Ruth St. Denis Collection Finding Aid


Collection Summary
Repository:	Adelphi University
Creator:	St. Denis, Ruth
Title:	Ruth St. Denis Collection
Inclusive Dates:	1904-2005
Bulk Dates:	1938-1968
Quantity:	14.5 linear feet
Abstract:	Ruth St. Denis founded Adelphi University’s Dance Department in 1938. Although she came out of a vaudeville tradition, she was one of the first professional dancers outside of ballet to treat dance as a serious art. St. Denis was best known for her dances based on Asian styling, elaborate costumes and settings, Delsarte-based poses, theatrical characters, and expressing spirituality through beauty. Prior to her work at Adelphi, she was the co-founder of Denishawn Company and School. She is credited to be one of the founders of modern dance.
Language:	Collection materials are in English.

Ruth Dennis was born on a farm in rural New Jersey in 1879. The daughter of an inventor-father and a physician-mother, she was encouraged to dance at an early age. At the age of 16, Ruth Dennis launched her professional career in a dime museum, Worth’s Museum on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, where she danced “Gavotte d’Amour” eleven times a day. Thus began her busy career as a "skirt dancer,” a female dancer whose legs were visible under her short skirt.

In 1898, the young dancer was noticed by David Belasco, a well-known and highly successful Broadway producer and director, who provided her with her stage name “St. Denis.” She toured with Belasco’s company around the United States and in Europe as a featured dancer for five years. While on tour with Belasco in 1904, she saw a poster of the goddess Isis in an ad for Egyptian Deities cigarettes. The image of the goddess sparked her imagination and inspired her to develop a new concept of dance. The first dance she choreographed was Egypta; however, she realized it was beyond her financial means to construct. Consequently, the first danced she produced was Radha, telling the story of a mortal maid who was loved by the god Krishna, which premiered privately in 1905 and publicly in 1906.

St. Denis’s career as a solo artist continued to blossom. In 1907, St. Denis and her mother went to Europe and traveled the continent performing her "dance translations,” which by now included The Cobra, Incense, The Nautch, and The Yogi. She was declared a sensation and was particularly successful in Vienna, Austria, and in Germany. In 1909, she returned to the U.S. and gave a series of well-received concerts in New York and other major cities.

In 1914, she met and married an already successful young dance-innovator named Ted Shawn. In the spring of 1915, they formed Denishawn Company and School, which had an “all-inclusive” dance concept, including Oriental and other ethnic styles, freestyle movements, and primitive forms, among others. Denishawn produced a number of notable dancers including Charles Weidman, Doris Humphrey, and Martha Graham. In 1931, St. Denis and Shawn parted, but were never legally separated, and Denishawn was reorganized, becoming the Ruth St. Denis School of Dancing and Its Related Arts, while Shawn went on to found Jacob’s Pillow School and Festival and Ted Shawn’s Men Dancers.

In the 1930s, St. Denis reassembled her Rhythmic Choir, which was a religious dance group that originated as a discussion group for her Denishawn dancers, and among those who regularly attended were Paul Dawson Eddy, president of Adelphi University from 1937 to 1965, and his wife Isabel. President Eddy invited St. Denis to launch the Adelphi Dance Department in 1938. She and four of her former Denishawn dancers, Jack Cole, Anna Austin, Ada Korvin, and Don Begenau, arrived at the Garden City Campus on September 8, 1938. The inaugural concert of the Adelphi Dance Department was held on October 28, 1938 and was met with great success.

Although her endeavors at Adelphi were clearly important to her, her enthusiasm for the department waned as it competed with many other interests. During the summer of 1939, St. Denis was on leave in California and was noticeably absent from the College’s plans for the next semester’s dance program. In a letter to St. Denis, dated August 7, 1940, President Eddy informed her of the Dance Department’s disintegration due to financial struggles and the dismissal of various faculty. St. Denis would no longer be on the Adelphi faculty. Despite this, she maintained a relationship with the Eddys and Adelphi University into the last years of her life by participating with the Children’s Centre for the Creative Arts and its annual Ruth St. Denis Day.

In 1947, St. Denis made Hollywood her headquarters and there established the Church of the Divine Dance, whose mission was the realization of building a dance liturgy. She was often called the "First Lady of American Dance" and the "Queen of American Dance.” At this time there was renewed interest in her earlier Asian-influenced dance. During the last two decades of her life she continued to dance. Whenever she was not performing, she traveled as a lecturer and mainly discussed feminist and spiritual issues. On July 21, 1968, she died in Hollywood after suffering a heart attack and was cremated and interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

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