Ruth Page: The Woman in the Work

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Dedication
Acknowledgments Overture
PART I : INTERNATIONAL STIRRINGS
1. From Pavlovita to Première Danseuse
2. World Travelers: Chicago Allied Arts and Beyond
3. "Gone Modern": Skyscrapers, Sacks, and Sticks
4. A Surprising Partnership: Page/Kreutzberg
PART II : BALLET AMERICANA
5. White She-Devil in an Otherwise Black-Cast: La Guiablesse
6. "Jungle Jazz": A Murder Trial in Ballet
7. "Ghosts of Harlem": A Blues Ballet
8. America's First Feminist Ballet: An American Pattern
9. Embodying "Lowlife" in High Art: Frankie and Johnny
10. Victory Garden: Danced Poems in the Time of War
11. Postwar Anomie: The Bells
12. Bible Stories Meet Music Hall: Billy Sunday
PART III : COSMOPOLITAN CHOREOGRAPHIES
13. The Remaking of the Choreographer: Revenge and the European Market
14. A Woman's Will: The Merry Widow
15. The Woman Who Could Not Sleep
16. Grand Finale Key to Endnote Abbreviations Endnotes
Index Poetry Credit Lines

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In Ruth Page: The Woman in the Work, the Chicago ballerina emerges as a highly original choreographer who, in her art, sought the iconoclastic as she transgressed boundaries of genre, gender, race, class, and sexuality. Author Joellen A. Meglin shows how her works were often controversial and sometimes censored even as she succeeded in roles usually reserved for men in the ballet world: choreographer, artistic director, and impresario. From extensive dramaturgical analysis of her most famous ballets — La Guiablesse, Frankie and Johnny, Billy Sunday, Revenge, The Merry Widow, Camille, Carmina Burana, and Alice — to embodied re-imagining of an avant-garde solo performed in a "sack" designed by Isamu Noguchi, this biography follows the global reach of Ruth Page's career spanning the greater part of the twentieth century. In the process of discovering the woman in the work, one encounters an international cast of dancers (Anna Pavlova, Harald Kreutzberg, Frederic Franklin, Alicia Markova), composers (William Grant Still, Aaron Copland, Jerome Moross, Darius Milhaud), visual artists (Noguchi, Pavel Tchelitchew, Antoni Clavé), and companies (Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Ballets des Champs-Elysées, London Festival Ballet). Disrupting notions that New York was the only cradle of the American ballet, and George Balanchine, its exponent to eclipse all others, Ruth Page explores the woman's unique sensibility, corporeal praxis, and collaborative ethos to reveal her Chicago-centered network of creativity.

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