Gendered Discourses in American Ballet at Mid-Century: Ruth Page on the Periphery

Abstract

At mid-century, American ballet was transformed at the hands of its most prominent critics. This radical aesthetic shift affected received historical narratives, and women's place within them. Ruth Page offers an interesting case: a woman ballet choreographer who earned a place in dance history, but is often cast as second rate. This article examines the way in which critics employed gender as a means of creating generic and aesthetic oppositions in postwar American ballet. Two of Page's ballets of the late 1930s are also discussed to suggest frameworks for producing new understandings of women's work in ballet.

Notes

The phrase “hidden from history” refers to Shelia Rowbotham's influential book of the same title, which helped to launch a movement in feminist scholarship to uncover the previously lost stories of women in the 1970s. Hidden From History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It (London: Pluto Press, 1973).

Page has not been widely studied by dance scholars, with a few important exceptions. Joellen A. Meglin's recent studies are significantly augmenting the available scholarship on Page; for example, “Choreographing Identities Beyond Boundaries: La Guiablesse and Ruth Page's Excursions into World Dance,” Dance Chronicle, vol. 30, no. 3 (2007): 439–69, and “Blurring the Boundaries of Genre, Gender, and Geopolitics: Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzberg's Transatlantic Collaboration in the 1930s,” Dance Research Journal, vol. 41, no. 2 (2009): 52–75. Other analyses of Page include Elizabeth Cooper, “Dances About Spain: Censorship at the Federal Theatre Project,” Theatre Research International, vol. 29, no. 3 (2004): 232–46.

A notable exception is Mark Franko's analysis of Martha Graham's attempts to negotiate the tensions between “feminine” expressional dance and “masculine” abstraction; see Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 39–57. Gay Morris also mentions the masculinized nature of criticism on Alwin Nikolais and Merce Cunningham's objective choreography; see A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945–1960 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 196–97.

Denby's notion of American neoclassical ballet echoes, for example, in Deborah Jowitt's description of the New York City Ballet dancers’ “boldness,” “frankness,” “speed,” and “unselfconscious dignity and courtesy as attributes of American character at its best,” or in Alastair Macaulay's account of how the Balanchine dancer's “blazing energy” and “full-toned audacity” were “startling to European eyes and an embodiment of American character” in the mid-twentieth century. Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 274; Alastair Macaulay, “Mother Ship Off Balance, Balanchine Still Soars,” New York Times, November 14, 2008.

Meglin notes that already in the mid 1930s, critics had begun expressing their discomfort with Page's use of mimesis and narrative, as well as her popularity. See “Blurring the Boundaries,” 63.

Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 389. Mark Franko has also argued that the inconsistencies in Martin's definition of abstraction often emerged in conjunction with his criticism of left-wing dance, whose political and emotional agenda threw a wrench into Martin's efforts to bring dance into the annals of high modernism. See Franko, The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 113–19.

Denby studied at Hellerau-Laxenburg, the former school of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze that was transformed into a center for Ausdruckstanz in the 1920s. Following his graduation, Denby was first accepted into Kurt Jooss's company (he quit after one week), then worked as the partner-collaborator of Cläre Eckstein, a student of Mary Wigman. Denby danced with Eckstein until he left Germany in 1933, making appearances at the 1930 German Dance Congress. See Edwin Denby, Dance Writings, ed. Robert Cornfield and William Mackay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 16–21. Also Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 17, 119–21, 291–92.

Only a handful of Balanchine's dances can actually be said to embrace such formal purity. How critics dealt with such discrepancies is a story I will tell in my projected book on this research.

While Martin, Denby, and Kirstein were the prime movers in the Americanization of neoclassical ballet, other critics also played a role. See Andrea Harris, “Choreographing America: Re-defining ‘American’ Ballet in the Age of Consensus,” in Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance, ed. Iris Smith Fischer and William D. Demastes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 144–45.

My analysis is based on the videotape of the 1978 made-for-television restaging of the ballet. Frankie and Johnny, produced/directed by Richard Carter, staged by Frederic Franklin, performed by the Chicago Ballet, cassette 119, Ruth Page Video Archives (Chicago: Thea Flaum Productions, 1990).

Early twentieth-century social feminists tended to view the prostitute as a victim of excessive male desire and in need of rescue. See James Messerschmidt, “Feminism, Criminology and the Rise of the Female Sex ‘Delinquent’ 1880–1930,” Crime, Law and Social Change, vol. 11, no. 3 (1987): 243–63. In Kurt Jooss's The Green Table, which premiered in New York in 1933, Ramsey Burt argues that the figure of the prostitute, a common trope in Weimar artworks, stands for the deleterious effects of modernity. However, the prostitute in The Green Table is manipulated like a doll, passively turned, swung, and partnered by the male characters—as Burt notes, her vulnerability to corruption relies on and reinforces social assumptions about femininity. The prostitute's symbolic lack of agency in Jooss's ballet markedly differs from the psychological and kinetic complexity and independence that Frankie's dancing conveys in Frankie and Johnny. Ramsey Burt, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, ‘Race,’ and Nation in Early Modern Dance (New York: Routledge, 1998), 48–50, 53–54. “The Green Table, with the Joffrey Ballet,” directed by Emile Ardolino, staged by Anna Markard, Dance in America (New York: PBS, 1982).

My analysis of the choreography is based on the 1938 filming of the ballet in Chicago under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project. An American Pattern, performed by Ruth Page, Bentley Stone, and members of the Federal Ballet, cassette 105, Ruth Page Video Archives (Chicago: Thea Flaum Productions, 1990).

On the “new woman” as a symbol of American systems of mass production and mass consumption after World War I, see Emily Rosenberg, “Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the ‘American Century,’” Diplomatic History, vol. 23, no. 3 (1999), 481– 87.

As stated, Page created Frankie and Johnny and American Pattern in collaboration with her dance partner and co-director, Bentley Stone. According to George Dorris, Stone choreographed the bulk of Frankie and Johnny, while Page contributed her own part as Frankie. George Dorris, e-mail message to author, October 28, 2011; also “‘Frankie and Johnny’ in Chicago and Some Problems of Attribution,” Dance Chronicle, vol. 18, no. 2 (1995): 183. As I have argued, Frankie's psychological expressivity and emotional appeal drive the dramatic arc of the ballet, and I see them as central to the exploration of gender and the social order in the work. I have not found similar documentation of how the choreographic labor was distributed in American Pattern; however, if Page and Stone's method of working together was to each take responsibility for his or her own part, then it seems safe to surmise that Page's contributions were greater, as Stone danced supporting roles in this ballet. It is difficult to sort out their individual contributions, and beyond the scope of my study. But although I end by highlighting Page's choreographic critique of gender, it is not my intention to diminish Stone's collaborative role in these works.

George Balanchine, “Notes on Choreography,” Dance Index, vol. 4, nos. 2–3 (February– March 1945): 23. In the idea that objectivist modernism made it more difficult for women to express a critical perspective on the social order, I am paraphrasing Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 24.

1. Marcia B. Siegel, The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 110.

2. Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 134.

3. Susan Bennett, “Theatre History, Historiography, and Women's Dramatic Writing,” in Women, Theatre, and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, ed. Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 52, 53.

4. Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism's Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 19.

5. Lynn Garafola, Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 391.

6. Andrea Harris, “Choreographing America: Re-defining ‘American’ Ballet in the Age of Consensus,” in Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance, ed. Iris Smith Fischer and William D. Demastes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 139–55.

7. From an extensive body of scholarship some examples are Christine Battersby, “Stages on Kant's Way: Aesthetics, Morality, and the Gendered Sublime,” in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, ed. Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 88–114; Bennett, “Theatre History,” 46–59; Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other,” in his After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–62; Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987); and Janet Wolff, AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).

8. John Martin, “The Dance: Native Blend,” New York Times, March 8, 1936, X8.

9. John Martin, America Dancing (1936; reprint Brooklyn, N.Y.: Dance Horizons, 1968), 93, 92.

10. Ibid., 103, 105.

11. John Martin, Ruth Page: An Intimate Biography (New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1977), 13, 14.

12. Lynne Conner, Spreading the Gospel of the Modern Dance: Newspaper Dance Criticism in the United States, 1850–1934 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 109.

13. Douglas Dunn, quoted in Margaret Fuhrer, “Edwin Denby: Iconic American Dance Critic,” March 15, 2010, Dance Teacher, http://www.dance-teacher.com/content/edwin-denby.

14. John Martin, “The Dance: Abstraction,” New York Times, December 11, 1938, 196.

15. John Martin, “The Dance: Being Bullied,” New York Times, January 15, 1939, X8.

16. John Martin, “The Dance: Hybrid Art,” New York Times, February 12, 1939, 136.

17. Joellen Meglin, “Blurring the Boundaries of Genre, Gender, and Geopolitics: Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzberg's Transatlantic Collaboration in the 1930s,” Dance Research Journal, vol. 41, no. 2 (2009): 53. See also Mark Franko, The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 107.

18. Martin, America Dancing, 67.

19. Ibid., 72–74.

20. Ibid., 81.

21. John Martin, Introduction to the Dance (1939; reprint Brooklyn, N.Y.: Dance Horizons, 1965), 208.

22. Gay Morris, A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945–1960 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 44.

23. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” [1939], in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 50; Martin, Introduction, 53.

24. Martin, America Dancing, 91, 92.

25. Martin, “The Dance: Abstraction.”

26. Martin, “The Dance: Hybrid Art.”

27. Martin, Introduction, 123, 123, 122.

28. Ibid., 217, 211, 210, 124.

29. Ibid., 216.

30. Franko, The Work of Dance, 107.

31. See Sally Banes, “Sibling Rivalry: The New York City Ballet and Modern Dance,” in Dance For a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet, ed. Lynn Garafola with Eric Foner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 73–98.

32. Lincoln Kirstein, Ballet Alphabet [1939], in Ballet: Bias and Belief: Three Pamphlets Collected and Other Dance Writings of Lincoln Kirstein, compiled by Nancy Reynolds (New York: Dance Horizons, 1983), 312.

33. George Balanchine, “Notes on Choreography,” Dance Index, vol. 4, nos. 2–3 (February–March 1945): 23.

34. Edwin Denby, “Balanchine's ‘Apollon’; American Ballet Caravan” [1938], in Dance Writings, ed. Robert Cornfield and William Mackay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 47.

35. Edwin Denby, “Balanchine's American Ballet” [1937], in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 45.

36. Edwin Denby, “A Note on Balanchine's Present Style” [1945], in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 413.

37. Lincoln Kirstein, What Ballet Is About: An American Glossary [1959], in Ballet: Bias and Belief, 378, 375.

38. Ibid., 376, 417, 383, 377, 374.

39. Ibid., 434.

40. See, for example, Battersby, “Stages on Kant's Way”; David Levin, “Race under Representation,” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, no. 1–2 (1991): 62–94; and Schor, Reading in Detail. For an account of the sublime and neoclassical ballet, see David Michael Levin, “Balanchine's Formalism” [1973], in What Is Dance?, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 123–45.

41. Lincoln Kirstein, “Alec: Or the Future of Choreography” [1953], in Ballet: Bias and Belief, 98.

42. Ibid., 101, 103; 101; 98,100.

43. Joan Wallace Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 55.

44. Ibid., 63.

45. Edwin Denby, “A Briefing in American Ballet” [1948], in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 522.

46. Ibid., 523.

47. Kirstein, What Ballet Is About, in Ballet, 376

48. Denby, “A Note,” in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 412.

49. Edwin Denby, “A Letter on New York City Ballet” [1952], in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 421, 422.

50. Ibid., 420.

51. Edwin Denby, “In the Abstract” [1959–1960], in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 467.

52. George Amberg, Ballet in America: The Emergence of an American Art (New York: Mentor Books, 1949), 127.

53. Edwin Denby, “Some Thoughts about Classicism and George Balanchine” [1953], in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 438, 422.

54. Denby, “A Letter,” 422, 435.

55. Ibid., 422. On American ballet and postwar consensus culture, see Harris, “Choreographing America.”

56. Lincoln Kirstein, “Classic Ballet: Aria of the Aerial” [1976], in Ballet: Bias and Belief, 131.

57. Denby, “The Monte Carlo Distracted” [1946], in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 347, 348.

58. Edwin Denby, “Ballet: The American Position” [1947], in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 512.

59. Denby, “A Letter,” 428, 429.

60. Ibid., 428.

61. Edwin Denby, “On Meaning in Dance” [1943], in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 131.

62. Denby, “Ballet: The American Position,” 512, 524.

63. Denby, “A Letter,” 429.

64. Edwin Denby, “Fokine's ‘Russian Soldier’; Tudor's ‘Pillar of Fire’; Balanchine's Elephant Ballet” [1942], in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 93.

65. Edwin Denby, “Massine and the New Monte Carlo” [1938], in Cornfield and Mackay, Dance Writings, 53.

66. Denby, “A Letter,” 422; “A Note,” 414.

67. Scott, Gender, 10.

68. Martin, Ruth Page, 14, 13.

69. Ibid., 15, 14, 13–14, 13.

70. “Federal Ballet Presents” [poster], Federal Theatre Project, Vassar Collection of Programs and Promotional Material, Jericho-PA folder, Box 159, National Archives, Records of the Works Projects Administration. Also http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/new_deal_for_the_arts/images/celebrating_the_people/federal_ballet.html (accessed October 24, 2011).

71. On Page's political engagement during the Federal Ballet period, see Cooper, “Dances About Spain,” 232–39. On Page's previous choreographic explorations of gender, see Meglin, “Blurring the Boundaries.”

72. Meglin, “Blurring the Boundaries,” 54–63.

73. This and the following three quotations are all from Ruth Page, An American Pattern [scenario], folder M30, Ruth Page Collection, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

74. Emily Rosenberg, “Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the ‘American Century,’” Diplomatic History, vol. 23, no. 3 (1999): 481.

75. Wolff, AngloModern, 87. For a similar perspective, see Bennett, “Theatre History,” 53, and Clark, Sentimental Modernism, 202.

76. Griselda Pollock, “Moments of Temporality of the Avant-Garde ‘in, of, and from the feminine,’” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 4 (2010): 802, and Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (New York: Routledge, 1999), 33.

77. In addition to the above-cited works, see also Griselda Pollock, “Inscriptions in the Feminine,” in Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the feminine, ed. M. Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995), 67–87.