Choreographing Identities beyond Boundaries: La Guiablesse and Ruth Page's Excursions into World Dance (1926–1934)

Abstract

Before she dreamt of her mission to create the American bal let in Chicago, Ruth Page traveled the world in search of styles. She was already a highly proficient dancer, having toured South America with Pavlova, performed as Adolph Bolm's partner in his Ballet Intime in London, New York, Chicago, and Buenos Aires, successfully auditioned for Diaghilev in Monte Carlo, and been appointed as ballet director of the Ravinia Opera Festival, just out side Chicago. On her way to ballet Americana in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this native of Indianapolis went through a number of choreographic phases that mirrored larger currents in American society in general and the dance world in particular. The time was ripe for a feminist, a liberated and cultured woman, and most of all a dancer to travel to Asia. Invited to per form a series of concerts for the coronation ceremonies of Em peror Hirohito in Tokyo in October 1928, she proceeded with her mother and father on a five-month tour of Japan, China, Cambo dia, Siam, Java, Bali, Burma, India, and, on the way home, Spain. Like a budding dance anthropologist, or at least an American dancer in search of new choreographic material, Page took dance lessons wherever she could, kept notes from the field on classes around the world, and had films made of dance performances and learning practices. Her meticulous note-taking is clear in a collec tion she published in 1984, Class: Notes on Dance Classes Around the World, 1915-1980} Sixty-one pages are devoted to "ethnic dance," thirty pages to the German modern dance, specifically classes by Mary Wigman and Harald Kreutzberg (selected from more than seventy manuscript pages), and seventy-seven pages to ballet, from a cast of stars, both internationally known (Bolm, of course, and Enrico Cecchetti) and local (a number of Chicagoans) .2 Page saw