Ruth Page: The Woman in the Work

Ruth Page was a Chicago ballerina who was a highly original choreographer who sought the iconoclastic and transgressed boundaries of genre, gender, race, class, and sexuality. This biography follows her career spanning the twentieth century, exploring her unique sensibility,corporeal praxis, and collaborative ethos. It also features an international cast of dancers, composers, visual artists, and companies.

Format: Hardback
Length: 544 pages
Publication date: 14 June 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

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 showcases 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, such as 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.

Weight: 926g
Dimension: 242 x 165 x 44 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780190205164