Student Notes on the Teachings of Florence Fleming Noyes Meg Brooker

Archiving Multiple Perspectives: Student Notes on the Teachings of Florence Fleming Noyes Meg Brooker Abstract: Between 1911-1928, Florence Fleming Noyes developed Noyes Rhythm, a “Duncanesque” movement system that explores physiological responses to music, nature, and mythological imagery. In compiling her 1949 publication of the Noyes movement system Rhythm and the Noyes Technique, Valeria Ladd drew on multiple students’ notebooks dated to 1913. The Noyes technique has been passed down through several generations of movers, and teachers-in-training consult the Ladd book as the authoritative text for the practice. This paper examines two early student notebooks and begins to historicize Noyes’s teacher and mentor Lucia Gale Barber. Between 1911-1928, Florence Fleming Noyes developed Noyes Rhythm, a “Duncanesque” movement system that explores physiological responses to music, nature, and mythological imagery. Influenced by her elocution studies at Emerson College, Delsarte exercises, and her exploration of rhythmic movement with Lucia Gale Barber, Noyes developed her own perspective on dance performance and movement training. In 1923, she published Rhythm: the Basis of Art and Education, and argued for rhythmic movement as the foundation of education reform, yet she never published her own technique book or manual of exercises. Twenty years after her death, in 1949, Noyes’s student Valeria Ladd published Rhythm and the Noyes Technique, and in 1982 the Noyes Foundation issued an expanded edition of Ladd’s book titled Rhythm for Dance and Art: the Exact Notes Taken of the Teaching in Action of Florence Fleming Noyes. In compiling her publication of the Noyes movement system, Ladd drew on student notebooks dated as early as 1913-1915, including the summer Noyes taught in collaboration with Hazel MacKaye. The Noyes technique has been passed down through several generations of movers, and teachers-in-training consult the Ladd book as the authoritative text for the practice. Until recently, they have not had access to the original student notes that served as the source material for Ladd’s edited manual. In 2016-2017, with support from two university research grants and a National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation Assistance grant, the Noyes School of Rhythm Foundation began processing and cataloguing over one hundred cubic feet of archival materials, including these original student notebooks. My initial proposal was to examine these notes, alongside Ladd’s notes and her published text, seeking to broaden understanding of Noyes’s original teachings by including multiple student perspectives. In studying the notebooks, I was struck by how fully formed the system was, just a few years into Noyes’s teaching. This led me to investigate the work of Noyes’s primary dance teacher and mentor, Lucia Gale Barber. In 1911, Noyes’s teacher Lucia Gale Barber passed away, and at the invitation of Barber’s sister Mary Gale Davis, who served as principal of her Washington, DC- based school, Noyes began to teach Barber’s system of movement. In 1912, Noyes moved from Washington, DC, to New York City and opened a school in her own name. According to Ladd, “[Noyes] included in her technique, though in a changed form, some of the movements taught by Mrs. Barber: the so-called ‘animal’ rhythms, the folds, and the rotaries” (Ladd 1982, xii). Little is known about Lucia Gale Barber, but in recent years Noyes Rhythm master teacher Nancy Nichols has become curious about this early period of Noyes’s work. (Nichols has been my primary mentor as a Noyes dancer and teacher, and I am grateful to her for granting me initial access to the school archives when I was a graduate student). In response to Nichols’s questions, I started looking for information about Barber’s school and the years Noyes spent training and performing with her, and I am currently in the beginning stages of this investigation. While there is more comprehensive work to be done to fully report on Barber’s work, including her involvement in the American Pageant Association and direction of several well- documented pageants and masques, there are a few insights and discoveries that I want to share here, in advance of examining the student notebooks. First, in her introduction to Rhythm for Dance and Art, Ladd credits Barber as the originator of the term “rhythm” as applied to early twentieth-century aesthetic dancing (Ladd 1982, xi). This seems to be a sweeping claim, yet in a 1909 article in the Nashville Tennessean titled “Washington Society Takes Up Greek Dances: Follow in the Footsteps of Graceful Isadora Duncan,” Barber is cited as someone who “had introduced and advanced this art [Greek dancing] long before the echoes of Miss Duncan’s triumphs abroad came floating over the water.” The article describes Barber’s extensive training in elocution and physical culture (although it fails to mention specific styles or techniques such as Delsarte), framing the foundation of her system as “a life study made by Mrs. Barber on ‘rhythm in its relation to the principles of nature’” (Nashville Tennessean 1909). Barber’s authority extended beyond Washington, DC, for she lectured and taught successfully in New York and Boston before her Washington arrival. Society women, including prominent political wives, seem to have been the major audience for her work. While Barber’s society students did perform in public lecture demonstrations and recitals, the overarching goal of Barber’s movement practice was developmental and educational. Barber founded and maintained a school in Washington, DC, with a broad-ranging curriculum, including a course in “rhythm.” Oral tradition among Noyes teachers, including master teacher Nancy Nichols, refers to Barber’s system as “animal rhythms.” The Nashville Tennessean article is the first source that I have found that directly references animal movements in Barber’s work, reporting, “Mrs. Barber arranged a unique exposition demonstrating her theory that birds and animals represent the various phases of rhythmic expression given by the human body” (Nashville Tennessean 1909). The article describes a group of children demonstrating the movements of a seal, a technique that is still practiced by contemporary Noyes movers. Many of the techniques in the Noyes work, including those based on animal movement, follow developmental movement patterns. According to the Nashville Tennessean, Barber’s work in Washington, DC garnered the respect of many local educators and was taught in at least one public high school. Further sources for Barber’s ideas include two articles published by Barber during her lifetime: “Physical Training in Character Building,” published in Mind: A Magazine of Liberal and Advanced Thought, dated 1901, and “The Significance of the Present Dance Movement,” published in The New England Magazine in 1910. These articles reveal the depth of thought behind Barber’s system and demonstrate her perspective on some of the more visible artists of her time. Barber writes, “It is generally conceded that moral and mental conditions produce corresponding effects upon the body: but that bodily states may also affect mind and soul is not so commonly recognized” (Barber 1901, 37). This statement reflects Francoise Delsarte’s “Law of Correspondence,” and Barber would have been familiar with Delsarte, as Steele MacKaye first lectured on Delsarte in Boston in 1871 and cultivated a large group of followers there. (Ruyter 1999, 20). Barber goes on to write, “When we say that we cannot change our bodies, we fail to realize that we do change them with every thought and feeling” (Barber 1901, 38). She argues for relaxation and developing breath control, or “perfect respiration” (Barber 1901, 43), as essential for both spiritual and physical development. It is important to note that Barber was working with both the body and the voice. Noyes, in the development of her own practice, departed from both Barber and Charles Wesley Emerson, her primary influences, in privileging the body movement as a means of expression over the voice. In her 1901 publication “Physical Training in Character Building,” Barber does not directly use the term “rhythm,” but she does open with the concept of rhythm in her 1910 article “The Significance of the Present Dance Movement.” Here she provides an overview of the early modern dance movement, termed by Barber “‘the Renaissance of Dancing’” and “classical dancing” (Barber 1910, 273, 278). Barber critiques the performance work of Loie Fuller, Gertrude Hoffman, Maud Allen, and Isadora Duncan. She reads the work of these artists through the lens of rhythm, which she defines as “a psychical, as well as a physical, experience, co- ordinating body and soul. It is thought and emotion expressed in motor terms” (Barber 1910, 275). She goes on to define classical dancing as the “perfect co-ordination of motion with emotion, according to anatomical structure and to psychical content” (Barber 1910, 278). She calls rhythm, “the father of all the arts” and furthers that this includes “the art of living” (Barber 1910, 275). Clearly, Barber’s training is more than an exercise regime and has applications beyond dance performance. Barber’s movement work requires intense concentration coupled with relaxation. Barber specified that the dance “movement must be made from the smaller muscles outward,” and the Nashville Tenessean cites Barber’s description of the relationships between music, feeling, and consciousness, resulting in a “relative communion between physical

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