Triumph of Age

A living legend stepped on to the stage of the steamy barn theater at Jacob's Pillow in Massachusetts' Berkshires one day last week. She was Ruth St. Denis, world-famed dancer for more than half a century and, with Isadora Duncan, founder of modern dance. By the laws of time (she admits to 73), old Dancer St. Denis should have creaked. Actually, though nobody in the audience pretended that she looked like the girl in the White Rock ads any more, many forgot her age as they watched the practiced magic of her performance.

To the rasping accompaniment of a recorded piano, "Miss Ruth" wove her way through some of the Oriental numbers that first made her famous in the U.S. and Europe in 1906-08. In The Incense, she was an Indian woman carrying a tray of smoking incense; Miss Ruth's figure was no longer as willowy as it was in Theodore Roosevelt's Administration, but her bare arms undulated with astonishing grace and control. In The Cobras, she was a fakir. As the cobras, represented by Miss Ruth's arms, slithered over her head and body, she wore an impudent expression that told her audience that neither she nor the fakir took the cobras very seriously. In The Yogi, she strode on to the stage in flowing saffron robes with a long tambura (Indian lute) held at her back and her white hair wildly flying. She had first danced it in Vienna in 1908; in this appearance, she was frankly an old woman, but a triumphant old woman.

Afterward, dance fans streamed backstage to shake her hand. Consensus of oldtimers in the crowd: "How this takes me back!"

Wearing a slash of scarlet lipstick and dashes of mascara across her scanty eyelashes, Miss Ruth explained something of how she does it: "I've been flirting with Gayelord Hauser, eating yoghurt and all those things. At the merry age of 73, one has to watch for a gathering around the hips. I never drink or smoke." She also practices yoga every morning.

Her Jacob's Pillow performance was one of Miss Ruth's occasional public appearances. Most of the year she is busy in Hollywood with the Ruth St. Denis School and the "Church of the Divine Dance," where she has about 50 disciples of all ages. She also has 50 acres south of Riverside, Calif., where she would like to start a colony. "If I had an endowment--which I ain't got--" she adds with the breeziness of an old trouper. "I would take six boys and six girls and keep them under monastic discipline in a retreat for five years before I would allow them to dance. My vision is of a renaissance in America, beginning with the dance."

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