Ruth St. Denis was an American vaudeville performer who is best known as a pioneer of Modern Dance. However, her work was so heavily influenced by the Orientalist fashion that was all the rage at the turn of the last century that she could just as easily be considered a prototype for the American bellydancer-as-artist. The famous story is that she was inspired by an Orientalist advertisement for cigarettes. She subsequently went for a photo shoot dressed in a Cleopatra wig and never looked back.

St. Denis had a flair for the dramatic. She had no formal dance training, but honed her chops on the vaudeville circuit, which could call for wild acrobatics or a flashy skirt dance at the drop of a hat. She was also a follower of the Delsarte method of calisthenics, which was hugely popular at the time; its practice went hand in hand with the enthusiastic search for spirituality that was a widespread characteristic of the era.

With her show biz pedigree, St. Denis managed to capture the imagination of American audiences in a way that Sol Bloom’s imported ethnic dancers at the Chicago World’s Fair had not been able. Although the “hoochie coochie” dancers attracted plenty of salacious attention, the general public found them too foreign and vulgar to be appealing. But because she was white and carried herself with an authority of spiritual legitimacy, St. Denis was able to get away with an exotic persona (not to mention very little clothing) quite outside the social norms of the day, which made her an instant sensation, and a heroine to early 20th century women. She trained a number of dancers who became famous in their own right, including Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, and later went on to found the Church of the Divine Dance.

The American bellydance craze, at least until it hit its peak in the 1970′s, possibly owed as much, if not more, to the Orientalist stylings of Ruth St. Denis and her followers as it did to actual Middle Eastern dance. She was influential to the dance and costuming trends in Hollywood, where she taught for many years. Hollywood films in their turn directly influenced dance and costuming styles in the Middle East, resulting in the modern two-piece costume, which is still de rigeur for most bellydancers.

This cross-pollination carries on today, as globalization and the Internet continue to alter the face of bellydance, and countries that once appeared as distant, exotic dreamscapes no longer seem so far away. It is now possible to compare videos of dances from all over the world at the click of a mouse, and the matter of “authenticity” can be a sore spot for some bellydance purists who wish to clean the slate and return the dance to its original home in a cave somewhere in the Levant. But Miss Ruth, as she was known to her friends, knew better; she knew that the true birthplace of the dance is not a country somewhere, but in the heart of each and every dancer.

~ Kozmique, as seen on Kozmique.com and moderator of HippyMom’s Belly Dance Forum!