping for some display of taboo female anatomy offered in filmy, brief costumes) and women (enjoying the temporary escape from ordinary life into a glamorous luxury) (Snyder: xvi). At one end of the spectrum, a “hoochie-kooch” side show exhibition dancer who billed herself as “Little Egypt”23: . . . was engaged to entertain at the Seeley dinner. . .just as Little Egypt was ready to pull off a few nifty wriggles, Chapman with a flock of bulls broke in and pinched everybody. The raid was front-paged . . .this put the cooch on the map (Laurie: 40).

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A hoochie-kooch dancer moved in ways no ordinary woman could or would; waving her arms and hands, twirling, or dipping in deep backbends with a physical freedom and abandon that implied sexual looseness. The act was so popular that hundreds of imitators seemed to spring up on stages all over the country overnight. “Little Egypt” performed at Coney Island and at the 1893 Colombian Exposition in ; one 1906 (silent) Edison film short features a hoochie-kooch in bloomers, dark stockings, and heeled shoes24. But small-time side-shows weren’t the only venues for these dancers. In 1900, while on tour with the Balasco production of ZaZa, Ruthie attended the Paris Exposition, an event that fueled not only her own impulses, but those of many other artists of the time, toward Egyptian themes cast in the Art Deco style (Chapter One). St. Denis found at the Exposition not only a wide range of exotic music and dance performed by performers brought from distant countries, but also a variety of imitators and European adaptations. She records in her diary having seen, as one American journalist suggested, that the Paris Exposition was: . . .nothing but one huge agglomeration of dancing. There were ballerinas at the Palais de la Danse, Egyptian belly dancers, Turkish dervishes. . . (Shelton: 42).

On the artistic end of the spectrum, audiences were overwhelmed with an abundance of Salomés and Cleopatras in both America and Europe. They viewed not only the performances of Maude Allen (1880-1956) in her Vision of Salomé (, 1906) but also Oscar Wilde’s play (published in 1893 and presented on stage in 1905), and ’ music-drama, which premiered in 1907 with Mary Garden in the title role. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes toured Europe with a 1909 Cléopâtre that displayed a beautifully costumed Ida Rubenstein. One of the biggest successes of the Ballets Russes in Europe was Fokine’s lush Arabian Nights extravaganza, Schéhérazade (1910), in which Nijinsky danced to acclaim as the sensual “golden slave”. But in dance, no story was so compelling or popular with audiences than Salomé. The exotic character of Salomé (and Allen's vision especially) offered an image of young womanhood as both beguilingly seductive draped in translucent veils, and terrifyingly

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depraved in demanding the head of John the Baptist. Perhaps this character invoked fears and fascinations with the character of a strong and independent young woman who took matters into her own hands, displaying a feminine allure inextricably bound with a “masculine” aggressiveness. This new young woman was healthy in mind and body, out of her tight corsets and her dragging, germ-catching long skirts25, confident in her decisions and more or less “out of control”; that is, out of male control of her sexuality. The New Woman described by Elizabeth Kendall in her book, Where She Danced is discussed as a product of the later “ragtime craze” around 1914, but this description could also have been applied to Salomé, who: . . .was modern because she was a dancing addict and the sign of a future when no one would bother with social conventions and ceremonies . . .crudely ignoring the proprieties and acting instantly on one’s desires (Kendall: 100).

Daughters (such as St. Denis) had been invested with the lessons of their mothers’ defeats in life. These daughters (like Salomé) learned to demand what they wanted from men; the modern incarnation of womanhood. The public, at first stunned by this kind of aggressive , fell into a period of “Salomania”, and many dancers sought to fill the demand. St. Denis considered creating an allegorical Salomé for Reinhardt's 1907 production of Strauss’ work, but could not come to terms with the more lurid aspects of the role (Shelton: 76-77). Perhaps less squeamish, Fuller mounted her own version in 1907. Also in the Middle Eastern vein, ’s “Arabian” music for Peer Gynt (1876) proved irresistible to a wide variety of dancers, particularly Anitra’s Dance. One Rita Sacchetto (1880-1959) included; “an allegory for a cast of thirty to the music of Peer Gynt that showed the striving of the soul of woman upward from the darkness of submission into the light of emancipation”(Anderson: 32-3). Few others had such feminist messages, however, and there consequently followed a series of exotically seductive Anitras, among them St. Denis. Ancient Egyptian themes as serious art topics were rare, though they retained some of the exotic sensationalism of popular entertainments. Sent M’Ahesa, (now all but forgotten) who was born Elsa Maragethe Luisa von Carlberg in Latvia around 1893

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specialized in ancient Egyptian dances inspired by tomb paintings, and her angular style was commented on in a review of 1910 as both strange and beautiful. The most famous of her dances was titled Bird of Death: “. . . in which she portrayed a sinister birdlike creature with enormous wings said to live in caves beneath the earth” (Anderson: 39). Some presentations purported to express a “dime museum legitimacy” through an educational veneer. In 1913 one Adorée Villany gave programs claiming to trace the history of Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria in dance that included a Salomé. However, the attention she received was largely due to being fined in Paris for performing these dances in the nude (Anderson: 40). Finally, exotic dances from Egypt became so commonplace on stages throughout Europe and America that they could be wittily burlesqued: Probably one of the best known of dance acts in music halls, which lasted until recently, was the superb comic trio of Wilson, Keppel and Betty whose mock-Egyptian sand dance, performed with utmost seriousness, was one of the joys of the late English music hall (Clarke and Crisp: 234).

Still, it is curious that an image of Egypt that had so captivated St. Denis should have first resulted in a series of dances inspired by Hindu India. Perhaps she understood that with so many Near East exoticisms rampant in regular entertainments from vaudeville to opera, she would have to (literally, geographically) go beyond its ready accessibility and familiar audience/performer contexts in order to dictate the terms by which her art was to be understood. In other words, St. Denis had to clear her stage space of the clutter of “all those other dancers” by staking out new territory in a heretofore unexplored frame of exoticism. As it turned out, she found what she was looking for in the spiritual exoticism of Hindu India. And at least some of her audiences received the message of her danced spiritualism. In his book, Theatrical Dancing in America: The Development of the Ballet from 1900, Winthrop Palmer quotes26 Charles Frohman’s stage manager of musical comedies, who wrote of St. Denis: This sort of dancing—the new sort—appeals to the higher senses and makes you think. It interprets beautiful things and can be as expressive as music or poetry. . .more postures and pictures than actual dancing, as we understand it (Palmer: 57).

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There was probably more than one reason for the diversion which can be found in the structure of Incense. To begin with, the dance follows the rituals in an exotic display St. Denis describes as having been influential on her initial choice of a Hindu theme: During these days [1906, New York] someone took me down to Coney Island. . .my whole attention was not captured until I came to an East Indian village which had been brought over in its entirety by the owners of the Hippodrome. . .something of the remarkable fascination with India caught hold of me (St. Denis: 55).

Another influence in the direction of India for St. Denis was Edmund Russell and his (sometime) wife, Henrietta, who had studied with Delsarte in Paris. Their “. . .ideal was to treat life as art and to enhance it according to the principles of Delsartian esthetics” (Ruyter: 24). Henrietta27 was particularly popular teaching ladies of high society how to move, pose, speak, dress, and even decorate the house according to the principles of Delsarte. Life should encompass in every detail a sense of beauty and rightness guided by a “natural and practical” approach suffused with the mystic, instead of dominated by the near-sighted, uneducated, and frankly mercantile concerns of the middle-class. And for this brand of spiritualism, these aesthetic Delsartians also: . . .equated art with religion, the physical with the spiritual; and bypassing the disesteemed ballet, they identified their expressive arts with the glories of and the mystical East (Ruyter: 29).

Edmund Russell particularly cut quite an exotic public figure, disdaining European male attire in favor of Eastern garb with a reputation as both an actor and Orientalist who had actually been to India. He taught deportment and gave dramatic readings that melded spiritualism with exoticism in a uniquely American context: The deeply spiritual and intuitive quality of Oriental thought struck a responsive cord. . .As eclectics, the transcendentalists found little difficulty in incorporating selected Oriental ideas into their view . . .Oriental thought was accommodated to both the religious and the postitivistic mood [in America] (“Oriental Ideas in American Thought”: 429-438).

Russell’s most popular presentation was a long poem by Sir Edwin Arnold, called The Light of Asia. Both St. Denis and her mother attended these sessions with great enthusiasm. They were part of a larger group of intellectual Americans captivated by this

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uplifting oratory that stirred the emotions and evoked a utopian, rather than a utilitarian vision of progressive idealism: . . .Arnold exploited the sensation the book created by coming to the United States in 1891 to lecture on Buddhism and to read from the Light of Asia before enthusiastic audiences. . . Oriental thought was carried out almost entirely through books and the written word. Knowledge gained was largely second-hand (“Oriental Ideas in American Thought”: 437-8).

The elegant prose of the literature captured St. Denis in a flow of words that felt to her as if they could be transformed into dance. But this was not the first time St. Denis had made the connection between “prose and pose”, for she also recollected a performance of which, if you: . . .put your fingers in your ears so that you can’t hear her. . .you would see that she is dancing. I feel that my picturesque posings on the stage, sometimes artificial and sometimes legitimate, stem from watching this performance of Bernhardt (St. Denis: 58)

Upon becoming friends with Russell, St. Denis borrowed his books and solicited his advice on how to devise her dance. As a result, the spatial symmetry of Incense, in which the dancer is effectively framed by two large incense burners down stage right and left bears direct visual correlation to the staging of Edmund Russell’s Light of Asia: He [Russell] made a deep impression on me as he stood on the platform, dressed in a rich Indian turban and a long raja coat28, flanked by two tall candlesticks. The rest of the room was in darkness, and he made an arresting figure as he read in his modulated, beautiful voice. . . (St. Denis: 59).

Russell was further instrumental in advising St. Denis on the details of Hindu life that would enhance the conviction of authenticity expressed in Incense, and on several occasions St. Denis and Russell gave joint performances of Incense and The Light of Asia. The success of this association between lecturer and dancer expressed a compatibility of meaning between movement and speech at the essence of Delsarte’s theoretical work, whose principles were closely studied by both Russell and St. Denis. As St. Denis reminds us, her impetus in choreographing Incense for its communicative properties was as much conceptual as physical:

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It must be remembered that my creative instincts were and at the same time were not those of the dancer. . .Without question I was at that time a kind of dancing ritualist. . .I longed to translate into rhythmic patterns a spiritual significance. . . (57)

In the process of realizing that goal, St. Denis incorporated whatever suggestion, regardless of source, that seemed appropriate to her at the time. For Incense she undertook library research, consulted East Indians29 in all walks of life then living in New York, and paid attention to the reactions of friends and family30 to whom she showed her progress. This is not to imply that St. Denis was careless of the sources of her material. But she was enthusiastically eclectic. And no one thought to tell her that what she wanted to do couldn’t be done—hadn’t been done—on any Western stage. Instead, St. Denis found a faith and confidence generated in her inner circle of friends she not only drew upon, but also exuded. She would need all the confidence she could draw from within herself for her first paying public showing of Incense, which was booked into the New York Theater Saturday Night Smoking Concerts (a nearly all-male audience) by Louis Weber to substitute for a cancelled act. And her earliest advertising copy billed St. Denis’ “Indian” dances as Native American (she learned to describe them as “Hindu” for her American concerts) or invented fabulous tales of her “true life story” as an exiled Oriental princess. But not everyone missed the point; Henry Burleigh, the negro singer, admired her dances so much he arranged a concert with her and presented her at Charles Frohman’s Aldwych Theater (An Unfinished Life: 65-6). Finally, when a group of upper-class women bought a special showing of St. Denis dances at the Hudson Theatre she also drew upon their perception of her not only as an artist, but also a spiritual guide light, for: “. . .Each of these supporters saw in Ruthie’s dancing a serious attempt to translate oriental principles into American art” (Shelton: 55-6). St. Denis herself acknowledged that shifting from an Egyptian theme to an Indian one seemed strange, though it did not constitute a significant change of concept; quite the contrary. In some degree recognizing the generalized nature of Oriental themes in western culture she states that:

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India held my interest to the same degree that Egypt had. . .However, it must be clear that this seeming shift of loyalties involved no basic change. The image of Egypta had set into vibration an inward state that would inevitably express itself. . . it made no difference what the artistic environment or race culture was that I transmitted through the dance (St. Denis: 55-6).

This kind of thematic amalgam of exotica matched St. Denis’ eclectic mixture of artistic, philosophical, and spiritual impressions acquired through voracious reading and reflection. Filtered through the utopic idealism instilled in her by her mother and (to a lesser extent, her father), and reconstituted into unified, all-embracing spiritualism, dance became for St. Denis the mechanism of synthesis for her expression. And even in her first venture into this new art St. Denis confirmed her innate, unerring aesthetic sense of time and space by positioning her body as her commitment to what she called “truth and beauty”: In this rhetorical fiat, the material body is not so much denied as transposed into the figuration of transcendental vaules. Through her dance, St. Denis declared that she was presenting the mystic’s experience of unity with God (Desmond, Dancing Out the Difference: 261).

St. Denis worked to make this commitment recognized by audiences of Incense, and her subsequent sacred/exotic dances constitute developments and variations on that pattern (St. Denis: 277). In the process, she transformed herself from an impoverished American New Jersey farm girl into an international goddess of dance. In Incense, St. Denis straightforwardly presented herself to the audience as a dancer, choreographer, and an exotic character engaged in a spiritually-expressive state. To better understand how these identities were communicated to her audiences, it is useful to examine the movement and non-movement features of this dance. A detailed account of the movements in a performance for a video reconstruction of Incense is given in Appendix A. It is on this account that the following discussion is developed regarding how the movements successively combine to create meaning. As has been previously mentioned, St. Denis varied the details of this dance over the course of its many performances, and this video reconstruction is based on one of her later versions (Clark: interview, 30 January 2003).

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True to its introspective and self-absorbed nature, Incense contains no sudden movements thrust out into space, such as jumps or rapid changes of direction. Instead, each gesture grows out of the one preceding it and fades gradually into the one following, just as the fragrant smoke of burning incense slowly ascends and shifts suspended in the air without abrupt beginning or end. This predominant dynamic supports the impression of the performance as a sacred ritual, and transforms the stage area of Incense into sacred space: I was dimly aware [none of the temple dances] belonged in the theater . . .when I tried to invoke an atmosphere of worship. . .I tried to restate man’s primitive use of the dance as an instrument of worship. . . (St. Denis: 72).

As a Delsarte-informed ritual, each movement of Incense is deliberate and purposeful; only the effort required to accomplish each move is used, and what is not immediately engaged is left at repose, yet ready. As a reverie, the attention of the dancer is internal, almost trance-like. She follows a progression of development according to a compelling, unseen, yet irresistible impulse from within the center of her own body. Time and space seem to support an eternal now of being. Nothing is rushed; nothing is delayed. “A true Delsartian, St. Denis believed that each gesture should objectify an inner emotional state” (Shelton: 62). To accomplish this ritual, St. Denis employed natural and simple movements that non-dancers could perform, such as walking, kneeling, and standing. But out of this simplicity she presented a deliberate stylization; by slowing down the speed at which these movements are usually executed in ordinary life, St. Denis suggested otherworldly tasks. All her precise movements are neither hurried nor delayed, and invoke Western classical depictive traditions of Ancient Greek and Egyptian statuary styles in that they are performed so that the audience receives at all times an “open” (as opposed to “closed”)31 picture of the dancing that is symmetrically-composed in the performing space. While the torso faces the audience, the dancer offers a three-dimensional of head, hips, legs and/or arms in a way that recalls the contrapposto postures of Greek sculptures, and passes through positions in which one leg is relaxed with the rest of the body compensating balance invoking the Praxitelean curve32

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The dancer first presents herself and the offering tray held in front of her by directly facing the audience. This initial composition presents a symmetrically triangular balance with the dancer equidistant up stage center between the two incense burners, one positioned down stage right, and the other down stage left. A fourth point of reference is implied by the privileged position of the audience in a direct frontal line from the dancer. Although the dancer circles both incense burners, she does not move far from their implied perimeters. Both the dancer’s arrival at the beginning of the dance and departure at its end occur at the same central upstage point, between the folds of two hanging tapestries. This entrance and exit of presence is gradual and unassuming, just as there is no distinct moment of arrival or departure of the scent of incense. Within this confined, “diamond”-shaped space the whole dance and its experiential meanings are contained. The dancer’s first visible movement33 in Incense is a gentle rocking step toward the audience that establishes the variations of rippling movements of which the dance is composed. In this, as in all locomotive movements, the center (a point about two inches above the navel) of the dancer’s body leads, and it is from this center that all gesture unfolds and in turn is refolded. In keeping with the impression of an ordinary Hindu woman performing the ritual of puja, locomotion across the stage is accomplished in a fluid undulation. The carriage of the upper body is serene and simple, with the head slightly lifted. Transitions are always smooth and flowing, and once direction is indicated in the glance, the body goes there as if in direct obedience to the inclination of spirit. The impetus of movement always seems to arise in the center of the body to flow evenly outward to the extremities in a way that does not waste energy. During the dance (with one notable exception) all the joints of the body remain slightly flexed so that the dancer is able to gently sway the tray forward and back as she walks. The walk itself employs a sagittal34 rocking movement, as if testing the ground before a complete transfer of weight is executed. Together, the gentle swinging of the offering tray and her walk suggest the ebb and flow of breathing. This flexible impetus and yielding quality is graphically expressed in the stance of the dancer as she walks toward each incense burner. Her upstage arm reaches in front of her in the direction of her walk, palm outward, while the downstage hand supports the offering tray behind her.

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Besides being a sculpturally-interesting position of the upper body as she walks and inclines her head slightly from side to side, the position suggests an offering of the self spiritually before (i. e. in front of) the physical incense powder in the tray. Furthermore, it opens the tensions between a physical self transformed into ephemeral spirit the same way burning incense is transformed from powder into perfumed smoke. In this sense, St. Denis drew her audiences into an experience of time and space as insubstantial and unstable as perfume so that the enduring spirit inhabiting that temporary continuum is felt as eternally beyond it. As the dance builds to its climax, the body of the dancer is increasingly seized in sequentially flowing ripples—first of the arms as the incense burns, and finally into a full-bodied rippling. The surrender of the self to the deity is as gradual and irresistible as the lingering scent of smoke: The rising smoke of the incense was to me a symbol of devotion, of prayer and meditation, of the surrender of self and the ecstasy of release, and I attempted to say with my rippling arms and my whole body what I felt in my heart (St. Denis: 69).

Tensions between a substantial body and insubstantial smoke are enhanced by the choice of filmy drapery in the costume. The dancer in the video reconstruction examined for this study appeared to be wearing red trousers with a choli35 top. Over this, two semi- transparent veils were draped across her body; first a white veil, then a silver-trimmed dark-blue veil that covered her head and framed her face. She wore a thin silvery band across her forehead and a silver bangle on her right arm, and was barefoot. An examination of photographs, and accounts of those who saw St. Denis perform in Incense, reveals that the costume she wore was different36 (Shelton: photoplate facing page 55, captioned as having been taken in 1906). Although the Incense costume changed somewhat over time, it remained a “smoke-colored” sari made of a semi- transparent fabric plainly decorated37 and draped so that it both concealed and revealed St. Denis’attractive female form. The endpiece of the sari was draped over her head. St. Denis’ choli, or under-blouse was covered in pearls, and she wore a cap of little white flowers invoking strings of sweet-smelling jasmine that Hindu women often twist into their hair. Her feet and waist were bare.

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There are other differences between this early Incense photograph and the video reconstruction. For example, the dancer in this video reconstruction does not appear to be wearing more than standard dance makeup. St. Denis states that for her earliest performances of Incense she applied full body makeup that darkened her skin, emphasizing the illusion of remote exotic authenticity (Desmond, Dancing Out the Difference: 265). So effective was this illusion that she recalled press releases billing her as a kind of half-Indian royalty, trained in the esoteric arts of dance in a raja’s palace. Later, when her reputation as a serious concert dance artist was established St. Denis abandoned her darkened body makeup for the dance (St. Denis and Terry). In any case, the pale color of the sari augmented the impression of purity and devotion appropriate to the dancer. This illusion of seeming to “shine from within”, as if St. Denis were a candle flame38 was enhanced by controlled lighting designed for her by her “Brother Buzz”. Even beyond performing Incense, St. Denis seems to have been fond of this garb, for photographs of her teaching at Denishawn often show her and her students wearing saris (as well as Greek chitons) in this fashion, posing with peacock feathers, or in performance of many subsequent dances on Indian themes (Shelton, et. al.). The costume apparently also served as a “uniform” of authority not only in teaching Oriental dancing, but in lecturing the general public, as well. An early film documentary39 shows St. Denis standing on a darkened stage wearing a pale sari like the one in Incense and declaring that she, Fuller, and Duncan first invented modern dance. Claims of invention aside, the point here is that this speech claiming St. Denis’ preeminence in having instigated a wholly new dance form was made wearing an exotic costume that recalled the authority of oriental spiritualism which St. Denis established for herself in her first solo. Professor Jack Clark, who produced the video reconstructions of both Incense and Gnossienne used in this study explained during the course of several interviews with the author that he arranged this adaptation of costume to facilitate the dancer’s movements and preserve the essential qualities St. Denis required. St. Denis wrapped her sari according to both her perception of authenticity40 and the need to move unencumbered. Layers of transparent veils draped around the dancer’s body were intended to suggest the swirling qualities of smoke reflected in the mimed gestures.

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However, as previously noted, St. Denis’ costume was by no means a set element of the dance. St. Denis often changed the steps and accessories during her many years performing Incense: St. Denis not only changed costumes and settings for her dances, as whim or circumstance dictated, but she was also given to changing the dances themselves. . .her reason for the changes was simply that she got bored . . .(Terry: 73).

In any case, the consistent feature of “smoke-colored” veils compliments the implied narrative of the woman intent upon yielding her spirit to the divine, for in traditional Hindu India only renunciate, widowed women wore white or very pale-colored saris like the one in Incense. At the same time, the figure of the dancer swathed in gauzy near-white against a heavy, dark tapestry background produced quite a contrast between dancer and her surroundings. It is she who is light, airy, and as prone to shifts of feeling as smoke is to a breath of air; an insubstantial entity come briefly into the heavier, weighted material world. In this context, St. Denis draws upon Romantic ballet contexts, in which an otherworldly feminine elusiveness was swathed in plenty of white tulle41: While Romantic ballets had certainly exposed the female form, costuming it in gauzy skirts and tight-fitting bodices, many choreographers had promulgated images of chasteness and veiled voluptuousness as well (Tomko: xi).

The stage setting/dancer arrangement also recalled the formal seriousness of Delsartian Genevieve Stebbins and the classical connotations of Greek marble statuary mimicked in the tableaux vivants42. Several interesting features come into play when a performer assumes the characteristics of statuary. The figure becomes impersonalized and abstracted, or separated from common contexts of time and space. Furthermore, individual imperfections disappear in a generalized uniformity; details reside in the movements instead of superficial features such as hair color, complexion, etc. The image is depersonalized so that the person is transmuted out of the ordinary and the temporary into the eternal and rare.

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Correspondingly, the implication is that petty human imperfections are surpassed, and the dancer, associated with the classical beauty of antiquities found in museums, is equally rare, unique, and precious. In drawing upon Greek statuary for the imagery in Incense, St. Denis was in effect defying an impression of her experiential product as having been “mass produced”, even through grueling repetitions of “six a day” stints on vaudeville and tours repeating the same dance so many times that she would at one point collapse off stage, wailing that she was not a machine (St. Denis: 101). As did the avant-garde artists discussed in Chapter One, St. Denis with Incense referred to classical traditions without allowing her dance to become dominated by them; in other words, the materiality of the form is intended to support insubstantial feelings, or impressions instead of the other way around. An interesting tension is established in Incense with the figure of a woman who at once appears as enduringly posed in grace and beauty as a Greek statue of marble, and yet is as ephemeral as incense smoke and fragrance. The implication is that the “statuesque”43 St. Denis in Incense is to be revered on the stage with the same respect as a Greek statue on display in the Louvre. In this context, Incense is a work of art “turned upside down”. Instead of asserting that living flesh melts into mortality while statues endure, another kind of balance between “transient” and “eternal” is forged: the dancer in the here and now not only brings marble “to life” but suggests in her fleeting repeating dance the enduring quality of constant reinterpretation, while static, inorganic marble (and by extension any physical “representative” of the human including machines) can be smashed, eroded, or lost altogether44. Not only were the movements and costume of Incense eclectic, but also the music St. Denis chose for it. Her selection reflected what she considered to be a tasteful balance between the purulent and the grandiose; or, between the ballet music and popular , neither of which were “spiritual”. The task of finding the right music was harder than usual because St. Denis wished to distinguish herself as a different kind of dancer. As has been previously noted, other “exotic” dances of the time were usually thinly- disguised burlesque acts, and this status applied also to their staging and choice of music. Ralph Locke, in his essay, “Cutthroats, and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins, and Timeless

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Sands” discusses the adaptation of music with an exotic turn—from popular to traditional opera and ballet—for Western audiences: The use of simple materials was conditioned by many factors: the limitations of Western notation and Western instruments and performance traditions (both of which allowed no room for microtonal scales); the limitations of Western hearing and of the Western conception of the musical “work,” when confronted with the very different complexities of non-Western music. . .and, always, the underlying assumption that non- Western culture was inherently less elaborated. . .more easily reduced to a few concrete images. . . and musical devices (Locke: 117).

Unlike later dance artists, early pioneers like St. Denis, Fuller, and Duncan did not have the resources to commission music for their first works, and in any case, serious composers of the time—especially in America—were not given to writing music for dance. Generally, dancers were forced to rely on the variable talents of pick-up musicians found in each location they toured. Most of these only played piano, and their repertoire of music was limited. A rehearsal normally consisted of the dancer telling the pianist the kind of music wanted, and then a brief run-through to mark positions on stage, set the , and cut or augment measures as would fit the needs of the dance. Short, three-minute solos or duets with their simple, repetitive musical cues were ideal performing units. Since nearly every theatre had a piano, almost all the music was set for that instrument. Many vaudeville skirt dancers of all kinds, as well as both Fuller and Duncan did at least one dance to ’s Springtime, a piece of music now so cliché that only cartoon characters dance to it. But exotic dance did not depend on exotic music anyway; in fact, much of the music St. Denis used was Western in nature. As Margot Fontyn comments in her book, The Magic of Dance: [St. Denis] . . .was infused with a deeply sincere mystical conviction that made her a compelling performer, and undoubtedly she pioneered a public for serious dance with her oriental phantasies set to Occidental music (Fontyn: 98).

Certainly the tune “Little Egypt” was typical accompaniment for any dance acts on exotic ideas. The Fantasie arabe by “the wildly fashionable [European] pianist- composer, Frantz Hünten and arranged by Philipe Mustard” was according to Locke, the norm. He summarizes this tune’s corresponding popularity in America:

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Narrow in range and obsessive in its melodic patterning, it would have a second in America. . .even today this “Hoochy Kootchy Dance” as it is often known, probably remains the “exotic” tune best known throughout the Western musical world (Locke: 116).

But what St. Denis wanted was something fairly recognizable to Western musical tastes with just a hint of the Oriental to it; as simple and direct as her danced message in Incense. The rigors of touring her works through vaudeville circuits could not accommodate an orchestra, so St. Denis searched for piano-adaptive music that could provide a transition between a comfortable familiarity of popular tunes and the serious expressions of spiritual transcendence she was after. St. Denis relates that: I found it very difficult to find the music which would express these qualities. . .The Incense was not finished yet, but I had met Harvey Worthington Loomis, the composer, and heard one of his haunting little pieces, and I knew it belonged to the piece. He seemed pleased at my appreciation and dedicated the little piece to the Incense (St. Denis: 57-8).

St. Denis’ choice of an American composer who shared her ideals of a newly- revised American utopia was appropriate. Although biographical information about Harvey Worthington Loomis (1865-1930) is sketchy, it is noted that he was primarily inspired by Native American folklore in his piano pieces. He is also listed as a member of the Cornish Colony, a New England group of artists, writers, crafters, and composers active between 1895 and 1925. Members generally came from New York, and stayed full-time or part-time in the general area of the colony. Collectively, these artists inspired and encouraged one another toward realizing an Americanization of a past golden age. As part of this artistic and intellectual collective, Looms believed that his role in the effort should be to create music inspired by non-European sources even though he relied on established musical conventions of the West to convey them. His short piano composition for Incense followed Western musical conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm. At the same time, it evoked nostalgia for a lost memory of perfection appropriate to the wistful curves of St. Denis’ movements and poses. It is sweetly reverential—even introspectively sad—without being overly sentimental; the piece contains minor notes that fall in a simple melodic line without flourishes.

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Created on a utopian ideal of Orientalism as a basis for a uniquely American brand of mysticism, Loomis’ music suited St. Denis’ purposes well. Above all, the music did not stand out for itself in a way that overpowered the subtle movements of the dancer. Its climax rose gradually and logically; each phrase in the music built on the one that went before to imply a steady seeking for, and brief moment of connection with, divine communion. Finally, the music repeated its opening melody at its conclusion, just as the dancer exits in the same fashion as she entered the stage. Like the dance designed for it, the music was understated, suggesting a neo-classical ideal of restraint, moderation, and simplicity. Professor Clark, who created the video reconstruction used in this study, emphasized the importance of the musical structure to how St. Denis arranged the dance. The dynamics of the music were reflected in a corresponding physical/emotional response in the dancer of Incense, and this quality of matching visual meaning and auditory impression is consistent in nearly all of St. Denis’ subsequent dances. The fitting of the dance to the music depended largely on her intuitive sense of timing, which could—and evidently, according to associates often did—change from one performance to another: All through her long career, St. Denis was given to improvising. One of her dancers once said, “I think Miss Ruth has key places in all of her dances and she always gets to them on time, but what she does in between varies from performance to performance.” Left to her own devices, she was unfailingly effective, but it was sometimes difficult for her to adjust her own inspirational movements to the routines of others (Terry: 73).

No two audiences of Incense ever quite saw the same dance. This was due, in part, to the open-ended nature of choreography at the time. But even when St. Denis was able to hire her own accompanist (1884 -1964) a kind of informal arrangement between movement and music continued. Dorothy Madden, in her book, You Call Me Louis, not Mr. Horst, quotes Horst, who worked as the Denishawn accompanist from 1917 to 192745 on how dances were fitted to their music: There was no choreography in those days. We didn’t even know the word. You did sixteen bars, and then you heard the next sixteen bars and thought about what to do with them (Madden: 36).

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St. Denis dances even as late at 1917 tended to shift in length, become absorbed into larger works in good economic times and broken off as solos during bad times. When Horst accepted a pickup accompanying/ position with the Denishawn Company on two weeks’ trial, it was a vague and confusing start. Madden records that: There was no time to rehearse, only a moment or so to ask the dancers how some of the music went. Ted Shawn was there and went over his dances, but Miss Ruth was not present to explain her famous solos. The dancers’ answer to his question, “What’s this?”, holding a score, was: “Well, this goes yum, bum, bum, bum.” That was all he was given. . .some of the music was printed but most of it was in manuscript (Madden: 29).

Respect for the music as an integral part of performance was slow in coming, but over time, Shawn and St. Denis came to trust Horst, and offered their students an opportunity to study music with him in their school. Horst received top billing with Shawn and St. Denis during Denishawn’s tour, which was half concert, half vaudeville bookings. He engaged serviceable musicians to play the music, conducted with one hand and played the piano with the other, managed the tour while Shawn was in the army, and smoothed relations among artists in the company. Both Shawn and St. Denis praised Horst’s presence as one of incalculable worth. Due to his comments in rehearsal, St. Denis became aware of the fact that her dance changed every time it was performed, and he impressed upon her the need to more closely fix the dance to the music: The cut and paste system was what Miss Ruth was using for her dances. She had been criticized about her choice, mish-mash, and use of music and admitted that the criticism was valid as she knew little about music. Eventually she credited her musical growth to Louis and Ted (Madden: 34). Complimenting the intimacy of movements and music, the stage setting for Incense is simple, even austere. In the video reconstruction of the dance used for this study, the dancer is close to the audience and on the same level. There is no special surface on the floor. A plain scrim provides the background, and the audience sees the entrance and exit of the dancer to and from the upstage center of the area where the dance proper begins and ends.

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The performance is moderately well lit with general lighting. It provides for no particular distinction in any area of the stage or segment of the dance above any other; in other words, the lighting remains uniform over all areas of the dance space and unchanged throughout the dance. While it is speculated that the original lighting conditions for Incense were, based upon both St. Denis’ and Terry’s descriptions of it, probably subdued to promote the atmosphere of a predawn ritual and mystic ambiguity, it still was carefully controlled. She probably had been impressed by how effective good lighting schemes acted in support of Fuller’s performances in Paris (Chapter One). As with other elements of performance, what St. Denis began in Incense she proceeded to develop in her subsequent dances. Shawn’s student, Barton Mumaw recalls to Jane Sherman in her book, Barton Mumaw, Dancer, the extent to which lighting was important to St. Denis: . . .look to Ruth St. Denis, a true lighting innovator in her day, who maintained that, “You cannot talk lighting. You have to do it.” Working with and learning from her, Shawn often complained that she had no conscience about expense when it came to that department (Sherman: 311).

The stage space of Incense is otherwise bare except for two tall incense burners placed downstage left and right. Although they are listed here as part of the stage set, the burners serve several implicit and actual functions to enhance meaning in the dance itself. As the dancer moves between them, the burners provide important symmetrical spatial points of reference. They in effect frame the movements of the solo dancer, not unlike the way in which the heavy, ornate borders of the Egyptian Deities cigarette poster framed the seated goddess Isis. The two burners also offer supporting points of an equilateral triangle in which the dancer is the apex. In this function the burners serve as symmetrically-stationary parts of the stage set, interacting visually with the dancer as a visual stasis contrasting with her movements. However, when the dancer adds incense powder to them, they also take on the function of props, pouring out fragrant smoke. The stir of the air around her as she dances, “choreographs” these swirls of smoke, as if they had been veils tossed by servants. And finally, if the positions of the burners are taken in context with subsequent St. Denis dances, they also imply a supernumerary function as non-dance bodies.

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The smoke arising from the incense burners is left to the imagination in this reconstruction. However, in her autobiography, St. Denis specifically states that the incense burners were lit, and gave off their perfumed smoke while she performed her dance46. She also had incense burners lit in the foyer of the theatre at its first public performance, and required that the exotically-attired ushers move about with quiet efficiency in greeting the audience. This pre-performance condition incorporating the sense of smell promoted an atmosphere of reverence and authentic sanctity associated with a temple for the audience (Terry: 53). The dancer bears in her hands an offering tray from which she grasps powdered incense to be burned. This tray is a physical property in service of a spiritual ritual enactment. Its connection with the physical body of the dancer is established in the opening movements of the dance in the way she sways it forward and back parallel to the forward and back sway of her walk. The dancer manages the tray smoothly, shifting it from hand to hand and supporting it with hands and palms as an extension of her arm. The tray furthermore suggests smaller points of triangles spaced evenly on either side of the dancer’s face as it is lifted to the right and to the left. Its function of containing an offering to the deity is emphasized, just as the body of the dancer “contains” a desire for divine communion. When the dancer lifts her tray high over her head it symbolically marks an intermediation between heaven and earth. It is placed on the ground in front of the dancer while she undulates her entire body as if she had been converted into insubstantial smoke. In that position the tray acts as a physical, immobile and “grounded” marker to which the dancer refers (that is, she does not move away from her position directly up stage center of the tray) even as she is freed from the confines of the earth as suggested by her undulations. The offering tray (like the incense burners) metaphorically supports the dancer in the opposing tensions of permanent materiality and the impermanent, ephemeral qualities of the dance. Through its position in front of her on the floor and the ceremonious way it is placed there and picked up again, the tray’s framing function is both spatial and temporal. The tray and incense burners frame the dancer in Incense, who is at once worshipping and to be worshipped, lit up inside the little black of the theatre to be

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admired at a distance, but never touched. These conditions promoted an atmosphere of reverence lifted out and away from modern life into a realm of unchanging sanctity: Some scholars suggest that the American brand of orientalism represented a rejection of the fluctuating modern world, a retreat to the sacred societies of the East as primitive havens of spiritual order (Shelton: 55)

The success of Incense established St. Denis as a serious artist with a spiritual message for her audiences. It became the first in a life-long series of dances for St. Denis that explored an astonishing range of different exotic themes and narratives from India, Egypt, Japan, and China collectively, from traditional legends and stories to ideas of her own; and across Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian sources. A distinct psychological division was established in St. Denis’ Oriental dances to separate the dancer from her audience, and in no dance is this more pronounced than in Incense. This “intimately remote” relationship is maintained even in her “music visualizations”, which nominally had no theme except to physically express the dynamics of the music. In the flowing, organic process of dancing life itself becomes suspended, a quality St. Denis touches upon in describing why exotic themes held such a renewing fascination for her in so many of her dances: . . . I am in a more harmonious state of being than at any other time. . .The anxious, commonplace moods of ordinary living are excluded. . .I find a real escape from the limited sense of life. . .Human relations are suspended and the sense of age—of being any particular age—is nonexistent. . .(277).

There are a number of elements in Incense to which St. Denis consistently returned even in her last works. These include the use of veil-like drapes (often white) for costumes that both reveal and conceal the feminine body; a central orientation in the stage space to focus on the solo dancer in slow, meditative movements flowing into and out of iconic pose invoking gentle introspection. St. Denis dances noted for such qualities in particular include Kuan Yin (1919), White Jade (1926), and Color Study of the Madonna (1934). In her discussion of the art and popular appeal of St. Denis’ career, “Into the Mystic with Miss Ruth”, dance writer Christena Schlundt points out the continued success of lighting and costuming first pioneered in Incense:

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Her [St. Denis’] stages were light shows long before the term existed . . .suggestive shadows revealed deep mysteries. . .yardage surrounded her like foothills around a mountain. She stirred, whipped, churned them, settled them in meaningful peace (Schlundt: 6).

The influence St. Denis had on other dance artists is nearly incalculable and a topic of greater scope than is possible to fully discuss here. However, it is appropriate to mention that Incense and the performance aesthetic for which it stood profoundly influenced the work of both her partner Ted Shawn (whose work Gnossienne is discussed in greater depth in Chapter Three) and their Denishawn student, Martha Graham. While she studied more directly with Shawn, Graham nevertheless mastered movement qualities and the centrally-staged soloist for dramatic point of view that had become St. Denis trademarks indicated in Incense. These include contrasts between reaching away from and yielding to gravity in kneeling or sinking, bare feet that feel the contours of the ground, and movements originating from the center of the body. in her discussion of the first modern dancers in America from her book, The Book of the Dance, makes the connection between such dance movements and the exotic, non-Western themes that gave them expression. She47 says of Graham that she was: . . .influenced at first by St. Denis’ Oriental studies. . .the use of the ground, the kneeling, squatting, rising, and sinking, which is an essential part of Oriental dancing and found nowhere in any Western form, she incorporated into her style. She also appropriated the Oriental use of the foot, the shifting and sliding on the earth, the curling of the toes to act as a hinge. . .she stressed continuous unfolding movement from a central core, as in all Oriental movement, but she added spasm and resistance which are not characteristic of the East at all (de Mille: 157).

Even when there were other dancers on stage with her, St. Denis occupied a central position. So often were other dancers appearing in a kneeling position on either side of her in highly symmetrical arrangements, that it is a small reach of the imagination to consider the two incense burners for her first dance a pair of “silent” dancers. Very quickly the two burners were replaced by two diagonally-positioned rows of seated Indian men (ostensibly worshipers) in the later Radha. This central focus was also adopted by Graham.

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The idea of centrality in Incense is not really a new one: the arrangements and movements of groups on stage in Denishawn dance works were comparable to those of classical ballet. The Swan Queen in (Petipa: 1895) occupies the center of the stage and the focus of the audience flanked on either side by the corps du ballet swans kneeling and posing in support of her star position. Not only did the groups support the individual, but also the male supported and framed the female. In partnership with Ted Shawn, St. Denis was usually down stage (i. e. in front, from the audience point of view) from him, so that his masculinity framed and presented the central perception of her feminine point of view, not unlike the traditional ballet in which the male dancer’s main purpose is to showcase the ballerina. Graham learned very well from St. Denis how to centrally position herself in solos and maintain oppositional contrast in larger group works so that the audience is always connected with her character’s point of view. If, as is the case in Graham’s Primitive Mysteries (1930), the group of women around her are standing and jumping in unison, she is seated quietly in the center of their activity. If the group is in dark colors, she is in white, to emphasize not only her perspective of singularity facing a group, but also her isolation—her seprateness—from the group. This central position in the work, whether solo or ensemble, was so much a feature of her dances that Graham, when once asked by a naïve stage hand where center stage was, firmly replied, “Wherever I am, that is center stage.”48 Probably one of the most noticeable influences St. Denis had on Graham was in the area of lighting, costume, and props. It has been noted that Graham is “fond of capes and veils” (Leatherman: 141). In Acrobats of God (1960) Graham wore a vividly-hued sari, the end of which trailed behind her on the ground: A red-yellow-orange-gold strapless evening dress with a cumbersome train, it is a sari given to her [Graham] by Rukmini Devi when she was in Madras. Revering it as a gift and as a garment, she refused to cut it and spent many hours at the mirror draping and redraping it about her before she fashioned it to suit herself (Leatherman: 29).

Many of Graham’s costumes have the comparable effect of both covering and revealing the body as St. Denis’ sari did for her in Incense. In some of Graham’s dances, though, the body of the dancer seems pitted against the costume. Ropes entangle, drapes

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smother, and skirts drag against the legs and feet. In Clytemnestra (1958), Graham wears a veil covering the back of her head and falling to the ground in a way that recalls St. Denis’ veil in Incense with the effect of mystery, of concealing and revealing the female form, and indicating her character’s separation from other dancers and the audience. But in the same piece Graham also wraps a long length of cloth around herself, the ends of which are bolted to the floor of the stage on either side of her. While St. Denis used these objects to serve her spiritual message, Graham employed the same symbolic choices to reveal a psychological experience of the human condition. Generally for Graham, costumes and their properties of drape, lighting, and movement are integral components of the dance in question: Fundamental to her approach is the old sense of the significance of dress, of dressing as ritualistic change. . .that sense which has, except. . .in certain rites of the churches. . .all but vanished from the modern mind. It permeates Martha’s plays. Her characters, in particular those she portrays, are often ritually dressed in the course of the action or they shed outer garments to convey changes not of worldly status but of states of mind and heart (Leatherman: 139).

But in the use of props, Graham pushed their use deeper into symbolic meaning than St. Denis did. St. Denis used her focus on the offering tray in Incense to modestly draw her eyes downward and emphasize how the impetus for her walk came from the center of her body as if pulled forward and out away from her by the tray. She referred to the two burners on each side of the stage almost as if they were supporting dancers. But Graham’s dances had characters manipulating , stylized daggers, ropes, whips, fans, and even wind chimes to the extent that in some of her pieces the differences in function between props, sets, and costumes become indisinguishable. For example, Jocasta’s hair ornament in Night Journey (1947) refers both to her mythological name (“Shining Moon”) and the sickle-shaped robe brooch with which Oedipus blinded himself. And the umbilical cord binding Jocasta to Oedipus is the same cord she uses to hang herself. Just as St. Denis built her spiritualism on exoticism, Graham built her psychological dramas on the previously-established spiritualism of St. Denis. One striking difference, however, between Graham and St. Denis lies in the use they made of music in their dances. St. Denis conscripted existing Western-style pieces that could be

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played on the piano, and that suggested Oriental themes. But Graham commissioned nearly all her music specifically for each piece. And while St. Denis followed the melodic and rhythmic line of the music with a corresponding sequence of movements to achieve an emotional concordance between them, Graham dance movements cohabited the same time as the music in a way that allowed both music and dance to make separate, yet emotionally-associated statements. The other dance artist upon whom St. Denis exerted considerable influence was her partner, Ted Shawn. He records that in March of 1911 he first saw her perform, and that the vision she presented to him of a sacred being wholly absorbed in dance left a deep impression: I had seen the Russians a few months before, and although I marveled, they had awakened nothing deep in me. But when I saw Incense I wept— not caring that it was in a crowded theater. . .I date my own artistic birth from that night (Terry: 84).

The statement is curious, given that the Ballets Russes did not come to the United States until 1913; it is speculated that Shawn may have instead seen Gertrude Hoffman’s parody of the works the Russians had been presenting in Paris. In any case, Shawn had already set upon a dancing career. He did not like ballet particularly, but he discovered he did like to dance. After joining with several partners (notably Norma Gould) for tea dance performances, teaching and even a film documentary, Dance Through the Ages, Shawn answered an advertisement in 1914 from St. Denis who was looking for a partner. Joseph Mazo describes Shawn’s for St. Denis in his book, Prime Movers: The next day he [Shawn] danced for her [St. Denis]; he performed an Aztec dagger dance which St. Denis later described as “one of those rather crude and simple rhythmic dances which in after years one looks back upon with a kind of loving tolerance” (92).

Even so, St. Denis was impressed with Shawn, and they spent time together talking about their artistic goals. They married and combined their names into Denishawn, an organization that would become a school and performing group to frame their partnership.

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Shawn’s professional and personal life with St. Denis was unusual for a man. While she was called “Miss Ruth” and preserved the distant benign persona of the goddess even with her most intimate students, Ted Shawn was simply called “Ted”: Ted Shawn was never a great dancer. . .but his choreography was exceptional by current standards, and he had a flair for mixing art and business in the right proportions, cleverly devising programs that allowed St. Denis her mystic vein but ended with a dash of ragtime jazz. . . (Fontyen: 108)

St. Denis was the dominant performing artist and more publicly recognized, but Shawn was certainly the more methodical in directing and teaching students, dealing with performance technical support, and devising choreography. While St. Denis drew upon the students for her productions, teaching was less interesting to her than dancing. By contrast, it was mainly in the context of the school that Shawn created a great many different kinds of dances, from large production numbers to brief solos for himself, of which Gnossienne was one. When his professional and personal partnership with St. Denis had effectively dissolved in 1920, remnants of the Denishawn school continued with him until 193149. Both St. Denis and Shawn had serious spiritual messages to convey through their dancing but their differences in dealing with the exotic in spiritual service were pronounced. While Shawn claimed to be a missionary for the right of men to dance with dignity, and (after Denishawn) worked diligently to realize his all-male company of dancers, all of St. Denis’ exotic dances carried mystic, spiritual messages that were deeply connected to her sense of self as a person and as a performing artist. But Orientalism did not suit Shawn’s athletic ideal of the expressive male dancer. Although he produced his own Arabian Nights fantasy with Julnar of the Sea in 1919 and from time to time incorporated Oriental themes, this was a realm that remained St. Denis’ preserve. While St. Denis’ remote exoticism permeated every dance including her music visualizations, Shawn’s dances seemed to draw audiences into closer identification with the dancer, often with an element of humor even when his themes had an exotic basis. St. Denis was always the goddess. But Shawn constantly changed characters, from contemporary (Frohsinn: 1920) to ethnic studies of a profane nature (any of his Spanish or Jazz pieces) to divine subjects (The Cosmic Dance of Shiva: 1926). Although he often

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took himself as seriously as did St. Denis, Shawn was not without a sense of humor in his dances, a trait he actively passed on to one of his male students, Charles Weidman. Still, Shawn did not often successfully combine attributes of physical athelticism, spiritual expression, and exotic material, except in his Native American dances. This may have been due, in part to gender codes of the period. St. Denis assumed her performing role as a woman, but Ted Shawn’s entry into dance was a different matter altogether. At a time when the reputation of all professional dancers was morally suspect, and the status of a man who danced was even lower than that of a woman (especially in the United States), Shawn summoned a missionary’s zeal to bring the male dancer into full artistic respectability. In nearly all dance performances of the time, women dominated the stage. Since a man dancing with sincere expressiveness on a par with poetry was so rare, the dances and dancing of Ted Shawn was an exotic event, and he was not slow to realize the potential of “the never-when, never-where” ambiguity of distant lands and cultures that had become a staple of St. Denis’ work. His negotiation of his artistic balance led him to develop themes first using ancient Aztec images, and then drawing on Native American and African-American traditions in which St. Denis had less interest. While he did create some “Far East” dances, Shawn is more well-known for being the first American male dancer of any note to bring Native American themes into the concert stage repertoire, among them Osage-Pawnee Dance of Greeting (1930), and Xochitl (1920) based on an ancient Aztec theme, and in which he had as his partner the young Martha Graham. A fuller discussion of Shawn’s dance art expressed in Gnossienne is the topic of Chapter Three. The point to remember here is that Shawn’s greatest artistic influence in the years leading up to Gnossienne was St. Denis, who, like a “mother/wife” (a role associated with the goddess Isis) guided his choices in everything from choreography to costumes. How he was able to reinterpret a feminine-dominant expression of spiritualism in dance into a masculine one will be examined presently. With Incense, St. Denis arrived on the American dance scene just following Duncan and Fuller, absorbing lessons of stagecraft from each. Along with her experiences in vaudeville, dime museums, and with Belasco, she learned the value of adaptability and Oriental mysticism in a uniquely American context. A determined survivor who insisted that her audiences respect her seriously spiritual message, St. Denis

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arranged the sequencing of solos in her dance programs to accommodate widely varying performing conditions, from those of a salon in a private, upper-class home50 to vaudeville tour stops and concert stages: She [St. Denis] made the middle class take account of itself, and if the form she used was less dance than pantomime, more spectacle than ritual, it was nonetheless magnificent, poetic pageantry in the grand romantic style (Palmer: 57)

Incense introduced St. Denis as a spiritual dance artist and Orientalist dancer. Each dance in the cluster of which Incense came first was designed to be as flexible as St. Denis’ personal appeal. Such dances had to be capable of being inserted or withdrawn from any given production on short notice, and generalized enough in content to allow for the rigors of repetitive performance and touring. This modular construction is consistent with St. Denis’ method, successfully pioneered in Incense, of going through the creative process by negotiating between her inspirational content and a systematic procedure to realize it as a staged presentation. Incense is an interesting example of early Twentieth Century avant-garde experimentation. In it, St. Denis maintained a sober, serious tension between her exotic East Indian theme that all too easily could have disintegrated into a salacious entertainment, and her uplifting message of spiritual transformation. Neither popular dance, nor ballet familiar to middle-class sensibilities, dominated Incense, and yet its features drew from each. This tension at first confused, then intrigued her audiences, who were captivated by her combination of sensual visual appeal and remote distance from possession by a male gaze. She was, first and last, “unavailably accessible”, an artistic “wife and mother” who inspired many across a great divide of the footlights. Like its creator, Incense invoked the geographic distance of India, yet spoke to a particularly American ideal. St. Denis’ stage conditions for the dance, regardless of venue, condensed time and space into an intimate expression of human yearning for union with the divine. Drawing heavily upon Delsarte principles of movement and meaning which were particularly understood by her female audiences who had studied the exercises or performed themselves in tableaux vivants, St. Denis used natural, ordinary movements that non-dancers could do, but invested them with ritual symbolism.

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Passing imperceptibly from one pose to the next in the dance, she made of Incense a commencement oratory of the dancing body in service of expressive desire. St. Denis asserted the unique, organic interpretation and reinterpretation of the human body charged with obedience to the soul; an attitude toward physicality Western culture had not seen since the Renaissance. As much a Romanticist as Duncan, St. Denis presented the individual—in this case, female—as the beleaguered yet undefeated Romantic heroine in the role of society’s guide and educator into a utopic idealism. Despite vaudeville tours, Incense defied a precision that implied mechanization of human gesture and feeling. That kind of experiential commodity was one St. Denis determined could never be exactly the same twice; never precisely reproducible. The worshipper of Incense performed her simple ritual many, many times, and each time it was the first.

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END NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

1 The term “legitimate” was often used at the turn of the century to distinguish between “highbrow” stage presentations based on themes that enobled typically high-class audiences with an educational or uplifting context, based on European aesthetics and traditional arts and “lowbrow” entertainments that pleased or titillated low-class audiences, such as dime museums, fairs, and vaudeville.

2 The term “independent” here means that St. Denis retained artistic expressive control rather than following a “genre” pattern established in both popular dance and the ballet. In this context the combined expression of the woman and the artist is perceived as a human one, instead of the image of a woman acting as a vehicle for the expression of male fantasy.

3 Dance historians Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp place the Romantic Period in ballet as commencing with the appearance of Marie Taglioni in La Syphide and ending when the male dancer as porter (i. e. “the ballerina’s third leg”) was banished entirely from the 1870 Paris Opera production of Coppélia. The male hero Franz in that production was fetchingly portrayed by a girl (147).

4 Some distinction needs to be made between the terms purdah and puja. Purdah is a Moselm term incorporated into North Indian Hindu life signifying the secretion of respectable women away from the public (masculine) eye. It refers to covering the head and sometimes (as in wedding ceremonies) the face; to providing a separate screened gallery for women only at public presentations; and to allowing the women of the household private access to the home or temple shrine (usually before dawn) for worship when no men are present. Puja refers to the Hindu practice of offering the deity flowers, food, milk, and incense as part of the ritual worship that includes requests for blessings, favors, thanksgiving, and praise. St. Denis’ use of these words indicates that she very well understood the religious and practical distinctions between them; some of her commentators, however, confused these terms.

5 An “open” position for the performer is one that does not “block” or “close off” the body from the point of view of the audience. If the lower part of the body below the hips is turned away from view, for example, the upper part counterbalances the turning by facing the audience, or the downstage arm is carried lower than the upstage one so as to not cover the face. There is in these visual stage conventions an awareness of where the audience is at all times.

6 A “Chinese Gamine” dance taught to the author by one of St. Denis’ Denishawn students includes a good deal of pantomime, shrugging, eye-rolling, and mugging at the audience.

7 In this photograph, St. Denis wears a sari draped in the modern Nivi style, which had been prevalent in India since the early 1900’s (Lynton: 71). Her sari hem, however, is lifted well above her ankles, as would be practical for dance even though the correct sari length for a Hindu woman of quality is that it should fall just above the toes. Earlier photographs of St. Denis in the dance wearing a sari show the hem in its correct length. It was speculated by Sherman that St. Denis may have “hiked” up the hem in response to vaudeville and burlesque managers requiring her to “show a little leg” (Tomko: 73).

8 National Geographic writer Pallava Bagla (April 23, 2002) discusses the disappearing street performance of India’s snake charmers as an art handed down from father to son, indicating that women were not included in its near-mystic/magic techniques in managing poisonous live cobras. A photograph of St. Denis in the dance appears in Shelton’s biography of her (facing page 78) wearing what would have corresponded to masculine attire. Women street performers sang, danced, or played musical instruments. arts such as snake charming and fortune-telling (in India, at least) belonged to a male preserve, though the precise caste and religious affiliations of these performers seems to have been indeterminate; a fortune teller, for example, may variously call upon a series of Hindu deities and throw in a couple of references to Islam’s Allah and “The Beloved Mother of Christ” for good measure. However, Terry’s description of the dance states that the snake charmer of St. Denis’ interpretation is a “dirty, evil-looking woman” (Terry: 54). It is possible that both St. Denis’ yogi and snake charmer more accurately belonged to that ambiguously-gendered category she had enjoyed growing up as a “tomboy”.

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9 This arm ripple was evidently something St. Denis had developed previous to Incense, for she mentions in her autobiography that her friend Bob Scully wrote to her advising her to keep it in while she was working on the first Hindu dances, of which Incense was one (St. Denis: 57).

10 A yogi is a male renunciate; a yogini is the female counterpart. Few Hindu women—especially beautiful young ones—disappear into the jungles to seek God because they were far more valuable to their families as wives and mothers. Living in solitude in the jungle and begging once a day for food is an uncomfortable lifestyle, and a single female was considered far more vulnerable to “demonic influences” than a single male of any age. The last phase of a Hindu Brahmin’s life in old age was to give away all his possessions and enter a life of simple contemplation and withdrawal from society. In this he was accompanied by his wife if he was married.

11 St. Denis persuaded a miscellaneous group of Indian men living in New York ranging from students at university to “unmistakable neer-do-wells” to first play music and answer her questions, and then sit on the stage as if in worship for Radha (St. Denis: 58).

12 The term “goddess” is here used to emphasize the centrality of St. Denis’ figure on the stage scene as if it were a in which St. Denis occupies the position of a deity attended both by on-stage “worshippers” and by implication, the “off-stage worshippers” of the audience. Strictly speaking, Radha is not the name of a goddess in the Hindu pantheon, a fact of which St. Denis was quite aware (St. Denis: 57). As she explains in her autobiography describing the creation of this dance, St. Denis liked the name of the very lovely mortal girl whom the Vishnu avatar Krishna loved best of all the gopis (cow-herd girls). Radha is revered in written and oral traditions as an example of earthly love of the divine and she is often depicted in paintings and statues as Krishna’s beloved; she is not, however, worshipped separately. Symbolically, Radha represents a sympathetic, compassionate intermediary between human and divine not unlike a Christian Madonna.

13 It was believed that when the Dennis family took in a girl who was pregnant out of wedlock, Emma planned to execute an abortion. Neighbors called her to court on the matter, an incident which left a strong impression of unstable social acceptance with Ruthie (Shelton: 7).

14 St. Denis attributed her “illegitimacy” of birth with having invested her with a sense of being born a kind of rebel to law and social norm; that she never quite had a firm foundation upon which she could rely. This impression may speculatively have impelled her to the intense reinvention of herself through her art that characterized her artistic and personal relationships (Shelton: 7).

15 Both St. Denis and her mother became converts to this “practical theology”

16The term “natural” in this context meant an easy, unimpeded flow of correspondence between feelings and the physical body. Many Delsarte exercises contain a meditative stance impelled by suggestive imagery to place the mind in the desired frame and a relaxation of the body. Only those muscles required to execute the movement were to be engaged. Grace was a simple succession of movements that were truthful and beautiful because all that was tense or artificial had been removed.

17 Stebbin’s “uniform of authority” costume is invoked by St. Denis’ choice of a “smoke-colored” sari, and her green drapes have a counterpart in the tapestries that provided a backdrop to Incense. The correlation between sari and Greek robes is not all that odd; during the Chola Dynasty in South India (300BC to 1250AD), Greek soldiers made their careers as policemen, forming a unique caste (Yadeva) of Hindu society all their own. Hindu historians have informed the author that this also meant a cultural exchange between pre-Hellenic Greek and Hindu societies, including dress.

18 One popular dime museum concert performance type brought indoors from the circus in cold weather was the tableaux vivant. A few covertly catered to salacious appetites with naughtily “nude” models that were covered in white paint (Sobel: 24).

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19 Some dime museum tableaux were elaborately expressive, such as “The Happy Family”, in which a beautiful young woman sat among a menagerie of live animals, none of which—amazingly--disturbed each other in the show (Laurie: 168 ).

20 Tony Pastor’s Palace Theater in New York was at the top of the vaudeville pyramid for class acts imported from Europe (including leading actors and opera singers) and the best American performers (Snyder, Sobel, et. al).

21 Belasco recognized in St. Denis’ dancing a curious “virginal sensuality” and gave her the nickname Ruth St. Denis by she was known ever since. While she worked for him, St. Denis proposed the idea of creating for herself a “Madame Butterfly” dance. Although the project never materialized, the idea suggests that even before her episode with the Egyptian cigarette poster, St. Denis had an interest in developing Oriental dances (Shelton: 41).

22 This production formula was first applied to Radha.

23 The title “Little Egypt” was taken by any of a number of “exotic” dancers of the time. Donna Carlton’s book, Looking for Little Egypt discusses this entertainment phenomenon of the time.

24 A series of Edison shorts demonstrating film’s debt to vaudeville format appears in the video reconstruction, The Great Primitives. Details of this documentary video are unavailable at this time.

25 These were specific objections Emma had to female dress of the time, and she sought to free her daughter from them (Kendall, Shelton, et al).

26 The author was unable to locate the precise context of this quote, which was evidently from an uncited article by the stage manager called, “the Hindu Dances of Miss Ruth St. Denis”.

27 By the time St. Denis met Edmund Russell, Henrietta had left him and continued as a serious teacher of Delsarte. Shawn later encountered her and learned from her as Mrs. Hoving.

28 If this outfit imitated the dress of the Hindu Swami Vivekananda, who made a dramatic appearance at the Parliament of World Religions in 1893, it is speculated that it was either white or saffron, colors associated with a renunciate holy man. If so, it would have made a stark contrast against a dark background, as if the man was “illuminated from within”. Russell, for all his emphasis upon the spoken word in his presentations did not neglect his visual impact. Not only did he dress the part, but on occasion dressed his faithful black nanny in Indian clothes to lend authenticity to the event as she ushered invited guests to refreshments, or to be seated for the reading. The creation of a total atmosphere in the surroundings of the performance of Orientalism was not lost on St. Denis who, for her earliest performances of Incense, had Indian ushers seat the audience, and the scent of incense burning before the start of her dance.

29 St. Denis reports that at one point her questions on religion prompted a violent argument between a Hindu Indian and a Moslem Indian (St. Denis: 58).

30St. Denis’ friend Bob Scully is credited in her autobiography with urging her to keep rippling arm movements which so fascinated audiences of Incense (St. Denis: 57). St. Denis proudly recalls also that a group of German physicians who had seen her perform the dance on tour in respectfully requested to examine up close the physical mechanism by which she accomplished the illusion. It is interesting that modern versions of the classical ballet Swan Lake (Petipa: 1895) viewed by the author also contain a similar arm ripple performed by the “white swan” Odette in Act II.

31 An means that the stage picture of the performer shows the front of the body; closed refers to a view of the back. In Delsartian terms, an open position implies honesty and a straightforward expression. A implies or secrecy. Everything the dancer does in Incense is visible to

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the audience; particularly, she does not turn her upper body away from the audience even when arms or legs cross. When she kneels, the downstage leg is down, and arm movements to each side lift and descend in a way that leaves her face and upper torso open to view. These open positions are characteristic of Greek sculpture, influenced by stylizations of the human body in Ancient Egyptian renderings (Matthews and Platt: 81).

32 Matthews and Platt briefly describe this convention of Greek statuary as exemplified in the sculptor Praxitles’ Hermes with the Infant , in which the figure of Hermes is lounging in a casual yet dignified pose that presents the body in a gentle S curve (Matthews and Platt: 81).

33In this reconstruction the dancer visibly walks into the stage area from the right and takes a position facing the audience once she has reached up center stage. As she pauses there, she forms the apex of a triangle with the two incense burners from the point of view of the audience. In the earliest performances by St. Denis, however, the dancer approached the stage unseen by the audience while the first few bars of the music were played. The first she is seen, she goes through the central opening provided by two ornate cloth hangings, already facing the audience.

34 Front to back relative to direction of locomotion, as opposed to swaying from side to side which would convey a more sexual connotation.

35 A choli is a short, form-fitting cotton blouse usually worn only under the drape of a sari, the sleeves of which reach to the elbow or it may be sleeveless. A salwar chemise is a long, loose fitting tunic over matching trousers that is ample in the hips and fitted tightly at the ankles. Around 1900, Sikh and Moslem women of North India wore salwars while in the Hindu South, saris were favored (Lyton: 71).

36 Professor Clark explained to the author that this choice of costume at variance from St. Denis’ sari had to do with the fact that saris, draped and tucked, have a disconcerting tendency to unravel in movement. The author had ample opportunity to experience the embarrassment of tripping over the hem of a sari in exiting a public bus in Madras. It is not known how St. Denis kept her sari in place, but it is speculated by the author that she would likely have had to pin it rather aggressively.

37 Most saris (with the exception of those worn by widows) are brightly-colored and a wedding sari particularly should have a trim heavily embroidered in gold thread, “the width of which should be no less than the length of the bride’s forearm” (author’s travel diary).

38 As has been previously discussed, St. Denis saw Loie Fuller perform at the Paris Exposition while on tour with Belasco in 1900. Fuller’s use of colored lighting on volumes of silk for a stunning effect would surely have impressed upon St. Denis the potential of effective controlled lighting.

39 Trailblazers of Modern Dance WNET/13, 1979. However, it is interesting that St. Denis was visible only from the neck down.

40 It is speculated that St. Denis learned how to wrap a sari from descriptions given to her by men who might not necessarily have known exactly how it is done. Young girls traditionally learn this skill only from older female relatives who, in the author’s experience, take great delight and care in estimating the girl’s height, build, coloring, caste, family status, personality, and demeanor before advising on the precise kinds of saris she should wear to appear her best. Only girls who have had their first period are allowed to wear saris; prior to that, they wear “half-saris” (a full length skirt, choli, and short veil) as soon as they can walk. The two main styles of wrap come from the North and South. In the North, influenced by Islamic political rule and cultural domination since 1206, women drape the endpiece of the sari over the head so that its decoration shows in front. Older style saris of the North drape the endpiece over the right shoulder but this practice went out of style in India by 1900 and the Nivi style from the South (in which the sari endpiece goes over the left shoulder and shows its ornate border in back) became universal (Lynton: 71). One reason St. Denis might not have been able to consult the wives of the merchants who helped her select sari fabric and explained Hindu rites to her is that those wives probably could not speak English. While the

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English language became nearly universal in the South along with the “mother tongue”, Hindi persisted in the North (The Story of English, by Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil, Viking, 1986, page 39). In later photographs, St. Denis draped her sari various ways, sometimes with the endpiece over the left shoulder, but one section always covered her head. This suggests to the author that the Hindus she consulted were probably from North India. This impression is reinforced by photographs of some of them sitting on stage on either side of St. Denis as Radha; they wear a head wrap which is also characteristic of North India influenced by Islam; in the South, men do not wear it.

41 In this context, St. Denis reverses ballet convention, for while ballet dancers of the time cased their waists in corsets and their feet in stiff toe shoes, St. Denis’ waist and feet were bare.

42 It is ironic that the marble statues are treasured as white, when evidence indicates they had originally been painted over to more closely resemble living human beings.

43 This quality of statues and statue-posing invested with an eternal beauty free of human imperfection is an important theme in Oscar Wilde’s play, A Perfect Husband.

44 Delsarte books featuring photographs of Greek statuary that were intended to serve as inspiration credit that many of the statues were to be found in the Vatican, and that they were Roman copies of Greek originals that had been lost.

45 Mr. Horst left Denishawn at the same time as Martha Graham, and the two of them worked together until his death in 1964 (Sherman: 9).

46 A 1906 publicity photograph of St. Denis wearing her smoke-colored sari and pearl-covered choli shows a blurring of detail above each incense burner suggestive of of smoke. The same blurring appears above the dish in her hands. But this does not mean the incense in them had been lit; it is equally possible that the effect of smoke in the photograph was created by the photographer in the darkroom employing a simple technique known at the time as “dodging”. Descriptions of the dance as St. Denis performed it specifically mention that the burners were lit and exuding a fragrant smoke during the dance.

47 De Mille’s statements are grandly generalizing but useful here to point out the direct influence of St. Denis’ Orientalism on Graham’s early style and further development.

48This anecdote was told to the author in informal conversation with former Graham student Dr. John Wilson.

49 In November 1919 their house burned to the ground. From 1919 to 1920 St. Denis and Shawn toured separately and a process of dividing dancers, rehearsal space, billing, etc. began (Shelton: 160).

50 Like Isadora Duncan, St. Denis found it profitable to appeal to the artistic intelligence of affluent women by performing in their salons for small groups of guests. The tactic proved effective in establishing artistic fame for earlier virtuoso performing artists of the Romantic period, such as the Italian violinist Nicolò Paganini (1782-1840), and pianists Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) and Franz List (1811-1886) as well as the American composer/musician Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869). However, unlike Duncan, St. Denis was careful of her reputation as an artist of good taste and a woman of moral integrity.

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CHAPTER THREE

Ted Shawn and Gnossienne

It is easy to dismiss Ted Shawn’s quirky, two-minute1 solo Gnossienne as marginally useful to the development of avant-garde dance early in the Twentieth Century. However, after its premiere in 1919 it remained in Shawn’s repertoire for more than thirty years, passed into the repertoire of his protégé, Barton Mumaw2, and then from Mumaw to his dance student, Jack Clark. With Clark’s 1995 reconstruction for video (the version used for this study) Gnossienne spans more than seventy-five years in performance3, and remains a stylish, male solo demanding absolute physical control. That Shawn was readily identified with this dance is evidenced in the many photographs taken of him in the role. The decorative border applied to an October 1928 Denishawn brochure that also showed St. Denis in her most famous dances (Cohen: 12) included one of Shawn in a pose from Gnossienne. But unlike Faune or Incense, the dance transferred smoothly4 from its original dancer/creator into the performance repertoires and teaching programs of others. Of the three dances in this study, Gnossienne represents a tantalizing amalgam of interrelated goals for its creator, only one of which was public dance performance (Mumaw, Sherman, et. al.). As an example of early modern avant-garde performance art, Gnossienne is suitable for this study. It is self-reflexive in bending time and space into an intimate, circularly-contained ritual. Like the other two dances, Gnossienne presents the dancer in a central physical position on stage, indicating an internal condition witnessed by the audience. Its presentation of spiritualism in exotic dressing produces a sly parody of religious form empty of spiritual content. At the same time, Gnossienne comments on the dominance of female artists in exotic dances of the time. Created and performed by an American man, the dance defies normal conventions of gendered performance; if a man must dance at all, he may do so only to support and show off his female partner. As will be argued in this chapter, Shawn’s character of an arrogant priest “partners” a dominating, demanding off-stage goddess. It tests perceptions of naturalistic

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performance in its tension between an external, stylized physical exhibition and a psychological joke. Finally, Gnossienne comments on the role of technology in modern life. The (male) dancer’s body is presented as an efficient tool to express conflicting responses to submission to duty, the exertion of free will, gender, and power. The dance occupies the middle position in this study for several reasons. Although it was first performed for the public in 1919 after the premiers of both Incense (1906) and Faune (1912), Gnosienne reflects a stylistic and narrative negotiation between them. The dance bears a strong resemblance to Faune5 in choice of theme and masculine gesture; with its flattened, iconic movements and poses and methodical choreographic development (Chapter Four). But Gnossienne as a narrative of ritual worship and in the way the dancer moves from one posed moment to the next also demonstrates the impact of St. Denis’ dances, of which Incense established the template. Shawn’s “Gnostic” priest directs his worshipping energy in very much the same way St. Denis’ Incense worshipper referred to an off-stage deity. This chapter presents evidence that St. Denis’ (and the public’s) perspective of expressive, spiritual dance as a feminine preserve established in Incense is playfully satirized in Gnossienne. In his developmental dance training and orientation in an artistic life, Shawn is appropriately positioned between St. Denis and Nijinsky. Both St. Denis and Nijinsky were encouraged and trained to become dancers from an early age. They had performed and achieved fame in the choreography of others long before making their own. But Shawn grew up under American perceptions of the dancing male as (at best) a foreign import tolerated only for the sake of “high art” culture (i. e. the European-based ballet) or (at worst) a feminizing degradation (Tomko: 29-30, et. al.) Shawn’s projection of himself into an artistic life was precarious and complex, and he found inspiration and direction to dance from the writings of other men. But in the specific physical instruction of dance, nearly all Shawn’s teachers were women6. Out of the words of men and the physical dance expressiveness of women, then, Shawn forged his own version of how the dancing male should perform and what his place in society should be.

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Shawn found it especially difficult to reconcile movements that would read to American audiences as masculine with ritual spiritualism. First of all, “real men” didn’t dance; especially American men. If a man did dance, his role was to show off his partner. If he danced alone, he had to present a virtuoso display of athletic vigor in an “alien” context; Russian, Spanish, African, Irish, or perhaps an inhabitant of an ambiguous geography such as a . And second, any idiocentric expression of spiritualism through movement was rare enough even when performed by women such as Duncan or St. Denis. An American man in that position virtually did not exist; the brief dancing career of Paul Swan, for example, ended in ridicule (Kendall: 111). Shawn believed it was his job to change that, and he spent his career dedicated to the effort. Unlike St. Denis or Nijinsky—both of whom began dance training as children— Shawn came to dance relatively late in life. He was a Methodist divinity student at the University of Denver when he began taking lessons in ballet to recover from the weakening effects of diphtheria. With characteristic vigor, Shawn set about to train himself in any and all forms of physical expression7 in which he could find instruction. It wasn’t long before he was also teaching and performing. By the time he first saw St. Denis in Incense at the age of twenty in 1911, Shawn had already been busy teaching, learning, creating and performing a wide range of exotic and popular dances in partnership with Norma Gould (Palmer: 34). Although he reports having been profoundly affected by St. Denis’ vision of spiritual dance, it was not until 1914 that Shawn answered her advertisement for a and married her. As an extension of their personal and performing partnership, Shawn and St. Denis co-founded the Denishawn School of dance that would supply them with a company of well-trained dancers, and a source of revenue to mount and tour their more elaborate dance projects: The Denishawn school, training ground of the Denishawn dancers, was created by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, but Shawn, who arranged schedules and taught most of the classes, was its real head (Palmer: 38).

The professional and personal marriage contributed to the mutual growth of both artists. But while St. Denis conceived of Denishawn as a means to provide her with the dancers

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and income to produce larger productions, Denishawn for Shawn was a model upon which he could frame his educational aspirations: To realize his vision, Shawn relied on organization, emphasized the importance of the school, and recognized the necessity for many dull, difficult tours if Denishawn were to survive financially (Mumaw: 59).

In a very real sense, Shawn managed the school as part of his mission to educate both himself and American society in the right of men to dance. His earliest dance teachers and students were all women. Certainly this irony is a great part of the humor of Gnossienne, which wryly acknowledges the dominance of women in dance at that time. Its simple narrative presents the ritual dance of a priest of ancient Crete in worship of the “Snake Goddess.” It is to this all-powerful female icon (who remains hidden off-stage) that the priest finds he must surrender his own willfulness as sacrifice. Gnossienne also reflects Shawn’s simultaneous roles of teacher, student, choreographer, and performer. Unlike St. Denis’ Incense and Nijinsky’s Faune, both of which marked the public commencement of those dance artists as choreographers, the movement sequence Shawn later transformed into Gnossienne was first created as a teaching tool for his summer Denishawn students. Barton Mumaw’s description of the dance (which he learned as Shawn’s student) in the book he wrote with Jane Sherman8, Barton Mumaw, Dancer begins as follows: Gnossienne was originally created by Shawn in 19179 as a classroom exercise to help pupils achieve disciplined body control. It remained in his repertory for thirty years after its first public performance in 1919 (Mumaw: 251).

The dance was not the first Shawn had choreographed for himself, either; from 1911 to 1918 he had created jointly with St. Denis and on his own no less than sixty-one dances, of which twenty were solos for himself (Dreier: 43-6). Many of these Denishawn solos featured Shawn’s male body in a variety of exotic dances with spiritual, heroic themes. Amid the nearly exclusively-female10 performing company and school of Denishawn surrounding St. Denis, these Shawn dances often took on an evangelical urgency. For not only was Shawn struggling to make himself “seen” as a male dancer, he needed to be respected and taken seriously; independently from the women. In his

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discussion11 of Shawn’s art, Winthrop Palmer suggests that this combination of tasks was both an asset and a detriment to Shawn’s ambitious goals: He [Shawn] was strong enough to break away from a weak and dangerous pattern of human authority. . . It remained for his followers to create a dance expression that revealed man possessed of human virtues, not of heroic qualities alone. . . (Palmer: 32-3).

Whether or not one would agree with Palmer’s assessment of Shawn’s contributions, it was typical of Shawn’s earlier dances that religious fervor presented the male body as an end in itself, rather than as a tool through which that fervor expressed its ineffable presence12. Although sequences from previous dances13 are evident in it, Gnossienne is exceptional in its strong, forceful, yet controlled series of poses and the strange ways in which those poses are connected. The dance occupies a special place in Shawn’s repertoire in part because it seamlessly incorporates an abstract movement vocabulary14 suitable as a dance class exercise with a cleverly devised dance story. But Gnossienne’s arrogant, willful priest is different from Shawn’s previous works, as well as Incense and Faune in the way it forges a synthesis of spiritualism, exotic theme, and manly expressive gesture in a humorous way. Making a joke in dance got the laugh on the audience before they could ridicule him. Shawn expected audiences to find humor in Gnossienne and went out of his way to encourage it in the way he took his bows at its conclusion. (Sherman: letter to the author, 6 September, 2003). As has been discussed in Chapter Two, Incense was quite serious in its spiritual expression. And Nijinsky’s Faun, for all his adolescent naïveté over the complex mysteries of the feminine ends with a serious enigma of the self relative to the “other” at the conclusion of the ballet (Chapter Four). Gnossienne’s priest, however, seems to revel in the “quizzical quality of the flat gestures; he thinks he’s hot stuff, dancing for himself” (Clark: Interview 1/30/03). This kind of arrogance seems to refer to previous solo male dancers15, who had learned to entertain with virtuoso stunts displaying manly strength and agility. This character has no spiritual communion with the divine, or any real insight into the nature of his presence. From start to finish in the dance, the priest exaggerates his ritualized performance, suggesting the unresolved torment of dancing on the “horns of a dilemma”

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between exercise of free will and the absolute demands and judging eye of his goddess. The humor in this all-too-human state may not have been readily accessible to audiences on a conscious level, but Mumaw reports that: Children, more quickly than adults, recognized the suggestion of fun in the unusual movements [of Gnossienne]. They often giggled freely, while grownups seemed unsure if they should enjoy the laugh hidden in the dance. . .Not until the dancer took his first bow in character did they realize that it was “safe” to be amused (Mumaw: 253).

Just because the theme suggested the ancient solemnity of a Cretan ritual didn't mean it had to be regarded with hushed reverence. If laughter was a doorway through which changes of attitude could pass, then by all means it should be encouraged. Throughout his long career Shawn was unflagging in his crusade to gain men the right and dignity of dancing. The preacher and educator in him would use any means at his disposal to bring that about—including jokes. Shawn was well aware of what he faced as a male dancer in the United States in pursuit of sacred expression. Long after Denishawn had dissolved he concluded that: Though I, the first American man16 to make the art of dancing his life work, had made good, there still was a prevailing prejudice against dancing for men. It was considered to be an effeminate, trivial, and unworthy occupation for the strapping and well-muscled male (Shawn, One Thousand: 240-1).

Shawn set about to overcome these entrenched social stigmas almost concurrent with his intention to become a dancer. It was all very well to partner women in popular dances, or to support a ballerina in a ballet. Shawn made a handsome frame for Norma Gould in the popular dances that had become the rage of the time. Later, he served the same function for St. Denis in her artistic, exotic “ballets”. But to meld introspection and dance in masculine performance in a way that the American public would support it was a much trickier task. Consequently, Shawn set his course upon a multi-faceted creative life17 dedicated to both self-education and the education of the American public to respect the dancing male in expressive dance. Gnossienne was an important step in the realization of Shawn’s goals: Shawn’s desire to raise the dance to a higher sphere and again give expression to religious emotion through the dance, which has been his

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from the very beginning, has never let it interfere with his fine sense of delicate humor. . . This complete realization that though life is serious yet it is gay, and that pure laughter is as healing to the spirit as the vision from the mountaintop (Dreier: 13).

Born in 1891 in Kansas City, Missouri, Edwin Myers Shawn was the son of a Kansas City newspaperman. His mother’s family was in show business (Palmer: 33) so he did have some precedent of theatrics upon which to draw, albeit mainly in the arena of entertainment18 and a far cry from . Still, Shawn’s mother, who was related to the Booth family of actors, evidently encouraged his artistic and spiritual leanings: Mary Lee Booth Shawn, like St. Denis’ mother, produced amateur plays starring her own child, and eventually Teddy channeled his dramatic talent toward a career in evangelism (Shelton: 119).

But at this time the ideal American boy wasn’t supposed to enjoy either religion or theatrics. He couldn’t be studious, well-mannered or church-going because participation in these social conventions constituted submission to female domination. Following the conquest of the last western frontier in the 1800s, the concept of manhood in American life yielded to a carefully-constructed and performed masculinity. Just as race and class distinctions hardened into Victorian social order, so did the divisions between the “male” preserve outside, and the “female” preserve inside the home (Kimmel and Levine). In order to display manliness, men got as far as possible out of the house, the domain in which their wives, sisters, daughters and especially their mothers reigned. If they were ever to grow into real men, boys had to negotiate a difficult balance between a remote respect for women and a vigorous resistance to any and all attempts by women to “civilize” them. As soon as they were old enough to run19, “real” boys did so, even if it was only as far as the corner drug store, an alley, or empty lot to “hang out with the guys”. Only sickly, bent, pasty-faced pansy boys stayed at home, too weak physically or emotionally to resist female domination. Such boys were often perceived as adopting “feminine” tactics of deceit and artificiality. Any good, honest boy was the same, inside and out, and his idealization made certain assumptions about the proper development of a boy into a man; “echoing late nineteenth-century masculine complaints against the forces

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of feminization. But it is also developmentally atavistic, a search for lost boyhood. . .” (Kimmel: 320). Grown men, of course, escaped Victorian domestication by spending their leisure time in beer halls and saloons, or if of the upper classes, in men’s clubs from which the presence of women was banned. Regardless of class, however, the point was for a man to be perceived at all costs as, “not female”. To do that, men engaged a public performance of masculinity that was diametrically opposed to the feminine. If women dressed in color with an elaboration of accessories, men dressed simply in somber shades. Even more fundamental than clothing was the perception of quiet, indoor activities (including going to church) as both artificial and feminine. That made it imperative for men to be outdoors in a “natural”, rugged rural environment away from “citified and sissified”, even decadent influences. And even if they spent all their working days indoors laboring in the cities, men grew rugged beards and affected hearty tans in order to project an honest image: The central characteristic of being self-made was that the proving ground was the public sphere. . .the new man of commerce wore plain and simple clothing “to impart trust and confidence in business affairs” (Kimmel: 26-8).

In order to grow up as good men, boys should spend their time outdoors in the countryside and be vigorously active. Any activity that was quiet, reflective, or even religious in nature signaled an inherent weakness, both physical and mental. Boys, including Shawn, were in the precarious position of having to earn their young manhood by proving it to themselves and to others. And the regimen by which this proof was accomplished was harsh:

Boys [at the turn of the century] were to avoid dancing, sleeping on feather beds, warm rooms and reading books—these last because they were “artificial”. . .compared with [a] “completely natural experience,” the real instruction of manhood (Kimmel: 161).

All “social graces”, including Christianity, had been meticulously feminized in Victorian society. It took the violent20 histrionics of a Billy Sunday to shake loose its

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sentimentalized image of Jesus as a gentle androgyny and reforge Him into an honest, hard-working laborer of peace, and a virile warrior in the war against evil (Chapter Five). This social condition meant that although Shawn, “passed his childhood among books and amateur theatricals” (Kendall: 104), as a young man he had to find a way to negotiate between his deeply religious feelings and the need to be accepted as a real man. The answer came to him in the writings of two men. The first of these, Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), was “a culture popularizer” who drew upon legendary heroes of the (sometimes ancient21) past and rendered them palatable to ordinary Americans in a popular series of books called Little Journeys to the Homes of Good and Great Men22. Hubbard’s utopian community, Roycroft, provided a redefinition of manhood that was much less harsh than the Victorian model by promoting a Greek ideal of manly beauty. Roycroft also “became a refuge of the New Woman”, in which Shawn took particular interest (Kendall: 105). This “New Woman” was the image of feminine power breaking free of Victorian corsets and social behavioral constraints; a femininity as much “on the run” from narrow morality and sentimental enfeeblement as men. The New Woman entitled herself to smoke, work, agitate for the right to vote, and (of significance to Gnossienne) dance by herself. The promise of Roycroft lay in a common ground of beliefs from which both men and women could remake themselves physically and mentally out of Victorian progressionism (Glossary) without actually abandoning it entirely (Tomko: 1-35). As a “culture farm” Roycroft also presented Shawn with the template for his later conceptions of communal artistic and lifestyle self-sufficiency in Denishawn and Jacob’s Pillow. But in the more current terms of constructing himself as a young man, Hubbard also offered Shawn an interesting compromise between; “. . .the European aesthete and the American Rough Rider. . .Hubbard, by his example, showed it was possible for young [American] men to be both aesthetic and robust” (Kendall: 105). The second influential book for Shawn was by the Canadian poet, Bliss Carman (1816-1929) called, The Making of a Personality (1906). Shawn evidently first encountered this writing in 1911; the same year he first saw St. Denis. In this manifesto, strongly influenced by Mrs. Perry King’s unacknowledged applications of Delsarte exercises, Carman asserted:

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. . .that dancing was an ideal vehicle for “bodily and emotional freedom and nervous relief as well as stimulus to expression within the limits of orderly beauty,” and he [Carman] praised Ruth St. Denis’ efforts to create a dance that was physically, mentally and spiritually nourishing (Shelton: 120)

Shawn was impressed by this “. . .equation of physical beauty with moral purity” (Kendall: 108). Longing to reintegrate religious fervor with idealism in dance, he left his then-partner, Norma Gould, and went east to meet and study with the authors23 of the book, which Shawn felt, “. . .said about dance all of the things I had been feeling and thinking, but which I had never been able to express so articulately” (Shawn: 11-2). Performance of such a project by women was easily acceptable, but when applied to men they were not without risk, for: Men, of course, had trouble enunciating a male aesthetic doctrine for fear of straying into narcissism or homosexuality. However, it was just such a doctrine, discovered by Bliss Carman in women’s books and restated by him in his own, that freed young Ted Shawn for a serious dancing career (Kendall: 109).

Even so, it would take Shawn some time to begin putting together these seemingly incompatible roles. As a very young man starting out, Shawn’s idealism first found expression in physical strength appropriate to the American male model. Responding to President Roosevelt’s24 exhortation that all American men should cultivate physical preparedness, Shawn spent his college year summers toughening up in logging camps. But mere physical vigor wasn’t enough; Shawn’s deeply religious convictions had led him to the ministry as well. He was studying to become a Methodist minister when in his junior year Shawn succumbed to diphtheria. The enforced quiet reflection of his recovery from ill health also led Shawn to recognize that he could not only “remake” himself physically, but also “rediscover” the expressive prerogative of the human (male as well as female) body as an instrument of worship (Sheldon: 119, et. al.). Just as St. Denis was able to transition from an Egyptian to an Indian theme for Incense, Shawn adapted his goals as a divinity student set for the ministry to his “missionary work” to enlighten American audiences in the manly art of dance:

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It is interesting to have him [Shawn] recognize the fact that his inner spirit did not change with the change in his form of expression. Dancing took the place of preaching—that was all (Palmer: 33).

The long illness left him weak, and this was not an acceptable condition for Shawn’s self-image. He [Shawn] rejected a civilization that accepted shrunk shanks in its white collar workers, stooped shoulders, squinting eyes, puny arms in its laboratory men, dull, brute power in the industrial plant worker, harnessed to factory equipment, and the feeble attitudes of drug-store and drawing- room dandies (Palmer: 32-3).

In order to regain his muscular strength and restore his sense of balance, Shawn began his dance training in ballet, and entered into a pattern of study that soon included designing dances, teaching, and performing in partnership with his (female) teachers. The first of these was Hazel Wallack: . . . [who] taught with a thoroughness that revitalized Shawn’s body, and a freshness that brought back all his boyhood theatrical fancies. He was plunged. . .into all the current controversies over the new, aesthetic dance (Kendall: 106).

These “current controversies” played an important role in Shawn’s gradual negotiation of resistance against American men dancing expressively or in a spiritual context. In one way, they concerned a veritable “” of the time for popular ragtime dances25 that nearly amounted to a “social war”. The older generation and stalwarts of cultural purity believed such dances were immoral. The younger generation “free spirits” (the icon of which was the wild-female “flapper”, or the “New Woman”) used these dances to declare independence from Victorian stuffiness. Gone were Dodworth’s dance manual injunctions of minimal contact between partners performing the once-radical and potentially-decedent and . Perhaps more direct to Gnossienne, some of the new social dances could be socially performed by anyone of either sex without a partner:

The dance craze of 1911 brought with it the Tommy, bunny hug, turkey trot, one-step, camel walk, etc., all of which George Dodworth and all the old teachers violently opposed. These dances, many of them from

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the slums and dives, brought with them certain teachers from the same sources (O’Neill: 99).

While lower classes went in for “animal” dances that could be performed without a partner, upper- to middle-class women particularly wanted to learn the new partnered dances that offered close body contact26 between men and women. But these affluent women would not want to learn them from “unsavory” sources or perform them in low- class dives. Consequently, 1910 to 1914 saw a brief surge of interest in “ teas”, where affluent middle- and upper-class women paid to dance with polished, attractive young men. The “tango-tea” male dancer was suave, mysterious (anonymous), sophisticated, seductive, urbane, and not a little “foreign” vis à vis the “true” American male (husband/supporter) who was none of those things (and proud of it), but who held down a respectable job and made money. At the same time, refined dance performing/ teaching teams such as Vernon and Irene Castle presented a stylish elegance, proving that the close partnering of a tango, for example, didn’t automatically mean it had to be lewd; it could also be excitingly romantic, even beautiful. This kind of elegant, romantic dyad social dancing also “infected” ballet performances imported from Europe: the success of (1881-1931) and Michael Mordkin27 (1880-1944) in exotic ballets was a direct result of this popular arrangement (Kendall: 96-9). Another “dance controversy” centered on the rash of popular interest in the exotic/erotic “Salomé” dances (Chapters Two and Five) that not only appeared in vaudeville and the ballet, but also “infected” the popular image of the dancing “flapper”28. But here Shawn had to be extremely careful in how he presented himself as a serious classical dancer even with exotic associations; a public intoxicated with ragtime wasn’t very appreciative of a man in “classic” dance—particularly an American one29. Shawn took careful note of the fate of his only close competitor, Paul Swan. Although billed as “the most beautiful man in the world”, Swan’s attempt at serious expressive dance as a male soloist met with humiliating ridicule in 1914, when he performed a series of “classically-derived” solos at Hammerstein’s (Kendall: 111). Shawn would be well advised to put as much distance as possible between himself and Swan’s fate, and in a sense, he initially sheltered his aspirations “behind a

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skirt”. Soon after beginning his dance studies with Wallack Shawn joined her as her dancing and teaching partner in 1910 and together, “they danced an amalgam of ballet, ballroom, and Salomé styles” (Kendall: 106). This pattern of partnership in performing and teaching continued to establish Shawn as a serious male dancer when he later joined Norma Gould in 191130. The popularity of these elegant partnered dances Shawn performed and taught with Gould offered an aegis of acceptance under which other, more serious classical themes could gradually be introduced. An undated brochure advertising the ambitious array of dances Shawn and Gould offered for instruction included; “Grecian, Oriental, Nature and Barefoot, Rhythmics and Aesthetics, Choreographic Drama, Dance Pantomime, Music Interpretation, and Dance Originating31” (Jacob’s Pillow Archives). This broad range of instruction suggested an amalgamation of aesthetic and educational goals justified by an historical context. And juxtaposition of beneficial, educational physical exercises (something Americans of both sexes pursued as a worthwhile self-reconstruction) with classical dance gave classical dance a cultural validity. Likewise, if people were willing to pay for instruction in exotic, “ancient” dancing, then placing them historically increased their legitimacy as a social and educational benefit. The combination suited Shawn and Gould, and in 1913 Shawn sold a motion picture idea to the old Thomas A. Edison Company for a Dance of the Ages presentation: . . .on a thin thread of supporting scenario, was strung my idea of the dance from the Stone Age down to America 1912, swiftly through Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mediaeval Europe on the way. . .being a moving picture of Norma Gould and me and our group”32 (Shawn: unpubl. manu.)

So, very much like a dime museum “professor”, Shawn positioned himself as a dance educator. He assumed the function of introducing American audiences to a variety of exotic ancient dance forms while at the same time presenting himself as the exotic dancer, albeit under the pretext of supporting the “real” dancer, Norma Gould. The distribution of the film was an excellent means by which Shawn could reach many more audiences than through live performance, (which he said was one of his reasons for doing it). But it was only one of several ways in which Shawn supported himself in the process

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of learning basic dance vocabulary. Later that same year, he and Gould also taught —an activity neither relished, “. . .but there was no one in Los Angeles so well prepared as we were, and it was all so easy to do—and there was so much money just ripe for the picking” (Shawn: unpubl. manu.). The ambiance of the place also encouraged unorthodox performance: When Shawn arrived in Los Angeles during the summer of 1912, he found . . .no one was ridiculed for his ideas or for his attempts at innovations in the arts. It was an exiting experience for Shawn, therefore, to find a place in which he might work freely and without arbitrary, conventional, and stultifying criticism (Poindexter: 132).

Finally, the Santa Fe circuit33 picked up on the entertainment value of the Dance of the Ages film and sent the Gould/Shawn dancing duo with a few of their students on tour. This expanded view of Shawn as an American classical dancer under both a popular dance and an historical/educational pretext reaped limited benefit; the program elicited cautious praise mixed with confused reactions. Shawn received a letter dated 5/27/13 from a school friend who had seen the Dance of the Ages film and informed Shawn that: . . .I am awestruck and completely and unconditionally proud of your stunt. . .I have always disliked your dancing as an ambition but you I have loved and it was on account of you I disliked the dancing for a man’s dancing is not usual & is looked upon as effeminate but if you can stand it I surely can. . .(from: letters and memorabilia of Ted Shawn, Jacob’s Pillow Archives, 2003).

Despite such reservations, Shawn persisted. The complimentary arrangement of touring, film, school, and performing group in partnership with Gould seems to have provided Shawn with a template of development in his association with St. Denis; Denishawn also combined these mutually-supportive activities under Shawn’s direction. But the combination of exotic historical dances with the popular ballroom craze still didn’t satisfy Shawn, especially after having read Bliss Carman’s book. Shawn left the Santa Fe tour as quickly as he could to pursue Delsarte studies with Mrs. Perry King on Carman’s advice. His choice to undertake the study was a change of direction for him; Shawn records that he had previously seen many poorly-understood renditions and didn’t have much respect for performances labeled “Delsarte”:

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. . .in my own childhood I saw only the distorted. . .“statue posing,” in which amateur entertainers, costumed in bulky, graceless “Greek” robes, whitened skin, and white wigs, took “poses” supposedly expressive . . .(Shawn, Every Little Movement: 11).

This choice of a Delsarte teacher could have ended in disgust for the system entirely, for despite Carman’s regard for her, King was not a Delsarte expert. King took the basics of Delsarte’s methods and applied them to her own ideas about teaching young ladies how to act and move with social grace. She taught the exercises she had learned as a student of Mrs. Hovey (whom Shawn later encountered and with whom he continued his Delsarte training) without crediting either her own teacher or Delsarte (Shawn, Every Little Movement: 12). In addition, King had no idea how to teach expressive movement in keeping with a masculine ideal: Mrs. King proposed specific beautifying measures, exercises and diets, to improve the person—and it was this emphasis Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey seized upon. Their own self images, the clothes they wore, their male beauty, were prominent features of their poetry. . .(Kendall: 109).

This public display Carman and Hovey adopted from King’s training had nothing to do with dance. Although King had collaborated with Carman on several innovative performances34, gender divisions had the men reciting the written word while women performed interpretive dance/mime movements to them. Using words instead of music to accompany expressive gesture was certainly unusual for the time, but a man who wanted to perform as a dancer instead of reading text was heading into new territory. Mrs. King really didn’t have a very good idea what to do with Shawn:

. . .it was all very well for the girls, but since 99 percent of Mrs. King’s work had been with girls up to that time, she had no material, nor a glimmer of an idea of what was masculine movement, or subject matter suitable for a man (Shawn, One Thousand: 18).

This confusion was nearly universal in American society at the time; there simply was no context in which to place a danced male expressiveness. In a letter to Shawn dated 27 a college friend identified only as Hugh35 reported on reactions he overheard to the film Shawn had made with Norma Gould. Hugh records comments from the

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audience struggling to place the ideas of “American male” and “dance” in the same context, and pointed out that the effort cannot avoid comparisons to the feminine such as, “. . . it was a funny calling for a man. . .”, or, “. . .he is graceful, more than feminine litheness. . .so free acting and limber. . .” (Jacob’s Pillow Archives, 2003). Still, Delsarte exercises properly applied held the promise to Shawn of contributing to the development of expressive gesture for both men and women. It wasn’t until Shawn was able to meet and study with Henrietta Knapp Russell36 (later Mrs. Hovey) that he could begin to apply these methods. Shawn describes the impact Mrs. Hovey--whom he had met only after marrying St. Denis—made on him: From our 1915 meeting until Mrs. Hovey’s death, I took private lessons from her. In 1916 I attended her lectures whenever I was able to duck Denishawn extracurricular activities like sewing and dyeing (Shawn, Every Little Movement: 63).

The impact of Delsarte’s system of movement analysis and discernment of meaning in “natural” gesture (briefly discussed in Chapter One) on Shawn’s choreographic development can hardly be overemphasized. Barton Mumaw acknowledged the considerable contribution Delsarte made to the development of American modern dance through the teachings of Shawn in an (undated37) letter to Rebecca Terrell: Shawn is generally recognized as the Father of American Dance which is evidenced by an article in the NY Times of Sept. 28/91 by our distinguished dance critic in which she writes: Francoix (sic) Delsarte is an often forgotten French Connection: Ted Shawn was a follower of Delsarte: American Dance, in fact, had a French Grandfather (Mumaw: 1991).

Mrs. Hovey offered a rigorous, meticulous training. But she still was not a dancer, nor could she teach or coach Shawn in his applications of Delsarte in manly dance. The key to melding spiritualism, exoticism, Delsarte, and dancing Shawn needed appeared when in 1914 he auditioned (through the auspices of Brother St. Denis) for Ruth St. Denis (Shelton: 120). Despite her fame, St. Denis’ exotic mystic dances weren’t going over very well at that time with a public intoxicated with the novelty of popular dyad dances. Thinking to expand her programs to include a partner, St. Denis offered to incorporate both Gould

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and Shawn to perform these more popular dances so that they would carry her serious artistic solos. Gould declined, but Shawn, entranced with St. Denis, joined her on tour. According to Shelton, “Ted taught Hilda [one of St. Denis’ backup dancers] his ballroom routines, and they also performed Greek and character dances he had choreographed” (Shelton: 121). St. Denis and Shawn shared similar ideals on life, art, and spiritualism; they also shared the Delsarte training that informed their belief in “natural” movements translated into dance (Chapter Two). They agreed that: “Delsarte himself believed that his science was the key to all art, and some of his most ardent disciples. . .maintained that it was almost a new religion, and the key to perfect life” (Shawn, Every Little Movement: 13). Together Shawn and St. Denis toured, romanced, and finally married. Denishawn opened its doors to students in the summer of 1915 (Shelton: 121). This close personal and professional partnership had the curious effect of both augmenting and restricting the two dance artists. Shawn freed St. Denis from managerial and teaching duties at the price of popularizing her programs. Shawn had the advantage of St. Denis’ fame at the price of her artistic domination. In general, Shawn’s Denishawn work prior to Gnossienne wavered between the economic necessity to teach and perform, and his desire to launch into spiritual dance expression on a par with St. Denis’ work. St. Denis was certainly in her support of Shawn’s efforts; still, his quest for manly sacred dance independent of her was slow to develop. This was probably due to the fact that the only male body on which he could experiment was his own. Men did not join Denishawn as students until 1920 (interestingly, the same year women in the United States gained the right to vote), and even when offered dance classes for free, only a few came. Shawn reflected upon this condition as a reason why he sought to establish his all- male dancing group after the dissolution of Denishawn: . . .men were the minority in every company, including Denishawn, and the public eye had not really been focused on the problem of men dancing. I hoped. . .when people saw young American athletes going through masculine dances, prejudice would be overcome and dancing as a career would take its place with other legitimate professions (Shawn, One Thousand: 241).

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At first, both the school and the company of dancers trained there were filled with women. Most Denishawn dances were based on oriental themes favored by St. Denis, such as the 1916 Pageant of Egypt, Greece, and India for one hundred and seventy dancers, of which Shawn was the only male. And for most of his own group choreography Shawn had only female bodies to work with, as reflected in titles such as Apsaras38 (a 1915 Trio for Girls) and Garland Plastique (a 1917 ensemble for five girls). As noted in Chapter Five, Denishawn provided training in Delsarte, Dalcroze, and a broad range of dance styles to a number of silent film performers, all of whom were women (Shawn: 59). In addition, some ballet dancers39 also took supplemental dance instruction at Denishawn. One of these, Sadie Vanderhof (Vanda Hoff) became something of a rival to St. Denis’ reigning deity with her own vaudeville dance drama, The Dancing Girl of Delhi which “Brother (Buzz) St. Denis” produced after he had left Denishawn (Shawn: 62). The pattern of female dance domination continued into partnering; for those dances in which he appeared with St. Denis, Shawn’s main visual function was to frame her feminine centrality, regardless of theme. When it came to experimentation on his solos, Shawn was on his own. Although her own aesthetics did not predispose St. Denis to be much help to him in the effort, she nevertheless heartily encouraged and advised Shawn very much in the same way her mother had advised and encouraged her through the creation of her 1906 Indian dances (Chapter Two). “Manly dances” in Shawn’s repertoire of the time resorted to three cues to signal their distinction from the feminine. They included a prop weapon, such as his Samuri Sword Dance (1915) and Japanese Spear Dance (reworked in 1919); included a masculine display of bravura inherent in the style, such as Spanish Dance (1915); or suggested masculine labor, such as his Coolie Dance and Tillers of the Soil (both created in 1916 and performed with St. Denis). The touch of the popular and familiar that Shawn gave his dances encouraged audiences to relax, and provided a welcome relief to the seriousness of St. Denis’ exotic mysticism in their programs: Shawn had the great gift of creating and teaching movement that was original, yet immediately understood by an audience, powerful and athletic, yet expressive. His intuition told him that men’s dancing should be based on familiarity with male physical limitations and abilities as well as with the work and ideals considered “masculine” at the time (Sherman: 101).

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While it is true St. Denis’ aesthetic preferences dominated Denishawn, Shawn’s counteracting influence went a long way toward expanding its range of expression. Former Denishawn student and dancer Jane Sherman contests the assertion that, “In general, Denishawn demanded a flowing presentation, often in diaphanous costumes with scarves and veils. . .It eschewed the bluntness of sharp percussive movement in favor of a sinuous line.” (Don McDonagh: Times, 10 January 1977). Sherman counters this assessment by saying that: In general, Denishawn presented so many different types of dancing that only one who had not seen the full repertoire could thus generalize. “Sharp percussive movement” in direct opposition to a “sinuous line” was an intrinsic element of many solos and ballets such as . . . Gnossienne (Sherman: 1). However, by 1916 (before Gnossienne), there were signs in the ranks of Denishawn’s female students of a stylistic revolt40 against the preponderance of dances in the traditional feminine style. As Denishawn’s director and teacher, Shawn responded through experiments with “non-feminine” movement vocabulary on female bodies41 in his Denishawn classes. Given this condition of choreographic experimentation in the process of dance education for Shawn, it is not surprising that Gnossienne first grew out of a class exercise taught to a group of Denishawn students: Several of my solo dances were originally designed for individual students or as class exercises. . .Gnossienne was a dance in flat, two-dimensional style movement that didn’t come off when the class tried to do it for Ruth who dropped by the practice studio. I jumped in and did the exercise, solo. . .When I finished I turned to the class and then to Ruth, saying, “There. That’s the way it’s supposed to look.” And that’s the way it was done by me for the next thirty years (Shawn, One Thousand: 70).

The transformation of Gnossienne from a classroom exercise into a solo for Shawn does not seem to have happened rapidly, for the dance did not premier until 1919. Not only was he deeply involved during this intensely creative and developmental period in teaching classes for the school, but Shawn was also choreographing and producing with St. Denis a number of elaborate spectacles. Although Gnossienne might have fit easily into a Denishwan program as a purely abstract piece (it was sometimes listed as

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“music visualization” according to Sherman), Shawn was further encouraged by St. Denis to explore its potential as a narrative. Every bit the of libraries, museums, and historical lectures that St. Denis was, Shawn first searched for the right music and found what he was looking for in the first of a trio of eccentric piano pieces titled Gnossiennes (1889) by a then little- known French composer Erik Satie42. He evidently came across pictures of the ancient Palace of Knossos in Crete and chose a fresco known as The Cup Bearer to serve as his model, fabricating a story around the image. The title Shawn chose Gnossienne: a Priest of Knossos fit well to describe the close relationship between the music and the dance. As Sherman introduces the dance in her book, The Drama of Denishawn:

This strange solo with the strange title represented Ted Shawn’s vision of an ancient Cretan rite. (Gnossus is another spelling for the Cretan city of Knossos. Gnosis is a Greek word meaning positive knowledge. By onomatopoetic coincidence, both words apply to this unusual dance) (Sherman: 33).

St. Denis and Shawn had very different ways of going about the task of both teaching and choreography. St. Denis taught primarily by “inspiring” her students; performing always for them (for everyone) to encourage them to emulate her. In the process of choreographing and rehearsing, she relied upon the aesthetic impulse of the moment43 and her well-tuned artistic sense to lead her to the right movements. St. Denis’ rehearsals were performances and her performances often as fluid as rehearsals because she relied on the effect of melding her internal feeling with the external condition of being watched (Chapter Two). This ability was considered second nature to the feminine. “She [St. Denis] loved to put on a show. . .real work came to a halt as rehearsing was immediately transformed into performing” (Mumaw: 27). But Shawn taught analytically, breaking movements down into component parts so that the dancer’s body could serve as a tool at the service of expression. This pattern created a consistency between the functions of teaching and choreography:

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The purpose of these exercises [before the dance or the dance as art is approached] is specifically to get the student’s body in such condition, and his mind-body coordination to such a state that, when he begins to learn a specific dance form or dance style, he will have. . .a perfect and effortless instrument of his will (Shawn, Fundamentals of Dance: Forward, ix).

And when it came to devising new dances and rehearsing them, Shawn had a far more internally-structured method of rehearsing on a par with Nijinsky’s secretive development of Faune (Chapter Four): “He [Shawn] banned all spectators when he was choreographing in the belief that ‘outside’ vibrations interfered with his concentration” (Mumaw: 27). Despite their working and performing differences, both Shawn and St. Denis were dedicated to their religious fervor, and believed that dance should be an act of spiritual expression. This impetus for Shawn took an interesting turn in Gnossienne. Instead of hitting at an exotic/spiritual connection with a typically St. Denis-like mysticism44, Gnossienne turned out a series of parodies of tried-and-true clichés on both religion and dance of the time. The dance in this sense makes it a striking example of Early Modern avant-garde art (Chapter One). The humor and fun in the piece is augmented by the choice Shawn made of its music, a short piano piece by Satie: “. . .Shawn was able quite amazingly to sense the sly, ironic intent of the music and to incorporate it into a Cretan ritual of distinct originality (Sherman and Mumaw: 252-3). The title given to the music by the composer set Shawn on a search of historical accounts depicting artifacts from the Crete Palace of Knossos, from which he selected specifically the “Cup Bearer Fresco” (Guest: 16) and invented a narrative to fit his dance. “To music by Erik Satie, I represented a priest of ancient Crete going through a ritual at the altar of the snake-goddess” (Shawn: 70). Shawn may not have been aware of the extent to which Gnossienne’s inside joke appealed to audiences until after he began performing it:

Ted Shawn had not expected the laughs this class dance got when costumed and put in the spotlight. But showman as he was, he very soon encouraged them—laughs—where appropriate—and he always milked the 2nd bow for a final laugh (Sherman: letter 6 September, 2003).

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But although the priest goes through the elaborate motions of his devotion to the snake- goddess (whom the audience never sees) with the utmost seriousness, something of a joke is shared with the audience: . . .it was danced with a straight face, [but] there was more than a hint throughout that the priest and his Snake Goddess were secretly amused by a ritual in which they no longer found deep significance (Sherman and Mumaw: 252-3).

Gnossienne strikes and maintains an obviously analytical, highly stylized approach to movement. Its precision of timing between iconographic45 poses, isolations of parts of the body demanding great physical control, and rapid, abrupt (yet never hurried) movements with this stylization demands that it be performed the same way every time. True to its ritual basis, the dance draws its audience into an unreal space and time that is more psychological than geographical; a feature Gnossienne shares in common with Incense (Chapter Two) and Faune (Chapter Four). An uncredited review for the St. Galler Tagblatt dated 29 April 1931 picked up on this circular, internal self- referential quality: This dance creation is without question a perfect one: strict carrying through of motive, unbroken development of the idea, keeping to essentials. The end flows back into the beginning.

Although former Denishawn student and dancer Doris Humphey is credited with having said that Gnossienne could not be taught46, the dance has had a lively existence as a teaching tool for Shawn’s lectures, seminars, and dance classes. In particular, it appears as one of several exercises notated by Ann Hutchinson Guest in Shawn’s Fundamentals of Dance. Guest characterizes Gnossienne as: . . .a good springboard for discussion of parallel movement. . .[demanding] clear spatial placement of torso and limbs, and quick, separated action of the knees, ankles and feet. It features sharpness of movement and clearly established positions (Guest: 1K Gnossienne Movement: 16).

One of Shawn’s most gifted students and performers who joined his company of men dancers, Barton Mumaw47, learned Gnossienne from Shawn in order to assist Shawn in his dance/lecture seminars (Introduction). The process of learning it demanded close attention and an immediately responsive body able to produce the crisp, clear changes of

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direction and movements contrary to “normal” human movements (Clark interview). As Mumaw noted to Jane Sherman: “I think Ted was surprised when I was able to learn the Gnossienne movements. . .” ( letter dated 25 May 1979), and: “. . .my assisting Ted was thrust upon me, so to speak, and I remember that 50 minutes of teaching [Gnossienne] seemed endless and I worried every time about how I would be able to last that long . . .”(letter 29 June 1979). The closed intensity of the piece was a challenge for novice and accomplished performer alike: This brief dance appeared deceptively easy to do. In reality, the strict geometrical body positions, the persistent bent-knee steps on half-toe, and the precise control of balance demanded tension in every muscle as well as an exact rhythmic response to the accented grace notes and chords of Satie’s weird melody (Mumaw: 252).

When Mumaw turned to his own dance teaching and engaged in the process of reconstructing Shawn’s dances, he taught Gnossienne to his student, Jack Clark48. It is Clark’s rendition of the dance for video that the current study uses for discussion (Appendix A). In a letter to the author 6 September 2003, Jane Sherman recalled the differences between Shawn’s and Clark’s interpretation of the dance: Jack [Clark] was splendid—because slighter than Shawn, his interpretation was a little fey—lacking Ted’s weight (in both senses of the word), his humorous touches more “flirty” where Shawn’s were sly and his approach more reverent, overtly. (I never saw Barton do it).

The movements of the dance are evenly crisp, precise, and abrupt, but not jarring. There is no movement in which the energy of it leaves the extremities; it is contained within the autosphere (Appendix A) of the body. Although distances are indicated, there is no gesture of flicking, tossing, or throwing out into space; no loss of meditative self- absorption to suggest a break with serious ritualistic form. Jane Sherman, who saw Shawn perform this dance many times, points out the stylish efficiency of the movements: This [sequence of reversals of direction and arm movements] is done with swiftness and precision. It becomes an oft-repeated theme, with all gestures as controlled and exact as the moving of a fine watch (Sherman: 33-4).

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Gnossienne furthermore can be “read” through Shawn’s training in Delsarte expressive movement vocabulary; the extent to which Delsarte’s meticulously drawn analysis of human movement and meaning influenced Shawn can hardly be overemphasized49. He believed that Delsarte’s system of expressive movement; “. . .is now, the most complete and perfect science of human expression”(Shawn, Every Little Movement: 11), so it stands to reason the precision of Gnossienne should reflect these artistic goals: . . .he [Delsarte] said that emotion produced bodily movement, and if the movement was correct and true, the end result of the movement left the body in a position which was also expressive of the emotion. . .Delsarte himself defined grace as efficiency of movement, that movement which achieves its end by the least waste of effort, and with the least shock or jar to the organism (Shawn, Every Little Movement: 11).

In no other dance Shawn choreographed is this correlation based on Delsarte’s teachings more evident than Gnossienne. The dance is, rather like Delsarte’s discussion of movement and meaning, rather more accurately a series of poses linked together by efficient movements. Delsarte training, which Shawn took very seriously in his own dance education and in the instruction of his students, included not only gesture and meanings associated with physical attitude, but also the techniques of effective oratory50. The analogy of expression between speech and movement in Gnossienne is not as great a conceptual reach as may at first appear. Shawn repeatedly emphasized this relationship between speech and movement: Muscular strength must be built up through the right kinds of exercise—to the dancer. . . to produce many different qualities of movement; and he must eventually be able to improvise as readily as he engages in conversation (from Introduction to Shawn’s Fundamental Training Exercises, unpublished)

Shawn above all, advocated that all art, regardless of medium (that is, including both the written/spoken word and dance) had in some fashion to recognize Delsarte’s “Law of Correspondence” which Shawn states as a correlation between inner intent and external manifestation that is both “true” and “natural”: “To each spiritual function responds a function of the body; to each grand function of the body corresponds a spiritual act.” (Shawn, Every Little Movement: 31). Shawn’s application of Delsarte was not

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mechanical; he abhorred performances which claimed to be Delsarte-based but which mechanically, slavishly repeated the form without understanding the flexibility of its content: I have used these laws in ways and forms of my own. . .The knowledge and use of this science does not confine, limit, or make one’s art mechanical or regimented, but on the contrary they make it possible. . . to express more perfectly those things which are uniquely his to say, in forms never before seen. . .(Shawn, Every Little Movement: 77).

This idea of continually re-interpretive form designed to carry “true” feelings through “natural movements” forms the basis of naturalism of movement to which both Shawn and St. Denis adhered, and it literally and meticulously informed how Gnossienne may be read for meaning. Shawn describes one position of the arms, a feature emphasized in the dance in a way that invites comparison with Delsarte’s directions on meaning and position. Shawn states that: The arms are crooked at the elbow. . .the hand [of the right] in the same position as the left hand and parallel to it . . .the arms produce the square root sign of mathematics (Shawn, Fundamentals of Dance: 16).

Just as St. Denis in Incense referred to an off-stage, invisible deity in the general direction of the audience itself (Chapter Two), Gnossienne’s priest pleads with an off- stage, invisible deity—ostensibly the Snake Goddess who is not actually present on stage—seems to be located somewhere off downstage right (Clark). But the poor priest leaps back and forth between the “horns”51 of a dilemma the same way the dancer’s focus shifts back and forth between stage right and stage left near the end of the dance. This produces a comic effect, as the single-minded priest appears to be equally divided between two opposing directions. Alternatively, this strong shifting between opposite sides might indicate a spatial correlation to the personal pride of the priest in conflict with divine command. The issue is apparently resolved when the priest finally turns with stomping feet and an outward thrust with his arms toward the goddess, almost as if shoving his obedience toward her.

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The combination of quick changes of direction paralleling changes in the bent- knee or straight knee positions is part of the humor of the piece. Shawn notes in his book on Delsarte that, “the knee is also a thermometer of the will—strong and straight in aggression. . .but bent in submission. . .wherein one gives up self-will for Divine Will (Every Little Movement, 41-2). However, the character of the priest in Gnossienne manages to reverse these indicators of meaning; the pull of his will and the pull of the goddess are successively responded to with almost equal fervor as his knees straighten in poses characterizing association with the Cretan frescoes and bend quickly as if in a rushed gesture of obedience; a mumbled chant to be got over as quickly as possible. In all moments of standing before starting in a new direction, the dancer presents the upstage leg forward, downstage leg back, lower body facing the direction of movement, and upper body facing the audience. Quick shifts of balance permit the dancer to lead with that upstage foot for any locomotion in that direction. Knees and elbows are bent or straightened with the same abruptness as changes of direction52. Arms trail behind the body forward or emphatically reach out in front of the body. Hands are held with fingers and thumb closed53, like mittens as the wrist moves the hand quickly up or down. Shawn gives this attention to the position of the thumb in context with Delsarte, who instructs that, “. . .the thumb in spite of its seeming lack of expression, is the most important finger, for it indicates degrees of vitality (Shawn, Every Little Movement: 43- 4). By the way in which the priest’s thumb lies closed against the side of the hand, neither folded toward the open palm nor extended wide, Shawn seems to be saying that his “vitality” and energy is capable but restricted, severely under (ritualistic) control. In this way, even the slightest detail such as the positions of the priest’s thumbs are important; the visual whole of the dance is affected. Shawn evidently took the arched back, the frontal torso with profile face, arms and legs and the angular position of joints from the image of the fresco of the Knossos Cup Bearer. The pose of this figure read through Delsarte told Shawn how he wanted to enrich his character for the dance. This characteristic of studied stylization gives Gnossienne not only its archaic grace, but also an intriguing tension between ritual devotion and a quirky quality of individuation suggesting that the character of the Snake Goddess’ priest is not quite all he appears to be at first glance.

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This priest certainly thinks well of himself (Clark) and is putting on a show of religious fervor. As the dance continues, the priest becomes more emphatic in his gestures, at one point stomping audibly on the floor with his foot. Through the cool, highly stylized gestures, he reveals himself personally and all too-humanly engaged in a struggle with his own high self-esteem before submitting to proper worship of his goddess. Head held high, this individual looks down his nose at everyone. But when he turns his back to the audience this priest also suggests that his individual pride is also archetypal: Seeing only the back, and not my individual face, it had stronger suggestiveness towards indicating that this is what happens to mankind . . .not just what happened to one individual (Shawn, Every Little Movement: 77).

An emphatic gesture of defiance54 is expressed in the priest’s lunge toward down stage left away from his deity. At this, the priest may be fooling himself into believing his devotion is absolute and sincere, but the audience begins to wonder. Finally, the joke is on the priest as the audience watches him turn first toward the station of the goddess, then suddenly in the opposite direction in a continual development of the flat, two- dimensional movements established at the beginning of the dance. This priest is truly on “the horns of a dilemma”55 and the irony lies in his sincere attempts to cover his distress with ritual. Not only is this a “Shawnesque” snub at conventional religiousness56 but it is also a direct comment on the diminutive male dancer confronted with the overwhelming, all-powerful divine feminine of expressive dance itself (i. e. St. Denis). Bows in Gnossienne have several meanings. Near the beginning of the dance there is a kind of running kneel in which the momentum of the dancer’s cross upstage is not interrupted; something akin to a Catholic’s swift “shorthand” bend and bob of the head coming into a church. Later in the dance the priest kneels with his arms outstretched to stage right and poses in five stop movements from high to low indicated by the music. The same stop action bow is repeated stage left. Each position of the arms in this deep stop-action bow corresponds to a Delsarte diagram from Every Little Movement indicating in turn, “it is improbable; it is doubtful; it is; it is certain; it is absolute57. At each station, and by stopping the action so that the

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pose registers with the audience, Shawn wryly indicates the priest can’t make up his mind exactly what it is he wants to project. Each pause may indicate the priest’s hesitation, hoping for some divine sign of approval at the lowest possible degree of self-surrender. This approach of “wheeling and dealing” with the divine faintly recalls the negotiations of a small boy with his mother for privileges. Certainly, the priest’s final act of falling rapidly to his knees and bowing his head in the direction of down stage right suggests that he has at last come to acknowledge his mistress’ divine supremacy. And even in this final supplication the outward bending elbows as the palms of his hands press against the ground, give a peculiar angularity and staginess to the surrender. It is as if in bowing to the goddess, the priest is also calling attention to the gesture self-consciously and in ostentation. If she, and by association, the audience is watching, this priest wants to make sure everyone knows he is yielding to superior power while retaining some small sense of self-dignity. By contrast, bows and bends of the body in Nijinsky’s Faune and St. Denis’ Incense do not call attention to themselves with elbows jutting outward from the center of the body58. In addition, the torso of the dancer’s body, and each extension from the torso had to be independently articulated, very much as modern dance students of the today59 must be able to perform in every class session. Clark had to repeat each short section of movement sequence in order to perfect its execution before stringing them together as a contiguous whole: “Barton [Mumaw] had me practice the simplest of the movements of arms over and over until I could snap into those positions instantly.” On the surface, the dance narrative in Gnossienne is about a priest in service to the Snake Goddess of Knossos in ancient Crete struggling to submit to her divine will through ritual performance. But it is in just this juxtaposition of abstract movement with religious ritual that the dance reveals its humor. Underneath this priest’s ritual of appeasement to his goddess lies the urging of his own willful spirit and pride. Gnossienne represents one approach Shawn made to reconcile masculine dance gesture with spiritualistic ritual. The abstract form of the piece suggests an almost automaton-like mechanism characteristic of Art Deco and a comment on technology. If, as the ritual suggests, Shawn’s priest has made the same gestures precisely the same way over and

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over, then the dance also invokes similar repetitive movements of factory workers. The infusion of humor into the dance as a mitigating element keeps the dance from becoming mawkishly preachy. A lot of mawkish preaching against dancing was going on in Christian churches in those days; denunciations from the vied with those from cultural purists in blaming social dances—and by extension any and all dancing—for the downfall of American society. It was indecent, self-serving, and non-productive; and since dance was a feminine activity, it also could not be sacred. Taking this idea into account, the joke of Gnossienne is not only on the character of the priest; Shawn may also have been aiming a barb at any church trivializing both dance and its potential for spiritualism as feminine, and therefore beneath serious consideration by men: In his religious dance, Shawn was challenging the priesthood of the established Protestant Church. He called the divorce of the art of dance from religion and religious expression illegal. . .Shawn was saying that the Protestant service had become dogma or sterile doctrine, that it must return to a simple primitive language if the Protestant Church would communicate with human beings and not die in dusty archives (Palmer: 37). Under its exotic veneer Gnossienne may also be read as a wry comment on the male dancer struggling for a sense of himself in the (absent yet domineering) context of “the goddess”60. So in addition to thumbing his nose at prudish religious objections to dancing, Shawn also parodies the by-then “tried and true” feminine performing link between exoticism and spiritualism, challenging its claim of exclusive right. The gesture is a kind of gentle yet pointed dig at St. Denis herself as the chief representative of this gigantic domination: . . .St. Denis satisfied contemporary thirsts for “culture,” in its nineteenth- century sense of things aesthetic and . . .Here were laid foundations for the gendering of modern dance study as female. . .Female spectatorship for new dance practices. . .wedged open the domain of meanings and gazes. . .(Tomko: 77).

Shawn’s priest bends far backward and looks high above as if up to a gigantic statue in his supplications. In so doing Shawn, through Gnossienne also, “wedged open the domain of meanings and gazes” to the male expressive dancer as well.

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At all times the stylized depiction of Gnossienne referring to the Knossos Palace frescoes61 is strictly maintained throughout the dance. In it, the audience is presented with a vision of a still image from the wall of an ancient, long-abandoned palace that has been forced into uncomfortable animation, while at the same time, unable to relinquish its two-dimensional identity. The dance is in this regard a curious realization of Delsarte’s that, “Art is an act by which life lives again in that which in itself has no life” (Shawn, ELM: 59). Any activity failing to support an organic mechanism in process, or that aimed itself toward a product was anathema to Shawn: [who] was in revolt against the worship of material power and the submission of man to the machine. He taught his pupils to dance. . .to destroy “the false religion”. . . the narrow conservatism that was strangling American education. . .future dancers accomplished this task because Shawn made a way for them (Palmer: 33).

The dance also lends itself to a decidedly avant-garde reading as a “non- performance”; particularly if the narrative of Gnossienne can be interpreted as both an appeal toward—and a “partnering” of—the unseen Goddess located off-stage right. It is in this context that Gnossienne invites a comparison with Faune. The priest extends his arms to her suggested location, evoking the Faun’s reach toward the Nymph as if simultaneously pleading and offering to clasp her in an embrace. Such an embrace in a dance brings to mind gendered balances and shifts of power and meaning in the popular dyad dancing of the day; relationships that don’t always present one gender as dominant. As has been previously noted, the role of a man in these dances—whether social or concert art—is to display his female partner to the audience as an object of its gaze. He does so by guiding her; signaling his decision about when and where turns and changes of direction will occur by the pressure of his contact with her body (hands and waist62 and moving forward so that his partner must counter by moving backward63. In a crowded ballroom, a good male partner steers his partner to avoid collisions (she can’t see where they are going), and he decides when she will turn under his arm. At the same time, the female dominates her male partner in the gaze; it is she the viewer looks at, not her partner. As has been noted earlier in this chapter, Shawn had plenty of experience before Gnossienne with these dynamics in partnering Wallack, Gould, and St. Denis.

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The idea that the Goddess is a veiled reference to St. Denis becomes plausible as Gnossienne’s priest performs positions and moves appropriate to his role in a dyad partnership. He often looks up and kneels when he gestures to stage right, where the goddess supposedly is located, as if she were either standing on a pedestal64, or very tall. This gesture reflects the way in which Nijinsky’s Faun looks up at the Nymph as he slowly kneels to her in a mirror image to the way the tall, dominating figure of the Nymph had previously knelt to him65(Chapter Four). In both dances, a kind of partnering is implied even though the person of the female is absent. The gesture suggests a very unorthodox play on the qualities of stone vis à vis a living human (discussed in relation to Incense in Chapter Two). If the Goddess’ image in Gnossienne is both stone and of a gigantic stature (suggested in the priest’s extreme lift of the head to make eye contact with Her), the thought of his partnering her becomes as ludicrous as a religious rite making petition to an insensitive rock. The priest’s deep lunges often end in iconographic poses and may be read as a visual connection with photographs of Shawn partnering of both Wallack and Gould66 . When dyad dances are put up on stage (art or popular), the male is usually positioned upstage of his female partner. The view the audience has of him in these posed, iconographic images is what can be seen of him around his partner. He is visible mainly by being somewhat larger than she. But if Shawn’s priest were to actually partner a gigantic goddess under these conventions, the diminished priest would be all but invisible to the audience; She would appear to be dancing alone. Appearing with St. Denis, Shawn may have felt invisible. If St. Denis as the Snake Goddess is visible while the Shawn/priest is not, the last part of the dance contains another kind of joke—a kind of avant-garde “non- performance” that takes place only in her perpetual “shadow”. It offers a comment on the difference between Shawn’s priest and St. Denis’ Incense worshipper. Both characters make offerings to an off-stage deity. But while the Incense deity is located in the audience (Chapter Two), Gnossienne’s Goddess is off-stage right. And while St. Denis presents a public performance of a private ritual, Shawn presents its opposite; a priest performing a public ritual as if it were a private (absentee audience) event. In this reading of the dance pushing it to its absurd extreme possibility, it is the Goddess/St.

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Denis who is really on stage, visibly dancing for her audience; the priest is off-stage, his ritual offerings invisible and unacknowledged67. The difficulties in finding suitable music for dance that had faced St. Denis also faced Shawn; serious composers were not inclined to listen to choreographers’ ideas. Shawn comments that choreographers were confined by the disdain serious composers had for dance: We, in turn. . .resenting the limitations of the mostly doggerel music called “dance music”, reached out for the works of the great classical composers, and often were guilty of musical sins—cutting, changing and even rewriting parts, in order to make the music fit a preconceived idea for our dancing (Shawn, One Thousand: 45).

The attitude toward music and its incorporation into the dance productions of Denishawn remained generally unchanged from St. Denis’ early years in vaudeville. In her presentation of “The Lost Dances of Ted Shawn” at the 2001 conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars, former Shawn student, Sharry Traver Underwood mentioned that “Papa” Shawn had a casual way of dealing with music credits on the program. “If you can’t remember who wrote the music for your dance,” he reportedly advised his students in 1940, “just credit Tchaikovsky” (author’s notes). It is interesting that, whatever the music chosen, Shawn: . . .believed, for example, that strong, harsh, broad movements corresponded to the lower, or masculine, section of the musical scale, whereas softer, more lyrical feminine movements corresponded to the scale above middle C. He later conceded that there was a discrepancy in this rigid differentiation, but he never entirely abandoned his belief (Sherman: 102).

The statement suggests a rigid, almost automatic response to music on the part of Shawn. However, his choice of Satie’s music to transform his dance class exercise into a solo performing piece suggests that Shawn was entering a more sophisticated rhythmic relationship with music more pronounced in his dance works following Gnossienne68. In any case, composer and dance artist shared compatible attitudes toward life, art, and religion69 that were reflected in the dance. Both Satie and Shawn were engaged in upsetting entrenched middle-class attitudes in Europe and America, respectively, and enjoyed doing it with humor. Both started out in “low art” venues. While Shawn held

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tango teas and played vaudeville circuits, Satie was a habitué of the Monmartre cafe Le Chat Noir, where he often played his off-beat, “tradition-bending” piano works (Chapter One). Satie was evidently as eccentric an artist of La Belle Epoque as his music suggests, and he particularly attacked the hypocrisies of organized religion. Just as Shawn sought to overthrow conservative Christian prohibitions against dance, Satie set up an annoying, absurd, one-man campaign against traditional ecclesiastical practices. He wrote scathing letters as the sole “shareholder” (Parcier de l’Eglise Metropolitaine d’Art) of his own church with the same enthusiasm as he composed his short, circular and intensely internal pieces. Part of the attraction and strangeness of his early short compositions was that they bridged the gap between the studied formality of classical compositions and the free spontaneity of popular cabaret tunes. His compositions were neither classical nor popular, while taking part in both musical worlds, as if he were trying to, “fly like a fish and swim like a bird”. In every aspect of his public performance of himself as a musical artist, Satie was intolerant of artificial boundaries of any kind and liked to exert his independence from social expectations. Like other music artists of the French avant-garde with whom he associated70 Satie delighted in thumbing his nose at middle-class complacency. He made a public spectacle of himself out of being a noisy recluse. Outrageous in his “ecclesiastical” proclamations, Satie carried out all his activities in a meticulous attitude of serious humor that worked hard at appearing careless; a cubist approach to music that “. . .suggests permanent movement and permanent rest” (Shattuck: 141). Satie wrote the three short piano pieces under the title of Gnossiennes in 1889 during the first part of his musical career71 after hearing “exotic” music played at the Exposition Universelle, whereupon he imagined himself under the influence of a Medieval cleric72. He secluded himself in his apartment with elaborate barriers against the outside world and covered the walls of his rooms with pictures, sketches and paintings from the Middle Ages. Satie declared himself “happy” with this living arrangement while he was occupied in composing Gnossiennes (Satie: 28). Both Satie’s Gnossiennes and his earlier Gymnopédies (also a set of three short piano pieces) quickly became popular among Parisian avant-garde artists for their

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strange quality of form, characterized as: “. . .neither a course nor a drifting. . .a fascination with a series of points which turn out to be one point. His music progresses by standing still.” (Shattuck: 140). “The comment at the Chat Noir was that this work [of Satie] seemed to have been composed ‘by a savage with good taste’. . .proper to the nakedness of his music” (Satie: 29). These comments about Satie’s Gnossiennes also suit Shawn’s meticulous development of the dance, which follows the music in its even and steady dynamics. Shawn’s priest may be said to “move by standing still”; an exercise of ritual that finds its purpose in serving itself. The music just seems to tick along on its own; the parts of its mechanism performing separate and interrelated functions. This analogy is supportive of Shawn’s approach to training dancers to be musically responsive: His [Shawn’s] purpose was to train the dancers to analyze, understand, and respond to one part of the contrapuntal music while adhering to the disciplines of rhythm, form and design as they related to the other parts or voices of the selected music composition. The parts were learned and danced separately and then combined to present a visualization in movement of the audible counterpoint of the music (Poindexter: 182).

This kind of self-contained mechanism for dance and music together served the intense, almost “second nature” movements required to execute the ritual of worship in the dance; the impression conveyed is that it has been performed many times before, and would be performed many times in the future the same way. This gives Gnossienne a sense of timelessness in movement meaning and musical meaning; the point of reference for the passage of time lies within the piece itself and not outside of it73 . This quality of self-referentiality in movement and music also makes the dance adaptable to variations in conditions; indoors, outdoors, concert stage, vaudeville, etc. It is both a classroom exercise and an expressive dance solo successfully performed and reinterpreted over time by Shawn, Mumaw, and Clark. One of the first things evident upon viewing Clark’s reconstruction of Gnossienne on video is that the speed at which the music was played for this reconstruction was faster than it should have been; for some unknown reason, the pianist accompanying him started at a fast clip, which surprised Clark as he struggled to keep up. Clark commented

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on this point in interview with the author, at which time we viewed the video together. However, he added that for modern audiences, the speed keeps up the momentum of the dance in a way that might have kept it from being “plodding”. Former Denishawn dancer Jane Sherman admired this version danced by Clark, which she described to the author as being more “light footed” 74 than Shawn’s though she could not compare it to the way Mumaw performed it because she did not see Mumaw in this role. Certainly some part of the appeal of Gnossienne as performed in the video restoration by Clark used for this study is its speed. There is always a kind of startled quality to the movements of this priest; an uncertainty whether or not he will be able to keep his balance. In conversations with Professor Jack Clark (30 January 2003 and 16 September 2003), Clark referred specifically to issues of balance. He said that the center of gravity in the dancer’s body had to be continually counterbalanced in order to perform each locomotive and positional gesture. The balance of the dancer is particularly challenged in the way in which he must quickly change direction with the lower part of the body while leaving the upper body position intact, or vice versa. Gnossienne is a deceptively difficult dance to perform (Sherman, Clark). As Mumaw describes it, the music has: . . .no time , contains no bars, and has none of the conventional markings. . . Instead, Satie’s musical instructions read, “With absolutely unchanging rhythm throughout. Monotonous and white”, “Far away” “Step by step” and even “On the Tongue.” They suggest a quality difficult enough to translate from page to instrument, let alone from melody into movement. But Shawn was able quite amazingly to sense the sly, ironic intent of the music and to incorporate it into a Cretan ritual of distinct originality (Sherman: 251-2).

Through this sense of ritual Shawn seems to have set up a kind of agreement between movement and sound within the context of his ideas about dance training, for which the movements of Gnossienne were originally intended. For all its sense of interlocking mechanism and efficient functioning, the relationship between dance and music remains fluid: No matter how complicated or unfamiliar the musical beat, no Denishawn dancer ever counted—in classroom, rehearsal, or on stage. We danced to the music, or rhythm and our training enabled us to move together when we should. . .Denishawn choreography followed the sequence of idea, movement in terms of music, then costumes, set, and lighting

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(Sherman: 9).

Makeup for the priest in Gnossienne appears to have been normal skin tone; Shawn evidently did not feel the need to emphasize the exoticism of his performance, or suggest an association with marble sculptures on the order of tableaux vivants by applying body paint75. The dancer is barelegged and barefoot. He wears only a pair of gold colored shorts with thick rolls of fabric around his thighs and mid-torso. Similar “snake” rolls are also worn around his upper arms and across his brow. The priest’s hair is plastered flat against the head: . . .Then I combed my dark hair down over my forehead, fastening it there by means of a fillet76 under the headband to make a straight line across the brow—a trick Shawn used for his solo, Gnossienne (Mumaw: 57).

Unlike Nijinsky (who had access to costumers and designers through Ballets Russes), everyone at Denishawn—including St. Denis and Shawn—had to design and make their own costumes. For his costume in Gnossienne Shawn seemed to exaggerate the features of dress in the Knossos fresco in a way that opened the possibility of humor. His gold trunks were decorated with spiral designs suggesting coiled snakes or seashells. The thick fabric rolls around his torso and thighs appeared bulky; almost as if to suggest a priestly attire designed to exaggerate the importance of the priest himself77 . Even so, the final version of the costume Shawn devised was somewhat toned down from his original intent. In a letter to the author from Denishawn dancer and writer Jane Sherman dated 6 September 2003, Sherman states that: When Ted Shawn first designed it [the costume for Gnossienne] and showed Ruth St. Denis for her approval, the brief golden trunks had the ‘snake’ roll not only around waist and legs, but also had a most suggestive roll running between his legs and up back and front to the waist. Miss Ruth was horrified. ‘Oh, Teddy, you can’t wear that!’ And Teddy thereafter did not wear that.

And just as each dancer who performs Gnossienne makes it his own through interpretation and physical differences, he also adds to it by making his own costume based on Shawn’s. In a letter to Jane Sherman from Barton Mumaw dated 25 May, 1979, Mumaw recalled that:

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I got great fun out of making the costume [for Gnossienne]. I had Shawn’s as a pattern and the original wood-block to imprint the material with the design which was a copy of a Cretan shell pattern. Stuffing the rolls for the legs and the waist with discarded bits of cloth and theatrical materials made them rather heavy. . .and the strips to hold up the “tire” around the middle inserted pressing uncomfortably into my ribs and back—yes, costumes are suffered. Ted used to say we were never satisfied with a costume until it became impossible to move in it78.

This ability to adapt whatever came to hand for prop or costume was taught in the Denishawn curriculum right along with dance classes in an effort to produce performers who could overcome a wide variety of uncertain theatrical conditions of the time. Clearly the Denishawn attitude toward costumes was that no matter how simple or elaborate, its function above all was to enhance the dance, which was no good unless it could be effectively performed without one: . . .Shawn, that most theatrical of choreographers, said, “If you can’t make a dance in the studio that stands independently of costume, that dance has not earned a costume.” Furthermore, in many a Denishawn number costume was reduced to such a minimum that dance simply had to be the thing (Sherman, Drama of Denishawn: 7).

The stage condition for this video reconstruction of Gnossienne was an unadorned dance studio with no accessories or props, although the positions of arms and legs at some places in the dance suggest the manipulation of a bow and arrow, or a spear. This impression of carrying a weapon is suggested by Shawn’s previous Arab, Japanese, Javanese, sword, dagger, and spear dances. The lighting79 for this video version is generalized and bright, which in one sense supported the dance by illuminating the dancer’s body in a simple and uncomplicated fashion. However, a sense of ancient mystery was not supported in the overall stage condition, suggesting that Gnossienne did not need an elaborate set to establish an exotic locale. Some black and white photographs of Shawn in this dance appear to have been taken outdoors; others with him posed before a solid-colored drape. Based on these photographs, it is speculated that when Shawn danced Gnossienne, some sort of fabric backdrop hung behind the dancer. This simple arrangement was implemented for many Denishawn performances, regardless of theme. In this video reconstruction there was no backdrop to distance the performance out of a classroom, and in some shots, a view of the piano appears. This

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setting evokes Gnossienne’s origins and continuation as a teaching tool and demonstration piece for dance lectures; nevertheless, it is a credit to Clark’s abilities that he was able to convey the dance so clearly in these unsupportive conditions. However, Gnossienne—as were many Denishawn dances—was also designed to withstand a wide variety of performing conditions as might be found on vaudeville tours, foreign tours, and even outdoor performances at private residences80. Overall, Gnossienne is one of Shawn’s most successful combinations of danced spiritual expression with humor. Occasionally Shawn returned to themes of ancient Crete established in Gnossienne, but these were rarely as successful, perhaps because the element of wry humor was missing in them. Such dances included Death of a God: Cretan Ballet (1929) and The Bull God (1930). But while Gnossienne can be considered an important step in Shawn’s search for the dignity of masculine dance, overly serious exotic-themed dances did not work as well for him as they did for St. Denis81. Despite the fervor of his Cosmic Dance of Shiva (1926) or the photogenic manliness of Death of Adonis Plastique (1923) these came across as stiff and over-posed. However, following the success of his Invocation to the Thunderbird (1918) Shawn developed other New World dances with spiritual and ritual ideas, such as Feather of the Dawn (1923) Xochitl (1920) and Osage Pawnee Dance of Greeting (1930). These experiments in a different exotic frame than St. Denis’ Orientalism found freshness in an equally different relationship to music: During the summer of 1917, Shawn’s experimentations led him to choreograph two widely divergent types of dances based upon the resource of contrapuntal music and of the American Indian, respectively. . . (Poindexter: 182)

In movement, an abstraction rather than literal gesture served Shawn more effectively. The culmination of this direction for Shawn was his Kinetic Molpai (1925) which nevertheless retained some link to ancient Greek sports (Shawn, One Thousand: 273). He also choreographed several “machine dances”, including Pacific 231, (1929), Geometric Dance, and The Metal Dance (both in 1930). Some of Shawn’s memorable spiritual dances evoke, rather than literally represent, their exotic origins somewhat along the lines of Gnossienne. Among them is the mesmerizing abstract spinning dance, Mevlevi Dervish (1924). In the simple, profoundly expressive O

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Brother Sun and Sister Moon: A Study of St. Francis (1931) Shawn perhaps found his most complete release into divine meditation through dance82. The sarcasm suggested in Gnossienne nearly fifteen years earlier yields to a simple, self-assured statement of danced faith in O Brother: His main interest was in religious dancing—“Dancing and praying are the same thing”; in dancing for men—“the right of a boy or man to dance as an independent artist, not merely in the roles of comedian and acrobat”; and in “Denishawn,” an organization of dancers83. . .(Palmer: 36).

Shawn’s legacy through teaching and dancing continued in the influence he had on the next generation of American modern dancers who studied with him at Denishawn. Both Martha Graham and Charles Weidman worked as his students from 1917 to 1927, when they left to create their own independent dance styles. When Graham left she was joined by Denishawn accompanist Louis Horst, who worked with her during her early choreographic career to hone her deeply personal, individual expressiveness. Weidman struck out with fellow Denishawn student Doris Humphrey84, and together they established a company with a broad repertoire that reinterpreted the success of the St. Denis/Shawn dyad. Although they eventually developed uniquely individual styles, while they were with Denishawn, Shawn taught and set dances for both Weidman and Graham that marked their subsequent developments as dance artists. The experimentation with a variety of choreographic styles under the training conditions of Denishawn encouraged both Weidman and Graham to leave and find their own artistic courses. In particular, Weidman and Graham took the abstract features of Gnossienne in their own ways. Graham moved directly into serious dramatic expression, especially in her series of dance dramas based on Greek tragedies. Weidman, however, moved in the direction of satire. Weidman was one of the first men to stick with Denishawn training long enough to join the performing company, and Shawn quickly perceived in the young man a fine potential for humor; “. . .even his bushy eyebrows could be expressive. . .” (Anderson: 164). Shawn brought that aspect out in Weidman to overcome Weidman’s initial lack of self-confidence as a dancer by creating the popular Crapshooter on him. “Shawn detected a flair for the comic in Charles and choreographed a comic dance for him, forcing him against his will to perform it,” according to Olga Maynard in her book,

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American Modern Dancers (135). Weidman caught on to the challenge and choreographic potential of humor, and many of his own dances reflected the wit of Shawn’s work with him, of which Gnossienne was a part. Weidman was, “. . .best known as a comic dancer and choreographer. . .Yet he could also be deadly serious. And some of his jokes could sting” (Anderson: 164). One of Weidman’s most successful pieces, Flickers (1941) was a wicked, manic send-up of silent films of the day and featured (his usually serious partner) Doris Humphrey’s “. . .outrageous clowning as a vamp” (Anderson: 165). Narratives from literature also attracted his choreographic eye in the same way an ancient fresco of Crete had caught Shawn’s. Weidman set dances to Beerbohm’s The Happy Hypocrite (1931), Voltaire’s Candide (1933), and three James Thurber pieces; Fables for Our Time (1947), The War between Men and Women (1954), and Is Sex Necessary? (1960). Weidman’s dances also continued Shawn’s abstract directions in Gnossienne by presenting dance as its own indicator. Like other avant-garde art (Chapter One), dance in this context appears separate and freed from an assumed link with expressive meanings so that free associations on the part of audiences could be suggested instead of specific meaning being dictated by the artist. Weidman experimented early on with dances that juxtaposed multiple meanings and genders: . . .the gestures did not have to have a dramatic base. . .they could develop according to their own movement logic. . . individual movement phrases might suggest a man taking a , a woman sweeping the floor, a nun telling her beads, and a man tugging at a fishing pole (Anderson: 165).

Graham, through her apprenticeship at Denishawn, benefited from both St. Denis’ (Chapter Two) and Shawn’s experimentations in the new American dance form. She partnered Shawn as a doomed princess in one of his forays into Native American themes, Xochitl (1920) and also choreographed her own Gnossienne in 1926 to music by Satie, suggesting she may have been impressed with Shawn’s male solo. Certainly the feature of movement isolations, in which different parts of the body move independently of each other, of Shawn’s Gnossienne suggests that it may have influenced the use of this key feature in Graham’s technique of expressive dance movement. As de Mille observes:

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She [Graham] discovered a whole technique of balancing on bent knees, with her thighs as a hinge and the spine cantilevered and suspended backwards in counterbalance. She invented turns with a changing and swinging body axis (57-8).

Shawn’s long-term commitment to the idea of dance as a language also manifests itself in Graham’s work quite literally: her dance works are narrative dramas, and she describes the early stages of working on them as “. . .to work on my script” (Leatherman: 54). “She [Graham] inaugurated several stage techniques. . .symbolic props and set pieces, speech with dancing, the chorus of commenting dancers as in the Orient” (de Mille: 58). From Shawn Graham developed an analytical, highly disciplined approach to teaching and choreography and, like Shawn, Graham preferred to work in isolation, without outside distractions of any kind. From St. Denis she learned to trust her own intuition and present herself as the central focus of the dance visually and psychologically (Chapter Two). Graham emphatically evolved her own tools of movement vocabulary and presentation in stage space that would help her life-long explorations of essential motifs, among them tactics of balancing between the feminine of St. Denis and the masculine of Shawn. Fonteyn observes that, “Shawn provided an ambiance [through Denishawn] in which America’s real ‘Mother of Modern Dance,’ Martha Graham, was able to discover her own direction” (Fonteyn: 108) Many of Graham’s works invoke, as does Gnossienne, impressions of Ancient Greece. But while Shawn’s goddess is implied, Graham’s feminine power is emphatically present and central. As did St. Denis in Incense (Chapter Two), Graham presented the feminine point of view as central to her characterizations of Jocasta, Clytemnestra, etc. However, it is interesting to note that the agony of that centrality, and the struggle between the divine and the human in Graham’s Greek works evoke similar issues raised by Gnossienne. The costuming for the men in a Graham Greek dance is often eerily evocative of that worn by Shawn in Gnossienne. In Graham’s Night Journey (1947), for example, Oedipus wears shorts covered in a ropy design, and similar snake-like ropes drape the shoulders of Agamemnon in Clytemnestra (1958). And in Alcestis (1960) the men’s shorts support flaring ropes extended past their hips, while their upper arms are similarly

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banded. In particular, the heavy-looking rope binding the brow appears in many of her biblical and Greek works, notably in Seraphic Dialogue (1955), and in particularly heavy double rows over the brows of the men in Legend of Judith (1962). Graham, as has been previously noted, also seems to have been in agreement with Shawn’s idea of costumes being useful to impede, or complicate movement as much as to facilitate or enhance it. Her [Graham’s] more complex and dramatically more meaningful costumes are designed against the movement. She has put herself and her dancers into tubes of cloth like cocoons; in voluminous robes, weighty and unyielding; in cloaks and capes made of yards of material so intricately designed, tacked, hook-and-eyed that the dancers forget from one season to the next how to put them on (Leatherman: 140).

Shawn’s ambition was to meld his ideas of spiritualism, dance, and masculine performance to the betterment of American society. In order to do this, he set upon a multi-faceted creative life dedicated to both self-education and the education of the American public to place the dancing male in a position of respect. The obstacles Shawn faced to make dance his life’s work were tremendous, and it is difficult today to imagine them. There was hardly such a thing as an expressive American dancer in the decade following turn of the century; much less one who was male. Shawn literally had no models to follow except those of pioneering women such as Duncan, Fuller or St. Denis. Fortunately, he was able to adapt their methods of negotiation for public acceptance to his own unique American case. The avant-garde conditions that had worked for these women artists made it possible for Shawn to also succeed in his own solo dances. As an example of Early Modern avant-garde art with an exotic theme, Gnossienne illustrates ways in which Shawn manipulated social perspectives about gender and dance. Created in the midst of Shawn’s early Denishawn phase, the dance takes as its exotic point of inspiration an ancient Cretan fresco of a cup-bearer from the Palace of Knossos. Shawn thematically developed this image into the character of an arrogant yet obedient priest in the act of worship directed toward the Snake Goddess. In the process, Shawn also invoked the image of the “invisible” male dancer in social and art dance whose only purpose in appearing on stage is to display the charms of his female partner. The idea comments on the domination of the female in expressive art dance of the time, and on the professional

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and personal partnership Shawn shared with St. Denis. As a “non-performance”, Gnossienne expresses distortions of time and space as conventionally constructed in performance. The angular, ritualistic movements of Shawn’s dance paired with Satie’s short piano music made a particularly successful combination of Delsartian naturalism and social commentary. Originally designed as a Denishawn dance class exercise to maximize the subjectivity of the student’s dancing body to expressive choreographic demands, Gnossienne is also an avant-garde work because it reverses the relationship between artist and art; it is a construction designed to serve the purposes of the artist instead of the other way around. Instead of choosing an exotic theme and choreographing the movements around it, Shawn allowed the physical structure of a choreographic teaching sequence suggest to him a presentational theme that would suit a performance piece. Gnossienne was part of a continuing process of self-education for Shawn that included enlightening others in all phases of dance. These educative goals are reflected in this dance, for just as the vain priest of Gnossienne must submit fully to his goddess, so must the student dancer submit his body to the rigors of training in order to achieve an instrument of precise expressiveness. Just as avant-garde art movements communicated missions to improve life (Chapter One), so did Shawn’s dances, of which Gnossienne was an extraordinary example. The ritualistic qualities of the abrupt movements in the dance Gnossienne provides audiences with a humorous comment on the ability of art to express more than one linear construct of time and space. The dance suits the style of Art Deco in its posed centrality of the dancing figure and abstract ritual. The lines of the body are straight and direct. Although not overtly stated, Gnossienne represents a response to the pressures of technology. Even though the ritualistic movements of his priest conform to precise dictates, the human alienation (i. e. “a ritual no longer having any meaning”, or a joke shared between priest and goddess, according to Mumaw) in it suggests a similar alienation of a factory worker from the products he contributes into the making of. The tools Shawn found early in his crusade for American acceptance of the manly art of dancing included education, the incorporation of exotic themes, and humor. Gnossienne

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represents an important step in Shawn’s efforts to pioneer expressive dance incorporating all three qualities. The dance’s ritualistic form, inasmuch as it spoofs exoticism and the feminine cliché of performing exotic dances, also spoofs the empty shell of ritualistic gesture—approved and taken for “true” by society—that is also empty of meaning for the person who performs it. Given Shawn’s early desire to become a minister, this reading of Gnossienne is especially ironic. His priest flirts with his own willfulness under the requirement of submission to the will of his all-powerful Goddess, and he struggles manfully to partner Her through the hollow gestures of a lost ritual. But Shawn never left his audiences in despair; it wasn’t his nature to end on a note of pessimism. The battle won in favor of the will of the Goddess, Shawn’s priest stands to regain his dignity before the audience, and his bows suggest that he may have lost this battle, but not exactly the war. Human and divine; profane and sacred; Gnossienne offers a portrait of American danced masculinity at once “invisible” and palpably present. Thumbing his nose at social and religious hypocrisies, Shawn’s priest eventually “knows himself” through humor and a ritualized imagery of masculine force in art. The dance fits well Shawn’s avowed statements on what art should do and be in modern society: It [art] can be so challenging and so stimulating that it arouses anger, making us re-assess all our accepted values. All true beauty has an element of strangeness in it. . .I believe that dancing is a man’s art form as much, or more, than it is a woman’s. . .The great choreographic works yet to come can only be performed by a company with balanced masculine and feminine choirs (Shawn: Credo85).

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END NOTES CHAPTER THREE

1 The video reconstruction of this dance as performed by Professor Jack Clark of Florida State University was timed at two minutes long. However, Clark stated in interview (16 September 2003) that this performance of the music was faster than in the version danced by Shawn himself.

2 In a letter to the author dated 6 September, 2003, Sherman recalled that Mumaw first performed Gnossienne on the first Men Dancers Program in 1931. In the same letter, Sherman states that the last reference she could find of Shawn performing this dance was March 27, 1938 in NYC.

3 Former Denishawn student and dancer, Jane Sherman, stated in a letter to the author dated 6 September 2003 that she thought Gnossienne was the longest-running modern dance of the Twentieth Century.

4 Although Incense was franchised out as a Denishawn product, the dance remained closely aligned with St. Denis’ persona. Several men, and even his sister Bronislava took over the role of the Faun after Nijinsky could no longer perform.

5 The only primary source mentioning that Shawn had seen Faune available to the author was in a letter dated May 2, 1923 that Shawn wrote to St. Denis of having seen the Russian ballet in performance. Shawn was not much impressed, but he did mention that, “Pilcer as the Faune at least tried.” (this letter from Shawn’s personal files was made available to the author by Norton Owen, Archivist at Jacob’s Pillow). Although it is improbable that either St. Denis or Shawn saw Nijinsky dance in Faune, it is virtually certain they would have seen photographs of him in the role. In 1916 both Denishawn and Ballets Russes were on a tour of the United States (in opposite circuits, but conjoining in Pittsburgh in March). The general run of American reviewers and audiences of the two companies tended to lump them together—a hazard of the close connection between exotic themes and early American modern dance (Kendall: 118-9).

6 Shawn did have a brief stint of taking ballet lessons with Pershikoff, from Gertrude Hoffman’s troupe while in Los Angeles (Kendall: 107).

7 Part of Shawn’s training included the rigor of Delsarte exercises which had, in its American form, a dual purpose in cultivating healthy bodies through exercise and training the performer in expressive gesture.

8 Sherman was a Denishawn dancer and student from 1921 to 1928 and wrote about her experiences with Shawn and St. Denis in The Drama of Denishawn and Shawn’s contributions with Shawn’s student Barton Mumaw in the book, Barton Mumaw, Dancer. At the recommendation of Norton Owen, archivist for Jacob’s Pillow, the author contacted Sherman regarding details of Gnossienne in particular. I am indebted to Ms. Sherman for her detailed, lively responses to my correspondence. In addition, the Jacob’s Pillow archives had preserved a tremendous volume of letters between Sherman and Mumaw regarding the book project, which Mr. Owen generously made available to the author.

9 Mumaw places the creation of the classroom instruction sequence as taking place in the summer of 1917, concurrent with Shawn’s experimentations with the relationships between movement and music (Mumaw: 251-3). For the purposes of clarity in this study, this date is considered accurate. However, it is noted that Shawn’s account of how Gnossienne evolved suggests that the classroom episode took place during the summer of 1916, which is in accord with Sherman’s account of its origins in a letter to the author 6 September, 2003.

10 In an attempt to attract men to Denishawn school and company, Shawn and St. Denis offered free scholarships to any young man brave enough to come and study with them. Charles Weidman joined them in this manner: he had not seen a Denishawn performance, but while working as a junk collector, Weidman had seen discarded flyers with intriguing photos of Denishawn dances (Anderson: 164).

11 Theatrical Dancing in America: the Development of the Ballet from 1900 (1978).

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12 A more detailed discussion of this dynamic at work in Faune is undertaken in Chapter Four.

13 Even a superficial viewing of Gnossienne reveals that it included poses from other Shawn dances, notably his Japanese Spear Dance of 1919. The repetition of these poses indicates experimentation with gestures that would be unmistakably “read” as “masculine” (that is, suggesting a prop weapon) rather than feminine.

14 Shawn reports in his autobiographic account, One Thousand and One Night Stands that in 1921 he was surprised by a backstage visitor, the photographer Dr. , who told Shawn that, “It’s very difficult nowadays to add anything new to the vocabulary of dance but I think you have done it with Gnossienne. It’s a genuine contribution” (Shawn: 101).

15American male dancers George Washington Smith (1825-1899: whose sons and two daughters also became acclaimed dancers), William Henry Lane “Juba” (1825-1852) and John Durang (1767-1822). Their performances were self-consciously “entertainment” to please audiences, rather than “art” designed to express the feelings of the artist. The division between art and entertainment coincided with the division between “natural” and “artificial” performance (Glossary).

16 As remarked in the previous note Shawn was not, strictly speaking, the first American male to make dance his life work. However, it must be recognized that these previous male American dancers presented their dances as delightful entertainments, as opposed to dances expressive of deep psychological, philosophical or serious themes.

17Shawn was not only a prolific choreographer and dancer but also wrote numerous articles and essays on dance and authored several books. He lectured on a wide range of topics relating dance, health, and cultural history of masculine dance and conducted numerous workshops, seminars, and classes on dance, both for the general public and dance students. When the author met Shawn in 196 7, she found him enthusiastic in his educative role. Student and companion Barton Mumaw recalls that Shawn also enjoyed carving wood sculptures of the masculine physical form in dance movement (Barton Mumaw, Dancer, co- author Jane Sherman: 236)

18 Jacob’s Pillow archival holdings contain a manuscript of Shawn’s play, The Female of the Species which was performed at his college 2 February 1912.

19 The archetypal runaway boy in was Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; in England J. M. Barrie’s Peter . Getting out of the house and away from the influence of women was the only way boys could simultaneously “grow up” into men and “remain boys” who had exciting adventures. Victorian sentimentality and fuss over the innocence and purity of small children was a genuine threat to masculine development. The author has a photograph of her grandfather taken around the turn of the century when he must have been about three years old. He stands on a chair looking into a mirror on the wall, wearing an extremely fussy “sailor suit” and with his long blonde hair in ringlets.

20 A more complete discussion of the phenomenon of Billy Sunday is undertaken in Chapter Five. Sunday shot off pistols, threw chairs, shouted with raised fist, and perform other acts of violence to get attention in his popular sermons. Men flocked to hear him denounce organized “feminized” religion and an overpowering mercantilism that destroyed the working man. He inspired (white only) men to believe in a merging of morality and Christian faith with physical masculine strength. Interestingly, like Sandow and Shawn, Sunday was also a “self-made man” who spent his childhood so physically weak he could hardly walk (Kimmel: 178-181).

21 One room of Roycroft Inn was named for Socrates; another for Susan B. Anthony (Kendall: 104-5). Hubbard’s rhetoric included down-home folksy phrases sprinkled with lofty, idealistic statements that occasionally echoed biblical language and references to Shakespeare. His appeal included notions of religious fervor, artistic beauty for both men and women, an outcry against the deadening effects of earning a living in modern life and urban decadence as opposed to pastoral nature. His call for emancipation

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included women, but emphatically did not include African-Americans or other non-white people; he could have written copy for the title plates in any W. D. Griffith movie. He traveled extensively and wrote prolifically about people of color. Hubbard died when the Lustitania was sunk, thereby attaining a kind of legendary status on a par with his “heroes” (www. ProjectGutenberg: 25 September 2004)

22 It is speculated by the author that Shawn likely encountered the writings of Hubbard around 1910 or 1911. Dates given by Shawn and St. Denis on when things happened are often inconsistent from document to document. Wherever possible, dates for both St. Denis and Shawn are verified according to the accounts of Suzanne Sheldon and Elizabeth Kendall.

23 Mrs. Mary Perry King co-authored The Making of a Personality with Carman. Carman’s group at Triunian School (where Shawn studied briefly in 1914 according to Sheldon’s account) included Mrs. King, who taught Shawn his first Delsarte exercises, without crediting Delsarte. Also at Triunian was Mr. Richard Hovey, and Edmund Russell’s estranged wife, Henrietta (Chapter Two) whom Richard Hovey later married. Shawn met Mrs. Hovey in 1915 after his brief stay at Triunian when Mrs. Hovey attended one of his dance performances. Her expertise in Delsarte (she had studied directly with Delsarte’s son Gustav and Mrs. King had been one of her students) and Dalcroze training brought her to teach at Denishawn, and she remained a life-long friend and teacher to Shawn until her death (Shawn, Every Little Movement: 12).

24 Roosevelt’s own performance of masculinity included not only a bristling moustache but also a carefully- orchestrated outfit combining “foreign” items like a fringed buckskin jacket and a sombrero with “feminine” details such as a silk neck-scarf. No one would be laughing, however, because the dandiness of the ensemble was set off with the prop/accessories of both a revolver and a rifle (Kimmell: 446). Shawn well took the lesson that a weapon for a prop reinforced the manly impression of his dances. Although his Gnossienne priest carries no prop, gestures in the dance evoke other Shawn dances in which he carried knives, swords, or spears (Dreier: 43-46).

25 A second wave of “dance mania” hit America later, in the 1920s, with the African-American based jazz (Tomko, Kendall, et. al.).

26 It should be noted that “full body contact” in the performance of such dances as the tango meant different things in different venues. While low-class performance may include full frontal suggestion of genital contact between partners (hence lewd), upper-class, refined performance offered the suggestion without performing it in fact. Partners in the latter, refined versions of these dances worked off the side of one another so that actual physical contact occurs (if at all) along the right or left side of each dancing body. However, the visual effect to viewers of this arrangement is one of a clenched, closed union of movement between partners.

27 Shawn was sometimes compared to other male dancers such as Paul Swan and even Mordkin. If he could not exploit the confusion to his advantage, it irked him; as when it was accidentally announced that Ruth St. Denis had married Paul Swan instead of Ted Shawn (Shawn, One Thousand: 45).

28 Certainly the abandonment to movement characteristic of a flapper evokes the empowerment of the character of Salomé (Chapters One, Two, and Five). Even more, the flapper’s exotic-inspired dress and accessories accentuated her vigorous movements and copied popular Salomé costumes, notably that of Maude Allen. These features included things that waved and moved in response to the dancer’s movements; long, swinging ropes of pearls around the neck, headbands with jewels and feathers fitted over a close-cropped hairdo, and filmy dresses dripping with bead fringes that not only left legs and arms bare to kick and twist, but also caught dim light and shimmered over the body. With ruby lips clenched around a long, slim (almost weapon-like) cigarette holder, the flapper exuded an uncontrolled, sexual, youthful feminine power. And when she danced, she was quite a sight.

29 Kendall qualifies this statement with the idea that the male ballet dancers of the Russian and Gertrude Hoffman companies were accepted under the exotic aegis of the ballet and perhaps because they were “not Americans” (Kendall: 111). Shawn also remarked upon this curious bias when he reported an argument he

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had with a college peer who asserted that men don’t dance. Shawn pointed out that they had enjoyed attending performances by Russian men together. His friend grudgingly agreed that it was all very well for aborigines and Russians to dance, but that it was hardly possible for an American man (Shawn, One Thousand: 11).

30 The exact year Shawn joined Gould in Los Angeles is not verified, but 1911 was also the year he first saw Ruth St. Denis in Incense (Chapter Two) and Gertrude Hoffman’s take on the Russian ballet. He evidently left Gould and went east to meet Bliss Carman and Mary Perry King in 1913. In 1914 he went to New York and joined St. Denis in the fall of that year.

31 It is not quite clear what is meant by this term, “dance originating”, but the author speculates that it may have been Shawn’s method of applied library research that would help dance students conceive and create dances based on historical/cultural information. This information would then guide the dance student in all phases of dance making from narrative and choice of movements to creation of their own costumes. This approach to dance making was still in force for students attending Jacob’s Pillow (author’s notes).

32 From an unedited manuscript for One Thousand and One Night Stands from Walter Terry in the private ownership of Norton Owen, director of Jacob’s Pillow Archives, 2003.

33 The Santa Fe circuit was a tour of acts sent out to stations along the old Santa Fe trail to entertain employees of the railroad and their families. In the 1930s and 1940s, tours were arranged for tourists from the East to visit Indian reservations in the Southwest, creating a market for craft wares such as basketry, blankets and pottery. Southwest Native American culture is sometimes referred to as the “American Orient” (from essays in “At the Contact Zone”).

34 Daughters of the Dawn and Earth Deities were experimental performances in that no music accompanied the dance/mime movements.

35 The letter made no other reference to the identity of the writer, but he had obviously been a good friend of Shawn’s from his college years. The author could find no other reference to who “Hugh” was.

36 Henrietta’s first husband, Edmund Russell, contributed to Ruth St. Denis’ development of Incense (Chapter Two). Henrietta, more serious and analytical than Edmund in her application of Delsarte, had studied with Delsarte’s son Gustav in France, where Gustav continued his father’s work (Shawn, ELM: 12-3).

37 This letter was found among the voluminous archival material loaned to the author by Owen Norton, Director of the Jacob’s Pillow Archives.

38 An is a beautiful dancing female often associated with the forces of nature in Hindu mythology. When sages sought the solitude of the jungles to increase their mystic powers, they were particularly susceptible to the temptations of sent by demons to distract them from their spiritual goals.

39 Including the author’s first dance teacher, Ms. Elizabeth Werblosky, a former member of the Chicago Opera Ballet.

40 As early as the summer of 1915, a few stalwart female students requested dance roles designed for them by Shawn that were not feminine. Shawn records in his book One Hundred and One Night Stands that one of his less-willowy female students during the summer of 1916, Mary Caldwell, told him that she was tired of “skippy dances” and asked him to create for her “a really fierce one”. The resulting solo set to music by Sousa, became one of Shawn’s most popular dances, Invocation to the Thunderbird and was kept in his solo repertoire from its first performance in 1918 to the early 1950’s. The New York City Library Performing Arts Collection Denishawn photo album includes a series of photographs of an unidentified young woman in aggressive, “unfeminine” poses performing what was called a “Savage Dance”. A dance of the same title was one of Shawn’s solos in 1912 (Dreier: 43).

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41 It may be pointed out here that Nijinsky experimented with his new movement vocabulary for Faune by using his sister’s body as a model (Chapter Four).

42 A fuller account of Satie and his early modernist work is given in Chapter One.

43 Mumaw recalls that one St. Denis rehearsal included her directions to a pair of left over dancers to, “. . .just go over there, dears, and make an elephant.’” (Mumaw: 27).

44 Many of Shawn’s other Denishawn dances on exotic themes emulated St. Denis’ mystic approach, but were not nearly as successful or memorable. Ever in her shadow, Shawn sought to break free into his own artistic arena, but could do so only after the dissolution of both their marriage and Denishawn. His character dances were lighthearted entertaining, and popular. But they did not satisfy the religious direction toward which he felt inclined until he began to delve into Native American themes in which St. Denis—whose focus was on the Orient—had less interest (Dreier, Sheldon).

45 Each still pose of the dance, however brief it may be, presents the dancer as a distinct—and distinctive--, two-dimensionally readable image. This quality of the dance makes it possible to immediately recognize postcard photographs of the dance on sale in the Jacob’s Pillow gift shop.

46 According to Jane Sherman in her book, The Drama of Denishawn (34) Barton Mumaw told her that Shawn had heard this statement from Doris Humphrey. Mumaw took the statement to mean that what could not be taught was Shawn’s particular nuances of performance. In a letter to the author (6 September 2003 ), Sherman stated that she had seen Shawn perform Gnossienne many times, and that her impression was that he had a certain physical “weightiness” or “a slower rate” in performance of the dance than did Mumaw. The dance was evidently further accelerated in the video reconstruction of it by Jack Clark, who learned the dance from Mumaw. Clark stated in interview (16 September 2003) that the pianist unexpectedly played the music for this performance faster than originally intended, giving Clark’s execution a rapid, almost “unbalanced” sense of transition between poses and movements. Clark’s Gnossienne priest could be described as “nimble” and “agile”; he felt that this speedier rendition was appropriate to the tastes of audiences current to his 1995 reconstruction.

47 A photograph of Mumaw in Gnossienne appears on page 250 of his book with Jane Sherman, Barton Mumaw, Dancer and its caption states that Gnossienne is the first solo that Mumaw performed.

48 As of this writing, Jack Clark is a professor in the Florida State University Department of dance teaching Labanotation, Repertory, and Contemporary Dance for non-Majors. In addition to his personal studies with Mumaw, he has served as featured soloist with the Denishawn Repertory Dancers, and participated in the Kennedy Center retrospective of American Contemporary Dance.

49 Every student attending the 1967 summer Jacob’s Pillow dance courses (including the author) was required to purchase and study Every Little Movement, Shawn’s book on Delsarte.

50 The connection between oratory and dance (expressive gesture) dates from early Renaissance manuals of comportment. For example, Thoinot Arbeau’s treatise on the art of dance (1589) Orchesography, includes numerous references to the expressive qualities of courtly dance that support speech and song.

51 It is speculated by the author that the Snake Goddess’ association with the sacred bull, the horns of which figure prominently in her iconography, would have been well-known by Shawn, who made extensive study into historical accounts of ancient civilizations. This impression is corroborated by Norton Owen, Director of the Jacob’s Pillow archives. Owen allowed the author to examine a book from Shawn’s private collection titled The Dramas and Dramatic Dances of Non-European Races by William Ridgeway (1915). Shawn later did a Crete dance called The Bull God in 1930 (Dreier).

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52 The combination of quick changes of direction paralleling changes in the knee bent or knee straight positions is part of the humor of the piece. However, the character of the priest in Gnossienne manages to reverse these indicators of meaning; the pull of his will and the pull of the goddess at opposite sides of the stage are successively responded to with almost equal fervor as his knees straighten in poses characterizing association with the Cretan frescoes and bend quickly as if in a rushed gesture of obedience; a mumbled chant to be got over.

53 Shawn’s description of the dance states that the thumb is open and separate from the fingers, but Clark emphasized that Mumaw specifically directed thumbs were always to be held closed, as is seen in the video reconstruction. See Chapter Four for a more detailed discussion of these “mitten” hands as used in Faune.

54 The lunging position taken by the Priest is read by Shawn in Delsartian terms as expressing defiance, or vehement attack (from: Every Little Movement, 45 and 113)

55 It would certainly not have escaped Shawn’s scholarly study that the Snake Goddess of Knossos also bore symbols of the sacred bull, and that her young devotees danced with bulls in her honor.

56 Both Sherman and Palmer in their discussions of Shawn comment on his determined effort to undermine conventional middle-class religious hypocrisy, and Gnossienne was only one of numerous explorations on that topic in Shawn’s dance works.

57 from the diagram, drawing by William Thomas, “The Degrees of Affirmation”, Every Little Movement: 56).

58 Shawn notes that Delsarte “called the elbow (as well as the knee) ‘The Thermometer of the Will. . .The elbow. . .moves outward, away from the body to express pride, arrogance, assertion of the will’” (41). Since Gnossienne’s priest has his elbows out, his defiance and pride “sticks out” through his ritual performance.

59 The author had a semester’s course with Graham student Dr. John Wilson during Master’s degree studies at the University of Arizona, and found this aspect of physical training extremely difficult to achieve successfully. It is speculated by the author that it is perhaps from Gnossienne’s use of the torso in independent movement clearly evident in the dance that Martha Graham may first have perceived its expressive potential.

60 A publicity photograph of Shawn and St. Denis has her perched literally up on a pedestal with Shawn standing at her side. This photograph, undated (possibly 1914) appears after page 78 in Sheldon’s book and is credited as having been taken by Nickolas Muray. The relationship between them of St. Denis’ divinity approached by her loyal servant, and disciple Shawn has been thoroughly discussed in their biographies (Sheldon, Shawn, et. al.)

61 The characteristic backward thrust of the upper torso, head lifted high in profile, legs spread apart, elbow and knee joints flexed at near right angles, and details of costume suggest not only the “Cup Bearer” fresco image (which curiously, is not a single male, but a double image of two males) but also the one known as “the Prince”.

62 The analogy of riding horses is appropriate here, for a well-trained kinesthetic communion between rider and horse depends upon pressure signals given by the hand or rein against the horse’s neck, or by pressure of knee or thigh against the horse’s shoulders. The side on which these signals are given cue the horse to move in the opposite direction; that is, a pressure on the right side indicates a turn to the left. The same dynamic applies to dyad dancing as the male signals direction to the female.

63 One of Ginger Roger’s comments on what it was like to dance with Fred Astaire was that the woman has to learn to dance backwards, leading with the left foot in response to her partner’s forward locomotion leading with the right. And she has to do it in high heels. Author’s notes on dyad popular dance gratefully

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acknowledge Dr. Kay Picart’s (FSU) informal discussions on the conventions of ballroom dancing during the author’s assistantship with her.

64 A publicity photograph of Shawn and St. Denis shows her perched literally up on a pedestal with Shawn standing by her side. This photograph, undated (possibly 1914) appears after page 78 in Shelton’s book and is credited as having been taken by Nickloas Muray. The relationship between them of St. Denis’ divinity approached by her loyal servant and disciple Shawn has been thouroughly discussed in their biographies (Shelton, Shawn, et. al.).

65 Nijinsky did not cast his sister Bronislava as the Nymph because he was adamant that the Nymph be portrayed by the tallest female dancer he could find (Nijinska: 405).

66 These photographs of Shawn partnering Wallack and Gould appear in his book, One Thousand and One Night Stands (with Gray Poole). The Wallack/Shawn photo is undated and uncredited; the caption states that this newspaper shot shocked the Chancellor of Shawn’s college because Wallack’s dress was slit to the knee (she is wearing ). The Gould/Shawn photograph is also undated and credited to Rembrandt. The caption states that Shawn and Gould started the first Tango Teas in Los Angeles in 1912.

67 In his book with Sherman, Barton Mumaw, Dancer, Mumaw discusses Shawn’s resentment later in life that all his efforts to transform American dance went underappreciated

68 Some of these dances paved the way for Shawn’s Native American and Jazz pieces.

69 Shawn (at twenty) and Satie (at forty-five) undertook formal training in dance and in music composition relatively late in life, and their previously-established philosophical ideas are supported by their art instead of the other way around. Non-traditional choreographers who followed this pattern constituted the topic of the author’s Master’s thesis.

70 Satie was well acquainted with both Claude Debussy and .

71 Dissatisfied with his early works, Satie reinstated himself at the age of 45 as a student of music.

72 In the writings by and about Satie it was not clear to the author what the connection was between “gnoticism” and “Medieval” themes in Satie’s construct. It is speculated that Satie was capable of playing jokes with his display of himself, and the Medieval cleric connection was his way of satirizing then-popular séances and trances. Perhaps he did believe that Medieval faith was a Gnostic (i. e. internally self-directed) spirituality compared to contemporary facades that passed for religion. It would be typical of the avant- garde to look to earlier, simpler (pre-Renaissance) times for “genuine” spirituality.

73 This quality of “all time and no time” inferred by ritual execution supported by music is one that Gnossienne, Faune, and Incense share.

74In a letter to the author dated 6 September 2003.

75 Shawn records in his autobiography that when he did perform one dance as a marble statue come to life (Death of Adonis Plastique in 1923), the extensive time it took to get into and out of the body makeup meant that those performances including this dance restricted the order of the program.

76 A fillet is a quaint term for a thin band, or ribbon tied tightly around the head to keep hair in straight alignment under a headdress. The careful arrangement of hair in Gnossienne, Faune, and Incense supports the ritual “uniform” (i. e. eternally the same unvarying look) of the dances and suggests the precise rendering of the human form in ancient statues, frescoes, etc. The viewer enjoys references to these ancient, immobile depictions of the human form come to life again (Chapter Five). It is interesting to note that fillets, precise cutting, and styling of hair close to the head (often under headdresses) also contributed to the look of the flapper.

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77 Stage comedy had a long-standing convention of signaling humor with exaggerations of costume; a military general with oversized epaulets and medals, for example, gave a visual cue of his arrogance.

78 It seems Denishawn student Martha Graham felt the same about her costumes (Chapter Two).

79 The author was unable to determine what lighting Shawn may have preferred for this dance. It is possible he might have had a subdued lighting scheme when it was performed on stage to suggest the cavernous rooms of the ruined palace of Knossos, but this idea is purely speculative. It would be logical to assume that he would have wanted full-body lighting so that all the movements are clearly visible to the audience, an effect achieved through a combination of lighting “trees” in the wings and overhead lighting. However, variable conditions in vaudeville stages imply that he may sometimes have had to adjust to the equipment at hand, including glaring footlights.

80 The economic tactic of performing at private residences in order to gain the financial support of wealthy patrons was engaged by virtuoso musicians in the Romantic vein such as Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Chopin, and List (piano), and Pagnini (violin). In dance, both Duncan and St. Denis found this tactic also helpful. For her first performance of the Indian dances at the Hudson Theatre in 1906, St. Denis had exotically-clad “authentic” Indians serving refreshments in the foyer of the theatre, and fragrant incense burning to set the tone apart from everyday life and entertainment for the performance itself (Shelton). The practice of performing in a garden or lawn setting for Shawn may have mediated between the sophistication of dance art and the “manly and healthy” condition of being outdoors “in nature”. Shawn continued this mediation in the establishment of Jacob’s Pillow; the site is in the scenic Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts not too far from New York and other Easter cities. Audiences were treated like guests to Shawn’s artistic “salon”; Jacob’s Pillow student/dancers provided valet parking and served refreshments before changing into costume and performing (Mumaw).

81 Shawn’s humor and popularizing influences on Denishawn have been discussed thoroughly in the literature, but as Shelton (et. al.) reminds us, St. Denis had her own “secular” streak (Chapter Two). The point in this study is to represent the goals of the artist as expressed through one characteristic dance. Incense, as St. Denis’ “signature” representation, does not contain a sense of humor as do both Faune and Gnossienne.

82 Both Dervish and O Brother were also reconstructed and danced by Jack Clark. It was the of the author to have seen the last stage performance of Shawn in O Brother Sun and Sister Moon: A Study of St. Francis while a student at Jacob's Pillow in the summer of 1967.

83 Palmer notes that Mr. Shawn defined “ballet” as an organization of dancers, and that Shawn was proud of promoting Denishawn as the first “all American” organization engaged in training and performing dance (36).

84 As Denishawn was at the time in the process of being divided between St. Denis and Shawn, Humphrey remained with St. Denis as student and performer. However, it is evident in Humphrey’s system of choreography that she learned much from Shawn. In choosing artists who have been influenced by the artists and what they developed in their case dances for this study, a decision was made to continue the line of male dance (i.e. St. Denis’ influence on Shawn and Shawn’s influence on Weidman) wherever possible because it is perceived by the author that this aspect of early modern dance is underrepresented in the literature. Graham is presented as having learned important and different staging tactics from both Shawn and St. Denis, although she performed more significantly with Shawn.

85 Shawn’s “Credo” (unpublished) was signed by him and given to each Jacob’s Pillow student. The quote is from the author’s copy.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Vasalv Nijinsky and L'Après-Midi d'un Faune

Vaslav Nijinsky’s first1 major choreography, L'Après-Midi d'un Faune (also referred to in this study as Faune) premiered as part of the 1912 Paris season of the Ballets Russes, and immediately set a pitch of controversy in the world of ballet and the world of art. Greeted at first with derision then hailed as an astounding break from traditional ballet, Faune has persevered; both as reconstructed from Nijinsky’s extensive notation of the dance (i. e. the Joffrey Ballet production of the ballet for PBS in 1980) and as a point of reference for new ballet creations2. This analysis of Faune includes an examination of such avant-garde issues as multiple perspectives of time and space, the sophistication of primitivism in modern art (Glossary), ambiguities of gender and sexuality, and the position of humanity relative to technology. The connection Faune made with Modernism in art was quickly noted. In an interview with Rose Strunsky that appeared in Current Opinion (New York, October 1915: 246-7) hardly three years after its premiere, Ballets Russes designer Léon Bakst credited Nijinsky’s ballet with establishing a bridge between, “the archaic and the modern”, and as demonstrating: “This modern strain of mysticism. . .which he [Nijinsky] showed in the ballet of the ‘Afternoon of a Fawn(sic)’.” Bakst concluded his discussion with the idea that in Faune, dance took its rightful place with other arts ushering in issues of the new century. This view is reinforced with Strunksy’s comment that; “Nijinsky has united in his principle of choreography the archaic combined with a strong modernism” (Strunsky: 246). Through Incense St. Denis demonstrated a significant change in the relationship between the performing dance artist and her audience. Gnossienne provided Shawn with the means to explore multiple goals of education, American masculine expressive dance, and spiritualism (Chapter Three). Interactions of dance and culture as projects of Early Modernism and the avant-garde embodied in Faune constitute the discussion in this chapter.

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For all the furor of its premiere, this thirteen-minute ballet was deceptively simple and straightforward. Instead of using exoticism for its lavish, other-worldly fascination, Nijinsky applied it as a tool to express a profoundly internal and intimate self-expression. It featured a small cast and a direct, presentational style stripped bare of the balletic flourishes and spectacle associated with previous Ballets Russes exotica such as Schéherézade (Fokine: 1910) and Cléopâtre (Fokine: 1909) . Nijinsky bypassed external showiness3 in Faune to present a complex work combining images of archaic Greek pottery with starkly modern themes and movements. Instead of seeking to satisfy audience expectations on the order of previous ballets, Faune defied them, just as the Early Modern visual arts of Cubism and Futurism rejected the aesthetics of the Academie (Chapter One). Instead, Faune was designed primarily to serve its creator as a point of exploration into gender roles, ontological spirituality, and alternative ways of perceiving space and time. Above all, Faune makes use of an unconventional movement vocabulary for expressive meaning. It is in this aspect that this ballet bears a closer stylistic and expressive correlation with both Incense and Gnossienne than it does with other ballets of its time. Like St. Denis and Shawn, Nijinsky used the exotic context of his dance to convey his ideas about the human condition from a fresh, unfamiliar perspective. St. Denis presented her audiences with a Hindu rather than a middle-class Euro-American housewife in worship in Incense, and yet the connection between the familiar and the unfamiliar in the dance made it possible for audiences to participate in her longing for divine union (Chapter Two). Shawn’s Gnostic Cretan priest in Gnossienne bore little outward resemblance to a Catholic Christian priest. And yet his struggle to perform his ritual with genuine submission to the divine (albeit with an all-too-human humor) aligned him with anyone who both doubts his faith and participates fully in it (Chapter Three). In a comparable fashion, Nijinsky’s character of the Faun probed a profoundly internal speculation on the nature of desire for spiritual transformation. However, in this instance Nijinsky undertook his search through a being neither human nor beast, but one uneasily, longingly balanced between the two. And this beastly human (or human beast) was—like Nijinsky himself—wise and foolish; knowing and naïve; a triumph in the midst of failure.

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Combinations of exoticism and Western culture, human and inhuman qualities4, and emotional longings half-realized predominant in Faune were recurrent issues throughout Nijinsky’s early life, even before he undertook training in the Imperial Theatre. To begin with, he was born into a Polish theatrical family in 1888. Both his parents danced on stage and in circus tours throughout Russia, and his father also produced choreography and taught dancing (Buckles: 10). The fluidity between circus and stage may seem strange today, but at that time in Russia it was not unusual for performers to work in both venues in order to maintain steady, year-round employment. In her notes to Bronislava Nijinska’s memoirs (which provide informed, first-hand details of Nijinsky’s art), dance critic and historian Anna Kisselgoff states that: The term Theatre-Circus is particularly apt for the theatrical scope of the Russian circus. . .The idea that ballet existed only on one level, at the Imperial Theatres, is belied by the exposure to various dance idioms . . .as provided by the popular theatres and circuses (Kisselgoff: 35).

The Nijinsky children Stassik, Vaslav, and Bronislava toured with their parents and watched everything. As soon as they were old enough, they also performed; as is true of vaudeville and other popular entertainments, acts in which children behaved as miniature adults were an attractive draw. The public performance of gender as a construct of illusion became a part of their lives at a very early age; for example, Bronislava states that her brothers made their first appearance as dancers when their father taught them the , a high-kicking Ukranian dance. Vaslav (the younger at five) danced the part of the girl (Nijinska: 21). Later, Bronislava learned and performed a “Chinese” dance, taking the part of the boy to partner another girl. Then in the summer of 1896 she and her brothers also performed circus routines with animals and (Nijinska: 42-3). While touring with his parents, Nijinsky traveled through much of Russia and encountered such diverse performers as actors, singers, ballet dancers, gypsies, acrobats, jugglers, “wild” Indians (from South America), and American tap dancers5. The Russian circuses featured an equally eclectic variety of dances, elaborate spectacles, and puppet shows6. The Nijinsky children absorbed everything they encountered, and even the most exotic presentations were a source of interest, pleasure, and imitation.

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Vaslav was particularly adventurous and fearless of new experiences. Bronislava recalls that he took to sneaking away early in the mornings to help the circus stable boy take the horses down to the river to and racing him on horseback. Juggling and were circus skills that particularly attracted his interest, and he also had a particular fondness for birds, which he tried to train (Nijinska: 39). It was a tremendously cosmopolitan community in which to live and learn; however, Nijinsky’s mother wanted a better life. She ceased to perform and settled in St. Petersburg in 1897 while her husband continued his touring dance career. Then through her appeal to the influential Enrico Cecchetti7 (1850-1928) with whom she was acquainted, both Vaslav (in 1898) and his younger sister Bronislava (in 1900) were accepted as students in the Imperial Theatre. Their older brother Stassik could not join them because by then he had suffered a blow to his head and for the rest of his life had to be institutionalized as insane (Bronislava, Buckles). But for Vaslav and his sister, acceptance into the school meant they were headed for a secure life as dance artists; appointment into the Imperial Theatre included steady employment and pensions on a par with military service. It was a particularly fertile time for Nijinsky to be a student in the Russian Imperial School. Classical Russian ballet training and performance conventions perfected from the French tradition8 in long evolution during the Nineteenth Century were at their peak at the turn of the century, newly-infused with Italian technical skills as taught by Cecchetti: The marriage of Italian strength and Russian style was to be the special glory of the rising generation of dancers: and of these Nijinsky would be the brightest star (Buckles: 15).

While this phase of Russian ballet was not locked in a static form, only minor changes and adaptations were tolerated as long as they didn’t disturb basic, pre- established artistic structures. Unlike Europe or America at the time, Russia was still ruled by the absolute power of the Czar, his family, and nobles. All matters of life from political to artistic censorship9 were under control of a nearly-feudal system of patronage. Imperial ballets performed early in the 1900’s included restagings of older works from the previous century such as Bayadère (Petipa: 1877), (Petipa: 1881), The

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Sleeping Beauty (Petipa: 1890), The Nutcracker (Petipa/Ivanov: 1892), (Petipa: 1898), and The Little Humpbacked Horse (St. Leon: 1864). Due to his exceptional capabilities manifest in student performances, Nijinsky soon captured the attention of audiences and professionals of the Imperial Theatre, and quickly passed from student status to soloist. He danced to acclaim in several of the aforementioned ballets. In 1909 Nijinsky (who was only twenty-one) joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris. Although acclaimed for his roles in traditional full-length ballets such as , Nijinsky also triumphed in the shorter ballets10 that strongly retained their classical roots such as Chopiniana11 (Fokine: 1909). But while Nijinsky was still a student, a more fundamental change was also in the air. Influenced by Isadora Duncan’s first visit to Russia in 1904 (Buckles: 32), a small but actively creative group of Russian artists formed an interest in exploring new directions of artistic expression on a par with the Parisian avant-garde groups discussed in Chapter One. Duncan’s ideas about naturalism in movement and her evocation of classical Greek themes stirred an impetus toward individual expression that the traditional ballet cannon could not reach. This new breath of air stirred qualified admiration from Nijinsky, among others in the Imperial Theatres: Taken aback at first, Vaslav [Nijinsky] later came to admire her [Duncan] greatly. Her most immediate influence, however, was on [Russian choreographer] (Buckles: 35).

Fokine was at this time a young, intelligent, and curious12 choreographer who had served his term as a dancer in the Maryinsky Theatre and taught ballet. Fokine was determined to preserve the freshness and naturalism of Duncan’s dancing without also indulging in her “undisciplined” execution that would be out of keeping with classical ballet training. Eager to try out his ideas13, Fokine created a number of ballets on Greek themes starting with Acis and Galatea (1905) the first of many works by this choreographer in which Nijinsky danced. It is interesting to note that in this ballet experimenting with a naturalism indicated by Duncan, Nijinsky played the part of a faun: The Fauns looked like animals and, at the end of their dance, tumbled head over heels. . .[as Fokine said] “well in conformity with the animal characteristics of the dance” (Nijinksa: 140).

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It is possible that the expansion of ballet movement vocabulary to include “natural animal” gestures appropriate to circus acts pleased Nijinsky. The exotic character of a part human/part animal faun in Fokine’s first Greek ballet may have suggested to Nijinsky a way to negotiate between his classical ballet training and the fresh vigor of ambiguous identities from his childhood performances. Contradictory accounts14 have been given on how Nijinsky got the idea for and proceeded to develop his first major choreography, L'Après-Midi d'un Faune. Nijinsky did not leave much in the way of written discussion about his dances, and he notated only Faune in a way that permitted reconstruction. Given his fame as a dancer, Nijinsky could have remained content with dancing in the works others devised for him; however: Nijinsky was not wholly satisfied with his status as the most brilliant star of Diaghilev’s company: more and more he wanted to choreograph. Many of the strange, anti-balletic movements devised for the character of Petrouchka had been his rather than Fokine’s, and this made him all the more anxious to create a ballet that was his alone (Freeman and Thorpe: 15).

Although several conflicting reports about Nijinsky and Faune were consulted15, one authority must serve as the basis for this study of the ballet. Since Nijinsky’s sister acted in close professional association with Nijinsky while he was in the process of developing the movements and choreography before anyone else knew of the project, her version takes precedence here. The nature of the dance association between Bronislava and her brother Vaslav is detailed in notes and diary entries of the time in her autobiography, Early Memoirs (translated and edited by Nijinska’s daughter Irina Nijinska and Jean Rawlinson). From the very first, Nijinska’s body gave Nijinsky material upon which to experiment. He modeled each part of Faune, including his own on Nijinska, and she first learned from him the non-balletic movements he demanded (Nijinska: 315-6). She shared in her brother’s vision of a new expressive relationship between the artist and his work, and it was with the idea of training a new generation of dancers capable of meeting Nijinsky’s choreographic vision that she later created her ecole de mouvement in 1919 (Baer: 18).

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What is particularly interesting is that Nijinsky created Faune without direct reference to, or through mentorship by, any established dance choreographer of his day. While it was almost invariably the case that a novice choreographer worked under the direction and advice of a more experienced one16, Nijinsky took off on his own in a way suggesting that his point of authority in movement was as nearly as possible internal and self-directed. His own body, like Duncan’s body was for her, was a testing ground on which movement was examined for its effectiveness in expressing his feelings. In this perspective, Nijinsky was not the tool of his ballet training; instead, his ballet training was his point of departure; an interpretive construct re-designed for his own goals. Outside advice and influences could only obscure that direction for him, and this was probably a point of his personality that led him progressively further away from social and family connections as he grew older. Joan Acocella makes note of this aspect of Faune when she says in her introduction to The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky that: . . .the experimentalism of his [Nijinsky’s] ballets, his analysis of movement—and the fact that he began this analysis in his very first professional ballet, with no preparatory, imitating-his-elders period. . . may have been connected to some neurological idiocycrasy (Acocella: xli).

Nijinsky first told his sister about his plans to create his own ballet when he returned from his performing tour with the Ballets Russes late in 1911. Art impresario and Ballets Russes producer Serge Diaghilev had, based on the enthusiastic reception the group received outside Russia, decided to break with the Imperial Ballet in order to present new works in the more progressive art milieu of Western Europe. As part of the new dance, Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to write the music for Petrouchka, with choreography by Fokine (1912) for the Paris Ballets Russes season. Nijinsky was to dance the lead role of the puppet Petrouchka. But Nijinska states that Nijinsky's mind was not much on the new ballet because he had conceived of doing his own: “Bronia, what I am going to tell you now no one must know about. . .For the new season in Paris I am going to mount a ballet. It is going to be L'Aprés-Midi d'un Faune, to the music of Debussy. . .” Vaslav then began to share with me his general ideas and outline for this, his first choreographic composition (Nijinska: 315).

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The idea apparently came to him when Ballets Russes designer Leon Bakst (1866- 1924) who had just returned from a visit to Crete and Greece with Serov, “. . .delirious with rapture” (Levin: 321) took Nijinsky to the Louvre to see examples of Greek figure ceramics. There is no record of what Bakst said or what Nijinsky thought, but Bakst may have suggested to Nijinsky at the time that he would like to work on a ballet created on this archaic17 material, rather than the classical Hellenic inspirations upon which Fokine18 had based his new ballets. Whether or not the idea originated with Bakst, Nijinsky evidently gave it much thought, and told his sister what he wanted to do: “I want to move away from the classical Greece that Fokine likes to use. Instead, I want to use the archaic Greece that is less known and, so far, little used in the theatre. However, this is only to be the source of my inspiration. I want to render it in my own way. Any sweetly sentimental line in the form or in the movement will be excluded. More may even be borrowed from Assyria than Greece. I have already started to work on it in my own mind. . .” (Nijinska: 315).

Nijinsky’s interest in the movement potential suggested by the Greek archaic ceramic figures may have been focused by Bakst’s enthusiasm (Levin), but this should not cast doubt on his claim to the choreography of Faune. The group of artists Diaghilev attracted often worked in close collaboration and freely traded concepts with one another whether they were designers, painters, writers or choreographers. And though Nijinsky allowed himself to be persuaded by the ideas of others when he chose, he was firm in his adherence to his vision. Nijinsky records in his diary that: I thought out the whole ballet by myself. I gave the idea for the scenery, but Lèon Bakst failed to understand me. . . I loved the ballet and therefore transmitted to the public (Nijinsky: 204).

He urged that Fokine, who was working on his own ballets at the time, should not be told of these plans19, but that Bronislava should first help him work out the movements in secret. Nijinska draws upon her notes taken at the time to give some idea of the close conceptual dance relationship she had with her brother as he worked out the preliminary movements he wanted for the ballet:

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We are rehearsing in our living room. . . I have brought the triple mirror from my dressing table and put it on the floor so that we can really see ourselves. . . Vaslav is creating his Faune by using me as his model. I am like a piece of clay that he is molding, shaping into each pose and change of movement. . .It is amazing how Vaslav himself, from the very beginning, without any preparation, is in complete mastery of the new technique of his ballet (Nijinska: 316).

When the new dance vocabulary and the choreography was set to the music and ready for rehearsals, Nijinsky showed Diaghilev and Bakst what he had done (Nijinska: 328). Based upon their encouragement, rehearsals began in January of 1912. Nijinsky would not compromise his vision even when dancers in rehearsals for Faune were frustrated with the radical, non-balletic movements and postures he demanded of them; he insisted on their obedience to his choreography without variation or interpretation. Mere elements in a design, they were to keep their faces expressionless. Their bodies were as if “carved out of stone” as the dancers. . . put it. The choreography seemed to go against all their classical training, although . . .the precision of Nijinsky’s choreography required such training (Dunning: 24).

He was equally unmoved when dancers refused to be in the ballet20. Faune is the only one of Nijinsky’s four ballets to have been notated, by no means a simple task. Ninety rehearsals of less than an hour each (not counting the pre-rehearsal preparations worked out beforehand) were required to complete the ballet (Nijinska: 427). Much of the problem lay in persuading ballet-trained dancers to submit to an entirely alien movement vocabulary: The dancers moved back and forth across the stage like cutouts from a Greek frieze. Ballerinas who had spent years perfecting their found it difficult to keep their feet parallel (Jonas: 216).

Nijinska recalls that even when Diaghilev asked Nijinsky (who was usually compliant to Diaghilev’s wishes) to tone down his approach, her brother refused (Nijinska: 429). Nijinsky was impatient when liberties were taken either by the dancers or by the musician during these rehearsals. Indeed, for him the alignment of movement with music, while non-traditional, was exceptionally close, as if both had been derived

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from the same conceptual expressive presence. Nijinska sums up Nijinsky’s concept of the dance in this way: . . .he [Nijinsky] conducted his ballet, seeing each choreographic detail in the same way that the conductor of an orchestra hears each note in a musical score. . . Each position. . .was mounted according to a strict plan (Nijinska: 427).

Throughout the process, his sister supported his efforts and was quickest to comprehend the complex relationships of the poses, movements, and music Nijinsky required. For the premiere of the piece Nijinska danced among the chorus of nymphs; in later performances she assumed the role of the Nymph. But her association with Faune continued long after Nijinsky himself could no longer dance: His [Nijinsky’s] Jeux and Le Sacre du Printemps were dropped from the repertory soon after their premieres. L’Après Midi d’un Faune remained, but was danced with makeshift sets, in solo form, and even with Nijinska in the title role. . .(Dunning: 34-5).

In 1970 Nijinska demonstrated Faune for the Kirov Ballet in London21. The basis of this study of Faune is a video reconstruction of the dance by Elizabeth Schooling and William Chappell for the 1980 PBS production of Nureyev and the Joffrey Ballet in Tribute to Nijinsky. A detailed word description of this reconstruction is given in Appendix A. In the course of this analysis of the dance, Nijinsky’s ideas about presentational constructs of space, time, sexuality, gender, and spiritual transformation appear related to his impressions of the archaic Greek images he saw with Bakst. Modern Western ideas about what archaic objects signify in terms of tradition and naturalism opened the way for Nijinsky to map his unexplored emotional landscape through dance. A careful examination of this pottery style reveals a number of Nijinsky’s avant- garde ideas expressed through Faune. It is as if Nijinsky had seen fit to consult a much older and therefore “more genuine” aesthetic than the art world of his time. If the archaic Greeks presented the true and authentic nature of humanity unencumbered by the superficialities of social constructs, then it would be logical to assume that the artwork22 of these Greeks conveyed the same fundamental truth. As Acocella suggests in her introduction to Nijinsky’s diary, Nijinsky was consistently self-referential and self-

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interpretive, whether sane or insane. And if he mistrusted the words and actions of others around him23, perhaps he did not mistrust his personal interpretations of the visual images of the ancients. With that in mind, a discussion of these archaic depictive styles illuminates discussion of how Nijinsky made use of them in Faune. Anthropologists John Bordman and Anna Lemos identified in their respective discussions on the topic a number of consistent conventions in Archaic Greek imagery depicted on pottery ranging from 700 to 5000BC that speculatively impacted the way Nijinsky developed Faune. First, it is important to understand that these pre-Hellenic depictions were strongly influenced by the Ancient Egyptian style, a feature Nijinsky may have recognized, if only intuitively24. This highly presentational convention represented interpretive solutions to the challenge of invoking three-dimensional bodies—human or animal—moving through time and space upon a flat, two-dimensional surface. But with pottery another sense of space comes into play because it is rounded, not flat; in fact, the shape of a pot is made up of variations and widths of curved surfaces, providing a series of depictive zones, one above the other in uniform bands around the outside or inside of the vessel. Figures placed in these depictive zones implied a movement and motif that was unique to each band, a physical feature that artists who decorated the archaic pottery Nijinsky saw, had learned to exploit. He could easily see that a Greek vase is divided vertically by thin bands of decorative geometric designs into separate bands or zones. Narratively, these zones do not interact or intersect—in fact, they are often in contrast to one another in terms of activity, although characters from one band may appear in more than one zone; it is as if a psychological shift in identity takes place in the personage represented. While an upper band depicts a quiet, joyful banquet scene, the one just below it shows a violent and bloody battle, not unlike two Egyptian panels, one of which shows the Pharaoh in a peaceful domestic scene and the other showing him hunting or at war. Moreover, the two zones can be “read” by turning the ceramic in different directions: to follow the flow of line around the upper zone one would turn the vase clockwise, but to follow the flow of the lower zone, the vase would have to be

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turned counterclockwise. The specific way Nijinsky invoked these zones and the logic of the flow of movement within them in his ballet will be discussed presently. In consideration of the figurative depiction in this type of pottery, the most striking feature is the way in which animals, humans, and plant life are rendered in abstract, decorative constructs while still retaining their organic identities. This feature of ancient art, which resurfaced in modern context in Art Nouveau and continued to develop in Art Dec, (Chapter One) brings into discussion how minimizing the visual codes—that is, abstraction—is both an ancient and modern device. Regardless of how little or much the figure has been abstracted, it is still recognizable as referring to a living creature. For humans in these archaic depictions the torso was rendered in a frontal view, with the extremities of arms, legs, and head in profile. Legs were often at right angles at the joints; straight legs described triangles with the body at the apex, etc. Arms and legs were either flexed at angle or straight; a feature Nijinsky exploited almost obsessively in Faune. The illusions of curves so carefully developed in port du do not exist in this “pre-civilized” world of Nijinsky’s Faun. The ballet was marked in every way possible as removed and alien from the corruptions of modern, urban life with which conventional ballet art—for all its exotic themes—had become associated. Furthermore, symbolic abstractions suggesting a spiritual condition are also common in these archaic renderings, and reflect upon the constantly self-referential, mystical resonances of Faune. Animals and humans sometimes merge physical properties and gendered identities, as in two profiles of male and female pressed close together to show a single front view face25, or a woman’s head on a lion’s body with birds’ wings as a sphinx. One of the most consistent conventions of the Archaic Greek figurative style inherited from the Mesopotamian and Egyptian arts is that the female position is on the left of the observer’s view, and the male side is on the right. Thus, when a sphinx and a lion appear in the same zone, the sphinx (female/submissive) is always shown on the left of the (male/dominant) lion as they conflictingly/ complimentarily face one another26. This order of direction corresponding to gender exists only when the opposing figure of a lion appears on the same plane as that of a sphinx; if only sphinxes or only lions appear together; such figures of the same time in a zone face both directions in

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mirror positions to one another. However, it is interesting to note that European heraldic representations of the rampant lion place it on the right side of its field with its body (regardless of where the head—always in profile—is turned) facing left. The effect is at once figurative and abstract; depictive and decorative. And by incorporating it in his ballet, Nijinsky drew upon pictorial conventions that seem at once “natural” or “familiar” and constructed in a “strange”, exotic fashion to make comment upon the complexities of male/female relationships. In other words, the stage space itself has become culturally gendered in the way it is used. Just as Gnossienne’s priest defines gendered space with his Snake Goddess based on Shawn’s previous male roles in dyad dancing (Chapter Three), Nijinsky managed space in a way that reflected his previous partnering of ballerinas: . . .he [Nijinsky] observes an exact personal remoteness, he shows clearly the fact they [male and female] are separate bodies. He makes a drama of their nearness in space. And in his own choreography—Faun—the space between the figures becomes a firm body of air, a lucid statement of relationship, in the way intervening space does in the modern academy of Cézanne, Seurat, and Picasso (Denby: 2).

Earliest ceramic samples from Chios show humans and animals in the most abstract terms; a triangle for the torso and head, for example, occupying thin bands around the vase. Later styles rendered human and animal figures more realistically, and of the human figures of the later styles the most animated were those of komasts, or male revelers, who jumped, ran, and gestured extravagantly: Komasts [male revelers] are always painted in silhouette. . .Heads, hands, buttocks, and legs are always in profile. The upper part of the torso is either frontal or there are rare attempts at a three-quarter view. The posture is that of the dancing man, evident both from the way the legs are bent in postures of violent movement and from the manner in which the hands are stretched out in all kinds of extravagant gestures. . .(Lemos: 164).

These komasts, frequent subjects of depiction on the pottery, displayed both male and female attributes with flowing, rippling hair dressed in the feminine style, beards, and male genitals (Lemos). They often wore boots with the toes turned up. The fingers of their hands were closed together, with an opposing thumb as if they were wearing mittens. The ends of the fingers on these hands also turned up like the toes, suggesting

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that the energy flowing through these extremities somehow re-circulated back to the center of the body instead of dissipating outward into space, as in Southeast Asian dances. The implied movements and positions of these dancing revelers on ancient pottery displayed at the Louvre suggested dichotomies of vigorous sexuality and closed, trance- like attitudes of internal self-communion in which sexual passion, sensuality, and spiritual transport conjoined. The exaggerated posturings of the komasts may have suggested to Nijinsky a way of reversing the traditional separation of mind, spirit, and body prevalent since Classical times with a primal “whole, integrated human being” personified in the expressive dancing body. If this was one aspect of his artistic goal, then Nijinsky is certainly in conceptual accord with St. Denis and Shawn as a participant of the avant-garde. In this context, the correlation between a living human body and the implied, correlative integrity of a body of pottery has other symbolic meanings. Just as there are zones of depiction on the ceramic body of pottery, so there are zones of movement in the human body, a feature Nijinsky emphatically utilized in the ballet. This evocative relationship between a thing made and the human body is one of long standing; even today a classic coca-cola bottle suggests the curves of a young woman. In addition, the correlation between a vessel of containment made of clay and a human body is infused with sacred implications. Just as a pottery bowl is designed to hold and thereby define something—a fluid, perhaps—so is the human body presumed to have been designed to hold or contain the soul, or spirit-essence of a person. And in another perspective, the open, waiting body of the dancer (exemplified strikingly in the climatic gesture St. Denis made in Incense by lifting her head and opening wide her arms) personifies the spiritual seeker ready to receive communion with the Divine. This sacred context is certainly one that applies to dance in its spiritual expressiveness; the physical infused with the spiritual; the material containing the ethereal. While it is speculative how much of the conventions of ancient pottery imagery he consciously incorporated into his ballet, the effect achieved suggests that Nijinsky was aware at some level of the possibilities offered and the ways he could use them to create a truly modern ballet based on archaic conventions. In order to better understand how

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Nijinsky arrived at his startling choreography, it is helpful to examine key movement motifs in several previous works in which he danced. These motifs clearly indicate points of reference upon which Nijinsky drew to sustain the startling movements and characterization developed for Faune from another point of view. Nijinsky’s public persona before Faune was already closely associated with exotic, alien creatures. His unusual physical features27 and his ability to subsume his personality into any role made him an ideal interpreter of such “inhuman” beings as the assexual in (Fokine: 1910), the “Spirit of the Rose” in Le Spectre de la Rose (Fokine: 1911) and the sensuously hedonistic Golden Slave of Schéherézade (Fokine: 1910). Descriptions of Nijinsky on and off stage recall similar descriptions of the actress Sara Bernhardt (1845-1923) as a “blank” personality upon whom any role could be applied and convincingly realized on stage (Lieven, Buckles, et. al.). Nijinsky’s audiences praised his roles in traditional ballets such as Giselle, but he was most in his element portraying characters with ambiguous attributes inhabiting uncertain geographies28. It was in this exotic arena that his expressive dancing touched a transformative, almost spiritual quality: The audience does not see him [Nijinsky] as a professional dancer. . .He disappears completely, and instead there is an imaginary being in his place. . . Looking at him, one is in an imaginary world, entire and very clear; and one’s emotions are not directed at their material objects, but at their imaginary satisfactions. As he said himself, he danced with love (Denby: 5).

In a logical extension from his danced characters to characters in his choreography, Nijinsky proceeded to explore that same metamorphic territory with Faune. The capacity of the dancer to transform into the Faun so completely has been remarked upon by several commentators. Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) in his autobiographical book, The Difficulty of Being, stated: “We have seen the Faun. Never has his like been seen before; never has there been an astonishment so instinctive with divinity” (45). In her analysis of Faune, “A Simple and Logical Means: Nijinsky, the Spirit of , and Faun,” Claudia Jeschke suggests a further consequence of what she calls, “Nijinsky’s formidable capacity to identify . . .sense and express the essential” (117). She states that his talent in mime for these inhuman characters made it possible for Nijinsky to take a

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small step into abstract artistic expression, or to conceive of a ballet entirely independent of music: In his choreography, he [Nijinsky] proceeded on the assumption that movement in and of itself constituted a sufficient and serviceable agent of content. . .Reinforcing this talent [in mime] was the extraordinary degree to which he could internalize, inhabit, and communicate a given theme . . .(Jeschke: 117).

Probably the first indications of Nijinsky’s break with traditional ballet vocabulary appeared in Fokine’s ballet based on a Russian folk tale, Petroushka (1912) with music by Stravinsky. Fokine choreographed Petroushka for Ballets Russes with Nijinsky in the title role. But according to Nijinska (who was first given the role of the Street Dancer, then later danced the role of the Ballerina), rehearsals for the ballet were so rushed that Fokine left some of the specifics of gesture and steps up to the dancers themselves. Given this freedom, Nijinsky undertook to explore the complex personality of the puppet Petroushka, a being caught between the physical restrictions of a puppet with all the emotions of a living human being. Nijinsky came up with several striking positions and gestures29 that went against the grain of the traditional ballet lexicon in an effort to explore the intrinsic futility and impossibility of such a being (Freeman and Thorpe: 15). It is speculated that what Nijinsky learned about expression and movement through the character of Petrouska provided him with a foundation with which to begin on Faune because the two roles, created close together, bear some striking resemblances. Certainly the turned-in standing positions of both puppet and faun suggest a structural impossibility of the body, because the thighs are held as if the knees had been tied tightly together. This strange convention in both cases suggests an avant-garde reversal of the traditional, fundamental “turned out” leg positions of ballet, commenting on the way in which ballet technique “mechanizes” or “dehumanizes” the body of the dancer to conform to its visual construct. By reversing this turned out position, Nijinsky seems to comment on the artificiality, or unnatural condition of a traditional art as Isadora declared ballet to be. Or, if dancers can be trained to move with legs turned out, isn’t it possible for them to move from an opposing position?

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At the same time, the position Nijinsky adopted for puppet and faun expressed a social and emotional awkwardness of youth. He not only turned in the toes of the feet to make walking difficult, but the knees seem tied together as if by ropes so that the groin (sexual region) is also paralyzed. The position suggests an incomplete or unrealized sexuality for both characters that is no less poignant in its impossibility than in the fervency of its desire. A puppet especially is presumed to have no desire, being as it is an inanimate object manipulated with the illusion that it is a living being. In a reversal of identity, then, the character suggests that in the face of technological advances, the anxiety of modern people is that they are rendered as controlled by the dictates of the Machine Age as Petrouska was by the all-powerful magician30 puppet-master. Here is the human body subject to the same streamlined forces suggested in Art Deco and applied to all objects of commodity; steam ships, locomotives, cigarette lighters and skyscrapers (Chapter One). Faune and Petrouska also feature distinctive “mitten hands” in which the fingers seem glued together with awkwardly opposing thumbs31. Such hands are equally impractical for subtleties of human expression or for any physical work. Adding to the awkwardness of these hands, Petrouska thrusts his arms straight out from the shoulders to embrace the Ballerina Puppet in much the same way the Faun does toward the Nymph. In both instances, the gesture is futile in containing the feminine; the Nymph in Faune as easily escapes both the boy-intense desire implicit in the gesture as does the Ballerina in Petrouska. Nijinsky played off the puppet animate/inanimate and man/object nature in a way that probably informed the Faun’s man/beast, dominating/submissive, and male/female reversals. Specifically, the arms and legs of the mechanically-animated puppet and the impossibility of movement implied in them have a comparable resonance in Faune both physically and emotionally. Both characters are beings of intense feelings that can have no resolution; the puppet for the elusive, fickle Ballerina puppet and the Faun for the Nymph. Both reflect the great importance Nijinsky gave to feelings, especially in beings not part of the predominant power structure. This alignment suggests that the power in feeling is subversive, or a tool of the artist as underdog so championed in the avant- garde. “Nijinsky’s emphasis on perceiving and knowing through feeling is typically

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Russian, typically Romantic, and archetypally feminine” (Gesmer: 31). Considered in tandem these roles offer a compelling case of an avant-garde upturn of traditional presentational structures that inform ideas and anxieties posed by the Machine Age. As has been previously discussed, Nijinsky’s distortion of movement style in the ballet conforms strictly to the painted figures—animals, humans, plants, abstract geometric shapes, and fanciful combinations—on the archaic pottery artifacts which Nijinsky viewed with Bakst. Nijinsky’s visual understanding of the motifs, patterns of depiction, use of planes on the circular bands of the pottery zones, and the effects of curved ceramic profiles appear in Faune as both serious and (in a literal application) faintly comic motifs. The note of humor in the piece comes in part from the literal way in which Nijinsky appreciated the suggestion of exaggerated movement these archaic pottery figures invoked, an aspect reflected in the way poses in the ballet seem arrested at the peak of some large, kinetic impetus. By calling attention to this arrest, Nijinsky seems to be asking, “and so, what does this mean?”, just as he could ask the same question standing before the images on the pottery at the Louvre. Additionally, the images depicted on these zones may have suggested to Nijinsky intriguing choreographic tensions between (animal) passion and stylized, “passionless” abstraction with faintly comic results. The Faun and nymphs move across the stage and halt in an inorganic fashion, as if they had been transformed into repeating, abstract designs. Each part of the dancer’s body is in “isolation”, or capable of moving independently of every other. This returns again to the sense of being controlled by a force outside the character, like a puppet or, even closer, a in the hands of the choreographer. On a physical level, Nijinsky makes a comment through articulations of the human body and again asking, “what does it mean, if anything?” Or another way of looking at it could be that just as there are literal zones of depiction on the ceramic body of pottery, so there are zones of movement in the human body, either one of which may be articulated for expressive meaning. This outward, mechanical use of the body and stage as a support to an inward, organic expressiveness is a feature Nijinsky emphatically utilized in the ballet. Jennifer Dunning describes this effect in her essay on Faune:

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The story [of Faune] takes place along a narrow strip at the front of the stage, the dancers’ bodies moving with the look of a two-dimensional frieze, approximating Egyptian and early Greek reliefs. . . They move in a nearly automatic manner, taking small, abrupt steps with bodies carefully erect (Dunning: 22).

This is particularly true of the nymphs, who often pose and move as if melded into a single kinetic unit. Each nymph repeats the movement or pose of the one in front or behind her. Often they move in blocked unison, or in two “sliding panels” as if they had been transformed into screens or curtains gliding smoothly across the front of the stage. In addition, movements and poses are “traded” between the Faun and the nymphs, as if suggesting a recurrent geometric pattern across a flat surface, or a disruption of time sequence. It is in this multiple perspective of a flat physical arrangement that Nijinsky plays on ambiguities to disrupt the audience’s ideas of how presentational art “should” or “naturally should” go. It is in fact his close, confined handling of time and space in the dance that gives the work a kind of timelessness. At the same time, the primary idea conveyed through this abstraction in Faune was filled with conflicting, partially-acknowledged passions. The being revealed through the character of the Faun awakens before the gaze of the audience into a confused, difficult sensuality and not-quite understood sexual desire. As has been said of the dance: “. . .the subject [of Faune] was sex—adolescent sex.” (Jonas: 215). In Nijinsky’s vision, the dance reflects the emotional and physical exaggerations of the frozen images of the pottery komasts and their obvious depiction of gendered ambiguities32. Nijinsky himself is reputed to have commented on this kind of in saying, “The subject of a ballet must either be nothing at all or else something familiar or obvious to everybody.”33 There are no diagonal or curved crossings of the stage in Faune as there were in Incense or Gnossienne. Instead, the stage scene is transformed into a series of related yet separate parallel planes that deny a flow of action between them because they operate using different rules of space and time. Even as they interact in one zone, dancers face and move either directly stage right or stage left, making the alteration from one direction

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to the other abruptly. They accomplish this either as a single, or as a series of smaller, stop-action alterations to arrive at a new position from which the dancer moves, as if they had been captured on film, the frames of which had been projected onto the stage. This is not merely strange; it is, as Jaschke points out in her analysis of the dance, a deconstruction of traditional stage illusions of depth borrowed from painting: By moving his dancers almost exclusively from one side of the stage to the other, he [Nijinsky] evolved a choreographic structure that allowed for not only one but also several centers of spatial and theatrical gravity. As a result, he avoided the illusionism of centralized perspective, an illusionism that treats space as if it were real space in which quasi-real events unfold (103-4).

This locomotive flatness is also repeated in the poses and positions of the dancers’ bodies. In a few instances a change of direction is achieved slowly, by having the center of the dancer's body rotate within a frame provided by the arms and legs; a more "normal" relationship would have the center move first with arms and legs corresponding to that impetus. The dancers’ bodies in movement and stillness are presented to the audience’s view as unchanging; frozen in time rather than as beings made of organic, living tissue. This effect is achieved through the general stance of both nymphs and Faun in which legs and head are in profile (often, though not always in the direction in which they move or intend to move) while the upper torso faces the viewer. Limited dimensionality34 in the movements and body placements of the dancers in the stage space is immediately established through a series of poses by the Faun in the opening moments of the ballet. When the audience first sees him, he is facing stage left, lounging on his private hillock with his flute to his lips. Through an efficient series of abrupt (never hurried) transitions between poses, the Faun gradually turns to face the right, his entire body directly mirroring his first pose. Such a preponderance of pose makes Faune into a kind of “anti-dance”, a presentation in which movements—especially the smooth, gliding locomotive movements carrying the dancer across the stage without any vertical rise or fall—are rendered immobile. At the same time non-locomotive and still poses convey the impression of a movement that has just ceased or is just about to happen. This series of mechanically-urged images cumulatively suggest a perception of the human condition as

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fragmented, dislocated and alienated through the applications of inhuman forces in modern life. Due in large part to this quality of Faune, the ballet is considered to be the first modern ballet of the Twentieth Century and “fifty years ahead of its time” (Dunning, Rambert: 12). That the element of “sequential stillness” was central to Faune is certain. A detailed series of photographs of Nijinsky35 in the role of the Faun by Baron de Meyer emphasizes the way in which the ballet can almost be reduced frame by frame into an album format. And instead of calling it a ballet, the program notes at its premier stated it was, “. . .a choreographic tableau by Nijinsky. . .” (Nijinska: 435). How this actually works in the dance is difficult to explain. Faune could be examined as if it were composed entirely of sequential still poses which nevertheless contain in them a kind of “after image” of having moved. In this sense, the dance recalls the “arrested moment” central to Delsarte statue posing36 (Chapter Two). But the impression of time in this case also suggests a series of infinitesimally minute bursts of energy instead of a constant, uninterrupted flow like water37. This effect brings Faune into direct discussion with the goals of the Futurists (and their forerunners among the Impressionists) who sought to visually record the transient effects of energy on the mass of an object instead of depicting a “real” object (Chapter One). The idea is eerily reminiscent of the effect of celluloid film, comprised of a series of still frames which, moving at a standardized rate of twenty-four frames per second, gives the illusion of continuous movement. The effect produces a paradox to the audience. On the one hand, there is a great psychological distance between the viewer and the Faun; his frame of reference is out of normal time and space. But on the other, the viewer is gradually being made aware of the dream-like qualities of the dance and the sense of deep internalization going on in the character of the Faun: Nijinsky. . . .felt, conceived, and understood the central function of man in Greek art thus: whatever really happens, happens within man himself. The movements of grouped dancers and the utilization of stage space in Faun resulted not in an illusion of reality but, rather, in a symbol of it—a reality rendered abstract. Nijinsky sought an illusion that the performance would evoke within the viewer himself; he did not endeavor to create it for him on stage (Jeschke: 104).

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A musical counterpart of this effect might be when a composer leaves out certain expected passages of music, relying on musical traditions familiar to the audience to fill in the silence. The listener, having been accustomed to hearing specific musical conventions all his life, responds to the conditions of those conventions even when only some of them are present in a musical work and others are absent. The “ear” of the listener supplies the missing (silent; still) components. The listener thereby becomes an interpretive participant in the creation of the work instead of remaining a passive receptacle of the artists’ visionary authority. Another striking feature of the dance is the way in which Nijinsky makes literal, almost comical implications out of flattened circular planes. It is as if he treats the area of the stage as one view of a Greek vase, the other side of which may be seen sequentially but not simultaneously. In some instances the Faun, who inhabits both his private upper zone and the lower “public” zone with the nymphs shares this limited view; a psychological intermediary between the modern audience and the archaic world shared with the nymphs. Unlike the nymphs and the figures on a ceramic vase, however, the Faun has the capability of transitioning between the upper and lower zones only by carefully—almost laboriously—realigning his body to accommodate the shift. This physical adjustment suggests an equally difficult psychological one. This curious quality of the dance can be read as a comment on the nature of time from a modern art perspective. Just as Nijinsky, a modern man, can view the archaic pottery of Greece, he suggests the audience, through his Faun, has the capacity to view the past from the perspective of the present. The nymphs, however, remain in the past. They, unlike the Nijinsky/Faun do not have the ability to reciprocate the gaze, just as people of past ages do not have the luxury of interpreting the future. At the same time, the Faun does not have the freedom to come and go as do the nymphs; he is on stage, or trapped in the visual range of the audience from beginning to end. It is as if the nymphs, lacking a vertical ability to move between upper and lower levels, have a compensatory horizontal frame in which to flow, a movement quality suggested in the act of the Nymph of swimming and in their gliding locomotions across

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the stage. So flat are these that the nymphs act almost as if they were mechanized stage set screens sliding effortlessly back and forth, into and out of view like clouds across the sky. This odd management of space adds dimensions of mirror imaging between male and female attributes with both serious and comic implications. Nijinsky emphasizes gender images through poses, which by their stillness sequentially impress themselves upon the memory to comment on the temporal "band" or zone of dance itself. One such moment occurs when the Nymph and the Faun have both risen to a broad fourth ballet position38 demipointe. At the same time, they are turned away from one another facing opposite sides of the stage at positions of stage left (Nymph) and stage right (Faun)39. It is as if they can see each other only from around the curve of the horizontal band; the Faun, with straight arms thrust out seems to reach for something he desires. Initially it might be supposed he is reaching for the nymphs who have just taken their exit in that direction. But this impression is countered by the Nymph, who emphatically reestablishes a previous position of startlement occasioned only by the Faun having come too close. If she is reacting to viewing the Faun from around the curve of horizontal space, then by implication he could also be reaching for her across the same space. They are visually connected by the fact that both have straight legs, instead of bent, high on demipointe. And movements of the Nymph immediately following this striking (Nijinsky makes sure it is emphasized visually) pose are to crouch as if to slink away and to reclaim her veil as if she thinks she has been seen. Protectively, she covers her front with the veil. One arm is laid across her ; the other across her hips. She is evidently unimpressed by his leap and boyish prancing in front of her, and neither creature seems quite to know what to make of the other. There follow some physical negotiations between Nymph and Faun to fit together in dominant and submissive roles. This is indicated not only by kneeling and standing, but also by changing sides to the view of the audience, according to the previously- mentioned conventions of space relative to gender in the iconography of the pottery. What is finally puzzling is that the Nymph at last eludes the Faun’s attentions by sliding out of his straight-armed embrace and gliding off stage right (at no time do any of the nymphs enter or exit stage left). And yet the Faun remains facing left, as if expecting her

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to come round the circle of the stage/pottery zone and into his embrace once again. This is a slightly comic effect, but one consistent within the literal context of a ceramic vase which, as it is turned around, shows its band of “narrative” (i. e. hunting, banqueting, etc.) ending and beginning at any given point on the band (Lemos). It seems to take the Faun a while to realize that the Nymph will not reappear, and he settles for what remains in his field of vision—the veil she has dropped on the ground before him. The feminine has in this fashion eluded literal idealization and slipped into a metaphoric existence, represented to the male gaze only by her veil. The use the Faun makes of this veil and its symbolic significances are discussed in greater detail later in this chapter. Costumes and makeup for Nijinsky’s ballet was designed by Bakst; in this study, only the Faun’s appearance is discussed. A valued and influential member of Diaghilev’s inner circle of collaborative artists, Bakst designed décor and costumes Ballet Russes productions, particularly those with exotic themes such as, Les Orientales (Fokine: 1910) and Schéherézade (Fokine: 1910). As Charles Mayer states in his article, “The Influence of Leon Bakst on Choreography”, Bakst had, along with Fokine and Nijinsky, been inspired by Duncan’s new freedom of movement, and he created costumes with the idea of enhancing the ability of the dancer to move expressively and “naturally”. As previously noted, Bakst took Nijinsky to the exhibit of Greek artifacts on display at the Louvre, and he was, as Mayer states; “. . .already considered an expert on the ancient world.” He was also dedicated to, and a strong force in the development of, “the symbiosis of music, dance and art. . .in Hellenic forms and sensibilities” according to Diaghilev’s vision (Mayer: 127). For Faune, Bakst saw fit to particularly accentuate the animal/man duality of the character and its association with nature. But the expressive intimacy of the ballet and its “stripped down” of movement also offered the designer an excellent opportunity to integrate all aspects of a performance into an experiential whole: . . .Bakst indicated an interest in developing the costume as a functional item in dance. . .capable of extending the range of the body's movement in space. . .rather than regarding the costume as a kind of disguise, in which the body was concealed and to which accessories were added as ornamentation, he used the total costume as a means of adding to the structure of the movement ( Potter: 155).

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The Faun’s costume and makeup for (1938-1993) in this video reconstruction appear very like Nijinsky’s in the De Meyer photographs. He is suited in a thin unitard mottled in large dark brown spots that fits like a second skin and shows the human musculature and movements very well. In this feature the Faun costume resembles the one worn by Nijinsky as the Spirit of the Rose in Fokine’s highly successful ballet, Le Spectre de la Rose. As for the previous role, Nijinsky’s “second skin” costume in Faune is festooned with leaves, suggesting the creature’s connection with nature. But the motley of spots for the Faun costume adds to this inhuman presence a kind of indeterminate ancestry; a being that is neither one thing nor another and yet some of both, not unlike the diamond motley of a harlequin . In an essay for the Apollon magazine in 1909, Ballet Russes designer Lèon Bakst explained his thinking in devising this kind of costume consistent with his later creation for Faune: The chimeras of the Greeks. . .were fashioned from the strangest combinations of different species of animals. Yet, some kind of logical sequence in the anatomical structure of the Greek chimera. . .reconciles the spectator to the phenomenon of a roebuck and a lion sharing one body. Even more striking in Greek sculpture are the centaurs and , where the astonished eye delights in the artistic combination of a man and a horse, of a man and a goat (Potter: 181).

This costume is fitted with a short tail at the small of the back. A wig, the curls of which are sculpted close to the skull to suggest a pair of horns, tops the Faun’s head. Around his neck and waist are thin gold vines with leaves. He wears flexible sandals that look like boots on his feet when he turns up his toes. In this reconstruction the Faun appears to be wearing flesh-toned makeup, but descriptions of Nijinsky’s makeup indicate that Bakst had the Faun wearing a kind of off-yellow color (Buckles). “Nijinsky wore a cream-colored body stocking painted with dark brown spots . . .He lengthened and pointed his ears with molded wax,” (Dunning: 26). Writing of the time, Diaghilev’s associate Jean Cocteau recalled that Nijinsky experimented with the details of his costume in a nearly obsessive fashion; “. . . one of a thousand instances of his perpetual rehearsing that made him sullen and moody” in the days before the premiere of the ballet; . . . he [Nijinsky] astonished us. . . by moving his head as if he had a stiff

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neck. . . We learned later that he had been training himself to stand the weight of the horns [for Faune]40. The music Nijinsky chose41 for his ballet was the tone-poem, Prélude à l'Après- Midi d'un Faune (1894) composed by the French composer, Claude Debussy (1862- 1918). The ten-minute prelude42 is generally considered to be the first Impressionist orchestral masterpiece of Western music, making a final break with the conventions of German Romanticism dominated by Wagner. While Impressionism was certainly influenced by Wagner’s “shimmering, constantly alternating chords” (Matthews: 535) and a desire to create fully-integrated works of art, Debussy sought the employment of sound for its own sake. The Impressionist composer reached—as did his early modernist counterparts43 in painting—for a musical construction that invoked a narrative rather than stating it in a direct and unmistakable fashion. This approach did not precisely tell the audience in a literal fashion what the piece was about, but instead allowed limited latitude of interpretation. The opening for this kind of interpretation, as was true of early modernist works regardless of medium, engaged a removal from dependence upon academic form through the application of an exotic, non-western aesthetic. Debussy: . . .created constantly shifting colors and moods through such musical methods as gliding chords and chromatic scales derived from non-Western sources. . .[Faune] . . .is a sensuous confection of blurred sounds and elusive rhythms. . . (Matthews: 536).

Debussy had taken the idea for the composition from a similarly-titled poem written in 1876 by the symbolist poet, Mallarmé (1842-1898), which describes the ineffable and transient qualities of beauty44. However much this quality of feeling may have stirred Debussy, he did not allow a miasmic, undirected flow of sound, or even sentimental interpretations to influence the underlying structure of his composition. Instead, he invoked the sensory experience of musical reverie and placed it like a skin over a very well-constructed, complex tonal and rhythmic skeleton. That way the internal structure, though hidden, is felt as a solid support to the more obvious realm of flight, dream, or thought evident in the poem.

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Debussy valued and incorporated a logical musical structure in all his music, and his Prelude is no exception. By subsuming logic in order to support intuition (when usually it is thought that intuition should support a logical conclusion in order to be validated) Debussy supplied the piece with a tension that is both disturbing and reassuring. But it is also completely consistent with Impressionist works of the time. Debussy grappled with his transition away from the Wagnarian formula45 approach to music in terms comparable to Nijinsky’s move away from Fokine’s interpretation of “the new dance” when he writes that: Music has a rhythm whose secret force shapes the development. The rhythm of the soul, however, is quite different—more instinctive, more general, and controlled by many events. From the incompatibility of these two rhythms a perpetual conflict arises, for the two do not move at the same speed. . .Wagner has the honor of being responsible for some of these. But they are for the most part due to chance, and more often than not awkward and deceptive. . .the application of symphonic form to dramatic action succeeds in killing dramatic music rather than saving it . . .(Grayson: 227-8).

It is speculated that Nijinsky both sensed and analyzed this change of balance between emotion and music in the Prelude. Buckles states that although Nijinsky never read Mallarmé’s poem46, his interpretation of Debussy’s score reflecting the poem was apt. The choreographer found cues for each dynamic of the ballet in the music through a nearly instinctive interpretation rather than a literal adherence to the sound dynamics (Buckles: 239). At the same time, Nijinsky was also capable of analyzing the internal structure of Debussy’s score. It would be a mistake to assume that because Nijinsky was a dancer, he did not understand music47 or art. Nijinska notes that her brother was particularly attracted by the paintings of Impressionist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), and that he had several prints hanging in his rooms (Nijinska: 442). Certainly the correlation between Gauguin’s primitives expressing a longing for a simpler, uncorrupted existence free of confining social strictures and Nijinsky’s ballet is evident: . . .Nijinsky was determined to distance himself not only from all the conventions of that traditional ballet whose crowning glory he was, but also from Fokine’s . His choreography for Faun is a modulated Cubism or “primitivism” in the manner of Gauguin whom he greatly admired (Nectoux: 12).

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Both Nijinska and Buckles also state that Nijinsky had had an excellent training in music and could play the piano quite well, although he evidently did so more by ear than by reading a score. Buckles further speculates that Diahgilev probably suggested the score of Debussy’s music to Nijinsky, but that: Nijinsky’s movement was so little related to the tone-poem, chosen perhaps after the style of choreography had been invented, that the score was reduced to background music. A new step had been taken in the history of the relationship between music and dancing. Suddenly it was possible to imagine a dance in opposition to music—or without it (164).

And Nijinska emphasizes in her account of the early stages of choreographic development that both she and her brother were quite well acquainted with Debussy’s music. Lacking a pianist for their secret rehearsals, they worked at first in short sections: . . .to become completely familiar with the music during our rehearsals I would play two or three bars to Vaslav, and he would then dance or demonstrate the movements. I would then repeat those steps as best I could without the music (315).

The process of setting music and movement side by side with long intervals between connections of the two produced a work densely integrated to itself through Nijinsky’s evolving understanding of movement beyond the ballet lexicon. Small wonder that the Ballets Russes dancers later rehearsing in Faune found Nijinsky demanding and difficult to work with. He not only required them to follow his instructions precisely for unfamiliar positions and movements, but also demanded a particular relationship between the music and dance that was equally unfamiliar. Dunning recounts in her essay about the ballet that one of the dancers, ,48 records that Nijinsky told her that she must: “. . .try to walk between the bars of the music and sense the rhythm which is implied.” The static movements. . .were unlike anything the Russian dancers had learned before and were chained in notably long phrases (Dunning: 24).

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This demanding relationship not only jolted the dancers out of the traditional presentational form of ballet (Jeschke) but also placed them as an element no less and no more important than the choreography or the music, all of which were equally subject to Nijinsky’s vision. In Nijinsky’s scheme, the dance and the music coincidentally inhabit the same time/space frame. This established a relationship between them that was as remote as that between the Faun and the nymphs (male to female), or between the two zones of stage movement (the upper, internal domain of the Faun and the lower experiential one he shares with the nymphs). These elements exist side by side to join only briefly between long intervals, suggesting an almost chthonic bonding only occasionally evident. In other words, Faun is as much about what is suggestively “absent” in the ballet as what is physically present. The result is a series of tensions, all of which are related to each other in ways not always evident, but nevertheless felt. If dance is language, then Nijinsky’s ballet comments on the ways words do, and do not, convey meaning. To achieve this effect, Nijinsky’s choreography was strict, precise, and unbending. To the dancers, this internalized order of form, which Nijinsky could demonstrate to perfection yet rarely put into words, was initially incomprehensible. According to Nijinska, her brother was equally impatient with the rehearsal pianist as with the dancers when liberties were taken with the tempo: Debussy’s dreamlike music was no help in keeping time, as one dancer recalled: “[We] walked and moved quite gently to a rhythm that crossed over the beats given by the conductor. At every entrance—and there were several—one began to count, taking the count from another dancer who was coming off. For every lift of the hand or head there was a corresponding sound in the score.” (Jonas49: 216).

The statements here seem contradictory: the movements and the music are first described as vague, “dream-like” and “moving quite gently to a rhythm that crossed over the beats. . .” and in the next sentence, precisely aligned to one another. If Nijinsky had been working on one level only to match music to dance, or dance to music, then this result would not make sense. However, if, as has been previously proposed, Nijinsky desired to bind movement and music closely together according to an internal, hidden sense of order to support a co-existence of music and dance, each in its own separately

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mystical, lyrical, and emotional realms, he then has the option of choosing when and where those “joints” may be allowed to show. Although neither Nijinsky nor Debussy conceived of rhythm as a regular pulsation or a predetermined form, each had his own idea about rhythm, Debussy envisioned his prelude as a succession of arabesques, an undramatic unfolding of variations on a motif. This can also be said of Nijinsky’s dramaturgy for Faun, which did not move towards any particular climactic moment (Jaschke: 113).

That Nijinsky was concerned with ideas of internalized order became more evident after Faune. Designs for choreographic notation became something of an obsession over time (Guest). His choreographic handling of the score from Stravinsky for his later ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) was so complicated that it is reported Nijinsky had to shout the counts to the dancers over the din of the audience’s jeers at its premiere, and afterward none of the dancers could agree on its details, making any accurate reconstruction of the ballet nearly impossible. Debussy expressed some reservations about how Nijinsky had used his music; some of his comments about the ballet are oblique and obscure: . . .Debussy was approached for permission to use his score. The composer was less than enthusiastic [evidently petulantly asking, “why?”] about allowing his first symphonic masterpiece to be linked with some kind of show50. And, according to Stravinsky, he finally consented— grudgingly—only under the most extreme pressure from Diaghilev (Nectroux: 20).

Perhaps Debussy was at first unhappy with how the ballet had developed; still, the composer could not have been completely disgusted. Later, Debussy seemed pleased with the success of Faune and went on to write the music for Nijinsky's second ballet, Jeux (1913). The poet Mallarmé (who had admired Löie Fuller) had died before Faune premiered. The backdrop and stage setting were designed by Bakst, but the backdrop for Faune was less well-received than his costumes and makeup, especially by Nijinsky. Bakst filled this backdrop with vibrant, primal colors suggesting a primitive innocence; colors that express the sincerity and honesty of expression and the artwork of children emphasizing bright colors. He justified this approach by drawing a correlation between

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the modern paintings of such artists as Gauguin and the ancient Cretan/Greek civilization of which he was entranced: . . .the freshness, the youthful genius that unfolds when a people are in their infancy, the bright and joyful feeling that radiates from their early achievements arose naturally and effortlessly out of their culture’s tastes, and did not violate them (Potter: 188)51.

If Bakst’s design was intended to suggest a forest scene, then it is a chaotically flat one, for it offers no sense of depth or mitigation of shading. Nijinsky evidently would have preferred a plain and simple backdrop (Nectroux: 24). For the 1922 Paris revival by Nijinska, Picasso designed a curtain in shades of gray (Jeschke and Nectroux: 135). However, if Bakst’s curtain is a work of art in its own right, it was not required to serve anything but itself in the layered scheme of the stage experience. A reconstruction of this original backdrop was made for the video version examined in this study. However, that having been said, it is also true that: Bakst’s backdrop, albeit magnificent, was neither functionally neutral nor austerely conceived. If its palette recalled Gauguin, its composition was much too elaborate to blend with a stage presentation whose keynote was to be unity and rigor . . .[however] Diaghilev’s point, that the aesthetic of Nijinsky’s work was akin to Cubism, serves to gauge the extent of these stylistic cross-purposes (Nectoux: 27).

The ballet takes place on two physical levels—one above the other— corresponding to the Faun's state of mind. As has been previously discussed, the upper level, designed as a grassy hillock, is private and internally-reflective to the Faun52 alone, while the lower one at stage level is shared with the nymphs as a public, experiential condition. Both areas are navigated entirely from side to side; hardly an eight-foot space existed between the hillock and the edge of the stage. This limitation imposed by the set emphasizes the negotiations of pose and movement commencing from the first moments of the piece. The opening vision is of the Faun alone in a reclining pose at the upper level. From this location the Faun descends to interact with the nymphs, and it is to this place he returns to the self-communion concluding the ballet. The lower stage level acts as a kind of public domain, which the Faun shares with the nymphs. It is in this zone he encounters the stirrings of his own

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sexuality and separateness from the female creatures, and it is only here that issues of gender (i. e. self in relation to other, or the feminine) arise. Nijinsky’s response to the decorative zones on the Greek pottery that inspired the ballet appears to have been reflected in his arrangement of the stage picture. As has been previously discussed, Archaic Greek pottery narrative bands on a vase might show the same hero (such as Achilles) but at different times and in different situations, such as a banqueting scene above a hunt. The two bands only obliquely refer to each other, and in some cases, are to be “read” around the vessel in opposite directions: the banquet scene going clockwise, while the hunting scene below it moving in a counterclockwise direction (Lemos). The Faun’s return to his hillock with the veil at the end of the dance emphasizes this interpretation of how Nijinsky used the set as a circular narrative. In this sense, the physical presence of the ballet offers a spatial correlation to the Faun’s attempt to reconcile in his own mind/body the disparate male/female stirrings stimulated by the nymphs. If the fact that an upper zone and a lower zone have physical/narrative connotations as do the zones of depictions on pottery, then the upper zone interpretively designates the Faun’s internal (conceptual/mental) self and the lower one his physical (sexual) self aroused by the nymphs. There is a continuation of multiple meanings and mirrored opposites in the use of the props, all of which are handled by the Faun and put to his mouth, very much as an infant explores objects. In the beginning of the ballet, the Faun plays his flute in a lounging position on his hillock facing stage left; later he repeats the identical position playing the flute facing stage right. He “eats” first a bunch of white grapes, then a bunch of red ones. The gesture the Faun used to mime eating is to first put the grapes against his open mouth, then slide them down his throat and chest. This gesture of consumption is also repeated with each fistful of the two ends of the Nymph’s veil, which serves as a proxy for the absent Nymph. Certainly the veil is heavily invested with several contradictory implications, and no prop in the history of stage presentation has created more controversy53. When it is used by the Nymph, the veil is first a garment that both hides and reveals her body in very much the same evocative way St. Denis’ veils do in Incense. As the Nymph

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prepares for a swim, two of her companions hold the veil in front of her, as if it could function as a modest screen despite its actual transparency. As has been previously suggested, the Nymph’s veil additionally evokes the properties of flowing water, which, like the structure of the ballet itself, primarily flows in only one direction. Taken in this context, the veil becomes an icon of a larger comment being made on the nature of dance itself, which once performed is retained only in memory. With the veil standing for flowing water, it adds images of nature and time well in keeping with Mallarmé’s Symbolist poem. And by extension, the cloth also ties Nijinsky’s piece to previous manipulations of lengths of fabric and the play of light upon them by which Löie Fuller summoned images of such forces of nature as fire. As soon as the veil passes into the hands of the Faun, however, it becomes quite different as a fetishistic proxy for the absent Nymph. In one moment the Faun playfully tosses it up in the air, obviously enjoying its physical properties as a veil. Later, with it bunched close to his body, the Faun jabs at and through its loop in an explicitly sexual manner. The next moment he holds it out away from his body draped over both arms in great reverence. Then in six very abrupt and highly-memorable stop-action movements the Faun draws the veil to his face, again invoking the time pulses of filmed movement juxtaposed against the conception of a continuous, uninterrupted and smooth flow of water. When the Faun ends this sequence by burying his face in it, he does so in a gesture that could mean he is being smothered by it or that he possesses it utterly. Given this interpretation of the veil, it is a strange image when the Faun slowly ascends to his solitary hillock bearing the veil draped over his arms; it is as if he is not only carrying his impression of the Nymph, but water/time itself. Certainly Nijinsky wanted the audience to remember this particular sequence, because it takes such a length of time, and throughout the Faun makes only those movement adjustments necessary to achieve the task of climbing the hidden stairs; otherwise, his body seems to glide unchanging through space. But even more than signifying the Nymph, the way in which the veil is handled further suggests an absorption, or internalization of its associative feminine qualities. It is almost as if the sexually-immature Faun seeks to subsume the new, fascinating female

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characteristics he has just encountered by “swallowing” the veil. And the gesture of eating it is a wry comment on the sexual differences between male and female—a kind of “eat first before you are eaten” animalistic gesture. Another gesture with layered implications of absorption and eating is the grimace of the Faun. While this grimace, repeated several times in the ballet, may be read as a smile of sensual pleasure, the way in which the Faun tucks his chin against his neck also invokes the pottery depictions of lions in silent roars, their tongues sometimes out. Here sexuality and the predatory nature of such beasts are brought together, for if the prey is consumed physically, still it is the predator who is obsessed with obtaining and consuming the prey. It is as if to say that it is the flight of the Nymph that stimulates the Faun’s pursuit of her as much as it is his pursuit that impels her flight. Probably the most discussed aspect of Nijinsky’s Faune centers around how the Faun lies on the veil, which shocked audiences and created a succès de scandale. But beyond this public response, this prop was invested by Nijinsky with his expression of spiritual transformation and feeling. The longest sequence in the ballet is near its end, when the Faun slowly, painfully carries the veil draped over his forearms in a symmetrical U up from the lower to his upper stage level. It seems that Nijinsky wished to call attention to an extraordinary time proportion; that a transforming experience quick in physical time is slow, repetitive and meaningful only in its reflective time. And the veil is the only object—just as the Faun is the only character—movable between the two stage levels. While the final movements of the Faun on the veil suggest both desire for the female and the self-gratification of masturbation, it additionally allows (given the Faun’s previous actions with it) an interpretation of incorporating both genders in one body, just as the nature of a faun is both man and beast. The success of Faun encouraged Nijinsky to continue experimentations with radical movement vocabulary that referred to, or invoked classical ballet without being slavishly bound to its rules. These ballets, which represented attempts to bring ballet into alignment with his ideas about feeling and spirituality include Jeux (Debussy: 1913) credited with being the first ballet on a contemporary sports theme and in modern dress and Le Sacre du Printemps (also1913, with music by Stravinsky). This latter ballet invoked primitive Russian rituals of sacrifice to compel the return of spring after winter.

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The fourth and last ballet by Nijinsky, Til Eulenspiegel (Strauss: 1916) premiered during the American tour, and was an impression of a merry Medieval prankster who thumbs his nose at society. It did not meet with much success, perhaps because by this time Nijinsky was showing clear signs of the insanity that eventually overwhelmed him. Unfortunately, Nijinsky’s performing and choreographic progress was halted by his irrevocable slip into insanity. He became obsessed with abstract design and an increasingly interior detailing of movement. His drawings54 and diagrams for dance ideas became increasingly abstract and undecipherable. Nijinsky didn’t write very much about his ballets or his ideas about them; and he was noted as being at least socially inept or “eccentric” (if not outright stupid) because he would hardly talk to anyone at all— especially to anyone he felt did not understand him (Levine, et. al.). Even in his diary, begun hours before his last public dance performance and ending just before he was institutionalized, Nijinsky hardly mentions his ballets at all. According to Joan Acocella in her introduction to The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, Faune is the only one of Nijinsky’s ballets55 that could be reconstructed from Nijinsky’s notations of the dance. Although he continued his exploration of , the encroachment of his mental condition turned Nijinsky to an obsessive and repetitive examination of increasing detail that connected less and less with the work as a whole. Lacking a company of dancers and unable to communicate his ideas in any other way, Nijinsky turned away from contact with other people and lost himself expressively in writing and drawings (Acocella). However, the character of the Faun was one with which Nijinsky closely identified himself: as he stated in his diary, “I am the Faun.” It is significant that the complexities of this half-man, half-beast should so completely encompass Nijinsky’s vision of himself as a gateway to humanity’s salvation from the corruptions of modern life. The writings in his diary stand as a kind of last, desperate plea for the validity of that vision. In a recent interview with Daniel Gesmer, Ballet choreographer and Nijinsky admirer suggests:

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The journal documents an erratic and ultimately tragic dance involving several states of mind or consciousness, including. . .a sincere experience of spiritual enlightenment. . . particular emphasis on “feeling,” a quasi- mystical form of intuitive, empathic perception that for Nijinsky was humanity’s best hope [for] love, unity, happiness, environmental conservation, socialist economics and a wise use of technology ( Calendar, Sunday, February 8, 2004: E-46).

Probably Nijinsky’s most profound influence on another dancer/choreographer was, as discussed throughout this chapter, on his sister. During her discussion of her early life and career, Nijinska illuminates every episode with admiration, respect, and love for her more-famous brother. As his sister and professional cohort, Nijinska placed her dancing body into Nijinsky’s hands so that he could develop his choreography for Faune free of any influence other than his own compelling expressive goals. And more than any other dancer of the time, Nijinska appears to have understood what Nijinsky needed in order to choreograph. Although she might have been disappointed to have been passed over for the role of the Nymph in Faune, she seems to have kept this to herself. In Nijinsky’s second ballet, Sacre du Printemps (1913) she provided him with her willingness to comply to the complexities of the role of the Chosen Maiden. She says of their rehearsals in Sacre together that: . . .I felt that my body must draw into itself, must absorb the fury of the hurricane. . .This work with my brother proceeded fast and easily. Perhaps it was because I saw, understood, and executed accurately, each movement, correctly rendering the inner rhythm (Nijinska: 450).

Nijinska’s later choreography—a logical extension of her own danced interpretations in Nijinsky’s and Fokine’s ballets—strongly reflects the influence of her brother’s work amid the cultural and artistic changes of the time. Like others in the Russian artistic circles at the Imperial theatres, Nijinska recognized the significance of Duncan’s expressive freedom and what it could mean to a revision of the revered tenets of ballet tradition. The initial courage to go forward in this direction for Nijinska, however, appears to have been filtered through her brother’s interpretation, rather than her own: I too find that after my work with Vaslav on his L’Aprés-Midi d’un Faune, my own technique in Narcisse has been influenced. I see how much I have assimilated Vaslav’s Ancient Greek style. . .(Nijinska: 353).

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Following Faune’s success, Nijinska did all she could to support Nijinsky’s new ballet and carry it forward. Anticipating a partnership with him, Nijinska established her ecole de movement in 1919 specifically to train dancers’ bodies so that they would be ready to rehearse and perform in Nijinsky’s new style: With typical , Nijinska conceived of her school as a training ground for her brother’s future company. Recalling the fierce resistance of her former colleagues to Nijinsky’s innovative choreography, she set out to devise a system of training that would transcend existing theory and technique, and create “a new type of ballet artist” (Baer: 18).

Like Denishawn, Nijinska’s ecole did not confine admission to aspiring dancers; it was also open to other performers of opera, film, and stage. Its curriculum included classical and character dancing, pantomime, and acrobatics. Perhaps modeling the artistic success of Diaghilev’s collection of collaborative artists in many fields, Nijinska also surrounded herself with other artists who both taught in her school and created new works with her, including the painter Alexandra Alexandrovna Exter (1882-1949), who (like Benois and Bakst for Ballets Russes) designed costumes56 for Nijinska’s Theatre Choréographique. And like Shawn, Nijinska combined her goals of education, performing, and choreography, for: “. . .the classroom was the laboratory where Nijinska worked out her ideas for ballets” (Baer: 20). Ironically, Nijinsky’s slip into insanity may have freed her choreography as she tried to step into the void he left. In 1918 Nijinska began writing her theory of choreography, and she kept detailed notebooks recording her experimentations with movement and meaning. Among her most notable contributions are (1923), (1924) and Hamlet (1934) in which, like Sarah Bernhardt, Bronislava took the lead role en travestie. Her forays into abstract and psychologically-driven ballet narratives inspired a new generation of dance artists, among them Anthony Tutor (1908- 1987), Fredrick (1904-1988), and (1904-1983) Of the three dances in this investigation, Faune is the one most clearly identified with the five points of the avant-garde defined in this investigation. Perhaps the most obvious point is the way in which Faune distorts conventions of presentational time and space traditionally accepted within the aesthetic constructs of ballet. Locomotion is flattened to exist on sliding, parallel planes corresponding to psychological states; one

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above and one below. It has been speculated in this discussion that Nijinsky got the idea from zones of archaic Greek pottery decoration viewed with Bakst, and was able to invest space with gendered directions based on what he absorbed. And his distortion of time from linear to cyclical; from an external dictation to an internal unfolding of self- realization mark Faune as revolutionary in the truest avant-garde sense. Exoticism served Nijinsky’s development of Faune as a point of departure from which he could make the extraordinary “leap” from traditional ballet classicism to a fundamental archaic authority simultaneously old and new. Like other avant-garde artworks, the exoticism of Faune provides the piece with a primitivistic quality. In the way it abstracts the visual components of the piece, the raw, innocent brutality of the character lends it validity as both spiritual (i. e., driven from within, or “Gnostic”) and natural (i. e., in opposition to the “artificial” positions and movements associated with the ballet). Particularly, Nijinsky the dancer was (like Shawn) in himself an “exotic” experience as an expressive male dancer and a person neither quite Polish, nor Russian, nor European; a being of ambiguous gender, part-animal and part-human. From this “expatriate” external condition, Nijinsky found it possible to find his own, internal landscape that resonated with common experience of the human condition. Although his choreographic and dancing career was cut frustratingly short, Nijinsky placed himself in dialogue with both the traditions of classical ballet and the urgings of new expressive presentational structures indicated in Early Modernism. Conceptual reversals—not just in the attitudes of the dancer’s body, but in the greater ballet lexicon of movement and its meaning in culture—occur in Faune as a metaphor for the avant-garde artist caught between traditions of fading relevance and new revisions yet to be tested for validity in the Machine Age. Between his roles of Petrouska and the Faun, Nijinsky explored the consequences of technology on the human body in a way that most poignantly “bleeds through” with human vulnerability, error, and futility. Discussions of Nijinsky’s art often ask the question of what he might have accomplished had mental illness not overcome him so early in his life. His response of revulsion to the horrors of World War I and the technological advances making the business of killing ever more efficient added to his expatriate status, and his traumatic break with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes no doubt complicated a previously-existing

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unstable mental condition57. Even as mental illness closed in on him, Nijinsky strove to express his ideas on art, life, God and the offering of the dancer’s being to embody and bring them into concert. Using his character of the Faun in analogy, Nijinsky “swallowed” contradictions of emotion and thought in order to synthesize in his own being a gestalt of personal and artistic expression. After his education in the Imperial Schools, Nijinsky performed only from 1907 to 191958 in roles ranging from the classical fairytale prince to the sexually-aroused Faun. And yet, for all the brevity of his dancing years he won high acclaim and continues to haunt the imaginations of artists even today. Like St. Denis (Chapter Two), Nijinsky was at the same time on public display and unavailable to possession by the onlooker; locked into his own deep inner self-communion. But he suggested to his audiences a situation of humanity in the here and now; caught between memories of an idyllic past and fears of an uncertain future. Faced with such an impossible condition, humanity in Nijinsky’s vision must fight a losing, subversive battle with the self to realize the spiritual in the physical; the innocence in degradation; the natural in artificial construct; the familiar in the exotic—in short, the expressive capabilities of the dancing body. Prince Peter Lieven simply states that: I pity from the depths of my heart all those who did not see him [Nijinsky]. No words can describe the lasting impression that he produced . . .he was so unlike anyone else, his manner was so clearly individual and personal. . .looking at his dance you found it so simple that you felt that you yourself could have done it (318-9).

As a famed dancer turned to choreography, Nijinsky had a rich source of material on which to draw. As a member of Diaghilev’s collaborative intellectual and artistic inner circle and on tour throughout Europe with the Ballets Russes, Nijinsky had access to the latest conceptual developments of his day. His early life experiences touring circus and dance venues of great variety with his family combined with the bohemian life of his adopted European city (Paris) gave him access to a sense of gentle humor and layered sophistication in his deceptively simple and evidently natural presentation. Nijinsky thought of choreography as a logical extension of his performing persona, and set about to systematically realize his expressive goals evoked by Archaic Greek pottery for his first ballet. And yet, Nijinsky’s four extant ballets give but a

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glimpse of the potential of his choreographic scope. Only three more major ballets were forthcoming after Faune. Jeux and Le Sacre du Printemps (another succès de scandale due to Stravinsky’s machine-pounding music) both had fewer than ten performances each, including their Paris premiers in 1913 (Gesmer). Nijinsky’s last ballet, Till Eulenspiegel59, was mounted on the members of his ill-fated company during their 1916- 17 tour of the United States and had only twenty-three showings, all in America. In Faune, Nijinsky achieved his expressive goals in ways comparable to those of Shawn through Gnossienne or St. Denis in Incense. Although he set about an analytical procedure of choreography in much the same way as did Shawn (Chapter Three), Nijinsky required this hidden, inner structure to support an outer “skin” of emotional, spiritual expression. The arrangement was well in keeping with his choice of Debussy’s music, for Debussy sought a similar structure in his music in direct line with Mallarmé’s Symbolist poem. The progression from poem to music to dance in Faune’s theme created a series of metaphors for the human condition, suggesting qualities of impermanence and the interpretive fluidity of memory characteristic of the avant-garde. Furthermore, Nijinsky’s revision of constructed time and space in the ballet allowed for a wry, humorous comment on those conventions of stage presentation in the ballet not unlike the effect of Gnossienne. And in his attitudes of internal communion and use of a veil as an invocation to the elusive qualities of the feminine realm of feeling and intuition, Nijinsky echoes St. Denis’ exotic, remote persona (Chapter Two) presented in Incense. For Nijinsky as well as St. Denis and Shawn, his dance was both public and personal. These dances represented a series of negotiations between internal spiritual longings and the external need to communicate ineffable experience to others. The ways in which these dances were packaged and marketed to audiences constitutes the next area of discussion for this study. In addition, the complex of avant-garde influences on in film and on stage, which tended to follow slightly behind the ground-breaking events in Paris, is undertaken in greater detail in Chapter Five.

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END NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1 Léon Bakst, in interview with Rose Strunsky for her Current Opinion (October, 1915) article, “Léon Bakst on the “Revolutionary Aims of the Serge de Diaghilev Ballet” mentions a 1911 ballet by Nijinsky produced in Paris called Un Jaune Septembre Bakst states predated Faune, and which was “received with peals of laughter.” This author has encountered no reference to this pre-faun ballet in any other document accessed for research. In his book, Nijinsky, John Buckles suggests that Nijinsky’s first choreography may have been to create movements for Bronislava’s role of Papillion in Carnival, 1910 (Buckles: 129-30). It is otherwise assumed that Nijinsky must also have choreographed informal classroom exercises, sequences, and short studio works during his student days at the Imperial Theatre.

2 choreographer John Neumeier premiered his Nijinsky in 2000 (originally subtitled Choreographic Approaches) which incorporated images from Nijinsky’s Faune as part of a tribute for the 50th anniversary of Nijinsky’s death. However, writers also find inspiration in Nijinsky’s life and identification with the role of the Faun as material for short stories and poetry. The monologue one-act play, Death of a Faun by Pownall premiered in 1991 as a study of the dancer’s insanity. The novel Vaslav by Paul Strathern (Quartet Books, UK: 1975) presents a fictional interpretation of the private life of the dancer. The stabilizing persona of the character of Vaslav in the play is that of the Faun.

3 The ballet has no magnificent leaps such as those for which Nijinsky had become famous.

4 Nijinsky excelled in unusual character roles such as human to animal (as in Faune), a force of nature (as in the character of the Kobold in Les Orientales) human to inanimate illusions of life (Petroushka) or exotic beings such as the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade.

5 Bronislava relates in her memoirs that her first dancing lessons were given to her by Jackson and Johnson, a pair of black music-hall tap dancers touring Russia at the time (1894) who came to their home as guests of their father. She says that when he saw how much she was enjoying the lessons, Nijinsky also tried it (Early Memoirs: 25).

6 Bronislava notes that when Nijinsky was caught fighting with his brother, their mother called him a “Petroushka” after the fighting puppet featured in the fairs and circuses; the designation pleased Nijinsky very much (Early Memoirs: 33).

7 The master Cecchetti taught in the Russian Imperial School from 1890-1902.

8 As part of Peter the Great’s Westernization of his Russian court, a of dance was established in St. Petersburg in 1735. The first students were young boys enlisted in the military. During the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796) ballet masters from all over Europe were imported to teach in the Imperial Schools, and in 1869 the master took directorship and produced a founding canon of classical ballet works that remains popular today.

9 The first scandal of Nijinsky’s professional dancing career occurred during a 1911 performance of Giselle before the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna and several Grand Dukes at the Imperial Theatre. Nijinsky wore the costume designed for him by Benois in which he had appeared at the Grand Opera in Paris. But conservative forces of Imperial censorship deemed the costume indecent (even though the Dowager Empress specifically stated she had not at all been offended) and demanded Nijinsky’s resignation. The incident compelled him to cast his fortunes with Ballets Russes (despite his mother’s objections) and leave the Imperial Theatres permanently (Nijinsky, Buckles).

10 The shift in Euro-American concert dance from full-evening extravaganzas popular at the turn of the century to short, intense, programmatic series of short pieces is discussed in Chapter Five.

11 Fokine later renamed the piece , and it is considered to be the first abstract classical ballet.

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12 In his account of the Ballets Russes, Prince Peter Lieven emphasizes that unlike most other performing artists of his time, Fokine was able to grasp the principles of the new art forms of the Twentieth Century and their application to ballet. Fokine left his Russian choreography mentor Petipa and the Imperial Theatre to join Diaghliev’s Ballets Russes as its premier choreographer in 1909. When Nijinsky was promoted as a choreographer by Diaghliev, Fokine left.

13 In 1916 Fokine published a statement, “The New Ballet”, defining ideas he had been developing since his first meeting with Duncan in 1904 (Buckles). This statement is on the order of an avant-garde art manifesto describing the goals of his new balletic vision. The choreography he produced for Nijinsky to perform to realize those goals constituted a bridge between the traditional aesthetics of “beauty” and “the ideal” of traditional balletic movement and issues of modernism in movement which Nijinsky demonstrated in Faune.

14 Some sources variously credit the choreographic idea and movement development of Faune to Fokine, Diaghilev, or Bakst acting behind Nijinsky's name. The accounts of and Romola (Nijinsky’s wife) on the development of Faune’s choreography are particularly contradictory; in any case, neither one of them was present at the time and they may have had ulterior motives behind their statements ( from: Afternoon of a Faun: Mallarmé, Debussy, Nijinsky) At the same time, it is generally agreed that as the impresario for Ballets Russes, Diaghilev encouraged collaborative creative efforts among the artists with whom he associated.

15 Vera Krasovskaya's book, Nijinsky, is honestly prefaced by the author as an "enhanced" non-fiction, or a reconstruction of her memory. Not all who wrote about what they knew of Nijinsky were as forthright.

16 For example, Shawn had plenty of guidance from both Gould and St. Denis in his first dance creations.

17 Many Archaic Greek pottery figures are of male revelers in exaggerated poses suggesting vigorous movement and possessing ambiguously-gendered features. At the same time, the positions of these figures, as well as those of animals, were influenced by those depicted on ancient Egyptian relics.

18Rather than adapt the Hellenic or Classical Greek images favored by the American dancer Isadora Duncan who had made such an impression on Fokine (among others) during her 1905 tour of Russia, Nijinsky found himself more interested in the movement possibilities suggested by the older archaic Greek figures (Nijinska). Fokine might have been inclined to experiment more radically with movement in his ballets of the time had not the more conservative influences in Diaghilev’s committee exerted pressure on him to “tone down” his use of non-balletic poses and movements so that dancers and audiences would more readily accept them. By contrast, Nijinsky steadfastly ignored these pleadings, and possibly in anticipation of these objections and mitigating suggestions would not show his work to anyone except his sister until the choreography was finished (Buckles: 164-5)

19 When, at a 1912 New Years party Diaghilev suggested to Nijinsky that he should do a ballet based on Debussy’s music titled L’Aprés-Midi d’un Faune, Nijinsky rather diffidently suggested that the material was more to Fokine’s taste (Krasovskaya, Nijinsky: 193). However, Bronislava’s account makes clear that Nijinsky had already chosen the music well before 1912. It is speculated that Nijinsky may have affected disinterest because he was already hard at work on Faune in secret, and would show it to Diaghilev only when he was ready to set it in rehearsals.

20 Although offered the role of the Nymph in Nijinsky’s ballet, wealthy socialite beauty-turned-dancer, Ida Rubenstein, refused because it lacked the glamour of her previous appearances in Cléopâtre or Schéhérazade. Bronislava adds that Rubenstein was also close to Fokine, from whom the rehearsals for the new ballet were kept secret (405-6).

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21 Both Leonid Massine (1895-1979) and Serge Lifar (1905-1986)--the latter having been a student of Nijinska’s school--danced as the Faun for Ballets Russes after it became clear Nijinsky (who last performed the role in 1917) could no longer function. Neither could match Nijinsky’s interpretation and their performances were met with lukewarm responses (Buckles). In her choreography Nijinska tried to continue her brother’s work and seemed to enjoy dancing masculine roles. For one abstract ballet she created in 1921 she wore his costume from Papillon, and was also photographed (undated) wearing her brother’s Faun costume in a pose from Faune (Kopelson, The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky). This was probably from her 1922 revival for Ballets Russes of ten Paris performances of Faune in which she danced her brother’s part, according to the Jeschke/Nectroux chronology of performances (Afternoon of a Faun: Mallarmé, Debussy, Nijinsky: 135). These anecdotes reinforce the idea that Nijinska’s body was in some sense interchangeable with her brother’s in these performances. It is odd that Nijinska’s does not include this information.

22 It is ironic to note that the utilitarian objects Nijinsky saw in the Louvre are regarded with reverence and have an aesthetic and intrinsic value far beyond their original purposes. The artisans who decorated these vessels

23 For example, Nijinsky did not trust his mother-in-law because he says in his diary that she is a good actress. He refers not only to her work as an actress, but also to her ability to seem one way by artificial, superficial illusion but in reality to be something quite different. He himself, however, believed that when he assumed a dance character, he became that character in essence; that this meant he was being “truthful” from the inside out.

24 Jean Cocteau, an early supporter of the Ballets Russes in Paris, records that Diaghilev told him that when Bakst met Nijinsky in the Louvre, he found Nijinsky staring as if in a trance at the Egyptian artifacts.

25 This amazing depictive convention is referred variously as a Gorgon (Greek), “the Glory Face” (Hindu India), or T’ai Chi (China). Evidently expressing the mysticism of a union in which both parts retain separate attributes such as male and female, animal and human, etc. this facial depiction appears in many disparate world cultures such as Medieval Europe (as the Gates of Hell) and Olmec stone heads of pre- Columbian South America.

26 Not only do the Faun and Nymph perform this intense profile to profile “face-off” (once with the Faun in the weaker, submissive female-designated space to the left of the Nymph towering over him, and once with them changing sides so that the Faun dominates) but Shawn also presents a “half-face-off” with his “absent” Snake Goddess (Chapter Three). With these poses, both Faune and Gnossienne evoke the sexual tensions of a Tango dance.

27 As a ballet student Nijinsky’s slanting eyes and high cheekbones had earned him the nickname, “Little Jap” (Freeman and Thorpe: 9).

28 Nijinsky’s life was that of an expatriate artist who never quite inhabits either his adopted home (Western Europe) or returns to his origins (, Russia). For him, life is a double loss of the innocent pleasures of childhood experienced as nostalgia for the past and a geographic loss of national identity. In other words, by belonging to the itinerant community of the ballet Nijinsky lost the community of national identity, a feature which may have impelled him to become deeply attracted to the writings of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Bronislava records in her memoirs that stirrings of spiritual revolution, in which it was prophesied that the would lead the way to a new utopia of Western Civilization had influenced her brother very deeply.

29 Exactly what of Petrouska was the invention of Nijinsky and what was Fokine’s is difficult to determine precisely; however, the common poses between the Faun and the puppet are remarked upon here as significant in understanding how the Faun was conceptualized.

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30 The correlation between a scientist debunking superstitious or mysterious phenomena and a magician stirring them up is a common trope of the time. Examples of this imagery in silent film include the 1926 Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), to name but a few.

31 See Chapter Three for a brief discussion of Shawn’s fingers and thumbs in Gnossienne.

32 The komasts depicted on Archaric Greek pottery sport both manly beards and hair styles like those of women; their movements suggest both a careful posing designed to be viewed and an uncontrolled, unselfconscious enthusiasm of movement; their genitals show they are sexually aroused.

33 This comment was reported in Dunning’s notes as having been given in Musical America, 14 June 1913, (9).

34 Visual artists and their critics have discussed at length the clensing effects of “limited dimensionality” leading to its ultimate expression of minimalism in modern art, and it is a topic too vast to broach here. However, the point at hand is that such limitation invokes a classical substance (simplicity, balance, ) rather than imitations, or Euro-American interpretations of the “Greek ideal” (Kramer).

35 Nijinsky was never filmed by moving camera, but this series of photographs by De Meyer soon after the premiere of Faune have been invaluable resources for reconstructions of the ballet (Guest) and for detailed discussions of Nijinsky’s art (Buckles). Later photographs of Nijinsky in the role of the Faun show a distinct alteration of its original subtleties and the creeping encroachment of insanity upon the artist (Neagu).

36 The author spent a great deal of time attempting to definitively determine whether or not Nijinsky had been directly influenced by the work of Delsarte. In an email communication, dance historian Nancy Reuter expressed her opinion that Nijinsky must have been aware of Delsarte’s ideas at least through contact with Duncan. Imperial Theatre director Vokonsky

37 This impression eerily calls to mind the theory of physics that asserts the true nature of time as a series of imperceptible bursts which, to those of us experiencing it as a condition of existence, seem to have no separation one from another, just as the spaces between the atoms making up all material objects is not visible.

38 Described as one leg forward, one back with the weight evenly distributed between them. The front of body faces the direction of the forward leg, and normal logic indicates that that is the direction in which the dancer will next make a move.

39 This left (female) and right (male) is a recurrent gendered consonance across many cultures, which, for Hindu India at least, refers to the left and right sides of a bicamerally symmetrical human body in which both genders are present; one dominant and the other recessive. In terms of energy flow through the psychic/mystic centers of the body’s charkas, the energy along the left side of the body flows from the head down, and along the right side of the body it flows upward toward the head. A Hindu temple is analogous to the human body in that when both men and women are seated in assembly, women occupy the left side of the hall and the men occupy the right. It is interesting that in St. Denis’ dances she either knew or inferred this relationship of gendered space by moving first to the left and then to the right side of the stage.

40 Cocteau, Difficulty of Being: 33.

41 The author encountered a baffling array of contradictory accounts explaining who suggest what to Nijinsky and when regarding the creation of every aspect of this ballet. However, evidence suggests to the author that the most reliable, unbiased sources of information would be the few words Nijinsky had to say and the detailed records of his sister, Bronislava. Accounts which support this direct narrative of creation for the ballet are put forward in this study on the understanding that conflicting statements were also consulted. It is not the purpose of this study to explain why there are so many different versions.

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42 The author timed the video reconstruction of the ballet at thirteen minutes duration.

43 Impressionist painters of this time would include Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Cezanne (1839-1906), and Monet (1840-1926).

44 Early in the poem there is reference to the scent of a rose, a line which refers incidentally to one of Nijinsky's most famous roles in the Fokine ballet, Le Spectre de la Rose (Berlioz: 1911).

45 It is interesting that Satie (whose first piano Gnossienne was used by Shawn) took the credit for persuading his friend Debussy to abandon the Wagnerian formula and experiment with different expressive relationships (Grayson: 227-8).

46 However, Nijinsky’s associates in Ballets Russes were fluent in French, and they translated and explained the poem to him (Nectroux: 36).

47 An embittered Fokine denounced Nijinsky’s choreography at every turn, and claimed the dancer-turned- choreographer had no more than an intuitive notion of music (Levin, Nijinska, et. al.).

48 Sokolova was the first English dancer in the Ballets Russes and Nijinsky worked with her on her dance in Faune through the difficult auspices of an interpreter, .

49 Jonas does not credit which dancer said this, but from his chapter notes it is estimated that she may have been Lydia Sokolova, from her book, Dancing for Diaghilev: The Memoirs of Lydia Sokolova, (, Mercury House: 1989).

50 This reluctance is interesting, given that Debussy had gone to Mallarmé to persuade the poet to allow a musical setting of his poem (Nectoux: 8).

51 Potter quotes Bakst from an essay by Bakst that appeared in the magazine Apollon in 1909.

52 Jaschke suggests that Nijinsky intended the ballet as an inner dialogue of the Faun from Mallarmé’s poem (117).

53 The Faun invokes an orgasmic spasm against the veil as the last movement in the ballet and in the first performance stirred cries for censorship. However, it can be argued that the Faun’s last movement (which Nijinsky evidently modified after the first performance) also suggest psychological, mystical, emotional implications consistent with the character, and it is quite likely that Nijinsky intended any and all these meanings in that gesture.

54Nijinsky’s intensely emotional drawings evoke the works of the Futurists in geometric abstraction and themes depicting inhuman entities which bear extremes of human emotions. The pencil rendering “Silence” by Romolo Romani in 1904-5 (from Futurism by Giovanni Lista, 2001 p. 35) bears a particularly strong resemblance to one of Nijinsky’s crayon drawings of 1919, which he told his wife Romola were “soldier’s faces. . .It is the war.” (Nijinsky’s Diary)

55 According to Daniel Gesmer in his Los Angeles Times article, “Hommage to a legend” (Dance Calendar, Sunday, February 8, 2004: E46) the other three ballets (Jeux and, Rite of Spring of 1913, and Till Eulenspiegel of 1916) were reconstructed by choreographer Millicent Hodson and art historian Kenneth Archer for the Joffrey Ballet, starting with Rite in 1987 and followed by Jeux in 2000.

56 Unfortunately, Exter’s designs were never executed, due to severe economic restrictions particularly during the war (Baer).

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57 Much has been written about Diaghilev’s love affair with Nijinsky and his wrath when Nijinsky married Romola in 1913. Neither the Ballets Russes run by Diaghilev nor Nijinsky as dancer/choreographer could quite independently of each other attain the intense creative fervor briefly held in the early years of their association.

58 Nijinsky’s last public dance was his deeply disturbing solo, Marriage with God at a St. Moritz hotel in . According to witnesses, it ended with an image of the Crucifixion (Gesmer).

59 The ballet represented a continuation of Nijinsky’s desire to expose the greedy hypocrisy of the well-to- do in society at the expense of the poor; a result perhaps of his fascination with the writings of Tolstoy.

213 CHAPTER FIVE

Popular Arts and Entertainments: American Developments

The three preceding chapters of this study developed separate analyses of three dances and the artists who created and performed them. This final chapter returns to the broad cultural perspective first introduced in Chapter One. However, instead of concentrating on the avant-garde elements of Early Modernism evolving among European visual and performing artists following La Belle Epoque, this chapter takes an overview of comparable considerations in American vaudeville and cinema. Cinema and vaudeville enjoyed tremendous popularity, and vigorously exchanged influences with the general American1 culture. Characteristics these venues share with the dances in question provide points of discussion in this chapter. While many other entertainments of the time (circus, dime museum stages, burlesque, music hall and carnivals, to name a few) contributed to the development of American culture, vaudeville and cinema directed the appeals of these smaller venues into strings of short, mobile performing units2 easily marketed for wide distribution and consumption. This chapter discusses how the process of marketing and distribution favored those units which not only entertained audiences, but also contributed to a growing consensus on the characteristics of American aesthetics distinctively defined from European influences. An examination of this process provides another perspective of avant-garde characteristics shared among the three dances under consideration. An important link between European and American Modernism is found in the design styles of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, in which European aesthetics preceded American variations3. These movements peaked in European popularity just as they were beginning to be accepted into the American mainstream about a decade after they first appeared in Europe. At first, American tours of European avant-garde art works were met with anger or confusion. Gradually, this kind of expression became part of America’s evolving adaptation to Modernism.

214 For all the similarity of avant-garde processes in Europe and the United States, there were some important differences. European art was preoccupied with redefining a variety of workable modern revisions vis à vis a long-standing tradition that established set relationships among the artist, work, and the consumer (Chapter One). However, American art was caught between emulation of European aesthetics and a countering redefinition of its own multiculturally-fragmented4 character in the latter half of the Nineteenth- to the first decades of the Twentieth-Century. Participating in this state of flux, American culture also became a project of Early Modernism; one that aggressively expressed itself in display of a public-self consistent with commercial, entertaining and artistic works. In the process, elements of the avant-garde creative impetus introduced in the first chapter (spiritualism, natural expression, distortions of time and space, a response to technology, and ethnic exoticism), resurfaced as an American interpretation. American expressive dance innovators facilitated this change; as was introduced in Chapters One and Two, the aesthetic impetus of the avant-garde reflected in the dance works of Duncan and Fuller first found acceptance in Europe, where evidence of their influence was reflected in Art Nouveau works featuring their images. Following Duncan’s and Fuller’s examples, St. Denis’ first tour of Europe made it possible for her to return to more serious attention in the United States on the strength of her European acclaim5 (Reuter: 57). This pattern parallels a similar shift in visual art of the time; the 1906 Incense includes elements of both Art Nouveau and Art Deco (Chapter Two), while the later dances Gnossienne and Faune relate more to the avant-garde features in Art Deco (Chapters Three and Four). This chapter centers on American developments; however, American and European arts remained connected. The extent to which European arts first dominated, then retained a point of reference for, American artistic experimentations can hardly be over emphasized. For example, anxieties arising from melding feminine power with technology were as much in evidence in European works such as the 1870 ballet Coppélia (music by Delibes/choreography by Saint Léon) and the Offenbach opera (1881) as in ’s 1927 silent film, Metropolis6. And both live stage and silent film renditions supplied an abundance of interpretations of Salomé as a metaphor for the New Woman of modern America.

215 The flow of influence soon changed direction. Duncan’s “naturalism” based upon American Delsartism7 had an impressive effect on Russian and European dramatists as well as upon the Russian ballet choreographers Fokine and Nijinsky. Plays by (1828-1906) and (1849-1912) and techniques of natural “realism” in the acting techniques developed by Constantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) reflected the experiential immediacy of Duncan’s dances. Their negotiations of reality and fantasy revised previous stage conventions that didn’t address the concerns of Modernism. It is important to this discussion to keep in mind that a highly fluid state of exchange existed across the Atlantic, drawing Nijinsky’s work into perspective with that of St. Denis and Shawn. The task of objectively characterizing public performance as either “high” or “low” art (Glossary) is not the purpose of this investigation. Rather, it serves this study to briefly outline the reasons these constructed divisions appeared. Spectacular entertainments with exotic elements were as much in evidence in formal ballets and operas8 premiering in the cultural centers of Europe as in productions mounted at Niblo’s Garden in New York9. And reflexive wit, humor, naturalism, and time/space distortions appeared in streamlined vaudeville acts and the earliest cinema experiments as readily as in the artwork of the French Impressionists and Cubists. Just as the avant-garde impetus ridiculed bourgeois sentiments in the unlikely venues of the Parisian cafés, similar avant- garde tactics punctured Victorian mores through American film and vaudeville. Such “punctures” were accepted through an eclectic format in which a wide range of aesthetics were juxtaposed; from a brief monologue from Shakespeare for example, to an equally- brief chorus of “talking dogs” in clown hats. This “string” of one short, self-contained unit of entertainment following another implied that no one unit had a lesser or greater value than any other. It is in this frame of reference that tensions separating “refined” and “common” culture10 in the decades just prior to 1900 and continuing into the 1920s come into discussion. Just as clear-cut distinctions of gender and class responded to pressures of urbanization, immigration, and industrialization in the United States, resonant distinctions in the public performance of culture also polarized concepts of public responses, spiritualism, entertainment, morality, and art. Certainly it is out of the realm of this

216 investigation to characterize every work in every possible venue in terms of its refined or common appeal. Instead, a few representative examples are discussed here to emphasize specific issues that artists and works at each end of the spectrum hold in common. Chapters One and Two presented changes in the relationships of meaning and power for the female artist (Incense). However, this chapter appropriately expands discussion of masculine display on stage and screen reflected in Gnossienne and Faune. Masculine identity in the United States leading up to, and encompassing the time period in question, frames the cultural revolt against Victorian feminizing of religion, representations of gender in film and vaudeville, and a turn toward Orientalism in American spiritual concerns (Kimmel). While these dynamics play into how Incense was marketed and received by its audiences, they offer a specific comment on issues of masculine expressive dance—particularly dance with ritualistic, spiritual expression— such as Gnossienne and Faune. Simply getting up on a concert stage and performing expressive dances was not sufficient for American audiences to overcome prejudices against men dancing. Instead, a carefully-managed mechanism of audience “sell” demonstrated that just about anything new (such as public masculine spiritual expression) could be put across if it demonstrated an unmistakable reference to traditional cultural views in the process of defying them. In other words, if the work could be packaged, advertised, and widely distributed in short, highly mobile and exchangeable units, then its import had a chance of being not only accepted, but incorporated into the new American ethos11. The impassioned, self-styled preacher Billy Sunday (1862-1935), adopted a vaudeville format to put across his highly successful crusades to re-masculinize Christianity. Sunday’s sensationalistic, programmatic approach achieved results in a popular entertainment arena. But they also reflected the direct artistic goals in Shawn’s choreography, and indirect ones in Nijinsky’s. As was discussed in Chapter One, collaborations between artists in different mediums of the avant-garde were common, and this kind of arrangement aided in the development of the three dances. Bakst and Nijinsky collaborated in the production of Faune (Chapter Four). St. Denis assisted Shawn in developing Gnossienne from a dance class exercise into a successful solo (Chapter Three). And St. Denis entered into a

217 collaborative relationship with her mother, her friends, and Edmund Russell to produce Incense (Chapter Two). Instead of focusing on these kinds of collaborations, however, this chapter examines how imitation and parody supported American vaudeville and the early (pre- sound12) cinema that followed close on its heels. These venues were at their best in avant garde reflexive expressions of rapidly-changing social and artistic structures. Everything from “high art” to “low art” rushed across the boards with broad humor, and didn’t care to reference its sources. Vaudeville artists freely incorporated images and gestures from commonly expressed social, political, and artistic images of the day. Anything familiar to its audiences was subject to imitation and parody. For example, performance artist/ vaudevillian Gertrude Hoffman (1871-1966) produced elaborate impressions of the Ballets Russes programs several years before the Russians came to the United States, and she even made an unsuccessful attempt to appropriate St. Denis’ earliest dances13. Hoffman’s artful “filching” was more the rule than the exception in the rapidly- changing venue of vaudeville. Such parody had a particular sociological function; as an expression of defiance against Victorian middle-class mores, vaudeville returned the immediacy of “acting out” culture back to the people after “cultural purists” had purged amateur performance of Italian opera, art songs, and Shakespeare (Levine and Kimmel). Vaudeville was perhaps the single most culturally-influential performance art presenting an American reinterpretation of European “high art” influences in an avant-garde defiance: . . .vaudeville was created largely by people from immigrant and working- class backgrounds who supplied both its talent and audiences. . .and they challenged and subverted the genteel Victorianism of middle-class, native- born Americans. . . (Snyder: 43).

Later, the nascent cinema industry, borrowing heavily from the success vaudeville14, followed a similar pattern. This exciting technological entertainment first found new audiences as “film shorts” touring alongside live vaudeville acts. But the hybrid entertainment of film and vaudeville didn’t last long. Vaudeville tours shut down as the motion pictures shifted from a presentational to a representational format15 to become the premiere American entertainment. Still, close associations between film and

218 vaudeville remained. Just as vaudeville provided a reflexive view of America’s evolving social structures, cinema also parodied and commented upon the very elements of experiential life, altering perceptions of time, space, audience orientation, and narrative continuity. In effect, moving pictures extended Modernism’s avant-garde dynamics inherited from vaudeville in new directions on the American scene: More human beings alive today have received their impressions of social behavior, moral justice, and poetic expression from the motion picture than from painting, the theatre, or literature. . .In less than an average life- time, this monster medium evolved from a peep-show novelty to the dominant cultural force of the mechanized world. . . unlike the arts of individual expression, the aim of the film has been to reflect in pictures, the universal longings of the multitude” (Card: Dryden Theatre Motion Picture Lecture, 1952).

The relationship of the dances to vaudeville and cinema is, at first glance, peripheral. Both Gnossienne and Incense were toured on vaudeville circuits, as were other dances by Shawn and St. Denis, respectively. Sometimes the dance artists toured their solos alone; at other times, they became part of the Denishawn standard. Faune remained in the repertoire of the Ballets Russes, which in itself was a type of traveling ballet “vaudeville”, presenting a series of short, intense works in an evening’s program with relatively small casts. Several versions of Incense were performed by St. Denis on film, but neither Gnossienne16 nor Faune were so captured as performed by the artists who created them. But one connection these dances have with vaudeville and film is that they all participated in marketing and packaging systems that were compatible with modular construction and unitization. The roots of this handy mode of unitization lie in the late Nineteenth-Century in changing models of architectural design. For example, the architect Louis Henry Sullivan (1856-1924), urged the construction of new city buildings called skyscrapers after the injunction that “form follows function”. His buildings, such as the 1890 Wainright Building in St. Louis, suggested that there need be no limit of dimensions (height, width, depth) or mass to a modular construction. This tactic of mutual legitimization of form and function enhanced mass production and marketing of commodities that could be assembled in modular units. If buildings could be made by modular construction, then so could the self-made person, or the self-made artist. By

219 extension, self-improvement systems generally throughout American culture latched onto the idea that an equally unlimited potential for individual enhancement was also possible. This concept is entirely compatible with ideas of progressive positivism (Glossary), which implied that human progress in all areas (given direction) has no limitation of development. Packaging and marketing strategies for the dances as modular units are discussed in this chapter by way of understanding how the dances constitute a response to modern American life. All three dances shared with vaudeville and cinema a mobile form of modular construction, which made for easy transport and marketing. The system provides for maximum flexibility and adaptability to variable performing conditions across the United States. Each “module” (in this case, a single dance work) carried an implied reference to a larger, less mobile entity. This kind of relationship established itself in even the earliest American performances. The effect was one of mutual validation between the large construction and the modules of which it was composed, a response to Modernism that is a uniquely American innovation at all levels of consideration: . . .technologies of [American] identity engineering do not treat the body as an organic whole. . .[instead] it is viewed as an assemblage of modules, each of which can be remade to suit the desires of the individual. . .a configurable entity (Shore: 150).

This is an important consideration because modular construction facilitates the commercial sale of both concrete (a book or a painting, for example) and discrete (experiential, performing) commodities. Modular construction of the dances as set by their respective companies fits into this frame. The Ballets Russes provided the base from which Nijinksy’s Faune could be advertised and distributed, both in Europe and in the United States. In a comparable fashion, the entity of Denishawn provided a similar base from which both Incense and Gnossienne could also be marketed to many audiences (St. Denis, Shawn, et. al.). However, in addition to presenting these dances on stage, Denishawn also developed a system of franchise in which selected dances (including Incense but not Gnossienne) were licensed to be learned and performed by certified students. The

220 package up for sale included careful coaching in the movements, construction of costumes, setting, and the right to use the music17. Revenues acquired in this way supported both school and performing company and provided mass duplication of the dance (previously created and performed only by a single artist) for distribution to many more audiences simultaneously: Recognizing the immense commercial and missionary impact of national distribution of their dances. . .concurrently with their vaudeville tours, St. Denis and Shawn expanded their operation. . .before Denishawn ended in 1931, it had become a franchising endeavor (Cohen : 2).

This approach paralleled systems of packaging, marketing, and distribution of vaudeville programs and cinema shows. And it is in the context of minimalization that modular construction intersects with the attributes of Art Deco, for which a streamlined, simplified appearance facilitates quick “brand name recognition” and maximum flexibility in the number of adaptive combinations marketable: The functionally distinct units could be conceived as distinct organizations of a few basic design elements. Thus, the logic of modularization encourages a homogenization of component units, a kind of “minimalism” in design . . .The fewer the design elements and the greater their combinatorial potential, the more elegant the design concept (Shore: 151)

Given the success of this tactic on the American stage, performing arts and entertainments became most marketable as a series of separate units strung together by the common thread of audience and physical location. Small wonder, then, that the most flexible and ubiquitous example of this kind of performance was vaudeville. If ever there was an American venue for the performance of the cultural self in relation to spiritualism, exoticism, response to technology, naturalism, and fragmentations of space and time it was, at the turn of the century, to be found in vaudeville. Culture is a multi-faceted conversation, and nowhere in turn-of-the-century America were the voices more complex, contradictory, and concentrated than in vaudeville (Snyder: Introduction, xvi). It is difficult to state precisely when and how vaudeville began in the United States. The venue of a series of short acts by independent artists in solo or small-group configurations evolved from a wide variety of popular entertainments of the time, especially minstrel shows18. In any case, vaudeville was in

221 place and running to full houses all across the country by 1890. Although its popularity was abruptly undercut by its wayward “child”, silent movies, and vaudeville for all intents and purposes vanished19 in the 1920s, its highly adaptable format based on modular unitization made it particularly flexible to touring demands. Although it didn’t last long, vaudeville was the most successful venue of popular entertainment in the United States between 189020 and 1920: In 1910 there were some 2,000 small-time hinterland theaters. . .Of course, the fans had their favorites. They could rattle off catchlines and bits of stage business, and many could repeat entire acts themselves (Sobel: 49).

Vaudeville was also the most fluid of presentational formats, having grown out of a wide variety of American entertainments and: . . .inspired probably by visiting English performers, took root early here . . .borrowing liberally from the varied native American variety entertainment as exemplified in minstrel or medicine show, circus concert, dime museum, town hall entertainment, beer hall or honky-tonk, even, in later years from the legitimate stage, concert hall, grand opera, ballet, musical comedy and pantomime (Sobel: 22).

Acts crossed vaudeville stages in series—some returning to regular engagements while others vanished entirely—in a perpetual effort to please a broad, multicultural, multilingual urban audience. The search for novelty acts in small21, economic packages produced routines that could be constantly copied, parodied, combined, broken down into segments, and re-combined. Each segmented unit carried the stamp of its original; a standard of expectation that functioned like an instantly-recognizable trademark. Vaudeville was, in essence a venue in which Americans culturally worked out among themselves what their ethos was going to be like separate from the European ethos, so that by the time cinema got underway that milieu of interlocking American qualities had coalesced into a unified image. Vaudeville bills adhered to the modular construction pattern because they were comprised of a series of acts presented one after another. It tended to offer the performer for a brief time in a central position of focus; the same kind of focus integral to Gnossienne, Incense, and Faune. Vaudeville served to partially fill the expressive void of popular entertainments shortly after Shakespeare, “serious” orchestral music, and opera had been removed from

222 the popular domain and placed in elite restraints22. It is as if these venues constituted for the American public a return to the needs of internalizing individual and collective expressive culture through performance that was lost in the 1800s when Shakespeare and Italian opera songs were no longer heard in the homes of ordinary Americans. Perhaps in these venues, the removal of culture by professional performers was returned through this vicarious dynamic. While a complete accounting of the vast offerings and impact of vaudeville and cinema on American popular culture is not possible here, it is important to this discussion to highlight specific features pertaining to the avant-garde impetus in Modernism that appear in these closely-related venues. Given its roots in circus, beer hall acts, dime museum shows, burlesque, and minstrelsy, vaudeville took the place of a lost expressive mechanism in which: The theater in the first half of the nineteenth century played the role that movies played in the first half of the twentieth: it was a kaleidoscopic, democratic institution presenting a widely varying bill of fare to all classes and socioeconomic groups (Levine: 21).

Vaudeville’s appeal was immediate, depending less on verbal acuity than visual communication in order to reach audiences that didn’t share a common language. In many ways vaudeville became a mechanism by which Americans could perform for themselves. Anyone who had an idea for an act (the stranger the better23) could audition it to the promoter/managers of the theatres and likely get a chance to try it out on an audience. Moreover, early vaudeville audiences, mostly men, were as quick and vehement in their opinions of the acts as had been the case for the frontier-touring Shakespeareans; free to express displeasure by throwing rotten produce at performers, whistling, fighting, spitting, and shouting repartee in a wild celebration of egalitarianism: At virtually every step. . .vaudevillians chose a mass audience over a local audience, a multiethnic audience over their own group, an interclass audience over an audience of one class (Snyder: 43).

The adaptable survivors of this rough sell quickly learned from precedents in beer halls, saloons, music halls, and side-show entertainments to encourage this lively interaction. It was the savvy singer who encouraged the audience to sing along in songs with which they were most familiar, thus putting them in a mellow, nostalgic mood. And

223 it was the comedian with a sharp, ready, and spontaneous wit to redirect hecklers by having the first laugh on himself, who lived to present again. Self-creation for display was a prime feature of vaudeville. Audiences delighted in warps of time, space, and identity; vaudeville supplied an amazing variety of anomalies to satisfy both the side-show appetite for the weird and the freedom of expression expected in a being of ambiguous origins. Anything oddly impossible could be turned into an act; all it took was a little imagination and some practice to pull it off. Crossings of race, class, gender, age, or species were spectacularly common; for example, an Italian-American could convincingly impersonate a Chinese playing a Hawiian ukelele, and share the bill with double-jointed contortionists, tap-dancing violinists, and comedian Bert Williams dressed up in a chicken suit. Gender impersonation was a particularly vigorous mainstay of vaudeville, more even than it had been in minstrel shows24. Not only did men impersonate women (such as Gale as Sarah Bernhardt, for example, or Wilde, who made it a point to pose in exotic tableaux highly evocative of Denishawn productions), but women also impersonated men (Janis as Will Rogers, or Loftus as Caruso). The first big time star of vaudeville, Eva Tanguay (1878-1947) was as outrageously defiant of middle-class social norms as any avant-garde artist who frequented the Paris cafés. She could—and did—do anything, say anything, or be anything she pleased and both men and women in her audiences loved it. Tanguay dashed about the vaudeville stage like a wild woman free of any constraint of modesty, delicacy, or etiquette of any sort. Hair flying about her head25, she shouted at the audience, sang bawdy songs and continued her temperamental, spontaneous performance of constantly irritating rigid social mores and generating scandal off-stage as well as on: Middle-class women experimented with alternatives to the chafing restraints of Victorianism when they watched the cyclonic singing and dancing of Eva Tanguay (Snyder: Introduction, xvi).

If Tanguey was the self-made woman of vaudeville, her counterpart across the gender divide was the definitive self-made body builder and strongman, Eugene Sandow (1867-1925). The top draw, highest paid performer of all time in vaudeville, Sandow26 was also one of the first performers featured in an Edison film short. Sandow neither

224 sang nor danced; in fact, he didn’t say much at all, allowing his body to speak for him as he posed nearly nude and demonstrated feats of strength on the vaudeville stage very much as he had previously in Zigfield’s show. Audiences loved him; the archetypal image of the self-made man, an individual who had successfully reconstructed his body and, by association, his very self. Finally in Sandow we find permission for men to display physical manliness on stage. In a kind of reversal of the usual order of stage gender display in which men watch women’s bodies to enjoy fantasizing about them and women watch women with the idea of emulation, Sandow’s admiring female audiences enjoyed the secret pleasure of fantasizing about him, while his male audience watched with the idea of emulation: Eugene Sandow. . . also attracted women. . .That women flocking to vaudeville houses might seek both the prim and the prurient was a phenomenon that would have lasting and increasing significance for vaudeville (Snyder: 33).

Like Shawn, Sandow had been the victim of a childhood disease that left him physically weak, and he turned to physical fitness and a regimen of good health in a mind-over- matter program of regeneration. The testimony of his success inspired men of the late 1800s and early 1900s to undertake similar “make-overs” in a cultural connection between the physical, and mental and moral strength. Sandow’s example suggested that it was possible for anyone—a city clerk, a business man, or a grocer—to remake himself into an image attractive to women and gain the respect of other men. These validations of self-worth were important to men of the latter 1800s in a way that had not been necessary in the earlier part, and Sandow’s success of masculine display demonstrates the pervasiveness of that sociological need: . . .many men—working- and middle-class. . .developed various strategies to insure that others would continue to see them as manly. . .the health craze was vital to the perpetuation of a virile nation; unlike the street corner or the , it was as morally purifying as it was physically imposing. . .This preoccupation with physicality meant that men’s bodies carried a different sort of weight than earlier. The body did not contain the man, expressing the man within; now, that body was the man (Kimmel: 126-7).

225 It is this perception of masculinity that Shawn trades on in Gnossienne and all his other solos. it was also a way of presenting the appearance of a constructed masculinity in very much the same way women performed their femininity. Sandow’s low-key persona (especially in comparison to Tanguay’s flamboyance) served as the reassuring image of a healthy-looking man in support of his own social structure. In this sense, a mutual validation comes into effect: Cultural analysts have long understood that health reform was a simultaneous abandonment of hope for any larger-scale social and political transformation, as though changing the body could somehow compensate for failure to change the body social (Kimmel: 414).

While vaudeville gave ample voice to the people in disrupting the normal order of daily life, or provided inspiring examples of the self-made man, it didn’t give much range to religious sentiments. An occasional “preacher-man” spoof appeared now and then, but serious evangelism did not take hold in this venue that favored the light-hearted and irreverent. Even the novelty of child evangelists did not gain a firm foothold in vaudeville. Instead of religion coming to vaudeville, vaudeville came to religion. Just as Shakespeare and opera had been removed from the voices of ordinary Americans, so too had religious speech. It took a trained professional spiritual leader to properly interpret God’s word and accurately speak it from a pulpit. But in the process of investing an official minister with the authority to speak for all, interest in religious matters slacked off. This was particularly true for men as Victorian virtues slowly transformed Christian expression into a means to control the vices of men (i. e. drinking, gambling, and prostitution) that threatened the stability of home and family. In the process, the figure of Christ as compassionate and loving evolved into a delicate, almost effeminate androgyny whose sentimental concern was for the weak, the lost, and the timid: Women constrained manhood—through temperance, Christian piety, sober responsibility, sexual fidelity. . .Part of the struggle was simply to get out of the middle-class house, now a virtual feminine theme park . . .Women were not only domestic, they were domesticators, expected to turn their sons into virtuous Christian gentlemen—dutiful, well-mannered, and feminized. . . (Kimmel: 59-60).

226 One preacher in particular, Billy Sunday, saw the need for religion in America to take back its masculine image as a struggle on the order of a prize fight and coalesced the appealing methods of several small-time itinerant preachers before him. Sometime around 1910 Sunday kicked his campaign into full gear, tearing around the Midwest United States like a dynamo. Armed with a vaudevillian’s sense of active rather than passive audience engagement, Sunday launched a war against sissified religion. More than a match for Tanguey’s fast and furious vaudeville style, Sunday’s physically impassioned, violent delivery galvanized men27 into finding themselves as moral Christians purged of Victorian feminism. But Sunday’s turn did not include any respect for dance. Perhaps perceiving in her a rival for spiritual reawakening in America, Billy Sunday was particularly vehement in his denunciation of Isadora Duncan, whom he characterized as a potentially dangerous, alien Bolshevik, immoral, and perhaps worst of all, too powerful as a woman (Clarke and Crisp: 216). Nevertheless, the physical component of masculine display was one Sunday vigorously manipulated. Like Sandow (and Shawn), Sunday was a self-made man who had physically recreated himself out of a childhood of weakness through the sport of baseball28. His example and preaching style were openly contemptuous of feminized versions of religion, and he vigorously “performed himself” in a way that implied that if he could make a moral, religious masculinity out of himself, then any man could. Above all, Sunday was physical. He shouted and punched the air during his diatribe in a way that thrilled and inspired men to stand up from their seats in the lecture halls, shout their defiance and punch the air right back. He railed against the mechanisms of industrialization and capitalization that dehumanized the laborer and at the same time invoked the power of the machine: Men are feeding their muscle and bone and sinew into the commercial mill that grinds out the dividends. . .Jesus Christ could go like a six cylinder engine. . .I’d like to put my fist on the nose of the man who hasn’t got grit enough to be a Christian ( from the sermon, “The Fighting Saint”, cited in McLaughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 177).

This trend of using entertainment techniques to carry a spiritual message included exoticism as a means to code a “genuine” or “natural” expression because it was, like the persona of the vaudevillian Eva Tanguey, presented outside artificially-controlled

227 conditions. If traditional religious leaders and their churches were fixed institutions of the cities, non-traditional evangelists (such as Sunday) had no fixed geography, traveling throughout the countryside. For example, the evangelist Roger Smith, who toured the United States starting in 1889, found that much of his success in attracting audiences for his message lay in the fact that he billed himself as a . Sometimes his daughter Zillah sang dressed in “native” dress as part of the religious address. The point here is that both vaudevillians and these evangelists worked outside the expected parameters of traditional entertainment and religion, respectively. It is interesting that an avant-garde approach to religion, and an avant-garde approach to entertainment should support yet a third avant-garde expression of spiritualism in the dances of Nijinsky, St. Denis and Shawn. What is interesting about Smith’s example is that the exotic associations of his daughter authenticated the religious message as “genuine” in much the same way the presence of a “real” Indian validated the claims of the snake-oil salesman29. During the Second Great Awakening of spiritual fervor in the United States, camp revival meetings held outside urban centers were tremendously popular. In these intense sessions, the validity of speech conveyed by non-conventional messengers such as women, minorities, and even children30 was accepted as true because they came directly from a natural, “pure” source beyond the corrupting influences of urban, industrialized life. . . .more frankly entertaining, even folksy. . .the revivalist was now competing with other specialists in mass persuasion. The audience was no longer his by right or default. He had to win it over (Weisberger: 230).

The eclectic inclusion of Orientalism in American spiritual development was also reflected in the attitudes of camp revivals. Formally, the appearance and speeches of Swami Vivekananda (Chapter Two) first at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, and later around the United States, introduced not only Hindu religion as a faith of tolerance, but a highly moral way of secular life based on religious rituals. Informally, these ideas of the individual self as an active centerpiece between an ancestral past and a descendant future functioned in American spiritualism in a way that emphasized individual responsibility for individual health and well-being:

228 In general, by the late nineteenth century, Americans appropriated Asian ideas to fit their own optimistic, pragmatic, and eclectic understanding of inner experience (Taylor: 189).

It is pertinent at this point to explore the fusions of exoticism, spiritualism and naturalism in “legitimate” (Glossary) stage renditions so that these same dynamics can be applied to the dances in this study. Influenced by a visit to Russia by Isadora Duncan (Chapter Four), there formed a small but very creatively active group of performing artists interested in exploring innovative movement expression inspired by Duncan. In his discussion of this artistic revolution in the first decades of Twentieth Century Russia, Michael Potter states that; “Isadora’s performances in Russia stimulated a dialogue among critics, artists [including Bakst], historians, and dancers” (Potter: 158). Potter continues, describing changes in costumes created by Bakst’s (who very much admired Duncan) assertion that it was important to; “. . .develop the costume as a functional item in dance. . .capable of extending the range of the body’s movement in space. . .” (Potter: 155). The search for naturalism in legitimate stage venues in Europe (urged by the Russian impetus) fused the elements of spiritualism and exoticism. What is interesting about this fusion is that the exotic attraction of fantasy should be the vehicle by which spiritualism and a natural expression of feelings should be carried. A few instances of how this dynamic played out in Russian and European legitimate stage venues serve as a springboard into understanding how it carried over into American film. To begin with, Duncan’s ideas about classical Greek dancing appear to have thematically influenced the 1911 Paris performances of Fokine’s Narcisse, in which Nijinsky danced the part of Narcisse. But descriptions of the development of this ballet, which closely preceded Nijinsky’s Faune31 suggest that the break needed to answer Duncan’s approach to “natural” movement in a ballet framework was at first partial and incomplete. In her memoirs, Nijinska expresses disappointment in the music by Tcherepnine (which she felt borrowed too heavily from Wagner and Tchaikovsky) and the lack of development offered in the theme to explore a multiple self in an exotic frame; in this case, between a classical and a primitive concert of being:

229 In the figure of Narcisse created by Nijinsky there was something reminiscent of the calm and massive strength of Michelangelo’s David, and there was the swiftess of the laughing faun. His body of the youth in love with his own image emanated health and the athletic prowess of the ancient Greek Games (Nijinska: 366-7).

The Russian ballet was not the only performing art influenced by Duncan’s declaration of physical and emotional “realism”. Russian dramatist Stanislavsky (1863- 1938), who, through his teaching and directing fostered a Russian avant-garde dramatic approach, was influenced in part by his meeting with Isadora Duncan during her visits to Russia commencing in 1905. In her autobiography, Duncan records Stanislavsky’s opinion by way of emphasizing what she believed was a universal yearning toward naturalism (and therefore truthfulness) in art opposed to the artificial: . . .I never missed a single one of the Duncan concerts. The necessity to see her often was dictated from within me by an artistic feeling that was closely related to her art. . .various people in various spheres sought in art for the same naturally born creative principles. . .we [Duncan and I] understood each other almost before we had said a single word. . .it became clear to me that we were looking for one and the same thing in different branches of art (Duncan: 168).

Stanislavsky’s response was to incorporate the ideas of Delsarte, whom Duncan very much admired32, into his methods by which actors should train, prepare a role, and perform. The main injunction in his written instructions to the novice actor required constant attention—on stage and off—to a conscious habit of self-examination. The student’s concern must center always on the correlation of a state of mind to physical expression: . . .day by day to cultivate the most delicate and precise ways of rendering all the subtle intricacies of human thoughts and feelings, visual observations and emotional impressions (Stanislavsky: 252).

But the Russian performing arts of the ballet and theatre weren’t the only ones in search of naturalism. Significant changes in balances of fantasy, realism and naturalism in European theatre arts comparable to those espoused by Stanislavsky were reflected in the dramaturgy of the Norwegian playwright Ibsen. Ibsen’s most well-known plays set a distinctly modern tone based on socio- and psychological pressures in contemporary

230 family relationships that profoundly influenced the development of American drama in the 1920s (Brecht and O’Neill) and 1930s (Odets, Wilder, and Saroyan). The period of his exile33 was marked with verse dramas (such as Peer Gynt in 1867), followed by realistic and controversial social-issues plays like Ghosts (1881), The Doll’s House (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1891) Ibsen’s last plays (When We Dead Awaken in 1899) were more symbolic; however, his most surreal narratives contain a good measure of contemporary practicality (Peer Gynt), and his most realistic, modern, psychological plays are not devoid of fantasy and exoticism (Ghosts). Two other European dramatists of the time produced plays that transformed everyday conditions into symbolic statements of the human condition. Strindberg produced The Dream Play, which had its premiere in 1902; a rambling evocation of consciousness of the self as a mythic being confined by modern concerns. For Strindberg, the real is strange and the strange real: his 1887 play, The Father, turns what appears on the surface to be a simple, and “realistic” domestic drama into a gothic horror, not unlike the plausibly bizarre tale, Metamorphosis (Frantz Kafka, 1915). A dream-like stillness of remote, vague, and impressionable feelings of doom also permeate the plays of Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlink (1862-1949). His Pèlleas et Mélisande is characterized as a poetic drama of tragic love set in a fantasy evocative of a medieval tapestry. The play proved particularly popular and caught the eye of the composer Claude Debussy. Debussy adapted the play into an opera with the intent of preserving its symbolist format with careful attention to all aspects of presentation. Lighting, costumes, set, music, and even the performers were deliberately chosen to enhance the ephemeral mood of the piece in a unified experiential whole. The format of this work is light-weight in terms of a small cast, short duration, and focus on the impressions and images occurring to Mélisande, rather than making of the heroine an exhibition for male appreciation. The opera expresses both Debussy’s fascination with—and rejection of—the dramatic goals of Wagner, as was briefly discussed in Chapter Four. In particular, both the opera and the play upon which it was based exemplify a melding of spiritualism and fascination with nature that produced an effect of iconographic imagery:

231 In his Symbolist plays Maeterlinck uses. . .ritual to create symbolic images to exteriorize his protagonists’ moods and dilemmas. . .[his works] are remarkable blends of mysticism, occultism, and interest in the world of nature. They represent the common Symbolist reaction against materialism, science, and mechanization and are concerned with such questions as the immortality of the soul, the nature of death, and the attainment of wisdom (http://www.nobel-winners.com/Literature/ maurice_maeterlink.html: 18 July 2004).

The posed stillness characteristic of Incense, Gnossienne, and Faune evokes this kind of ritual out of which a supposedly genuine spiritual expression is displayed in the ambiguous territory of time and space provided through an exotic theme. Jamake Highwater, in his book, Dance: Rituals of Experience, remarks upon how ritual transposes experience from one (real, ordinary) frame of reference into another (unreal, extraordinary). He says that ritual reveals: . . .the ineffable, structured into an event—that which is called ritual . . .you do not see what is physically before you [but] an interaction of forces by which something else arises. . .a virtual image. It is real, for when we are confronted by it, it really does exist, but it is not actually there. . .made experiential (Highwater: 33).

This ritual-like stillness “stands for”, or “represents” an ineffable realness in all three dances, a quality that could be effectively recorded and reproduced for mass visual consumption through the medium of still photography34. The accuracy of representation in still film development had a profound effect on all visual arts35 and how reality could be perceived in the context of Modernism. However, this point must be glossed over in this study in favor of the radical technological advance of vaudeville’s outgrown “child”, the silent film. It is ironic that ritualized stillness in live dancing should provide a bridge into the single-frame sequencing of photography which, in a running series, re-animates movement in film. This trait suggests film as the ultimate expression of modular construction and the medium of its most flexible packaging and marketing capabilities. Modular construction worked just as well in the cinema as in is parent entertainment, vaudeville. Even today trailers of upcoming attractions feature the same movie actors, or films in the same genre as the one currently showing in order to build audience

232 anticipation from one film to the next. The film industry packaged and marketed its product to those anticipations by shortening time and abbreviating space. In an elliptical editing procedure that condensed sequences within the confines of the camera’s vision and shortened duration into a kind of derivative essence, film evoked experience in a repeating, product that could be viewed simultaneously by many audiences in separate locations: Photography and the motion picture introduce—and institutionalize—a new, modern conception of time. Time could not only be caught but also replayed. It becomes, in a sense, a commodity. . .objectified. . .marketed . . .infinitely re-experienced (Belton: 6).

The visual immediacy of still photography was quickly overtaken by the representation of movement on film36, bringing distortions of time and space for expressive purposes in dance into the realm of experiential commodity for anyone viewing film. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the iconographic force of still photography and pose in dance also carried over into early film narratives37 Film historian and critic John Belton makes this comparison between still and moving film in his book, American Cinema/American Culture: Photographs. . .record events instantaneously. . .Thus the present and the past are rescued from the passage of time, lifted out of its continuous ongoing process, and frozen for all to see. Motion pictures record and reproduce the flow of time in a way that had previously been impossible . . . (Belton: 6). Dance and film seem, at first glance, compatible partners. The appeal of human movement and the possibility of rendering it stylistically on film must have been intriguing; it is something of a mystery why more early films did not experiment with the expressive, visual potential offered in dance. Part of the answer may have to do with technological limitations of film without a sound track or color. For example, the colorful light display38 that was an important element of Fuller’s stage works could not be duplicated in the early black and white films. And without sound, the artist dancing in a film had no control over the music played at each showing39. But one reason film and dance did not meld into an expressive form may be that early film makers seemed to assume that the presentational mode of filming dance was

233 exciting enough, long after dramas had moved into the representational40. Perhaps if the person was moving, then the camera didn’t have to move. For example, one of the earliest 1896 Edison shorts titled “Little Egypt” was little more than a documented carnival hoochi-koochi dance rendered respectable in bloomers, hose, and heeled shoes. In this short, as in others, the camera remains in one place the way a seated member of the audience would, viewing the movements of the dancer as if she were on a live stage. Still, experimentation in the expressive potential of this exciting new medium got underway almost as soon as the equipment could be devised. Löie Fuller (Chapter One) was fascinated with images in light, dark, mist, and shadows. Fuller was an organizer of effects with herself at their center; the archetypal and familiar human body connecting the fantasy of those effects to the audience. But dance was only one medium in which she experimented; Fuller was also one of several women engaged in making films41. The same impetus toward abstraction of the human form enveloped in yards of lighted silk drapery also led her into film-making ventures. These experiments with film did not, as might be expected, concern dance so much as fantasy and gothic mood themes of and witches in eerie night time or twilight wooded landscapes. At the height of her stage career, Fuller held an array of lighting patents to discourage imitators, and traveled with a company of personally-trained electricians that was larger than her company of dancers. The electrical manipulations of her theatre plunged its audiences into total darkness to reveal a series of carefully controlled dream-like images in a fantastic series of illuminations, to finish in a total absence of light. Such absolute control of an illusory vision could not have been imagined without the availability of electrical lighting, a fact that Fuller herself enthusiastically acknowledged. Every type of story imaginable was set in silent film. Even operas and Shakespeare’s plays were adapted to the moving pictures; something of a self-defeating avant-garde project for silent film-makers to undertake since both operas and Shakespeare depend upon the voice, language, and music. Nevertheless, stories familiar to audiences did fairly well in the movies; some of them little more than broad-humored spoofs that had played live on vaudeville. Lois Weber produced The Merchant of in 1914 and the stories of three of Shakespeare’s most popular plays in America—Romeo

234 and Juliet, Hamlet, and Richard III—collectively had been made into eighteen different silent movies between 1900 and 1924. Opera stories also managed to take the leap from the legitimate live stage onto the silent screen. No less than six versions (more or less connected to Berlioz) of Faust were made between 1903 (the first by Méliès) and 1915. The spectacular and exotic visual appeal of Aida and Madame Butterfly (in one version titled “ hari-kari”, which places it rather ghoulishly alongside such Edison exhibition shorts as “The Electrocution of an Elephant”) prompted several silent film versions. Familiar and sensational devotional stories with options for trick photography such as The Ten Commandments (de Mille: 1923), or dozens of Samson-and-Delilah and life-of-Christ films were also produced in the hope of attracting audiences through familiar, sensationalistic, and uplifting themes. By far the most popular silent film story between opera and biblical narratives was Salomé; a total of twenty-three silent films on this theme were made between 1918 and 1923, beating by far those on the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, at only nine. Taking its cue from stage success, film took advantage of Salomé’s appeal of those seven veils barely covering a lithe, attractive young female body in the transports of dancing (Chapter Three). The exotic character of Salomé (and Allen’s version especially) offered an image of young womanhood as both beguilingly seductive draped in translucent veils, and terrifyingly depraved in demanding the head of John the Baptist. The combination of a young, nubile and physically healthy woman with uncontrollable passions echoed fears of the new, modern woman capable of taking charge of her life and making demands (Chapters One and Three). Such display on stage and screen mitigated: . . .fears of feminization—that we have lost our ability to claim our manhood in a world without fathers, without frontiers, without manly creative work—have haunted men for a century. And nowhere have these fears been played out more fully for the past hundred years than in literature, film, and television (Kimmel: 321).

A less obvious connection between dance and film is that these dances reflect a visual connection with filmic “elliptical editing”. A kind of “shorthand” for real “time/real space” continuum in performance, elliptical editing refers to qualities already familiar to the audience, and in so doing makes a comment on them42. All three dances

235 in this study are short, varying from two minutes for Gnossienne to thirteen for Faune. Both Gnossienne and Incense reflect an abbreviated unitization so that either could be inserted into, or withdrawn from, other Denishawn programs at a moment’s notice, a practice of modular construction of an evening’s program. Following Debussy’s short but intense internalization of musical construction, Nijinsky utilized the Prelude as a means to unfold a transient, intense evocation of nostalgia for a pastoral scene. As was discussed in each of the three previous chapters, all three dances used their short format to heighten an immediate experiential mind/body sense of spiritual transport. Like film, these dances referred to “real” space and time43. This quality of a derivative action consistent with Early Modernism avant-garde (Chapter One) is also characteristic of the vaudeville format; any act, live or on film, did well if it presented its story in three minutes or less44. It made shuffling a dance program for variety, and adaptability to changing conditions much easier, and marketing a matter of reorganizing surface images in a variety of configurations (Glossary: Modular Construction): . . .the new communication technologies. . .helped give birth to mass culture and the era of mass consumption. . .by transforming time into a product that can be reproduced and sold. . .(Belton: 7)

Trying to keep up with the rapid technological advances in film and photography around this period of time is nearly futile, but a few examples serve to illustrate the balances between reality and fantasy which both dance and film explored. Although the French45 were quick to pick up on the opportunities celluloid film presented, the Edison shorts of 1895 provide some interesting examples of “trick” movie making that explore fantastic visual effects and psychological narratives. In The Pie Eating Contest the black and white contrast of the image is so extreme that all one sees is two disembodied, faces of men plunging into pies and eating them46. The entire footage of “The Pumpkin Escape” is run backwards to make it look like a truck-load of pumpkins have been maliciously animated to terrorize a city neighborhood. Edwin Porter47(1869-1941) presented a frantic imagination of gastric suffering in his 1906 fantasy, Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. Not only must the glutton of the story endure miniature demons leaping out of a giant tureen to give him a headache, but objects

236 in his room jump from place to place. Then his bed (with him in it) executes a dazzling spin, jerks through the room, and sails out the window for a midnight ride above the city skyline; all accomplished as tricks of the camera that delight audiences even today48. Porter was also the first to use crosscutting sequences between two scenes separated by space and time, yet connected by narrative thread. The resulting illusion of simultaneous thoughts and actions is a cinematographic technique in use to the present day. In Porter’s 1903 The Life of an American Fireman, time is condensed into simultaneous action, as the eye of the camera shifts rapidly back and forth between the outside of a burning building where firemen49 struggle to fix a rescue ladder, and the inside of the building where the ubiquitous mother and infant are desperately crying for help. The urgency of the situation is punctuated with noble resolve; Porter further refines the heroic sentiments of the fireman by setting up a dream sequence to precede the dramatic and climatic conclusion of the film: The fire chief is dreaming, and the vision of his dream appears in a circular portrait upon the wall. It is a mother putting her baby to bed, and the inference is that he dreams of his own wife and child (Pratt: from Edison Films, Supplement 168, Edison Manufacturing Company, Orange, New Jersey, February 1903, pp. 2-3).

The dream sequence in the movie is rendered as an internal mental activity through which the audience understands the fireman’s motivations; that even in his dreams he cherishes the lives of women and children as precious and to be protected from all dangers. The movie audience experiences an intimacy with the fire chief by being privy to his dream. In this way the dream sequence intensifies the narrative of the fireman’s story when he is later called upon to rescue a woman and her baby from a burning building. We know how quickly and willingly he would risk his own life to save them because his noble character was first revealed in his dream. This kind of experience is accepted vicariously as “real”. Although audiences know they are sitting in a darkened theatre, the agreement of “willing suspension of disbelief” allows the film-maker to transport them into fresh interpretations of the experiential world close to the mechanisms of memory. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that anyone viewing the conclusion of Porter’s hugely popular 1903 The Great

237 Train Robbery (in which an outlaw fires a gun directly at the camera) can even today, resist an involuntary impulse to flinch as if shot. Many of these kinds of films were promoted as historically instructive as well as inspiring, and in order to fix that perception, dance was included. To distinguish themselves from sheer entertainments, films with loftier educational messages for their audiences were called “Photoplays”50 instead of “movies”. An enthusiastic and prolific film-maker in this line of photoplays was D. W. Griffith (1875-1948), who covered his questionable authoritative claims by lavishly quoting both the Bible and Shakespeare51 in his opening dialogue titles (Brewster and Jacobs). Griffith was quick to recognize the visual impact of dance movement in his historical constructs. One of the highlights of his meandering epic of world history and social justice, Intolerance (1916) featured a lavish Babylon set with twenty members of the Denishawn Company dancing on the steps leading up to the palace/temple52. Evidently perceiving dance as a conservative, rather than innovative element in his film, Griffith chose to shoot the scene head-on with long- to medium-shots as if it had been part of an opera on a proscenium stage. Shawn and St. Denis wisely choreographed the dance with strong posed images invoking ancient bas relief sculptures. The fact that there was very little continuous movement between them allowed the highly-stylized dance to stand up to the break-neck pace53of the editing by conveying to the audience an immediately- recognizable iconographic image. Although this dance sequence is very brief, repetitive, and constantly broken into by other scenes in the rather frantic story-telling pace Griffith established in the film, it represents an interesting case of mutual verification between the Griffith’s fiction and Denishawn. By 1916 Denishawn was known for its high, uncompromising artistic standards and good taste in dance education and performance. In turn, the movie showed members of Denishawn dancing to a widely dispersed audience in an uplifting, thrilling “historical” narrative linking ancient struggles for freedom with a modern story of social and judicial justice. This capacity of film—especially silent films—to show hidden features of a character’s psyche rather than using words to describe them places it in a close conceptual immediacy between narrative and audience. In other words, the audiences of

238 these kinds of films vicariously experience an internalized kinesthetic response to the way in which images are meticulously designed and edited to unfold the tale as if it were happening to the viewer; even more so than live on stage. Films revealed this trait in the process of shifting from a presentational to representational format (Belton), so that it becomes not only the what of the physical experience, but the how and why of an equally- valid emotional/psychological one. Interpretation, then, becomes the means to reveal an emotional/psychological veracity that the physical alone cannot communicate. This dynamic, which Stanislavsky recognized in his technique for training actors in naturalism is one that is also exploited in film: The more immediate, spontaneous, vivid, precise the reflection you produce from inner to outer form, the better, broader, fuller will be your public’s sense of the inner life of the character you are portraying on stage (An Actor’s Handbook, 274).

While Intolerance gave visibility to Denishawn in a way not possible even through exhaustive touring, the Denishawn school in turn trained film performers alongside its dancers. Silent film performers who flocked to Denishawn included Lillian Gish, Roszila Dolly, Leonire Ullrich, Ruth Chatterton, Ina Claire, Mabel Normand, Blanche Sweet, Louise Glaum, Margaret Loomis, and Carol Dempster. There they received systematic training in Delsarte and Dalcroze expressive movement, polished through Shawn’s and St. Denis’ meticulous coaching in the “posed, iconic visual moment” which had been pioneered in Gnossienne (Chapter Three) and Incense (Chapter Two). Students of Ted Shawn at Jacob's Pillow as late as 1967 were required to purchase and study his Delsarte textbook, Every Little Movement, which Shawn first published in 1910 (M. Witmark & Sons). Although this analysis of gesture is tedious and somewhat outdated54, it must be remembered that Delsarte’s work influenced Hollywood stereotypical codes from its earliest beginnings, and remnants of such coding persisted in most films made in the 20th century: . . .Delsarte’s acting system, which was based on the teaching of poses, was still being taught. . .in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the evidence from films. . .shows that these traditions were still alive a decade later. . .(Brewster and Jacobs: 82).

239 The response of the first audiences to each of the three dances examined in this study provides a logical starting point from which to begin discussing them in terms of how they were packaged and distributed. While Incense both pleased and confused its audiences by presenting a vision at once sensual and chaste, it has over time come to be accepted as a landmark example of American modern dance innovation. As a radical departure from traditional ballet presentational form (Chapter Four), Faune elicited strong reactions among its first audiences who either vigorously supported its shocking expression or attacked it. Impresario Diaghilev manipulated advertising to capitalize on Faune’s shock value so that he could promote its continuation for Nijinsky. Gnossienne continues to puzzle audiences, and functions as a bridge between studio instructional demonstration and dance performance. Despite Shawn’s efforts to bring expressive, spiritual dance into the realm of legitimate American male activities, dances on the order of Gnossienne are still doubtfully accepted by most Americans. The Parisian critical response to Faune is well documented because it was extreme: the ballet was either violently attacked as an insufferable affront to good taste55 or praised as heralding the entry of ballet into the Twentieth Century. It was this final scene of L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912) that so outraged the editor of Le Figaro, [Calmette, in opposition to his own dance critic, Robert Brussel] who used the words “filthy”, “bestial”, “crude”, and “loathsome” and suggested that “decent people will never accept such animal realism” (Parker: 127).

As was discussed in Chapter Four, Nijinsky evidently recognized that his idea for the ballet would meet with resistance, and he conducted his initial choreography in secret with his sister Nijinska. Even in its first rehearsals Faune presented conceptual and kinesthetic problems for dancers and musicians (Chapter Four), presaging its general reception in performance. Together with the Parisian critic and presenter of modern art, Astruc, and early Ballets Russes supporter Jean Cocteau, Diaghilev carefully orchestrated the way in which Nijinsky’s first choreography would be viewed. The ballet was announced as part of the new season of Ballets Russes and had its premiere in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Also presented with Faune in the same evening were several tried- and-true favorites: Firebird, Spectre de la Rose, Prince Igor, and . Fokine’s upcoming Greek production, Daphnis et Chloe, (music by Ravel) was

240 completely overshadowed by Faune, and Diaghilev’s support of Nijinsky as a choreographer prompted the eventual departure of Fokine from the Ballets Russes. The audience was, according to all accounts, engulfed in stunned silence during the public premiere of Faune. At its conclusion, a confused cacophony of boos and cheers filled the theatre. Alarmed by this expression of shock, the producers did what they could to encourage acceptance of the piece as a completely new kind of ballet work: Diaghilev spared no trouble or expense to create a favorable climate of opinion for Nijinsky's first ballet. Following the répétition générale— which, according to Fokine, was so silently received that after a hurried backstage conference Astruc appeared in front of the curtain to announce that since “such a new exhibition could not be understood in a single viewing, the ballet would be repeated” —champagne and caviar were served to critics and supporters in the foyer (Buckles: 237).

Faune's erotic, primitive affront to the anticipated nostalgia of a pleasant pastorale usually associated with a ballet on a Greek theme was jarring, especially juxtaposed with Debussy’s dream-like evocations in the music. The seemingly incomprehensible combination of sophistication and raw expression took some persuasion to put across, even among the Parisian intellectuals. Gaston Calmette, writing for Le Figaro, vehemently opposed the piece; the artist Odilon Rédon opined that the poet Mallarmé would have been delighted with Nijinsky’s interpretation. Sculptor August Rodin’s remarks published in a rival Parisian paper, Le Matin, particularly: . . .paid a striking tribute to Nijinsky’s extraordinary success in portraying the wildness of a faun—apart from which he possessed the distinct advantage of physical perfection, with the beauty of an antique fresco or statue; he was the ideal model for whom every painter and sculptor had longed (Parker: 125).

These heated opinions added to the success de scandale propelling both company and Faune into public awareness; everyone wanted to see for themselves what the row was all about, and the resulting full houses ensured Faune’s continuing success. While Nijinsky’s Faune had the support of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, Gnossienne and Incense depended upon the agency of the Denishawn school and company as a mechanism of distribution and acceptance. This agency represented harmonic unions: the name “Denishawn” married not only the private but also the public

241 personas of both artists. Even the logo for Denishawn (designed by Rose O’Neill) expressed a human median between genders. The design featured a kneeling man and woman surrounded by what appears to be a length of fabric in the figure eight symbol for eternity56. Denishawn also provided an American model based upon the ballet format of a combined school and company with the practical purpose of training dancers in the evolving needs of a distinctly American performing company, as well as generating funding for new productions. In the process, Denishawn altered audience perceptions to accommodate later progressions of experimental dance as valid artistic and cultural expressions. While St. Denis presided as the reigning dance goddess, Shawn was a steady guide to students in the initial stages of finding their own modern dance expressions. In both functions of Denishawn, St. Denis and Shawn took complimentary roles. St. Denis’ influence on students was inspirational, while Shawn’s filled the more practical one of teaching. In addition, Shawn managed the company tours, effected negotiations with theatre managers, and kept the finances: . . .he [Shawn] had a flair for mixing art and business in the right proportions, cleverly devising programs that allowed St. Denis her mystic vein but ended with a dash of ragtime jazz. The public loved it (Fonteyn: 108).

Despite their incorporation into the performing repertoire of the company, reactions to Incense and Gnossienne were different. While Gnossienne started out as an expression of the dual educative and artistic goals of Denishawn, Incense had been created and toured in the United States and Europe by St. Denis several years prior. Acceptance of Incense varied, depending on the perception of the speaker, and ranged from dismissive, to sensationalistic, to reverent. In the American art scene of 1906 few professional dancers attempted such a radical revision of the audience/performer relationships as did St. Denis with her initial series of Hindu dances, of which Incense was the first (Chapter Two). But even St. Denis could never quite escape the entrenched attraction of an alluring female on stage for the male gaze. In discussing the art of St. Denis, Shawn57 presents the attitude of those producers who decided which performances were put up on stage based entirely on monetary return:

242 . . .we find, “. . .there are two ways to succeed with dancers. If they have a sensational acrobatic novelty that has never been seen before that will make money. Otherwise you’ve got to take their clothes off if you want anybody to look at ‘em. . .” (Shawn: 26).

Given this entrenched attitude, St. Denis was forced, especially in the beginning, to compromise with producers. Based largely upon her youthful appeal and possibly also upon the filmy drape (with the ever-present possibility it might undrape at any moment) of her sari costume58 St. Denis’ first engagement with Incense was at the “Saturday Smoker” special attended primarily by men at the Proctor Theater. Reactions were mixed; many in that kind of audience were unruly and crude; others were confused, because the figure she presented was simultaneously titillating and remote (Chapter Two). Gradually a few responded to the vision St. Denis presented, and word of her unfamiliar tensions of “sensual chasteness” spread: At least one critic found in St. Denis’ dancing “a universal rhythm beneath the broken chaos of our modern industrial world which shall infuse new joy and rhythmic harmony into our common life.” (Shelton: 55).

A landmark opportunity to perform Incense under her own controlled conditions came to St. Denis through the stalwart socialite and art patron Mrs. Rouland. Together with an invited audience of well-educated upper-class women only, Mrs. Rouland engaged the Hudson Theater. St. Denis flooded the foyer with the scent of incense and populated it with a group of quiet, exotically-attired “Indians” (some of whom were not actually from India) as ushers. In her autobiography St. Denis reports the audience response to Incense was one of stunned silence followed by enthusiastic applause. But such engagements were few and far between; until the establishment of Denishawn, Incense—along with her other Hindu59dances—were tucked into vaudeville tours between displays of “pickled calves” and clown acts (St. Denis: 69). The modular construction that Shawn engineered around her dances through Denishawn likely prolonged the inclusion of Incense in Denishawn programs: . . .the Denishawn repertory under Shawn contained none of that luxurious spread out time and resonant charm of St. Denis; Shawn had subdivided her art into a collection of small numbers. He copied the Russians; he borrowed their themes and their policy of mixed programs (Kendall: 120).

243 As discussed in Chapter Two, St. Denis generated stability in this fluctuating condition by fusing her name and artistic persona with the noble aspirations expressed in this dance. St. Denis the dancer became fused with the character of her portrayal, especially since early press notices asserted that she was a mysteriously aristocratic Eurasian trained from childhood in the esoteric dance arts of India. However, this frame of validation later gave way to commercial support through the Denishawn school. Incense was also offered, among other solos, to be taught to serious dance students by St. Denis herself: An announcement was included in the promotional pamphlet: “Miss Denis’ famous dances are taught only in their entirety, at special prices which includes the music and supervision of costumes. . . (Cohen: 2).

In this context, St. Denis the dancer and the Hindu woman she represented combined as an authentically alien import in more than one sense; she became known geographically, spiritually, and by commercial venue a rare and beautiful vision amid curiosities. Professor Jack Clark, who made the reconstruction examined in this study in 200160, indicated that members of a contemporary audience for a recent performance of Incense remarked on its subtlety, its simple and straightforward sense of transcendence, and its “indulgence”, which Clark explained as “how far the dancer was willing to go; the depth of engagement into the self-material before a self-consciousness kicks in.” Finally, Incense is a representation of a different period and style of dance performance (Interviews 16 November 2003 and 16 April 2003). And although St. Denis presented herself in Incense as remotely spiritual, the dance was only one of several facets of her performing range; the adaptability of her reach to ordinary audiences supported her exotic transports: She [St. Denis] appealed to the little man. . .in sum, for twenty-five years she was never off the stage, both popular and cultural. Her very ubiquitousness and multi-social level appeal cause the hang-up that this historian and other dance writers admittedly have about her place (Schlundt: 3).

At its premiere, Gnossienne did not receive enthusiastic response by most audiences, but Shawn noted in his autobiography that there were a few exceptions to this reserved confusion on the part of viewers as he performed it over the years:

244 No backstage visitor surprised me more than Dr. Arnold Genthe. . .I had known the eminent photographer only as hypercritical. . .[he said] “It’s very difficult nowadays to add anything really new to the vocabulary of the dance but I think you have done it with Gnossienne. It’s a genuine contribution.” (Shawn61: 101).

Neither the acceptance of Incense nor the shock of Faune greeted this dance, and it seems to fall into a category of curious oddities for most audiences past and present. Its flattened movement certainly evoke Nijinsky’s earlier piece, and yet because the dancer moves along constantly changing perpendicular planes, Gnossienne also suggests a different relationship to the visual perspective of an audience. Like Incense, Gnossienne was designed as an insertable solo to fit varying conditions of vaudeville circuits and concert touring. Clark mentioned that audience response to Gnossienne was interested and curious but not particularly enthusiastic. People described it as quirky, quizzical, and odd, and while watching it, they tried to suppress a nervous tendency to laugh. As discussed in Chapter Three, Shawn encouraged a humorous response to the dance by affecting haughty manners in his bows. Despite its humorous overtones, audiences find it difficult to laugh at something that also has a religious demeanor. The same response of confusion was observed by the author when Gnossienne was shown to a class of undergraduate humanities students at Florida State University, Fall Semester, 2003. Although Incense was offered in Denishawn brochures to be taught by St. Denis for a fee and licensed to a student to perform in her own program, Gnossienne was not among those offered by Shawn. The reasons for this are obscure; a drawing of Shawn in this dance appeared in the border decoration of Denishawn brochures. Perhaps it was not included among those franchised because Gnossienne was not an easy dance to learn in only a few lessons except by an expert student. Shawn continued to both perform it as a dance and use it as a class demonstration/exercise illustrating isolated physical control required of the accomplished dancer (Chapter Three). And although the choreography for it was set, Shawn continued to tinker with the rhythmic potential Gnossienne had opened. By the time simpler, less complex dances were being offered to generate revenues for new productions of Denishawn, Shawn had evidently taken some of the movement to music approaches pioneered in Gnossienne to apply in subsequent pieces:

245 . . .The reactions of the body in planal opposition creates the sustained poses. The dynamic structure of the work was uniquely innovative for Shawn, playing with the tension created by the 9/8 and 7/8 measures forcing against the expectations of common time (Cohen: 8).

As has been discussed in their respective chapters, St. Denis’ Incense and Shawn’s Gnossienne fit into the short-piece programmatic format of vaudeville, a feature that served the touring needs of Denishawn. Such dances were short, modularly-flexible, and central to the individual performer. Incense and Gnossienne were expressions of spiritualism through gendered responses to ritual, and they conveyed a sense of natural expressive movement, not the least in the fact that in both dances the dancers are barefoot62. These dances are also capable of lifting their audiences out of the ordinary into an exotic reference. They engage a performative suspension of ordinary time and space, and a stylized reference to technological advancements. Because they were short and adaptable to a wide variety of staging conditions, all three dances proved to be ideal modular units, capable of being assembled with other, similar dances in a variety of ways63 depending upon need. This kind of versatility made it possible for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to tour Europe and the United States in a streamlined fashion, with a minimum of sets and smaller company of dancers. Both St. Denis and Shawn toured their dances throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia as part of their dance programs that, for all their artfulness, effectively offered a little of everything to please everyone on the same order as vaudeville. Following the programmatic format of music in the process of escaping Wagnerianism64, these dances represent a similar break from the conventions of the full-evening ballet on a grand scale; from a complex whole to streamlined units making up the whole; from external display to internal transformation; from an exhibition of exotic elements to an evocation of a deeply personal experience. This kind of change is as much a feature of the avant-garde as of the general trend of performance in the United States. The trend appeared early, undoubtedly influenced by the logistics of travel needed to reach far-flung audiences. Imports from Europe constituted the greatest proportion of performing art across the Atlantic; “home-grown” productions relied heavily upon European traditions of aesthetics and performance

246 conventions. Still, American artists began appearing in operas, plays, and ballet- based on American narratives just twenty years after independence from England. The 1794 opera Tammany, or the Indian Chief was tremendously popular as one of the very first operas written in the United States with an American theme65. Given music composed by the violinist James Hewitt, and the story by Mrs. Anne Julia Hatton, it told the tragic tale of a noble but doomed Indian hero in his struggles against Spanish conquest66 and featured the dancing of the American John Durang (1768-1822). “It is interesting that the first opera-ballet given in this country should have been an American Indian dance!” (Moore: 26). 1794 was further marked in American performing arts history with the premiere in Philadelphia of the first serious American ballet-pantomime, La Forêt Noire67. American ballet-pantomimes in spectaculars were popular, not the least for the opportunity it gave audiences to view plenty of female charm exhibited by phalanxes of winsome young women in skimpy outfits. For example, the Black Crook that ran from 1866 to 1868 at Niblo’s Garden68 (followed closely by its imitator, The White Fawn in 1868)popularized fantasy as an excuse to show off plenty of female leg. Through vaudeville, this feature of combining fantasy and feminine allure still had not lost its appeal69 by the time George Méliès premiered the early silent cinema science fiction fantasy, A Trip to the Moon in 1902. Durang shared the dancing in Tammany with a Mr. Miller who, Moore speculates, probably had been working at the Vauxhall70 as a rope dancer and gymnast. Taking advantage of Tammany’s popularity, Durang later extrapolated his dancing role in it into his own ballet pantomime called The Huntress, or Tammany’s Frolics, astonishing his audience by dancing on a slack rope. The project was perhaps one of his earliest attempts at choreography (Moore: 27). More to the point of this discussion, however, is the fact that Durang inventively reworked his dance from the spectacle in which it initially appeared and presented it as an autonomous unit that could be toured in a way the original spectacle could not. A later American ballet-pantomime, The Abduction of Nina71 (1848) choreographed by an Italian student of Carlo Blasis, Gaetano Neri featured the American dancer George Washington Smith (1820?-1899) (Moore: 160). Neri, Smith, and a

247 bewitching ballerina, Giovanna Ciocca, followed their success in The Abduction of Nina with a series of divertissements, or short, one-scene solo or pas de deux dances that had the versatility of being inserted or withdrawn on quick notice from a wide variety of stage venues, including one from Rossini’s opera, William Tell72 (1827) which was inserted after an abbreviated derivation performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Neri and Ciocca quickly adapted to this American rough and tumble mixing of performance works to please the audiences; they had previously left Smith without a job for a few weeks while they danced at the Park between the acts of Hamlet, just as Smith had done a few years earlier. “Evidently Shakespeare, without a little dancing to lighten the evening, was not to be considered! (Moore: 161). This marketing approach for shows of all kinds employed a kind of mutual verification of a standard of excellence in order to persuade paying audiences to attend. For example, in 1849 an American equestrian drama called Eagle Eye, for which Smith choreographed a series of American Indian war dances gained popularity in eastern US cities (Moore: 161). Smith cleverly took advantage of the popularity of the drama to enhance his own dance reputation. He extrapolated the dances and presented them as part and parcel of the original. And in so doing, not only did Smith enhance his own name recognition by association with the original production of Eagle Eye, he also enhanced the original spectacle through the fame of his own name. American performers in the United States weren’t the only ones able to adapt their appeal in this way. One of three European artists who performed to acclaim in the United States from 1840 to 1842 was the Viennese ballerina Fanny Essler (1810-1884). Part of her great popularity derived from her ability to maintain a classical ballet presentation of popular folk themes like Scottish or Spanish dances. As a touring soloist depending upon the dubious training of local dancers, uncertain performing conditions, and a rugged touring schedule, it made sense for Essler—as for the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull and the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind who followed her—to present programs consisting of a series of short, quick, and highly-flexible solo works of as wide a range as possible instead of trying to mount large, full-length ballets. The pattern of starting with a large, spectacular work to gain broad public recognition and then later cutting it down into smaller, quick-touring units demonstrated

248 in Durang’s adaptation of his role in Tammany proved useful in spreading other works from large Eastern urban centers into the diffuse western regions of the United States. This tactic also paid off for American dancers featured in large, elaborate spectaculars in the big Eastern cities who subsequently capitalized on name recognition by taking a selection of dances from the larger work on tour. It was also a quick and easy way to tailor a program with maximum flexibility to suit any given condition, and to make audiences believe it has been tailored to their demanding tastes when all that has really happened is that the same pre-designed modules have been shuffled into a different configuration. In this type of construct, appearance is everything: The analogy between individual development and cultural development holds—and at no time more clearly than the turn of the century. . .In the culture of consumption, identity was based. . .upon how one appeared and lived. . .other-directed men scanned a mental radar screen for fluctuations in public opinion. . .having a good personality was the way to win friends and influence people (Kimmel: 119).

The transition from vaudeville to film was one of marketing as much as a fascination with the possibilities of the new medium. Film was the ideal experiential venue for mass marketing because it could reach so many more audiences in different locations. Certainly it is a good deal cheaper to send cans of films across the country than a troupe of live performers; the same film can be mass produced and shown simultaneously in movie houses all over the country, and it promoted trademark recognition of other products. In other words, if the movie pleased—so went advertising—then the toothpaste, soda, and even upcoming movie attractions displayed with it would also please: The cinema emerges as the perfect consumer product in that it not only gives audiences an experience to consume but it also functions as a “display window” for other mass-produced goods (Belton: 7).

In the rush to stimulate an appetite for the “new and innovative”, both the popular entertainments of vaudeville and film participated with “legitimate” stage venues of drama, opera, and the ballet in the five elements of the avant-garde. Exotic themes such as Salomé in all performing mediums provided a conceptual bridge from full-evening spectaculars featuring the feminine exotic to abbreviated, internally-intense expressions

249 of the “New Woman” (Chapter Three) exemplified by Tanguey. Although St. Denis maintained an air of sanctified dignity in Incense, she nevertheless benefited from Tanguey’s audacious control of the vaudeville stage for her own—rather than her audience’s—expressive purposes; barefoot, free of corsets, and potentially dangerous to the masculine identity for all her fascination. In a comparable fashion, the exotic display of the masculine “self-made” man such as Sandow paved the way for acceptance of Shawn’s Gnossienne. In this perspective, it is possible to place Nijinsky as an acclaimed (European ballet) dancer somewhere between the male and female performing exotic, especially with his ambiguously-gendered Faune. The fluidity of identity for the “self-made” performer as person, persona, and character fused into a commodified icon in vaudeville and its technologically-enhanced child, cinema, presented audiences with an experience beyond the everyday based in part on a continued fascination with exoticism. The scandal of Faune, for example, and the furor of passionate opinions arguing for and against the piece was just the reaction such avant-garde artists as the Futurists desired. This kind of publicity put the names of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in the category of modernism in ballet. And Nijinsky as the Faun embodied humanity caught between nostalgia for a simpler past and anxieties over an uncertain technological future. Modular construction as a format for experiential commodities favored art and entertainment works that were short, intense, and derivative as independent interlocking units that could be recombined in any order to suit various performing conditions. All three dances in this study come into this category, presenting the density of their communications in two to thirteen minutes. While both Gnossienne and Incense were presented on vaudeville stages as referents to the larger institution of Denishawn, Faune referred not only to the European successes of the Ballets Russes, but also to the traditions of the non-mobile Imperial Theatres and School, of which Nijinsky was a product. The splintering of a single “act” from a larger piece to which it refers was a practice arising shortly after the establishment of the United States; as was previously discussed, Durang successfully toured his dances from Tammany around the country. Incense, Faune and Gnossienne also were successfully toured throughout Europe and the United States.

250 Instead of external showiness, these programmatic dances also invoked deeply transformative spiritual messages because they were interally-directed from the soloist’s point of view. Audiences quickly identified themselves in the longing for divine communion expressed in Incense, and Americans responded to its Oriental mysticism, which had become a part of its own spiritual ethos. Gnossienne and Faune invoked comparable transformations through ritualized movements in which the body, in geometric configurations, projected ephemeral emotions. Gnossienne’s priest is humbled, but not completely; the Faun reverently bears the Nymph’s veil as if it were a holy relic up into his private realm of memory, perhaps to puzzle its feminine mystery. Cinema explored similar, psychologically transformative territory in moving from a presentational to a representational format; it was not enough to document a building on fire, for example, in Porter’s Life of a Fireman; the moral character of the fireman was revealed to the audience in dream, thus engaging it in the urgency of the rescue. The search for naturalism in performance continued in the teachings of Stanislavsky and challenged audiences in the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg. Delsarte’s principles of movement and speech to reveal the true nature of the individual permeated both stage and cinema dramas. Dance artists, along with film actors and stage actors studied Delsarte posing as a means of perfecting their expressive range. The incorporation of flowing garments (Incense) and the human (male) body revealed to view, distanced the performer/character from associations with sophisticated, hence artificial and false everyday interactions. Dance as a medium of expression in this context was ideal, because the body did not deceive as did words; a child-like simplicity was implied in bare feet, and pedestrian movements like walking, running and bending featured in these dances. Finally, the reflexive qualities of cinema and vaudeville also enhanced their facility in distortions of time and space. Two vaudeville acts, each lasting only a few minutes juxtaposed next to each other transported audiences from a modern-day city street scene to Ancient Egypt almost as quickly as today’s TV remote control changes the channel. The eye of the camera (first in photography, and then the silent film) was selective in what it allowed the audience to see, and not to see. Film scenes juxtaposed next to each other implied a condensed sequencing of events that has developed into a

251 kind of “shorthand” for real time and space. And the audience was invited to vicariously participate in an acceleration of time in the depiction of exciting scenes that last only a few moments, but invoke much longer periods of time. The arrangement required a significant alteration of the time/space relationship between the experiential commodity of performance and its audiences. In his article, “Photo Synthesis” (Los Angeles Times Calendar, Sunday, 7 March 2004,) Times staff writer Christopher Knight states that: Before the camera revolutionized the image world in the mid-19th Century, pictures were found mostly in rarified places of institutional authority— especially palaces and places of worship—or they were appended to texts in books or pamphlets. Usually a picture didn’t come to you—you went to the picture (E-1-40-41).

This shift constitutes an even greater alteration in meaning and visual interpretation of images with which in posed, still moments the dances come into context with modern issues of representation. And, as Knight suggests, the connective tissue in this dynamic alteration of images in the modern framework—whether dance, visual arts, or advertising design—refers to both the exotic (“rarified places of institutional authority” like museums, etc.) and the spiritual (“places of worship”). The particularly close combination of these avant-garde components in Gnossienne, Faune, and Incense maintained their connections with expressive art while at the same time opening them to unitized marketing practices effective in commodifying popular entertainments.

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END NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

1Despite outstanding innovations in early film by French and German artists, cinema is considered here as a primarily American development.

2 See Glossary for a more detailed discussion of modular construction and its significance in marketing both concrete objects and discrete experiential commodities.

3 An on-line chronological chart mapping the years of influence for Art Nouveau and Art Deco from the last decade of the Nineteenth Century to the first two decades of the Twentieth show a remarkable consistency of ten years between introduction in Europe to introduction in the United States. This strongly supports the perception that if innovative art and artists gained initial acceptance in Europe, acceptance in the United States would follow. Not only did Fuller, Duncan, and St. Denis recognize how this dynamic could help them gain acceptance in the US, but so did Nijinsky and Shawn, among others.

4 Both Kimmel (Masculinity in America) and Levine (High Brow, Low Brow) discuss the dramatic effect successive waves of immigrants into the United States had on American culture. A unifying, monolithic perception of the “true” American male was challenged by the arrival of non-Europeans and pressure from women for equal rights. The idea that a single, conjoined cultural, political, and gender unity (or consensual agreement, if preferred) of identity must be dominant at the expense of all others demonstrates a hierarchal structure particularly characteristic of American society and its public performance.

5 While Fuller kept a low profile of her sexual preferences, Duncan’s flagrant love affairs and performances in which she showed considerable flesh for the time always interested the American public a good deal more than did her dances. St. Denis carefully avoided public scandal, striving always to support moral behavior and equally high artistic standards in her students and company. American uneasiness over any “non-productive” physical activity (sports being productive of healthy young bodies) made it all too easy to criticize dance as immoral.

6 This movie, commonly cited as an example of German expressionism in American film innovation, served as the prototype of most science fiction movies to follow, including the reflexive imagery in the recent Minority Report (Spielberg: 2002). The evolving film genre of science fiction is marked with a distinct link between science and magic, a common motif in the earliest films; Méliès’ 1902 A Trip to the Moon features scientists who build the space ship wearing pointed hats and capes like a magician’s.

7 It is interesting to note that both American spiritualism discussed by Taylor in his book, Shadow Culture and American Delsartism (Zorn, John. The Essential Delsarte ) remark upon the differences from the European versions of these concepts in similar terms. Taylor presents American spiritualism as being highly eclectic, individualistic, and requiring an understanding of the mind-body link in which good health of the body infers a healthy spiritual orientation. In practice, American Delsartism also stressed the health of the body, and the idea that the correct state of mind will automatically produce a “pure, natural, and genuine” physical expression reflective of a spiritually-guided person.

8 Of these operas, the fabulous and elaborate productions of Aida (Verdi: 1871) serve as an example. The setting of the opera is an outrageously fantasized concoction of Ancient Egypt in which exotic live animals were brought on stage. It is to be understood that although stage venues of all kinds are listed in this study at the point of their premieres in the late Nineteenth Century, their popularity and frequency of performances in the United States and Europe continued well into the early decades of the Twentieth unless otherwise noted. Even to the present time, lavish productions of the classical ballet The Nutcracker, which first premiered in the Imperial Theatres of Russia in 1892 are so popular in the United States as a Christmas tradition that around sixty percent of regional ballet companies’ annual income comes from performances of this ballet (Dance Magazine).

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9 The most elaborate American musical presented at Niblo’s—The Black Crook—opened in 1866 and enjoyed forty years of continuous popularity and a Hoboken revival in 1929 (Moore: 65).

10 The development of cultural hierarchy in American performing art is admirably discussed in Lawrence Levine’s book, Highbrow, Lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. “high art” and “low art” are briefly characterized in the Glossary according to Levine’s discussion.

11 Shawn’s Midwestern competitor, Paul Swan, discovered to his great humility (Chapter Three) that a full evening performance of expressive male dancing could not be put across to audiences of that time. Even though he offered a program of a series of short pieces in modular construction format, his dances were all of a kind. It is speculated that although St. Denis and Shawn disliked having their earliest serious artistic works blended in with “cheap entertainment” appealing to the lowest common denominator in vaudeville audiences, they nevertheless were aware that acceptance of their esoteric expressions may have been facilitated by proximity in the same evening with what was commonly comfortable and entertaining.

12 The term “silent” movie is misleading; live performance of music to accompany early cinema was almost immediately arranged with the first public showings. Nearly all vaudeville theatres in which films were first shown already had a piano or organ. Experiments with sound tracks to carry voice and sound with film proved largely unsatisfactory until 1927 with the release of The Jazz Singer. But around 1918-19 a German sound system called the Tri-Ergon recorded sound with film, and in 1923 the American Lee De Forest Phonofilm system was demonstrated (Cohen: 7).

13 In a letter to St. Denis, Shawn states he had been to see the “Ballets Russes” and remained unimpressed by them compared to her performances. Since the date of the letter precedes the first appearance of the Ballets Russes in the United States by about a year, it is speculated by the author that what Shawn actually saw was Hoffmann’s parody. Fortunately for St. Denis, her dance was copyrighted and Hoffmann was legally barred from adopting it.

14 Instances in which early American cinema “borrowed” vaudeville format wholesale are too numerous to list here. Many vaudeville acts showed up on screen, and many vaudevillians found work in the movies. It could be argued that the basic vaudeville format never quite died out, for even in television one of the most popular entertainments was The Ed Sullivan Show (1948 to 1971), which offered; “. . .no pandering to the lowest common denominator here, there was grand opera and the latest rock stars, classical ballet and leggy Broadway , slapstick comedy and recitations from great dramatic writings, often juxtaposed on a single telecast” (http://www.timvp.com/sullivan.html, 31 October 2004).

15 This shift in cinema signals its potential as an art form instead of a “craft-full recording” of an event. A presentational film would be one of a train pulling into a station shot by a single, stationary camera. A representational film has a narration, space and time construct that could exist nowhere except on film. One example is Porter’s Life of a Fireman (1903).

16 A cursory search of Jacob’s Pillow archives showed that St. Denis performed Incense on film in 1950, (Reel 4.6 untitled), 1958 (Reel 25.9, Five Solos by Ruth St. Denis), 1958 (Reel 29, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn), and 1964 (Reel 30, Fifty Years of the Dance). Gnossienne did not appear in the listings; if it was filmed either with Shawn or Mumaw performing it as a class demonstration, it was not mentioned.

17 According to Cohen (“The Franchising of Denishawn”), the prospective student who had adequately learned a dance from Shawn or St. Denis could also purchase a recording of the music in the form of an Ampico or Welte-Mignon piano roll, two companies that went into competition to produce marketable music for recorded dance lessons and directions. They supplied these music packages not only for Denishawn dances, but also for popular and ballet dance instruction (Cohen: 5).

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18 Minstrel shows featured touring troupes of white male performers in telling jokes, singing, playing music, dancing, and haranguing the (largely all-male) audience, which vigorously responded in kind. The two-man comedy routine still popular today got its start from minstrelsy. Other venues contributing to the format of vaudeville include circus, music hall, dime museums, , and the burlesque revue.

19 The last vaudeville performance as such took place January 7, 1933 at the Palace, the last to close its doors on this form of live entertainment.

20 Sobel states that the first vaudeville house opened its doors in New York in the late 1840’s.

21 Vaudeville acts were varied, and each one had to put its point across extremely quickly.

22 This is not to imply that short scenes from Shakespeare’s plays and opera songs did not play on vaudeville; quite the opposite. Performers who had made names for themselves on the legitimate stages of Europe were no strangers to American vaudeville, and often commanded top billing. An uplifting draw, these offerings on vaudeville programs served to quell worries of propriety on the part of local officials who, as like as not, censored risqué material and ran daring vaudevillians out of town. In addition, parodies of serious stage works in theatre, dance, and music released class tensions by making fun of the elite powers of refinement that had removed them from the popular domain (Levine: 85-168). Deliberate anachronistic skits in which (for example) Hamlet smokes a cigar while delivering his heavily-punned soliloquy, or a similar treatment in which the opera La Sonambula had been transformed into an Ethiopian opera, Lo am de Beauties in pre-vaudeville venues were common fare.

23 One early vaudeville act captured on film featured three young girls in white pajamas throwing a white handkerchief up into the air between them, and periodically freezing in statue-like poses. Exact connotations of this bizarre act and its possible appeal to audiences are lost in the past, but it speculatively might have been a spoof on the popularity of Delsarte statue-posing among women of the upper classes of the time.

24 One member (usually the star) of show would put on a skirt or even just a crinoline hoop over his male clothing in symbolic assumption of the feminine for at least one act; vaudeville reproduced much of the minstrel show format (Sobel: 33).

25 Tanguay’s display of broad social disruption on vaudeville stages brings to mind the anarchistic appeal of a later “wild woman” performer, Janis Joplin (1943-1970).

26 An article about a female Sandow from was published in The Dancing Master.

27 Sunday’s definition of a man was exclusively the white Euro-American male model purged of blacks and other minorities. He aggressively urged minorities to go back where they came from if they didn’t like it here (Kimmel: 178). Blacks and women inconsistently were framed as both child-like and needing the protection of “real” men and also a dire threat to “the natural order of things as God intended”. Like the filmmaker D. W. Griffith, Sunday provided a homogeneous definition of the American Male responding to the increasing pressures of immigration and civil rights. The more the performance of masculinity was required, the more vigorous the attempt was made to deny its constructedness and assert essential properties. Linking masculinity with religion and morality with racism soothed fears that what is made can as easily be unmade.

28 According to Kimmel’s discussion of the appeal of Billy Sunday, Sunday had been a professional baseball player for Chicago and Pittsburg before turning to preaching (Kimmel: 179).

29 Or “real” Hindus present for St. Denis’ evening programs.

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30 Camp revival meetings worked by taking the devotional group out of the cities and towns and into the natural, healthful countryside. There, blacks, children, and women spoke to the group out of a faith that was considered more directly the word of the spirit than anything a male preacher in a church could convey (Weisberger and Eslinger).

31 Both the Greek theme of Narcisse and its posed statuary quality likely influenced Nijinsky’s conception of his own ballet in terms of what would be considered “natural”, or non-balletic gesture (Chapter Four).

32 There is no conclusive evidence Duncan formally studied Delsarte exercises (Reuter). She did, however, evidently pick up some of the basic concepts from her mother and incorporated them into her dancing. Upon reaching Paris she was disappointed that she could not study directly with Delsarte himself because he had died (Duncan: My Life).

33 Opposition to Ibsen’s 1862 satire Love’s Comedy drove him into exile from 1864 to 1891. The period of his exile was marked with verse dramas (such as Peer Gynt in 1867), followed by realistic and controversial social-issues plays like Ghosts (1881), The Doll’s House (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1891) Ibsen’s last plays (When We Dead Awaken in 1899) were more symbolic; however is noted that Ibsen’s most fabulous narratives contain a good measure of contemporary practicality (Peer Gynt), and his most realistic, modern, psychological plays are not devoid of fantasy and exoticism (Ghosts).

34 As has been previously noted in this study, Faune, in particular was recorded through the remarkable series of photographs Nijinsky commissioned of the photographer De Meyer, and this photographic record was crucial to the authenticity of restoration of the dance. Both Gnossienne and Incense were also photographed in a way that reinforced instant public recognition of both artist and work. Denishawn student Charles Weidman recalls that his interest in dance was sparked by photographs of St. Denis, Shawn and Duncan displayed on discarded programs which Weidman picked up in his job as a junk man (Anderson: 164 ). The evocative power of photography and film to convey the allure of dance exercised a potent influence on many aspiring dancers, including the author, who could not attend live dance performances during childhood. The concept of dance was first formed almost entirely from a few dance films, TV showings, and photographs of dancers in books, brochures, and stage performance programs.

35 The effect still film had on the visual arts of representation is generally recognized as one that released painting and sculpture from the need of realistic depiction so that the artist could spend his attention and creativity in the direction of expressing emotional states.

36 Faune was not recorded on film; however, reflections of its impact nevertheless appear in that medium. Silent film star (1889-1977) met Nijinsky during the latter’s tour of the United States, and Nijinsky visited Chaplin’s Lone Star Studio in 1916. According to Gesmer (“Hommage to Nijinsky”) the first pose of the Faun is lightheartedly mimicked in Chaplin’s 1919 film, Sunnyside. Other iconic poses identified with Nijinsky appear in the 1940 The Great Dictator (the final movements of Faune), and in the 1916 Easy Street (the collapse of the puppet Petroushka) (Gesmer: E-46).

37 An excellent discussion on the link between Delsartian pose in live performance and still photography with early silent film is provided in Brewster and Jacobs’ book, Theatre to Cinema.

38Early silent film was only in black and white; attempts at colorization were made by painstakingly applying color to each separate film frame (Belton).

39 Imagine Shawn’s dismay if Gnossienne had been filmed and shown in a small-town movie theatre to the strains of Mendelssohn’s Springtime vigorously and badly played on the organ by a local musician. . .

40 The question of why film and dance didn’t meld into a new expressive format earlier is a topic too extensive to investigate in this study. The author speculates that the conservative perception of dance and its connection to live stage conditions may have been a factor.

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41 Despite traditional histories of film exclusively listing men as film-makers and innovators, Ally Acker’s book, Reel Women, describes at least five women who collectively made a total of one hundred and seventy-six silent films, ranging from the fantastic to domestic issues to adaptations of Shakespeare’s dramas. Alice Guy Blaché is credited in Acker’s book with having been the first to come up with a narrative film, The Cabbage Fairy in 1896. However, this film did not survive (Aker: 7). And even after film production had been taken over as an American industry dominated by male directors and producers, women such as Germaine Dulac (1882-1942) created independent films at the service of surrealist or symbolist expression (i. e. Les Soeurs Ennemies in 1915).

42 For example, a kind of narrative editing was employed by Charlie Chaplin in his movie, The Great Dictator (1940) as the title character parodied the iconographic poses of Faune to suggest a carefree, naïve state of mind. The topic of how easily audiences accept elliptical editing in cinema due to comparable, derivative experiences in painting, literature, and drama is well worth more investigation than can be devoted to it here.

43 An adequate discussion of the experience of “real space and time” vis a vis an artistic reference to that experience is more vast than can be adequately explored in this study. The point the author wishes to make here is that film further condensed artistic reference to the interrelated experience of time and space from its already abbreviated form in live performances. That is, in the same dynamic as the theme of Faune moved from poem to music to dance (Chapter Four), the experience of time and space moved from directly living it, to stage, to film. Each phase condenses referentially qualities of the previous experience, until (as is true of avant-garde work) the quality of time and space being referred to achieves a kind of culturally- significant “shorthand”.

44 Vaudeville theatre managers were notorious for sticking to the rule that any act should not exceed its time limits to facilitate the hustling of one audience group out so that the next could be hustled into its seats and the program could start over from the beginning on (cyclical instead of linear) time. Some vaudeville shows ran six times a day. If an act ran over its time, or if a performer tried to sneak in that extra bow, the manager would reach a shepherd’s hook from one side of the stage, snag the offending actor, and yank him (or her) off the stage.

45 The first kinetocope parlors opened in 1894, soon after the public announcement by Edison that both the machines and the cylinders that would run on them could be purchased and/or rented through his company. Edison’s big chance to corner the market on celluloid film and portable projectors as pioneered by the French Lumière brothers slipped through his hands when he determined that he could make more money renting out his kinetoscopes. However, so powerful were the images of the Lumières’ projector that when they first showed a reel of an on-coming train on the wall of a Paris café in 1985 some patrons fled their seats in terror.

46 It is plausible that the film-maker did not intend this surreal effect; the result of excessive overexposure (The Great Primitives).

47 Porter worked in the Edison studio 1900-1909. By then Edison had abandoned his kinetoscope idea in favor of the projector. Porter’s early training had included traveling throughout the West Indies and South America with his projector for several months in 1897. Although he helped Edison set up transition from kinetoscope to projector format, Porter was quickly moved into the position of a combined cameraman and producer, in which capacity he served Edison until he left.

48 College students were not so jaded that these early silent films failed to charm them when presented in a film class in 2002.

49 Pratt’s description of the film includes the note that over three hundred New York firemen were engaged as extras for the thrilling fire scene.

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50 The term “Photoplays” fell into disuse after 1910.

51 Griffith used an unusual number of inserts in the form of dialogue titles at the beginning of his controversial Birth of a Nation (1915) to claim an authenticity of historical fact to support his fictional idea of heroism of the Clansmen by quoting from both the Bible and Shakespeare. While his racism is deplorable by today’s standards, his heroic themes were ambitious.

52 This description of Intolerance is somewhat misleading; the film itself is very long and rambling as it tries (rather unsuccessfully) to weave together five different narratives from five different time periods into a whole, sweepingly universal statement of the human condition. What makes it frantic is that the editing of the film in the cut/crosscut department created a very choppy experience for the viewer.

53 Although the restored footage of these films runs slightly faster now than they did prior to the standardized projection rate of 24 frames per second, each cut sequence lasts less than 10 seconds, adding to the sense of urgency, or excitement. The acceleration of image imprint to the viewer’s eye for instant recognition has increased over time; trailers for movies at the present time flicker scenes at the rate of one per half-second.

54 The author continues to be astounded that Delsarte’s ideas on expression and movement are conveyed through word descriptions, static diagrams, and illustrations. The struggle to make sense of the detailed analysis offered suggests the need for actual instruction by a teacher in a studio instead of trying to learn from the book alone. 55 Nijinsky’s final gesture in the dance suggesting masturbation seems to have been the source of criticism in an audience known to be blasé in the extreme.

56 It is interesting to note that O’Neill’s design adheres to the consistency of gendered space, placing the female figure on the left side of the design and the male figure facing her on the right. The same comment of partnered space for Gnossienne places the ostensibly female Snake Goddess off stage left (Chapter Three). Faune also comments on the gendering of space, in which the “smaller” Faun dominates the taller Nymph from his “correct” position to her right. The gender of the deity addressed in Incense remains ambiguous; in any case, that deity is situated in the position of the audience.

57Ruth St. Denis: Pioneer and Prophet.

58 Not to mention the skimpiness of the Radha costume.

59 St. Denis noted that she had to use the word Hindu or Hindoo for American audiences expecting to see Native American dances.

60Although it is not the purpose of this study to discuss how Gnossienne and Incense were received by Asian audiences, it is interesting to note that Gnossienne generally did not elicit much of a response except in Japan, where it was much admired and remarked upon. However, another solo by Shawn, Death of Adonis (with its Butoh-like whitewash body paint) was reported to have been particularly appreciated.

61 One Thousand and One Night Stands

62 Once modern dance became known as “modern dance”, its artists worked hard to set themselves apart from the “other concert dance” form, ballet. One of the ways they did this was to perform without shoes in direct opposition to ballet slippers. While Shawn and St. Denis performed barefoot, Nijinsky wore flexible slippers in Faune, as did the nymphs.

63 In Chapter Two, the usefulness of Incense as one of a cluster of similarly-themed, short solos for St. Denis was presented as one reason why she kept it in her repertoire, especially when she toured vaudeville.

258

64As was briefly discussed in Chapter Four, French Impressionist composers, including Debussy, were in revolt against the full- and even multiple-evening performances of opera (such as Wagner’s four-part 1876 Der Ring des Nebleungen cycle) that were lavish spectacles popular with middle- and upper-class audiences. The transition into short, intimate and intense “symphonic poems” constitutes a break with the Wagnerian formula that is comparable to a similar break by the Ballets Russes from the Imperial Ballets.

65 Tammany is not, however, recognized as an American opera from the standpoint that its libretto and music were created by Europeans.

66 The libretto for this opera has not survived.

67 Titles in French signaled potential audiences that the production was a high-class, European-style affair with quality artists. The convention of titling ballets in French was an affectation of American ballets well into the 1930s. Somehow Russian titles for ballets never caught on in the same way, but American and English ballet dancers sometimes “Russianized” their stage names in order to underline the strict classical orientation of their performances; a convention wildly lampooned by Les Ballets Trockaderos (i. e. Ballerina “Maya Thickenthighya”). The invocation of the Trockadero in a tradition of comedic parody recalls a vaudeville theatre by that name which opened in 1870 in Philadelphia. Now housing cinema and fine arts, the Trockadero Theatre is the only 19th Century Victorian theatre still operating in the US (http://www.philadex,com/philadelphia/concerts/trocadero.asp 21 September 2004).

68 The stories of the Black Crook and the White Fawn were mediocre at best, and the popularity of these spectaculars rested squarely with the dancing by women in tights. The first cast of the Black Crook was performed by a troupe of European dancers stranded by a theatre fire. Derivative productions of the piece continued to entertain audiences for forty years even after Niblo’s original run (Moore: 65-6).

69 The film features a fetching troupe of ladies in boots and tights to help the scientists into their rocket, and once they arrive on the moon an equally fetching troupe of female moon natives in boots and tights (probably the same group of girls in slightly altered costumes) greet them (from: The Great Primitives).

70 The Vauxhall Gardens of London was a popular entertainment venue opening in 1660 and closing in 1859; a Vauxhall Gardens opened in New York around 1800 but it burned down in 1808.

71 For once, according to Lillian Moore, this was not an American adaptation of the 1813 Italian opera Nina ou la Folle par Amour (Milon) but rather an original production that speculatively attracted its audiences through ready name-recognition of the Milon work.

72 Although written in French and premiered in Paris, Rossini’s William Tell was more often performed in Italian.

259 CONCLUSION

Avant-garde components appropriate to Incense, Gnossienne and Faune have constituted the basis of discussing these dances as examples of experimental Early Modernism. These components of exoticism, distortions of time and space, naturalism of expression, spiritual transformation, and responses to the challenges of technology present a common basis of discussion between art and entertainment. And the ways in which these components interact offer opportunities to encompass both the age and culture in which the avant-garde gained a foothold of such creative vitality. In light of these developments in Early Modernism of Euro-American culture the creators of Gnossienne, Faune, and Incense express their respective dances. Perhaps the most immediately obvious agreement between the three dances in this study is the employment of exotic themes. While Incense suggests contemporary Hindu India, Gnossienne summons visions of the Snake Goddess worship celebrated in frescoes from the Palace of Knossos in Ancient Crete. And Faune recalls a bucolic innocence and primal power inspired by Archaic Greece, in a time before the formalities of Greek classicism had presumably overpowered more immediate connections between emotion and action. At the same time, each artist was so intimately connected to his or her work that the spiritual message in the dance is the message from the artist to the audience. In an indirect assault upon a singularity of authority presented in the exotic themes of earlier dance works, these dances demonstrate how their creators made an effort to embody that authority. In other words, St. Denis, Shawn and Nijinsky as individuals became the recognized persona of the character in their respective dances. In all, Nijinsky’s first major choreography sought to bring together disparate aspects of his spiritual longing, ideas of presentational constructs of time and space, and ambiguities of exotic identity. He managed in Faune to seamlessly combine elements of nature and the innocence of youth in sexual awakening with a movement vocabulary invoking the dehumanizing effects of the Machine Age. The combination of all these issues in his ballet bring Nijinsky’s conception of his life in art well in keeping with the aspirations of the avant-garde milieu of which he was an integral part. As was discussed

260 in Chapter One, Nijinsky’s first choreographed role of the Faun was an ideal subject for artists in all mediums working in the Art Deco style. Exoticism was not a new feature of the avant-garde; as has been discussed, traditional arts and entertainments in both Europe and the United States drew heavily upon exotica to transport audiences out of the ordinary and everyday tedium of modern life. However, in the process of being filtered through defiance of the status quo, images of exoticism in the avant-garde served to comment upon its own constructed nature. In other words, exoticism in revolutionary innovations (regardless of medium) provided the “hook” by which audiences were attracted to view modern art long enough to grasp its radically-altered message. Incense was conceived as the first of a cluster of dances on Hindu religious themes as conceived and understood by St. Denis. Although her impetus to design solos for herself began with a poster advertisement for Egyptian cigarettes, St. Denis saw an overriding thread of spiritual connection between the image of the goddess Isis and her devout Hindu housewife in search of communion with the divine. This was more important to her than the specific differences of exotic locale between Ancient Egypt and contemporary Hindu India. Since a man dancing with sincere expressiveness on a par with poetry was so rare, Ted Shawn was an intrinsically exotic phenomenon, and he was not slow to realize the potential of “the never-when, never-where” remoteness of distant lands and cultures that had become a staple of St. Denis’ work. By incorporating the element of surprise in humor for Gnossienne, Shawn recognized that laughter promoted audience receptivity to the new concept of an expressive American male dancer. The exotic theme of Gnossienne allowed him the power to step out of either having to partner and thereby “show off” a female partner (which had been his job dancing with Wallack, Gould, and St. Denis), or to present a virtuoso show of manly physical prowess. Although Gnossienne’s priest is indeed a “show-off”, he does so under the strictures of formal ritual worship. Nijinsky could easily have gone down in ballet history as a phenomenal dancer who brought to his romantic hero roles a fine musical sensibility and generous support to the finest ballerinas of his day. But although he had been carefully trained in the Imperial

261 Russian schools, the air of change brought to Russia by Duncan touched Nijinsky’s early childhood circus experiences. Even the radical changes in the traditional structure of the ballet which Fokine and Diaghilev promoted in the early years of the Ballets Russes did not satisfy Nijinsky’s vision. With his sister’s aid, Nijinsky developed the choreography of Faune to conform to the images on Archaic Greek vases, and literally translated onto the stage a new visual structure based on zones of representation he found in them. The result was not only an exotic theme, but a texture of movement and a reshaping of performing space that bound Ancient images and Modern interpretation into a unique expressive experience. An authority of “authentic” representation assumed in exotic representations of classical long-standing conveniently transferred to the avant-garde. To begin with, all three artists grappled with issues of physical and spiritual harmony raised by the act of dancing; they, in common with other artists of the avant-garde worked through the process of making works of art starting with a concept of the self as art so that all art that comes out of that self is true to that conception1. While a complete discussion of spiritualism in art is not possible in this study, it is helpful to bring out the subject relative to its opposition in scientific and technological advances. Each new development in technology, designed to bring about mastery of the physical forces of nature, provided fresh opportunities for theatre artists to startle their audiences on an emotional level and alter perceptions of nature in relation to visions of the supernatural. Each artist incorporated the prevailing nature expressed in their respective dances into a performing persona, an attribute of the avant-garde in which the artist was as much an icon of audience recognition as the character exhibited in the work of art. Nijinsky declared that the character of the half-man half-beast Faun was himself (Jonas: 216). Although he portrayed both human and inhuman characters in the Ballets Russes repertoire created for him by Fokine, Nijinsky’s own creation represented a statement of his independent ideas on art and dance. St. Denis remained consistent with the goals expressed in Incense throughout her choreographic and performing career. Many of her subsequent solos particularly invoked the purity and simplicity of contemplative solitude characteristic of her first Hindu dance. Gnossienne opened an opportunity for the former divinity student Shawn to explore an integration of manly and spiritual dance

262 expressions. Its quirky humor acknowledges and comments on a public masculine display in the service of a religious rite. All three dances present various negotiations with music in keeping with these alterations of expressive movement. St. Denis first conceptualized the idea of her dance and then went in search of appropriate music for it. Shawn choreographed the movements of his dance first, then found the suggestion of an appropriate narrative and Cretan theme in the title of the piano work by Satie. Both Shawn and St. Denis incorporated the dynamics of their respective music choices closely to their expressive gestures. But Nijinsky’s abrupt, angular and flat choreography only subtly refers to the languid, dream-like dynamics of Debussy’s music. Movement and music in Faune cohabit the same temporal frame with key connections to one another, instead of match each other in a close parallel between visual and audible elements. Nijinsky had the idea for the ballet, a conception of its characteristic movements, and had chosen its music well before beginning to choreograph (Nijinska). Along these considerations the three dances also made use of posed iconographic images. In so doing, each dance artist encouraged audience receptivity to altered relationships between expression and the forms in which that expression is carried. The upset of traditional representational order is mitigated, however, through the employment of a form of ritual. Consequently, each dance explores a ritual enacted through the body as a means to convey that self-conscious construction along with the structure of authority to do so: . . .at each stage of knowledge, the general agreement of what the universe is supposed to be takes the form of a shorthand code which is shared by everyone. . .These forms primarily take the shape of rituals. Involvement in them implies that the participants are not maverick. They conform by acting out the ritual. Each participant has a specific role to play, and one that is not invented or elaborated but laid down prior to the event (Burke: 11-2).

Through the employment of ritual, then, the dance artist presents him or herself as an experienced guide into unfamiliar territory supported by an external formality of ritual. While Incense retains a slight acknowledgement of the audience in this journey, this presence is mitigated by the instructive element of the dance. Because it is

263 “Oriental” and therefore new, or unfamiliar, the presence of an audience expecting to be informed as well as entertained is assumed. Above all, Incense, as a transition between entertainment and spiritual expression demonstrated an awareness of staged aesthetics in the service of what St. Denis called “truth and beauty”. This translated for her into a careful balancing of visual compositional elements for every moment with long, flowing lines, circular and spiral directions, and an uncomplicated narrative, regardless of theme. In this regard, Incense is very much in keeping with both Art Nouveau and Art Deco aesthetics: the sinuous lines of her undulating arms and flowing sari recall the organic asymmetry of nature combined with feminine grace characteristic of Art Nouveau, and the repetitions of triangular shapes in her central position between two incense burners suggests the stability of Art Deco design. Gnossienne and Faune, by contrast have more in common with elements of Art Deco, which followed Art Nouveau both in Europe and the United States. Efficiency of line and speed suggested in rounded edges contrasted with flat, visually-straight lines and symmetrical geometry characteristic with Art Deco also predominated the stylistic features of Gnossienne and Faune. The constructed image of masculinity incorporated a play of surfaces in both dances, which nevertheless revealed complex considerations of gender. While Shawn’s priest danced a dyad form by himself in a hollow ritual shadowed by the gigantic persona of the feminine power in expressive dance (St. Denis), Nijinsky’s Faun failed to capture the elusive body of the Nymph, and instead pressed to his body and “consumed” her dropped veil by proxy. Furthermore, gendered space in Gnossienne and Faune was expressed through left (female) and right (male) sides of the stage, a pictorial convention the origins of which have been lost in antiquity (Lemos). In commenting upon this convention, which even today dictates where people sit in segregated congregations2 and the placement of male (lions) and female (sphinx) on iconographic fields of heraldry. The idea of containing within one body the powers of both male and female attributes was an inheritance of Early Modernism from the previous movement of Romanticism, and in its avant-garde manifestation, took advantage of both spiritual and exotic contexts. But ambiguity of gender was not the preserve of European arts alone; even American popular entertainments of vaudeville and cinema participated in

264 restructurings of gender representation. St. Denis presented in Incense an unavailable feminine form and an androgynous being absorbed in [her] own self-completion. Shawn was well aware of the strongly feminine connotations associated with any dancing body3 regardless of gender and strategically infused Gnossienne with humor in a way that would allow the audience to see him as a dancer first, and as a man who is dancing on stage as a secondary condition in the performance of the piece. Furthermore, Gnossienne suggested a reversal of power in gender with the idea of a physically-domineering goddess demanding submission of her all-too-humanly frail priest as he goes through the movements of partnering her as a solo dance. Nijinsky’s negotiations of gender and creation of the spiritual self in Faune were quite different from St. Denis’ or Shawn’s. Gender in Faune was less a negotiation designed around audience perceptions and more around the internal psychological structure of the dancing body as an androgyny; that is, in its literal, dictionary definition as: “[An] androgynous person [is] somebody who gives the impression of having both a male and a female sexual identity”4 The movements made by the character of Nijinsky’s Faune indicated this being was attracted to, and confused by, the nymphs who trespassed upon his domain; physically and psychologically. His gestures suggest he made an attempt to encompass their qualities into his own body; first by unsuccessfully attempting to embrace the Nymph, who easily slipped away. In the end he “consumed” the veil she has dropped, thereby attempting (in an infantile oral way) to obtain the feminine powers with which the veil had been symbolically endowed. Nijinsky’s Faun repeatedly struggled to reconcile dichotomies of identity such as masculine/feminine, human/divine, knowing/ignorance, singular/plural and intellect/feeling. Unresolved, he returned to these mystical considerations in his diary entries by expressing an obsessive permutation of possibilities of multiple identity and role constructs as if they were something like “psychological” costumes; a condition often attributed to the Modern man5. For example, Nijinsky states in his diary that he is both “husband and wife”, and that: I am God in Bull. I am Apis. I am an Egyptian. I am an Indian. I am a Red Indian. I am a Negro. I am a Chinese. I am a Japanese. I am a foreigner and a stranger. I am a . I am a land bird (44).

265 Nijinsky also states that he is “. . .one man in a million. I am not alone. I am a million, for I feel more than a million” (45). Perhaps he was in the process of succumbing to insanity6 while writing his diary, it was not unusual for Nijinsky to contradict himself in a single sentence. The translator’s notes for one of his poems in the diary indicate that his use of Church Slavonic Russian grammar had more to do with rhythmic and rhyme schemes than literal religious meaning. He also shifted between masculine and feminine second person modifiers, “. . .and from singular to plural and back again for no discernable reason”(Kyril Fitzlyon: 69). It is interesting furthermore in the context of gender and artistic creation that these artists worked in male/female pairs. As presented in Chapter Two, Incense was St. Denis’ first solo she made for herself as a dancer before she formed any artistic associations with other art dancers. Based upon a contemporary Hindu ritual of worship St. Denis’ image of a sari-clad woman wreathed in the smoke of incense offered her audiences a compelling image of exoticism rendered as both universal and personal truth. Certainly the examples of Stebbins, Duncan, and Fuller were well in mind, and the opinions of her mother influenced her greatly. But in the act of referring to them, St. Denis was also careful to simultaneously distinguish herself from these predecessors in dance art as well as from burlesque entertainments that relied heavily on exotic themes. St. Denis sought first the advice of men to establish he authenticity of her exotic theme for her first serious dance solo. She had performed on vaudeville and in the Belasco productions, observing how men dictated and organized theatrical productions. And she had as a model of staged exotic authority the example of Edmund Russell, who gave dramatic and well-received public readings of The Light of Asia. Not only did Russell encourage and assist St. Denis in her 1906 Indian dances, but he also gave several joint salon performances with her. St. Denis also consulted with East Indian merchants on the specifics of Hindu rituals and daily life. If, as Shelton has noted in her biography of St. Denis, Incense is fundamentally a Delsarte exercise (57), then its corresponding oratorical “brother” is to be found in Russell’s Delsarte-inspired presentations. While St. Denis gained validation for her earliest Oriental dances from men, Shawn’s Gnossienne grew out of a class exercise from the Denishawn school, which had been created as an extension of the artistic partnership between Shawn and St. Denis. By

266 that time, Shawn had worked with St. Denis as her partner and co-choreographer for at least seven years. It is evident that the more experienced and well-known St. Denis had a major role in guiding the development of Shawn’s creative output, and she enthusiastically advised him on all aspects of his work. Shawn's conversion to dance came about during an attack of diphtheria while he was in training to become a minister at the University of Denver. An overdose of serum left him paralyzed below the hips, and rehabilitation included ballet lessons. Shawn did not like ballet particularly, but he discovered he did like to dance. His decision to incorporate his evangelical zeal to bringing men to dance with dignity was met with horror by his academic advisor, and he left his studies to pursue his vision. In this gesture of reconstruction as “a self-made man”, Shawn calls to mind both the successful vaudeville strongman Sandow and the evangelical preacher Billy Sunday7. Shawn first saw St. Denis in 1911 performing Incense and her spiritual rendition of East Indian exoticism further inspired his purpose. After joining with several partners (notably Norma Gould) for tea dance performances, Shawn answered a call in 1914 from St. Denis who was looking for a partner. As her partner, Shawn was guided and advised by St. Denis in his early choreography very much in the way St. Denis had been guided and advised by her mother. St. Denis was intrigued with Shawn’s ideas, and perceived in him the same impetus toward a utopic idealism realized through dance. Joseph Mazo describes Shawn audition for St. Denis in his book, Prime Movers: . . . [Shawn] danced for her [St. Denis]; he performed an Aztec dagger dance which St. Denis later described as “. . .one of those rather crude and simple rhythmic dances which in after years one looks back upon with a kind of loving tolerance” (92).

Shawn’s professional and personal partnership with St. Denis was unusual; as it has been argued in this study the overwhelming dominance of women generally, and St. Denis’ fame specifically, in expressive dance colored some interpretations of Gnossienne. While she was called “Miss Ruth” and preserved the distant if benign persona of the goddess even with her most intimate students, Ted Shawn was simply called “Ted”8. St. Denis was the dominant performing artist and more publicly recognized, but Shawn was certainly the more methodical in directing and teaching students, dealing with

267 performance tech support, and devising choreography. Their performing company and school, Denishawn, was established after they were married and ended with marital separation in 1925, though remnants of Denishawn continued with Shawn until 1931. Despite their separate talents, it was St. Denis who had the greater fame; Ted Shawn. . .had a flair for mixing art and business in the right proportions, cleverly devising programs that allowed St. Denis her mystic vein but ended with a dash of ragtime jazz. . . . it was he who realized they should open a school. . .shrewdly making sure that Denishawn was synonymous in the public mind with art and good taste. . .(Fontyen: 108)

Nijinsky also formed an artistic partnership with his sister Nijinska. Together, they worked in secret to develop the movement vocabulary of Faune, and upon Ida Rubenstein’s refusal to take the part of the first nymph, Bronislava took her place. In 1914 Bronislava also performed Nijinsky’s role of the Faun, suggesting the interchangeability of her dancing body for that of her brother. The influence of Nijinsky’s ideas on Nijinska’s later choreography is pronounced. And when, in 1919 she established her Ecole de Mouvement, she did so with the idea that Nijinsky would eventually join in teaching and choreographic partnership with her. Together she hoped they would create new ballets referential to, but not dominated by, traditional ballet aesthetics. In order to achieve this goal, Bronislava recognized the need for an ensemble of dancers trained to handle non-traditional choreographic demands; a project close in concept to the principles of Denishawn. In 1915 Shawn stated that: “The art of the Dance is too big to be encompassed by any one system. On the contrary, the Dance includes all systems or schools of dance. Every way that any human being of any race or nationality, at any period of human history has moved rhythmically to express himself, belongs to Dance. We endeavour to recognize and use all contributions of the past to the Dance and will continue to use all new contributions in the future” (Guest: 74).

And Nijinska comments in her 1919 notebooks that: “The contemporary school must broaden itself, must enlarge its technique, to the same degree that contemporary choreography has by departing from the old classical ballets” (Baer: 86).

268 The three dances are staged with related yet different orientations of audience and dancer. St. Denis’ Incense places the audience in the privileged position of the deity being worshipped, and yet the dancer is also the entity on display in an acknowledgement of the traditional performing arrangement of the female dancer on display to the male gaze. Given her position in the cultural development of the United States of the time, St. Denis’ negotiation of this familiar relationship empowered her to both accommodate and defy these expectations in a way not unlike Manet’s Olympia, who returns the masculine gaze from a position at least equal to that of the viewer. But Shawn and Nijinsky present the gendering space in different context than that of Incense. The feminine dominance of expressive dance provided Shawn with an opportunity to explore gendered power in Gnossienne. His dance places the (absent feminine) Snake Goddess off-stage right, directly opposite his priest’s stage-left location of (masculine) willful pride. Faune’s nymphs (both present and absent) enter and exit exclusively on and off stage-right. While not actual deities, these nymphs generally (and the Nymph in particular) are the focus of the Faun’s interest and transformation analogous to the deities implied in Incense and Gnossienne. St. Denis and Shawn performed their respective dances throughout their long performing careers, but Nijinsky performed as the Faun only from its premiere in 1912 until the collapse of his ill-fated Saison Nijinsky in 1914. Faune and Incense represented the first formal choreographic works for public performance by their creators, but Gnossienne was created after Shawn had choreographed and performed many of his own solos. And while Gnossienne and Faune certainly had some landmark influences on subsequent works by Shawn and Nijinsky, respectively, Incense can be more accurately considered as the first in a close series of five solos for St. Denis, all designed after variations on East Indian motifs and often performed in sequence during the same production. All three artists had some prior performing experience in the works of others, and had achieved fame as dancers from which the authority to choreograph was derived. St. Denis and Nijinsky had their career focus on being dancers, a fact reflected in their subsequent dances. But Shawn’s Gnossienne presents a different relationship between the acts of performance and choreography because it grew out of a classroom exercise

269 Shawn had devised for his students. Gnossienne retained a dual purpose in that it was performed both as a dance and as a class exercise in Shawn’s lecture tours. The dance also passed from Shawn to Mumaw, then from Mumaw to Clark in this dual role of performance and education. Thus, Gnossienne was part of a continuing process of self- education that included educating others in all phases of dance. The evolution of choreography for Shawn grew in conjunction with, as opposed to arising as a result of, his development as a dancer. While the early art movements in Europe starting with the Futurists altered the relationship between viewer and art, as for artist and audience just before the turn of the century, immediately following in the first years of the 1900s cinema, taking its format cue from the success of its parent, vaudeville in the United States made of time and space an experiential commodity (Chapter Five). All three dances depend upon the posed stage picture by which the dance artist and the work created fuse into an iconic moment. As was true of both Gnossienne and Incense, Faune was composed out of a series of positions and a flow of transitions between them designed to present the dancer/choreographer as the central figure with whom the audience would most clearly relate. The stillness of these key positions suggests their emotional/conceptual importance; they were worked out in meticulous detail. Because the audience is prompted to focus on the single dancing body, and because that body poses in certain positions, the visual consequence is that these poses contain important messages. The sense of ritual formality in all three dances also paradoxically refers to natural movements designed to convey truth as opposed to artifice. In the execution of her worship, St. Denis employed walking, kneeling, rocking, and standing in a way that suggested that even non-dancers could perform these same movements. At the same time, however, her carefully-presented picture of the body to the audience’s view, for all the air of solitude, suggested an unacknowledged awareness of being observed, ostensibly by the deity. This tension of solitary task posed for the benefit of a (divine) audience is both flattering and demanding; the audience is welcome to join her in vision but not physically in fact. It was only a very short step for St. Denis to move from the position of worshipper to that of the deity being worshipped, as in Radha (Terry, St. Denis, et. al.). By merging these identities, St. Denis implies a seamless relationship

270 between exotic ritual formality and the naturalness of a (very beautiful young woman) performing them gracefully in a timelessly-eternal frame of temporal continuity. As was discussed in Chapter Five, both popular entertainments and “legitimate”, serious dramas of the directly or indirectly to the movement/emotion correlations were analyzed in minute detail by Delsarte. Perhaps in part due to the fact that the Delsarte system of exercises designed to improve the health and poise of middle- and upper-class women were popular at the time, its expressive melding of spiritual orientation with the methodical analysis of scientific inquiry made it read as “natural”. While both Shawn and St. Denis studied Delsarte’s methods and incorporated them into both their choreography and Denishawn’s curriculum, it is speculated that Nijinsky probably encountered Delsarte’s (American version) ideas of natural expressiveness through Duncan (Reuter). Delsarte’s Law of Correspondence cited by Shawn in his book, Every Little Movement states that: “To each spiritual function responds a function of the body; to each grand function of the body corresponds a spiritual act” (22). Therefore, if the body moved in accord with the inner dictates of its spirit, those movements would be recognized as both true and beautiful. With his ballets generally and Petrouska directly, Fokine had taken to heart the challenge offered by Duncan’s natural approach to expressive movement, and conceived a to ballet that would suit emerging artistic goals of the nascent Twentieth Century. In this effort, his choreography for Ballets Russes was exceptionally fruitful. But although he shifted exotic themes into a new arena of expression that propelled the Ballets Russes into the Parisian limelight, Fokine did not go quite so far as to reflect upon the construction of ballet as a convention of presentational assumptions.

Nijinsky’s Faune, however, went beyond Fokine’s conception (Dunning, Jeschke). For the first time in a ballet, the choreographer severely flattened all movement into a two-dimensional plane and patterned the stage view into precise horizontal zones, one above the other. In this treatment, the impression of great depth and sculptural dimensionality upon which traditional ballet technique and choreographic expressiveness depends was rejected in favor of another, equally-constructed presentational sense of time and space.

271 As much as our ancestors were accustomed to a vista dominated by nature, were used to living in a landscape of images. . .It’s a defining feature of modern experience, on which differentiates our age from any other (Knight: E-1-40-41).

All three artists constructed a new sense of the self in relation to art. But the construction of self as spiritual artist did not find easy ground in Euro-American Christian conventions; particularly for the dance artist. For this reason, Nijinsky, St. Denis and Shawn found it easier to accomplish this transformation in context with exotic themes. Shawn’s Gnossienne, St. Denis’ Incense, and Nijinsky’s Faune are intriguing examples of the avant-garde Early Modernism in Euro-American culture as a bridge not only between the United States and Europe, but between art and culture in the western tradition. In the gesture of the avant-garde defying middle-class mores, expectations, and hidden agendas in the relationship between power and meaning, these dances express the results of both collaborative and individual artistic responses to the pressures of Early Modernism.

272

END NOTES TO CONCLUSION

1 An example of this conceptual flow from the spiritual self to spiritual works of art made from the self might be St. Denis’ famous encounter with a poster for Egyptian cigarettes featuring a fanciful depiction of Isis, which she said completely congealed for her ideas for a new expressive dance (An Unfinished Life). The spiritual impetus offered her by the poster was filtered first through St. Denis, as she had herself photographed as the Egyptian goddess (1904), then created a series of Hindu Indian dances on spiritual themes of which one was Incense (1906), and only after that choreographed Egypta (1910) the first of a series directly related to the image on the cigarette poster. She herself stated there was but a very little difference between a theme of Ancient Egypt and a theme of modern Hindu worship, in part because the impetus of her conceptual starting point filtered through her personal spiritualism did not change (as she herself did not change), regardless of exotic theme.

2 Hindu assemblies facing the Darshan (appearance) hall for a guru, and the gender-segregated congregations of both Quakers and Shakers follow this convention, with the women sitting on the left side, and the men sitting on the right.

3 In the opening pages of his autobiographical account about how he became a dancer, (One Thousand and One Night Stands) Shawn shares with the reader his considerable trepidations over the derisive reactions men in the audience might have to his first solo dance performance. As long as he had a female partner, Shawn could somewhat justify his dancing as necessary to show his partner to advantage. But a single male dancer on the stage—particularly the vaudeville stage on which most of his early solos had their first showings—was a comic rather than a serious situation. In having the laugh “first” at himself in Gnossienne as the arrogant priest of the snake goddess, Shawn cleverly assumes control of the humor implicit in the male dancing body, thereby removing that prerogative from the audience so that it has a chance to accept some of its more serious aspects. This humor was a successful element of many of his solos (Chapter Three).

4Encarta World English Dictionary, St. Martin Press, 1999: 63.

5 An excellent interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for example, discusses the fragmentation of his personality as a particular dilemma of the modern man. Similar fragmentation appears in the writings of Camu and Kafka, to name but two other examples.

6As Joan Acocella states in the Introduction to her unexpurgated edition of The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, the journal gives a detailed and chilling account of an artist succumbing to the initial stages of psychosis.

7 Both Sandow and Sunday were physically weak as children.

8 Later, all Shawn’s students called him “Papa Shawn”. It is appropriate that some commentators refer to him as “the father of American Modern Dance”.

273

APPENDIX

A Description of the Dances

I The Incense

II Gnossienne

III Afternoon of a Faun

274 The following is a general word description of each dance. While it is impossible to catalogue the details of every movement in this fashion, the description facilitates an examination of the dances as cultural texts. Some clarification on the way in which the word “text” is used in reference to movement needs to be made. Without undertaking an extended discussion on how dance can, or cannot, be classified as language, a simple disclaimer is offered here. This study does not imply that words perform the same descriptive and connotative function in constructing meaning as do dance movements. Rather, both words and dance movements (or, the successive design sequences of the dancer’s body in space and time) serve as units of meaning in their respective mediums of expression. While some scholars prefer to use the word “signifiers” in referring to the “ineffable” meanings in dance, the word “text” was chosen to facilitate understanding some of the culturally communicative functions both written and danced expressions have in common, rather than their obvious differences.

Particular aspects of the dances are noted as follows:

Speed and quality: a general idea of how fast or slow the movements are and if they are smooth or abrupt relative to comparable everyday movements.

Direction: where in space the whole body moves, or how one part of the body parallels or opposes direction in another. These directions are relative to the point of view of the performer on the stage. If the dancer faces right and walks forward, it means the audience sees the dancer facing and moving to their left. In order to provide a standard of description for the use of space and direction in these dances, I refer to standard stage directions as follows: Upstage away from the audience Downstage toward the audience Stage Right Stage Left Stage Center horizontal/vertical diagonal/direct curved/straight parallel/angled

Positions: transitions into and out of positions of pose and if the position is open (for the front of the body visible to the audience) or closed (for the back of the body visible to the audience)

Autosphere: this term refers to that area of maximum space that can be reached by the dancer in all directions without locomotion (i. e. from a stationary position). The autosphere moves with the dancer and has as point of reference the dancer’s center of balance rather than a point of reference in the space outside the dancer.

275 I. Incense Choreographer Ruth St. Denis (1906) Piano Music Harvey Worthington Loomis Dancer Lisa Plank Reconstruction Professor Jack Clark Performance and video recording at Florida State University (2001) time length 6 min.

Information on the reconstruction process for this dance was gathered through conversations with Professor Jack Clark 9/16/03 and 4/16/03. It was undertaken by Professor Clark in response to an MFA candidate’s project on notation. It was reconstructed using a labanotation score supplemented by study of photographs and film versions of St. Denis’ performances of the piece.

Description of the Dance

The overall pace of the dance is slow and deliberate. There are no abrupt movements or transitions between movement sequences and positions of stillness. No movement energy leaves the autoshpere of the dancer, although distances beyond are sometimes indicated by extension of extremities.

The dancer enters the stage area walking from upstage right to center. As she does this, the music completes one phrase and a repeat. The dancer stands facing the audience, holding the offering tray in front of her just below heart level, forearms at right angles to her body. When the music starts a new phrase the dancer walks forward four steps in a straight line down stage starting on her right foot. With each step the foot is gently turned out and she rocks gently forward and back at each step. The dancer amplifies this forward swaying motion by slightly swinging the tray out away from and in toward the center of her body.

She takes one large step to her right with her right foot and turns her upper body to follow the line, leaving her left foot and leg to mark her central position. The left side of her body is toward the audience. She sweeps first down toward the ground in front of her then swings upward to the right, looking in that direction, bringing the tray as high as she can. She is in profile to the right, the left side of her body describing a long diagonal line. She retraces the line of movement back to the ground in front to the tray in both hands to the left and transferring her weight from the right to left leg without reaching with her foot. This time, the right foot remains pointing to the central position as she lifts the tray high to the left, mirroring the swing she has just made to the right.

The effect is that the tray describes a large U with the dancer in the middle, and the action of this symmetry is reflected in the repeating melody in the music. If there is a pause at the apex of these lines, it is very slight, for the dancer continues to move, and the line of her vision follows the trajectory of the tray. As she swings the tray down the dancer draws her right foot in to stand on both feet, the tray again at her center.

276 This sequence of walking forward and reaching right and left is repeated, but at its conclusion, the dancer this time circles her right foot behind her and bends down, placing the dish on the floor in front of her. As she lifts her upper body, her palms come together in a gesture of prayer, held first at her forehead, then lowered to her heart. Her eyes are looking down, then as her hands come down the center line of her body, she lifts her head and looks up. As if framing herself, the dancer curves her arms symmetrically and simultaneously together to reach down for the tray and she lifts it and herself up. She stands, holding the tray balanced in her left hand a little higher than her head but away from her body and turning right, walks in a curve down stage right to the right of the large burner there. The extended arm and hand supporting the tray is counterbalanced by a forward gesture of her right arm, palm facing out to the direction she is walking. Her head is held high and turns slightly from side to side as she walks so that her face is framed between her curved arms, which are held away from her body.

When she arrives at a position to the right of the burner, the dancer picks up some incense from the tray and tosses it into the burner with her right hand. The dancer’s right arm and hand undulate, and her head lifts. She transfers the tray to her right hand, pushes the palm of her left hand in front of her in a mirror repeat of her previous stance, and completes the circle walking around the burner.

She walks across the stage in a slightly diagonal angle to center stage. Her head turns right as she takes a forward step on the right foot, so her body is twisted. She makes a small turn circling left, the tray held high, her head following it and ends facing the audience, standing at center stage. She bends forward to change the dish to the left hand and lifts it as high as she can, making her body into one long extended line upward and looks up at it. She pauses in this position. She lowers the dish, transfers it to her right hand and walks in a downstage curve stage left, her left arm leading.

She circles to the right of the right burner and repeats tossing the incense, gesturing smoke with her left arm and hand in a mirror repeat of her actions at the first burner. She transfers the tray to her left hand and walks the rest of the way around the burner to take up a position at center stage again. Her head is tilted toward the tray, and her face open to the audience. She repeats a small circle to the right, now holding the tray in both hands. She places the tray in front of her on the floor, and stands up. Standing in second position, she undulates her body as if the previous undulations of her arms only had taken possession of her. All her joints move in a rippling sequence to accomplish this movement. She rocks right and left as her arms move up and down.

Then she bends forward down to the tray, both arms circling the outside of her body together and joining to pick it up. The sequence of circling both burners is repeated in a floor pattern roughly like a figure eight pinned at the center by a repeat of the gesture in which she holds the tray high in her left palm above her head. When she has returned to center stage, she puts the tray down on the floor again. As she rises to stand, her arms circle wide around her body and come together wrists back to back with palms facing outward high over her head which is held high. This pose is held briefly, reflecting a climax in the music.

277

She undulates out of this pose, repeating the same gestures as before, rocking from side to side. She bends again to pick up the tray and standing, appears to present it to the audience before walking backward, repeating the U shape gesture right then left. She takes a few steps backward again, pauses to look at the audience with the tray held in both hands at heart level, then she lowers her head slightly, turns to the right, and exits, up stage center and then to the right the way she entered. The dancer returns to take a dignified bow.

278 II. Gnossienne Choreography Ted Shawn (1919) Music for Piano Eric Satie (1889) Re-creation Barton Mumaw (1994-5) Piano Accompaniment Lyudmila Mclerud Dancer Professor Jack Clark Performed and videotaped at Florida State University (1995) time 2 min

The overall impression of the dance is quick and light, a study in isolated movements for segmented parts of the body. Lines are direct and forcefully indicated with no ambiguity of direction; there are few curves either in the floor pattern or in the movements of the dancer’s body. Although some movements, whether small (a flick of the wrist) or large (change of direction in which the dancer travels) are abrupt and some smooth and flowing, all have the same dynamic value, just as do the melodic sequences and their mirror-reversals. At no time does the energy of any movement leave the immediate area of the autosphere. The dance is introspectively centered, even though some locations beyond it are occasionally indicated through the extremities.

The dancer enters from up stage left moving in a straight line to stage right in profile to the audience. He quickly walks, glides and skips, head and lower body face right, but the arms and upper body face left. He stands, knees bent, then lifts high demipointe and lowers his heels again without moving any other part of his body. He turns abruptly to indicate a diagonal path down stage left, hands held at the right hip. This allows the audience to see the hand positions clearly. His head moves twice as if looking back, then he proceeds on a straight diagonal course, pausing to lift the palm of his left hand up and then down again as if coyly revealing a tiny portion of his hip. Simultaneously, he rises and falls again from demipointe, knees still bent, and moving nothing else except his head to glance back, with the hand gesture three times in crossing to down stage left.

There he falls into a wide second position, knees bent, arms up with elbows bent and turns to run upstage, presenting the audience with a picture of his back, arms framing his head. The palms of his hands are turned out. He runs a slight curve to stand up stage left, head facing right, but the rest of his body facing the audience. He lowers his arms, elbows still bent, to indicate his hips.

Simultaneously, his knees bend and he has risen to demipointe. His arms return to frame his head as his knees straighten and his heels touch the ground, presenting the previous pose as before, and this is quickly repeated. This time in crossing from upstage left to upstage right in a straight line the dancer drops into a quick kneeling position near center stage with his face and upper body toward the audience, left knee up, right knee down in a swooping motion that does not halt his momentum. His head looks in the direction in which he is rapidly traveling, except once or twice he looks back.

279 He takes a few steps more as head, and lower body facing right, torso and upper body facing the audience. His hands again come to his hips as he rises to demipointe, elbows and knees bent, then he returns to straight legs as the arms rotate up to frame the head again, this without altering the angle of the elbow or wrists.

At up stage right, he again turns to a diagonal downstage left direction while both arms come down to indicate that direction in front of him as if drawing an arrow. The dancer pulls his arms closer to his chest almost folded “indian-style”, left above right. He adjusts his position as he turns right, with left leg and arm extended behind him. Making an outside turn to the left, as he progresses down stage right, his arms follow the curve of his trajectory to lift beside his face. He takes a few steps in profile right and extends his arms in front of himself to step into a deep lunge. Here the elbows are fully extended as he moves his whole body from a high to a low position in five stop action movements; the last one in a ripple up the spine to head corresponding to a “grace trill” in the music. This gesture ends with both hands pointing toward his extended right leg in back, his head bowed. He suddenly lifts himself and bends backward over the extended legs, head facing upstage and arms and wrists again flexed to frame his head.

Maintaining this upper body position, the dancer turns right in an outside turn, leaping to the right leg in a wide second and continuing the turn by leaping to his left leg in a wide second, his back to the audience. He completes the turn to face the audience, and in another half-turn in the same direction, the dancer brings his arms wide out about shoulder level. He is running to the right as he brings both arms forward to press palms together in front of him, right leg forward, left behind in attitude (knee facing the floor). His head is slightly bent, as if “condescending” a humble attitude of prayer.

He hops back and forth between right and left legs three times, bringing his hands together forward and back of his body on each hop facing right, and looking back over his shoulder when his hands clap in back. He ends this sequence with a quick draw into a standing position, both arms framing his head, fingertips touching. He faces in this position to the left, lunging forward on his upstage (left) leg and drawing back into a passé supported on his right. He lunges again, this time drawing up in a passé on his left as his head faces right. His arms have not moved. As he steps behind himself, his arms come down wide to the sides closing near his hips, always up stage arm and leg forward, downstage arm and leg behind him. He continues to face to the right.

There is a slight lift to demipointe, then he simply swivels his body around inside the frame of arms and legs to the same position facing to the left. He again “shrugs” to the left. This shift and is repeated twice again. The dancer then turns to the left and in a running step diagonal sweeps his arms out and around him, though this time the right comes down (palm to floor) as the left goes up (palm to ceiling). Into this framing the body turns back to face the audience, and he draws himself into a passé on his left leg, left arm high, right arm low. He then drops into a diagonal cross down stage right, as both arms meet at the same level and sweep up and out overhead. With a slicing movement the arms pass and he falls into a deep bend on his right leg, left leg bending at the knee and behind. His torso is pitched forward, almost horizontally in the direction of

280 movement. In this “racing” position, he lifts on demipointe and runs the rest of the way down stage right. Again, he swings his arms wide overhead and pivots on his left leg high to return the way he came. But about half way back he lands in a wide second, his arms swing up to frame the head fingertips touching, and the audience sees him with his back deeply arched to them and head held high.

The dancer recovers from this position by turning to face the audience, right arm positioned over left arm in front of his chest. (You didn’t think I could do that, did you?) As he steps out to the right, presenting his body fully to the front, the arms switch position at each step. He stops center stage and swivels his body inside the frame of his arms from side to side and repeats this in crossing to stage left.

Changing again to move stage right, he brings his arms in a sweep up to frame his head again, this time kneeling on both knees, upstage knee in front of the downstage one. He arches back in a deep backbend, head high. Then in five stop movements, his arms come in front of him in a prayerful gesture and his body bends forward to the ground. Quickly he recovers to his feet and runs across the stage to the left, arms sweeping down to his sides again. In this direction he again repeats his supplication.

He recovers to his feet, and almost defiantly slaps his hands together in a crouch; each time swiveling as if to travel in the opposite direction three times. But as he shifts in this frame to the left, he seems to be looking back over his shoulder. This reversal of direction finishes with a defiant leap to the left, both arms coming overhead then pressed across his chest upon landing, facing to the left. Abruptly, he shifts direction to the right running in that direction with both arms out in front of himself, palms forward as if pushing. He ends his run down stage center, facing right. Feet together he rises to demipointe, with the up stage arm lifting, the down stage arm lowering. The last two steps in that direction, in contrast to the lightfootedness of the rest of the dance, are stomped audibly and heavily into the ground. He ends kneeling in an open position with his upstage arm extended, then suddenly bows, both arms bent, palms down on the floor in front of him, his head down.

281 III. Afternoon of a Faun Choreography Vaslav Nijinsky (1912) Music Claude Debussy ( Scenery and Costume by Leon Bakst

Dancer Rudolf Nureyev Reconstructed time 13 min.

The dance takes place on two spacial levels, one (private hillock to the faun) elevated above the other (which the faun cohabits with the nymphs). Both dance and music coincide in some sequential conclusions, but other than coexisting in the same time frame, do not refer to one another. Music and movement qualities are in opposition; while the music is languid and dreamy, most movements are abrupt, with sudden changes of direction and position. The faun achieves a very smooth transition of weight from one foot to the other in walking, but it is accomplished from the knees down, as if paralyzed at the groin. His feet are deeply flexed as he rolls his balance from one foot to the other. All movements have height and width, but no depth—it is as if the dimensions of upstage and downstage do not exist. Everyone moves in straight lines from one side of the stage to the other.

With the opening bars of music, the faun is discovered posed lounging on his hillock. He reclines in a position closed to the audience slightly on his left side propped up by his left arm. His right knee is flexed and his left leg extended in front of him, his toes flexed as if pushing against an invisible wall. In his right hand he holds a flute to his lips, and he is facing stage left.

He slowly lowers the flute to lay it on the ground at his side and sits up, his right hand extending to his flexed knee, hands in a mitten closure with the thumb up and separated. He rests his elbow on his knee. Abruptly he shifts position to turn away from the audience, then further to face to the right, elbows bent. Completing the turn, he lies supine full length on his hill, looking up into the sky. He stretches his arms high above his head in a yawn, then reaches in front of himself to sit upright, both feet deeply flexed in front of himself. His torso is now open to the audience, face still in profile to the right. His left arm supports his upper body as his right leg crosses his left. Resting his right arm on his right knee, he is now in mirror opposite to his first sitting position.

Reaching with his right hand to the flute, he again lifts it to his lips. This coincides with the introduction of a soft oboe segment of the music. After a moment, he replaces the flute on the ground and turns facing stage left in a deep closed lunge, right leg over left, twisting his body to look left. His right knee comes to the ground and his whole body faces left. He opens his mouth wide, crouching with both hands on the ground, his left knee up. As his left foot reaches forward to take his weight, right knee on the ground, his torso is again open to the audience, and he pauses, elbows flexed, palms facing the audience, left slightly in front, and right slightly behind his body.

282 He scoops both hands forward to pick up a cluster of (white?) grapes. Lifting them high over his head, he lowers them to his mouth. then places them on the ground again. Crouching forward, he scoops up another bunch of grapes (red?) and brushes them against his mouth as if eating and places them on the ground also. He then turns to face stage right, sitting in a mirror image to his first sitting position, face in profile to the right, right leg flexed over left that is extended in front of him both feet flexed. His left arm rests on his knee, and his hand, thumb separated gestures to the left.

He does not move as three nymphs enter from stage right and cross in a straight line to stage center. They are in profile looking in the direction they are moving to the left, arms linked loosely at the elbows, and their bodies, equidistant from one another facing the audience. Their upper bodies are immobile, carried smoothly over the ground in a gliding movement. They pause and turn their heads to look back where they came, expectantly. They gesture simultaneously lifting their right arms and walk the rest of the way to stage left as two more nymphs enter from that direction and mirror the gesture. With two nymphs on the right, and three on the left, the immobile faun is framed between the two groupings. One more nymph enters from stage right. She stops just under the faun’s hillock., bends down, and stands up in a flattened attitude facing left, both arms framing her head in profile, and her right leg lifted. She faces both directions as if to acknowledge the two groups and walks backward to join the two standing to the right. The picture is now symmetrically balanced.

No one moves while the faun with jerking head movements, seems to follow the entrance of one more nymph from stage right. Once she has stopped walking and opens her arms holding a veil, his head jerks back to its previous profile facing right. The two groups of three nymphs pass in flat lines behind her. She drops her veil on the ground and reaching out from her body with her arms wide, the solo nymph stands up. At either side, the two groups of three strike a symmetrical tableau.

The faun stands up. The single nymph drops another veil and turns to face him in profile to the audience. As the two groups of nymphs pass each other from side to side like curtains, the faun walks backward down his hillock, feet deeply flexed, arms bent at elbows, hands at his sides. He is in profile looking in the direction from which he has been descending. He walks straight from stage right to stage left, looking only in the direction in which he is moving behind the nymph, who countermoves in front of him. They do not look at each other.

Having reached stage left, the faun suddenly stops walking, lifts his left thumb to the side of his head and turns his head toward the last nymph passing in front of him in the line at the far left. When she turns her head in his direction, he brings up both hands to his waist, head high and grins at her. She makes a startled gesture with her hands and arms and quickly moves away from him. The two groups of nymphs exit as faun and one nymph cross the stage so that it seems he is watching the group exiting stage right. She is at stage left looking off to the left.

283 First the faun rise to demipointe, upstage leg wide in front of the downstage leg and both arms reaching out in that direction. Then the nymph rises to demipointe in the same position facing left, but her arms are out to either side of her. She turns, and seemingly wary of the faun, picks up her veil from the ground, her face looking to the right. She covers one shoulder, rises, and by simply twisting her lower body. Moving nothing else, makes off toward stage left, still looking over her shoulder. She stops in a semi crouching position as the faun shifts his body within the frame of his arms to her direction.

They walk toward each other, meeting at center stage on the same horizontal “plane” and he embraces her with straight arms. He is on the right of her facing left, and she is on the left of him facing right. She slowly sinks as he rises on demipointe, in a wide fourth position, towering over her. Her left arm crosses her abdomen, and her right holds the veil to her left shoulder. She slowly kneels and bends out of the narrow space between his arms ending in a deep bow. But she lifts her head and body away from him as he lifts his downstage right leg and proceeds to prance in front of her. He moves forward and back as she stands up. He runs and leaps to her position, but she has countermoved to his. He turns to kneel in front of her; they have essentially traded places.

But as he stands and rises again to demipointe, she sinks to her knees. Their hands and arms have made no change of position in this section. Slowly she leans far back, her right leg behind her so her torso is open. He makes a stabbing gesture with one foot and comes closer to hold her between his rigidly straight arms. He continues to attempt to confine her within his narrow range but she eludes him as they cross back and forth in straight lines left and right. He crosses his arms around her shoulders in standing behind her. Her arms are crossed under his and they move back and forth in this position.

She escapes, drops her veil, and moves as if to leave the area. But he reaches his upstage right arm to her, and they link elbows. She is on his right. They both kneel, she to the ground, but he only bending his knees to accommodate her. And when he turns to face away from her, lifting his left arm up and drawing it down close to his body, she slides out of his right arm to disappear stage right.

He is alone. He turns in her direction, reaching both arms straight in front of him. But he then smiles, turns his head and rests his arms at his side again, hands bent at wrists, thumbs extended. He walks toward and kneels at the veil, both arms coming up to the sides of his head and well out to the sides. He walks and kneels again to pick up the veil, his torso in an open position. He cradles the veil in his arms and turns to the right in time to face the entrance of three nymphs. But when they see him with it in his arms, they quickly return the way they came. The faun twice lifts the veil to his face in a gesture like the one used to indicate eating the two bunches of grapes, first facing left and then right, lifting the bunched veil on either side.

He swirls it up and down evidently pleasured by its movement in the air, turning in time to meet three nymphs again, one of whom makes a rapid waving of both her arms at him as if trying to get him to drop the veil so she can safely retrieve it. None of them dares to

284 get too close to him. When it is clear he won’t let go of the veil, they turn and run back the way they came.

He moves to stage left and closes the ends of the veil up against his body on each side, drawing it to his chest. He is looking down at it, his body faces the audience and he walks stage right. His walk is always stylized; with knees bent, he seems to smoothly roll from one foot to the other by rising to demipointe off the back foot onto the flexed front one so that his knees and hips never seem to move. When he turns, his knees are turned in, closing the groin. His chest and upper body stay open to the audience. Holding the veil with both hands to his , the faun walks to the steps leading up his hillock.

He ascends by lifting the leg at a right angle in front of him and rising to demipointe to place it on the step. It seems to give him a weird floating appearance, because the steps themselves are not visible. His torso faces the audience, but his head is in profile to the direction his is going. Once in his private space, the faun kneels, lowers the veil to the ground, and lifts both arms to frame his head. He kneels and jabs with his hands close to his sides at the veil; the action is not just in the hands, but also in the abdomen like a contraction.

He picks it up, and positions his downstage right hand to jab again from a position close to his mouth, but instead places his hand in the loop of the drape of the veil and lifts it reverently far out in front of himself, arching his back and head up as he extends his arms slowly. In six abrupt stop-action moves he draws the veil to his face. He lays it down on the ground again, kneeling before it and putting one end to his mouth as if kissing it. He then lowers his body onto the scarf, leading with the groin, and lying on it prone. His downstage arm slides to his side, his body convulses and he opens his mouth before relaxing again.

285 GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Terms used throughout this study reflect an interdisciplinary approach and merit more thorough discussion than can be provided in footnotes. As used in this discussion, such broad terms reflect an orientation toward performing arts scholarship in common usage. This is justified in that the base of discussion is located in the dances; however, moving between humanities and performance arts usage creates confusion. For that reason, a glossary of these terms clarifying the way in which they are applied in this study is appropriate.

Art and Entertainment Constructed designations of what was art and what was entertainment changed over the Nineteenth Century, setting the stage for the early Twentieth Century in Europe and the United States. This topic is admirably discussed in Lawrence Levine’s book, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. In general, the term “legitimate” was used at the turn of the century to distinguish “highbrow” stage presentations based on enobling themes that only high-class audiences could understand. Legitimate stage presentations included serious stage plays, opera, concert music, and the ballet and were based on European aesthetics. Ticket prices to these productions were too high for regular attendance by the lower classes. “High class” artists were presumed to have spent many years training in the subtleties of their profession under the aegis of large, state-supported schools and professional companies and in the mentorage of other renowned artists associated with a specific city. Such artists were almost exclusively white, Euro-Americans. “Low class” entertainers on the other hand, could be white or colored and were presumed to have simply “absorbed” the mechanics of their craft from imitation of others (despite the fact that effective comic timing requires meticulous training to achieve). While the artist supposedly dedicated his life to his art in “lawful” association with other artists, was often thought of as a rogue individual; a clever charlatan of no fixed abode and an opportunist out to cheat the public. “Lowbrow” entertainments included those that pleased or titillated low-class audiences, such as dime museums, fairs,

286 and vaudeville shows charging minimal admittance fees. Lines of division between “art” and “entertainment” are arbitrary, for there is much entertainment in the opera or ballet, and a good portion of vaudeville also presented “high class” actors, singers and dancers.

Culture Culture as discussed here refers to the second definition of the term presented by Duncan Ivison in his book, Postcolonial Liberalism. Rather than defining boundaries between what is authentic and inauthentic, or traditional from modern expression, culture is conceived of as being continually permeable and negotiable. People depend upon a concerted assemblage of performative, mediatory elements of culture to orient themselves to interpret experiences through language. Culture in this sense is not a static monolithic construct, but an on-going process of interpretation made cohesive by general common consent of its population.

Euro-American This term provides a convenient shortcut in this study by combining predominant European cultural attributes such as English, French, and German influences on American culture. It is an arbitrary designation that should be recognized as linguistic (English), religious (Christian) and physiological (North European). Although this is both arbitrary and characteristic of only a portion of the American population past and present, it is an important distinction in discussions of art and culture. Otherwise, assumptions in written documents by artists and critics of the time go unrecognized.

Exotic The term “exotic” is a broad designation of anything outside the norm of common European experience, of which Orientalism is one type. Exoticism is interpreted in this study to include not only distant geographic sites, but also references to remote, “ancient” times (or even in the future, as would be the case for science-fiction narratives)

287 ambiguously designated in the frame of fantasy (“a long time ago, in a place far away . . .”). Both exoticism and Orientalism are Eurocentric constructs of non-European cultures and therefore exist only within a context of European influence (the United States). Even the term “European” is somewhat flexible to include English, French, German, Italian, Austrian and Scandinavian inheritors of the (Christian) Western Greco- Roman tradition; excluding inheritors of the Eastern (Christian and Islamic) Greco- Roman tradition such as; Russia, Turkey, Romania, Poland, Morocco, Egypt, Arabia, etc. The exception is Spain and its colonies, perhaps due to its ties to North ; there is in this definition of “European” also a physiological distinction between fair-skinned northerners and dark-skinned “others”, including the Spanish, Gypsies, and Mediterranean others, such as swarthy Italians. The designation, “American” also means “European” in this sense, despite a diasporic population of peoples and cultures from all over the world, including Europe, from the very inception of the United States as a political entity. A third type of exotica was attached to ancient cultures of Greece, Egypt, and Rome in part because they could “not speak for themselves” and were therefore interpreted as a foundation of the essential, pre-industrial European ethos. In the discussions of both Gnossienne (Chapter Three) and Faune (Chapter Four), greater attention is given to this kind of exoticism. Belman’s book, The Exotic in Western Music lists seven characteristics common to all exotic music in Western arts that are also applicable to exoticism in visual performances (i. e. dance and theatre). Over the course of time, then, certain features signaling the exotic in these entertainments became codified. Whenever there was a call for an exotic element, these features were repeated, with only minor variation, for any and all non-European characters. Several essays included in the Bellman book describe in detail specific exotic features in musical and presentational terms. I have summarized these recurrent features as follows:

288 1. Exotic musical motifs were usually played on European musical instruments with percussion sounds dominating to indicate either a heavy primitivism or an aggressive mood.

2. Rhythmic patterns in music signifying the exotic were short and repetitive, as if the exotic character was unable to express itself in a cultured and sophisticated manner; this was reflected in the dancing.

3. Dancers often played instruments to accompany their dancing. These might include rattles for Native Americans, tambourines for Gypsies, sticks for Nautch dancers of India, etc.

4. Vocalizations consisted of short, nonsense, repetitive, and often non- melodic phrases rather than a linguistically worded, conceptually-complex expression in song. Sirens, for example, sang in high-pitched voices on sustained vowel sounds with vague melody and no rhythmic meter, suggesting a pre-linguistic, seductive condition. Both Native American savages and South Sea cannibals chanted nonsense syllables in monotone, as did Chinese sorcerers. Musical instrumentation supported and repeated these signature elements.

5. Both the dancing and the music were represented as “unlearned”, or “natural”. This reinforced the misconception that foreign arts require little or no formal training. At the same time, the training in exotic performing art is also referred to as esoteric, magical, secret, etc.

6. A single character dressed in an exotic costume stood for, or represented the generality of an entire culture. This had the effect of denying individual, clearly focused, and complex personalities. Alternatively, “flocks” of exotic people were presented as silent attendants on European princes and princesses. A single male European character could stand up against, and defeat, whole armies of exotic males, most of whom ran from a fight.

7. Exotic characters were often (though not always) confined to supporting roles. When exotic characters were placed in the main role, they were usually depicted as the tragic victims (usually beautiful young females from wealthy, aristocratic families in danger of being sold off by their fathers into an unwanted marriage) of a restrictive society longing to be free, pleading for a European (male) sanctuary. Their fates were also usually tragic: Chinese princesses died of love or went mad, Native American “noble savages” stoically suffered injustice before dying, etc. These personages often behaved in an irrational, emotional, child-like manner that denied them individual adult human qualities. The feminization of exotic characters (male and female) in the arts has been the topic of much discussion in the literature.

289 Humanism It is the intent of this study to present dance within its cultural context as a significant contribution to the humanistic project. This project, regardless of time or place, proposes to frame a concert of ideas about the individual’s position in life; within family, community, nation, and the cosmos. This frame of concerted ideas gives meaning and purpose to the existence of the individual. As part of an attempt to expand traditional academic concepts of which disciplines, values, and texts should be included in the humanities, this study of dance in culture makes use of the word humanism in its broadest sense. Although it is not the intent of this investigation to debate the issue of dance as a language, it is helpful to point out that it is examined as “text” in the sense of paralleling the communicative intent of a language. The text of a dance, then, can be analyzed for its gestalt of meanings and references to the individual’s position in life in a way comparable to examinations of written text for similar characteristics. If the intent of communication is given as the basis upon which dance is included in a humanistic discussion, then the limitations and strengths of both expressive gesture and oral/written language become apparent. Cross-disciplinary uses of such terms as “humanism”, then, need not be entirely alien to one another. If indeed; “The first humanists also grasped how this project of theirs [humanities] was simultaneously opposed to much of medievalism’s basic assumptions about man’s place in the cosmos” (Fleming), then dance as an avant-garde expression has a similar relationship with Early Modernism. Certainly the purpose of this study is to examine the dynamics of how these dances negotiate both the continuum and disruptions of this era. In this study, the term “humanism” is used in context with common usage in performance studies, and it is recognized that this is at variance with other academic definitions of the humanistic tradition. A helpful discussion of this kind of use is presented in Richard Schechner’s series of essays on the topic in his book, The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance.

290 Modernism and avant-garde Two main resources consulted for this study offered conflicting definitions of “Modernism”. Cantor in his book, The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times presents Modernism of the first half of the Twentieth Century as a rebellion against Victorianism; that whatever Victorianism was, Modernism was against it (43). Cantor marks out these characteristics of Modernism: 1. antihistoricist 2. departure from macrocosmic to microcosmic dimensions 3. preoccupation with self-referentiality 4. fractured and discordant 5. lack of predetermined pattern 6. rejection of philosophical idealism 7. functionalism 8. rejection of absolute polarities 9. elitist 10. open sexuality 11. aware of the consequences of technology 12. moral relativism 13. the arts as an ideal state 14. cultural despair However, this convenient depiction of Modernism as an abrupt break from Victorianism does not accurately accommodate cultural and artistic trends discussed in this study. Even the avant-garde aspect of Modernism, which fashioned itself in rebellion against established order retained much in common with Victorianism, and the concern for social improvement, or the idealization of women and children expressed in Romanticism is also familiar in Victorian expressions (Chapter One). All these cultural movements had their own arenas of “moral relativism, cultural despair, elitism, and functionalism”. The term “Modernism” can be approached in several different ways. In a broadly generalized historic sense, the Western tradition can be separated into two halves between the Ancient and the Modern World. Some historians place this separation in the

291 Renaissance, at about the time a change of perception in humanity’s position in the cosmos took place. In an effort to restore the position of rational investigation attributed to Ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance goal was, according to Micheleti, “The discovery by man of himself and the world”. Put another way, the Renaissance encouraged, “. . .an interdependent system based on individual effort enhanced by mercantile enterprise and military inventiveness” (Atchity: Preface to The Renaissance Reader, xviii). This idea suggests that the modern person is distinctive as one aware of self; the measure and maker (homo faber) of systems for cooperative functioning. The modern person is also the player of the game (homo ludens), suggesting an awareness of mutable social roles and identities, each one layered over another. In the context of Modernism, this Renaissance pairing of “self as maker” and “self as player of the game” suggests an awareness of the mechanisms by which social and cultural systems are created and re- created to ensure continuity and survival. And in the process of negotiating these shifts, the individual person finds that meaning in aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual arenas depends upon either an agreed-upon community or personal construct, both of which are interpretive, and interdependent. Projects in which these dynamics are in question are humanistic endeavors, whether in the form of philosophical inquiry, the struggle to establish beneficial political and legal systems, or expressed in the arts. During this period of nascent modernism, then, a crisis of identity arose when the individual found him- or herself in conflict with roles created by social obligation. Whereas prior to the Renaissance no option to question the rule of authority was available, the possibility of reversing the dictates of a hieratical system arose as a result of a rebirth of humanistic investigation. As will be discussed, it is in the tensions arising from the anxieties of self-doubt and defiance (in a multitude of variations) of established order that the avant-garde impetus is directly identified. To employ a comparable framework, the philosophical and sociological shifts into Modernism also can be said to have converged with art near the end of the Age of the Enlightenment (approximately on-going during the 1700’s) and the commencement of Romanticism (approx: 1770-1830). This convergence was considered in the epistemological examinations of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Hegel (1770-

292 1831). Over the course of his explanation of these German philosophers and the way in which their discourses on the nature of aesthetics suggested avenues of experimentation in art, Arthur Dantoii states that: This exaltation of art marks a distinction between these thinkers [Kant and Hegel] and their predecessors of the seventeenth century, who found scant occasion to write about art. . .in any special, self-conscious way (“A Century of Self-Analysis: Philosophy in Search of an Identity”. From: The Age of Modernism: 13-27).

Kant proposed that art had potential as an individually-interpretive activity situated between intellectual and moral judgment as a corrective to the limitations of pure reasoning. Hegel stressed the concept of accord, or unity of purpose among art, religion and philosophy (Der absolute Geist). In Hegel’s discussion, these pursuits collectively indicated a pattern of self-examination and reflection leading to spiritual transformationiii. In this study, the avant-garde movement within the broad period of Modernism is focused on as in defiance of middle-class precepts that are both modern and Victorian. At the same time, the avant-garde, like Romanticism, requires the presence of that against which it rebels in order to continue to exist. The term avant-garde means at the front of a military advance; the part that leads the way and is the first to get hit by the opposition. Avant-garde artists succeeded by failing; that is, they deemed the degree to which their art was opposed by the status quo (i. e. the bourgeoisie), as an indication of how successful their art was. As with most terms used in this study, the term avant-garde is used in its broadest sense. Richard Schechner’s assembly of essays, The End of Humanism, presents two kinds of avant-garde. The first is an historical avant-garde that is charted through its examples in art and a philosophical basis for that art; the many “- isms”, some of which are discussed in Chapter One. However, the second kind of avant- garde is also important to this study: [an]. . . “experimental” performance: whatever is happening at the boundaries, in advance of the mainstream. Of course, sometimes these two kinds of avant-gardes are expressed in the same movement (Schechner: 16-7).

293 While the movements of avant-garde artists in Europe influenced the approach the dance artists in Russia (Nijinsky) and the United States (St. Denis and Shawn) took in their dances, the artists and their creations are discussed in the framework of this latter sense of the avant-garde. Arts and entertainments, along with patterns of marketing, are discussed as avant-garde expressions in Chapter Five. In this sense, Modernism and avant-garde is taken here as an attitude in which certain kinds of experimentations with the above cited characteristics were ongoing, and of which those collected around the avant-garde represent the more radical, progressive and experimental. For this reason, this study relies more upon the model presented in Hilton Kramer’s The Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-1972 and Joachimides and Rosental’s The Age of Modernism: Art in the 20th Century as useful in discussing the dances. It is from a close reading of these art history books that the five avant-garde attributes of Modernism (exoticism, distortions of time and space, naturalism, spiritualism, and response to technology) are taken. For the purposes of discussing performing arts, it is more accurate to say that Modernism supported both a continuation of Victorianism and the radical experimentation of the avant-garde in an antagonistic and mutually-preserving relationship. This reading of the term is consistent with the humanities survey textbook by DeWitt and Platt, The Western Humanities.

Modular Organization Modular organization and construction appear with remarkable consistency regardless of medium in all instances of public display and marketing of goods and services. As discussed particularly in Chapter Five, modular construction patterns made it possible to market and distribute performing arts and entertainments in the same context as concrete products in a mass market configuration; the same principles apply to the construction of a as to the construction of artworks, including dance. Elements of basic modularization as discussed by Bradd Shore (Culture in Mind, 151) are as follows:

294 1. Modular construction employs a series of interlocking (or inter-related) units organized to construct a more complex entity.

2. Variations among the constructing units and multiple combinations of those units produce entities that appear to be different; a quantitative rather than qualitative multiplicity is produced.

3. Constant experimentation in devising configurations is encouraged; individual variation of expression lies within the limited parameters of a modular system.

4. The consumer’s attention is directed to surface features because modular systems have no intrinsic interior.

5. Modular systems promote an egalitarian bias because any one configuration is equal to any other; these configurations as well as the units comprising them are interchangeable.

Naturalism Of all the terms used in this study, “naturalism” has proved the most problematic. The way this term is used in this investigation is confusing because the three dances under examination appear highly stylized and presentational in their movements, yet they are claimed to be “natural and therefore true”. However, there are two ways in which naturalism is expressed in them. One is that all three dances incorporate pedestrian (i. e. non-dance) movements such as kneeling, walking, running, and swaying. These movements are performed in such a way that anyone might duplicate them without specialized training. Although the stage pictures of Gnossienne, Faune, and Incense are carefully contrived, there are no spectacular balletic leaps, extensions, or spins. Naturalism is also expressed in the costumes, which permit freedom of movement in the

295 dancing body. While the Incense worshipper and Gnossienne’s priest are barefoot, the Faun wears soft-soled sandals. The term “natural” attaches to these dances because they are performed in a non- ballet, non-socially-coded fashion. During the time period in question, ballet, opera, and social class performances in public were considered “artificial”, or “contrived” in a European context. In the United States, that European context had previously (before 1900) provided the model upon which American arts and social graces had been based. However, by 1900 that European model had provided the means by which the upper classes separated (“purified”) themselves from the lower classes, rendering European arts and artists—as well as those Americans who emulated them—to be viewed as “alien” to American values in other classes. The fusion between artistic performance and public social performance occurred at this time to create a dichotomous opposition between what was considered “American” versus “non-American” (everybody else). This polarized perception was particularly acute in the performance of masculinity in the US and was directly related to issues of political dominance at home and abroad. If the European male was slight, effeminate, probably bi- or homosexual, artistic, scholarly, and decadently sophisticated in the social graces (particularly dancing), he was in all ways “unauthentic”, “contrived” and “artificial” therefore not true and natural. Directly opposite then, the American male must be rough, robust, uneducated, a laborer, masculine, and heterosexual. A “true” or “authentic” American male spent his time (or at least acted and looked as if he did) outdoors, free of an “unnatural” urban environment. Feminine artistic activities—particularly dancing—were “alien” activities to the American male. To be male was to be “not-female”. The American man (associated with an uncultured, outdoors self-sufficiency) performed a “natural” self, created out of a worldly sophistication. Females (associated with a cultured indoors, urban dependency), and males of all other nationalities performed an “artificial” self associated with the arts and “book learning”. The other sense in which “naturalism” acts upon the dances in this study is that since social performance of the self is artificial, a ritualized performance of the artist in these dances—because it is not the norm; because it is exotic, alien, etc.—is intimate and

296 unobserved and therefore “true”. This is in the sense of Delsarte the idea that the movements of these dances are stylized and ritualized in a highly presentational form that they convey a reality of the inner self of the person/persona/character that ordinary pedestrian movements could not. Socially-performed mannerisms—considered artificial, and therefore “false” (particularly for women) were intended to obscure true feelings, not reveal them. Arrested action, or pose in a theatrical performance was not normal everyday life. Presented in an exotic context, such pose reflected not illusion, but the supposed natural and non-artificial simplicity of Greek classicism in its “pure, unadulterated” form. Exotic references to Greek arts embedded in all three dances (although “Indian”, the costume of Incense invokes Greek robes) are discussed at length in their respective chapters. Resources exploring these dynamics in greater detail are Brewster and Jacob’s book, Theatre to Cinema (which explains the relationship of posed images from live stage to film via Delsartism) and Michael Kimmel in his book, Manhood in America.

Orientalism The term “Oriental” is a broad designation based upon European concepts of non- European Eastern cultures subject to imperialistic rule in contemporary and ancient images. These include a more or less generalized exotica in the Near East; Turkish, Arabian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Persian, etc. Far East Orientalism included; Chinese, Japanese, “Siamese” (Thai) and Moslem/Hindu Indian sources. The very word “Oriental” is a western construct broadly encompassing perceived and interchangeable characteristics of these cultures; one particularly useful in discussing The Incense (Chapter Two). Although Russia and Spain also had exotic associations, they did not fall under the same kinds of generalizations as Orientalism. Since Orientalism has deep associations with Imperialism (Said), the ways in which various cultures are exoticized are determined by their subject status to western nations (i. e. as India was subject to Great Britain from 1857 to 1948, although British economic trade and cultural domination had begun many years earlier). The amalgam of these subject cultures in European depictive and performing arts suggested a feminized, lush wealth and sensuous freedom that flattered the European male gaze. Russian, Spanish (Gypsy),

297 Native American and African imagery presented a slightly different context of exotica because these did not come under direct European rule. The term “oriental” is a broad designation based upon European concepts of non-European Eastern cultures subject to imperialistic rule in contemporary and ancient images. These include a more or less generalized exotica in the Near East; Turkish, Arabian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Persian, etc. Far East sources of Orientalism included; Chinese, Japanese, “Siamese” (Thai) and Moslem/Hindu Indian. A third type of exotica was attached to ancient cultures of Greece, Egypt, and Rome in part because they could not “speak for themselves” and were therefore interpreted as a foundation of the essential, pre-industrial European ethos. In the discussion of both Gnossienne (Chapter Three) and Faune (Chapter Four), greater attention is given to this type of exoticism.

Progressivism This term describes an attitude rather than a cohesive movement in the United States as a cultural response to urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. The belief was that, given abuses and inequalities in society, government must first “purify” itself through reform and then act to protect its weakest members; children (abolition of child labor) and women (elimination of sweatshops and prostitution). Other points of Progressivism were prohibition, the “Americanization” of immigrants, and restriction of immigration. Progressivism was not entirely consistent. Supported by small business, professionals, and middle-class urban reformers, the approach did not challenge capitalism directly; it simply maintained that the most rich and powerful had a moral responsibility to administer to the most poor and weak. In this sense, Progressivism was paternalistic and moderate and at the same time supported women’s suffrage. As a particular approach to social and economic reform Progressivism appeared in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century and faded during the First World War. But some of its effects on foreign policy in the United States continue in the attitude that it is the responsibility of the most powerful nation to guide the less fortunate to a better life.

298 Romanticism The movement of Romanticism is closely connected with Symbolism in the perspective of this study because they precede the specific avant-garde attributes under discussion. Romanticism offered a corrective measure to rational thought and scientific progressivism characteristic of the previous Age of Enlightenment. The creative (poet) artist as “a man of feeling” was extolled for his visionary genius with access to fundamental reality and the capacity to inspire mankind toward improvement. The movement promoted individual initiative, nationalism, imagination, free expression of feeling, communion (or striving against) with nature, and idealization of women, children, and non-European groups. Pastoral nostalgia for a figuratively glorious past took precedence over the decadence and ugliness of industrialized urbanization. According to The Dictionary of the Arts, Romanticism is defined as: . . .a style that emphasizes the imagination, emotions, and creativity of the individual artist. . .asserting emotion and intuition over rationalism . . . in reaction against 18th century classicism and rationality (447).

Since human beings clearly would not always abide by logic and the dictates of rational behavior alone, let alone achieve rational integrity, Romanticism sought to subsume the rational into a balanced relationship with the irrational in an effort to discover the “true and essential self” from which right action would be directedivand nostalgically bring about a return to a former, more innocent and therefore uncorrupted social state. And in this directive the man of feeling; of passion and poetic vision, was to lead the wayv. The Romantic rebellion against neoclassicism through personal aesthetics, and an expression of transcendent reality was overcome by the 1870s by Symbolism. As discussed in greater detail in Chapter Four, Symbolism sought to capture the ephemeral experience of life. Symbolists (such as the poet Mallarmé) turned toward a more internalized, spiritual expression centered in the private thoughts of the individual, as opposed to a more geographic, political, or external expression in Romanticism. While Romanticism offered a broad, idealistic vision of utopia for mankind by the benevolent hand of the artist, the closely-related movement of Symbolism appeared late in the Nineteenth Century as a dialogue between poetry and painting. But Symbolism also had the effect of defining the general rebellion of Romanticism into a perpetually

299 volatile condition of spiritual self-validation. It is this condition of regenerating opposition to the status quo that made it possible for the avant-garde to remain innovative, shocking and “new” while continuing to sustain the illusion that the avant- garde was always about to be eliminated by a larger, more powerful middle-class mercantilism (Kramer: 3-5). This model emphasizes the Romantic notion that the individual artist of vision is always about to be destroyed (along with everything else of true, spiritual value) by the crass stupidities of the middle-class. Hisvi only recourse was to strategies of subversion, and he fought a heroic, losing battle. Symbolists internalized that battle. Their preoccupation with experiential transformation as gateway to spiritual revelation suggests a psychological reaction to scientific and technological advances such as the theories of Darwin and Freud which did not complicate the earlier Romantics. As the inroads of scientific discovery progressively brought to rational light elements of human existence formerly shrouded in mystery, the “unknown-unknowable” continued to retreat beyond those borders. Some of those borders were to be found on the symbolic grounds of internal expression and meaning. In other words, the more rational knowledge about the nature of existence was sought, the more essential it became to maintain a realm of experience that could not be encompassed by that knowledge. By way of answering this profound need for mystery in the human psyche, the Symbolists turned inward as the external realms of Romanticism’s sublime nature retreated. Instead of exploring geographic frontiers, Symbolists were engaged in, “. . .seeking to express moods and psychological states. . .Their [Symbolist] subjects were often mythological, mystical, or fantastic”(The Dictionary of the Arts: 500).

i The French historian Jules Michelet , who was the first to use the term “Renaissance” in the mid- nineteenth century is quoted in the preface of Kenneth Atchity’s The Renaissance Reader (HarperPerennial, 1996).

ii Danto claims Kant as “the first real modernist” because he was the first philosopher to bring into examination the mechanisms of criticism as a legitimate study (13).

300 iii It is precisely this impetus of unity among elements of performance that was the goal of the German composer Wagner, and is a mark of spiritualism in the dances which suggests “fundamental truth, beauty, and universality” iv It is interesting that this “core, essential self” constituting the individual free of outer societal corruptions was identified as the daemon, or part-animal, part-human (Id for Freud) being which must be tapped in order to discern the “truth” of the human condition. In other words, the human is once again placed in “the center of the universe” as the unchanging source from which apparently-immutable but ultimately humanly-constructed institutions of society arise. v The English Romantic poet, Percy Shelley, wrote passionately for the poet to become the legislator of a new world order. vi The arcitypal Romantic poet was male; the same principles of romanticism in early experimental dance was conveyed by women.

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Unpublished Manuscripts, Notes and Letters:

Letter, Jane Sherman. 6 September 2003

Conversation with Professor Jack Clark. 30 January 2003 and 16 September 2003.

Conversation with Professor Patti Philips. 16 September 2003.

Email Communication with Nancy Reuter. 16 December 2002.

Video Resources

Incense. Reconstruction by Professor Jack Clark. Choreographer Ruth St. Denis (1906). Music by Harvey Worthington Loomis. Dancer: Lisa Plank. Performance and video recording at Florida State University (2001) 6 min.

Gnossienne Re-creation by Barton Mumaw. Choreography by Ted Shawn (1919). Music for Piano by Eric Satie (1889). Piano Accompaniment Lyudmila Mclerud. Dancer Professor Jack Clark Performed and videotaped at Florida State University (1994-5) 2 min

Afternoon of a Faun Reconstruction by Elizabeth Schooling and William Chappell. PBS Production: Nureyev and the Joffrey Ballet in Tribute to Nijinsky. (1980). Choreography Vaslav Nijinsky (1912) Music by Claude Debussy (1894) Scenery and Costume by Leon Bakst. Dancer : Rudolf Nureyev (1980) 13 min.

Vaudeville, An American Masters Special narrated by Ben Vereen: 1997.

The Great Primitives: Landmark films from the First Decade of Motion Picture History, co- produced by Marilyn Fabe and Tom Schmidt. 16mm compilation film, 1978.

Trailblazers of Modern Dance. WNET/13 MP #3998-3999 New York University Library Holdings, 1979.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Elizabeth Drake-Boyt was born in Des Moines, Iowa, December 13, 1948. She has enjoyed a life-long interest in dance and theatre histories. Her BA was obtained from Southwest Missouri State University in Speech and Theatre. She took an MA in Theatre Arts, Dance Emphasis from the University of Arizona, and is a member of the Society of Dance Historians. The broad, interdisciplinary challenges presented in research projects and teaching in the Humanities promise to provide her with provocative considerations in the application of dance as an appropriate academic study.

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