JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Educational Theatre Journal. W hen dance historians and critics discuss the background of American modern dance, they usually mention Frangois Delsarte. Everyone agrees that in some way he was important to the development of dance in America, yet the precise nature of his impact has never been critically examined. This paper is an attempt to fill that gap. The focus will not be on the Delsarte System as taught in France, but rather on the American Delsarte System which derived from Delsarte's work and also included techniques from other sources and independent discoveries. It is my thesis that American Delsartism helped create an intellectual climate favorable to the emergence of a new dance art in America, provided that art with theoretical and practical principles upon which it could build, and offered a rationale and justification for its existence.Two things should be kept in mind. The first is that, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the traditional dance art of the Western world-the ballet-was in a serious state of decline everywhere except in Russia. In America, the ballet was not only at low ebb artistically. It was also held in disrespect for its foreignness and as an art founded and patronized by an aristocratic elite. Furthermore, respectable middle-class Americans tended to censure the ballet on moral grounds. They condemned the ballet girls as little better than whores, and even questioned the moral effect on viewers of attending a ballet performance.' To gain the respect and patronage of the American public, a new dance art would have to appear as a more worthy alternative to the ballet. It would have to be free of the objectionable characteristics of the traditional art and embody positive values that the society esteemed.Second, we should remember that beginning around the 1870s, an anti-traditional spirit began to assert itself throughout the Western world in every field of human inquiry and creativity. The American social historian Morton White has characterized this as a "revolt against formalism." In his study of the phenomenon in the social sciences, White Nancy Cbalfa Ruyter is a Lecturer in Dance at the University of California, Riverside. This article is based on a chapter of ber dissertation, "Reformers and Visionaries; The Americanization of the Art of Dance" (Claremont Graduate School, 1970).

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RESUMO -A Influência do Trabalho de Delsarte nos Estados Unidos a partir doFinal do Século XIX -Este texto trata da influência de François Delsarte em várias correntes do treinamento corporal, teatral e da preparação vocal nos Estados Unidos, a partir do final do século XIX. Apresenta-se a forma como suas ideias foram desenvolvidas e transformadas no país, desde 1870, tornando-se, em sua última fase, iniciada na década de 1880, uma teoria aplicada a todos os aspectos da vida independentemente de sua corrente europeia. São mencionadas as contribuições de Steele Mackaye, Genevieve Stebbins e Henrietta Hovey, entre outros. Palavras-chave: François Delsarte. Dança. Teatro. Delsartismo Americano. Corpo. ABSTRACT -The Influence of Delsarte's Work in the United States: Late 19th Century and Beyond -This paper discusses the influence of François Delsarte on bodily motion, theater, and elocution in the United States from the late nineteenth century. It presents his main ideas and how they were developed and transformed in the country since 1870, becoming, in their last phase, which began in the 1880s, a theory that was applied to all aspects of life, independent from its European form. The contributions of Steele Mackaye, Genevieve Stebbins, Henrietta Hovey and others are mentioned.

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There is much evidence of La Meri’s lifelong commitment to writing, which seems to have been as central to her life as dance. Fortunately, her thoughts, feelings, and insights survive not only in her published poetry, articles, and books but also in the hundreds of notes and notebooks, dance descriptions, letters, and other materials in her archives. At an early age, La Meri began publishing her poetry, and, later, works about her own life experiences and about dance and its many manifestations. After some discussion of La Meri’s poetry and the books of poems that she published, this chapter focuses mostly on the six books that deal with dance. These books include her autobiography (a memoir of her professional life) and five works that provide information and discussion about dance as an art form: including Spanish dance, Indian dance, choreography, and “ethnic dance,” a term she claimed to have coined. In her dance writings she also sets forth her theoretical, aesthetic and pedagogical conceptions and ideas.