Ruth St. Denis: A Biography of the Divine Dancer

I have always shared a close bond with this book, due to the fact that we were formed by the same person. I admit to being further biased because I learned the alphabet while usurping the typewriter during its writing to peck out lines of nonsense, and because its heroine shared the same name as my first best friend, Ruthie. Until recently, however, our relationship didn't get much farther than my poring with admiring friends over its much-beloved photographs of St. Denis, ethereally beautiful in her fantastic costumes. I'm glad I waited to appreciate the writing, and I'm glad I didn't wait any longer. Ruth's story as a pioneer of American dance is mesmerizing, from how the St. came to be in her name to her travels across the U.S. and the globe, her feminism and her frailty. Ruth was convinced she danced to express the divine, and performances usually portrayed her as a goddess - Eastern, Western, even a sea spirit - with her handsome husband Ted Shawn, 12 years her junior, enacting the role of mortal acolyte. One of my favorite photographs even shows Ruth on a pedestal, all in white down to her prematurely gray hair, looking deceptively like a statue as Ted leans unconcernedly against her. Offstage, however, their partnership was less divine... The history in this book, including Martha Graham's early days as a student at the Denishawn school, would delight anyone interested in modern dance. What I enjoyed the most in reading it, though, was discovering Ruthie's human side, her plucky character. A small-town girl with an eccentric family (including a brother named "Brother"!), from sharing a bill with freak shows she rose to become an internationally celebrated dancer, yet kept her head and her sense of humor. Her humor continued unabated to the end of her career: to celebrate their Golden Wedding Anniversary, Ruth and her husband performed a duet, titled "Siddhas of the Upper Air", a slow dance which involved the two walking up a ramp together while he held her about the waist, arms reaching upwards. Ted lyrically described their dance (p. 252), "The two of us were going up and up and up, remembering all the love of the earth but still lovers in infinite distance and infinite space, but still always up, going up." Ruth's remembrance, however, was more candidly down-to-earth: "Ted was scared to death. I wasn't, because I didn't think about it, but neither of us could see without our glasses"! In art and life, St Denis' quest for the divine continued until her dancing feet's final curtain. Before her earthly light was extinguished, however, it might be said of the `divine dancer' that she had achieved, however fleetingly, that aspiration which Goddard once attributed to Cleopatra, "...to rise into that region where art is lifted into life and life into art, the goal, alike, of art and life." Like a star whose light is visible beyond its time, her soul shines, dancing on.