American Delsartism: Precursor of an American Dance Art

Abstract

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).

Forgotten “New” Dancer of New York City's Gilded Age: Genevieve Lee Stebbins and the Dance as Yet Undreamed

“…12.Further information on Stebbins's previous studies and independence of thought can be found in Ruyter (1973, 428; 1988; 1999, 75–100); Thomas (2004, 191–192).…”

“…3.Bordelon (2016; 2019); Brandstetter (2015, 46–49); Ruyter (1973, 20 – 24; 1988; 1996; 1999, 45 – 56, 88 – 131).…”

“…Within her foundational analysis of American Delsartism dance historian Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter placed Stebbins as the sole Delsarte educator responsible for a new genre of solo dance (Ruyter 1999). Ruyter initially argued Stebbins's aim was not to “create a revolutionary new dance” (1973, 24), although later asserted that Stebbins “was unique in taking the dance in a new direction” by creating original dance compositions that either stood alone or carried forward a narrative of a dramatic work (1996, 74). Ruyter contended Stebbins “never would have characterized herself as a dancer” (1999, 124) but also assessed that in Stebbins's ideals and in her “approach to movement as an expressive medium, and in her performances, [she] introduced much of what would be credited by future generations to the invention of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis” (127).…”

Dance of the Twentieth Century: Slide Text and Catalogue

“…Silverman erroneously characterizes all of Duncan's and St. Denis's early commercial theatrical work as "vaudeville," and their main employers, Augustin Daly and David Belasco, as vaudeville producers. On the contrary, Daly and Belasco were producers of drama who hired Duncan and St. Denis for small dancing and pantomime parts in plays -for example, Duncan's role in Daly's A Midsummer Night's Dream (3). Other errors in this section include the listing of three dancers where only two are shown (7), the dates of St. Denis's The Yogi and The Peacock (16,17), and the garbled titles of dances and production in slides 20-23.…”