Numeridanse Present in collection s : Numeridanse. Ruth Saint Denis, a pioneer of modern dance, created choreography that was often inspired by traditional indigenous dances from Asia. One famous example of these works is her "East Indian Nautch Dance," shown here. Music for the dance was composed by Charles Wakefield Cadman. This film represents a brief performance of Saint Denis's "street nautch" as opposed to the "white nautch" , filmed in August The film opens with a medium shot of St.
Denis seated, with arms posed and eyes closed. She wears a great deal of jewelry, makeup, and an 'exotic' costume of many fabrics. After first appearing on the western stage in , Indian dance once again surfaced prominently in the early 20th century. As with the bayaderes in , the performers of the troupe in were of Indian origin. This time, however, their lead dancer and choreographer was not an Indian, but a young American named Ruth Saint Denis. Saint Denis' Indian dance pieces were attempts to convey Hindu philosophical ideas to Western audiences in a manner that would be intelligible to them.
These were not authentic Indian dances, as were those of the bayaderes, but were inspired by Indian themes and included the sinuous and rippling arm motions and graceful body movements and postures of classical Indian dances. Denis abundantly used Indian dress materials and jewelry and designed and wore long flowing costumes. To create an Eastern ambience, she used Indian brassware, ornate columns, flowers, incense and other creative stage props.
Saint Denis was a gifted dancer whose artistic creations demonstrated how to relink dance with spiritualism at a time when Western dancers had generally cut themselves off from its religious and spiritual origins. She had studied and was deeply inspired by non-Western and especially Indian civilization at a time when a tendency--much later dubbed as "Orientalism" by Edward Said--prompted her contemporaries to look upon non-Western people as inferior, backward and static or even weird and animalistic.
Ruth Saint Denis's relative open-mindedness was thus a fresh departure that helped free Western dance from its shackles, elevated it onto a higher plane and placed important and even profound facets of Indian culture before Western audiences.
