Years ago I read a book called Gods Who Dance, written by American dancer Ted Shawn (1891-1972). It tells the tale of his exploratory dance travels. Shawn was one half of Denishawn, a seminal and hugely popular dance company that was the first stadium dance act in the United States. Before them Isadora Duncan had opened people’s ideas to new thinking about dance. Isadora looked to the ancient world, Greece, for first principles. These progenitors of modern dance were an expression of the cultural imagination of America before anthropology and widespread tourism provided facts, experiences, and exposure to other cultures. Just as Art Deco was fascinated by the exotic, so was America and so was Denishawn.

Dance legend has it that Shawn’s partner, Ruth St. Denis, a famous vaudeville "aesthetic dancer" well before she met Shawn, saw a pack of Cleopatra cigarettes, mimicked the pose of the image... and never looked back. St. Denis’s most famous dance was called Incense, in which she becomes the incense itself. She performed it throughout her long life and all over the world. Denishawn could conjure more than incense. Starring in their own large spectacles, they could bring to life an endless pageant of exotica: an Aztec empire, the first Tillers of the Soil, Japanese Samurai, Egyptian deities, the Navajo, Siamese royalty, Moses. The Dance Division has a 1964 film of Ruth St. Denis dancing Incense.

Image 2. Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn in "Tillers of the Soil". Photograph by White, N.Y. Image 1. Ruth St Denis in "Incense." Photograph by Frederich August Von Kaulbach.There was not so much international cultural interchange between dancers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Museums, World Fairs, word of mouth, and visiting holy men were ways artists, or anyone for that matter, could encounter information about dancing in a foreign culture aside from actual travel. Denishawn spectacles, as respectful, researched, and intended as tributes as they were, also reflected the lack of access to cultural knowledge in the United States at that time. With Ruth’s inspiration for all things ancient and profound, and Shawn’s choreographic flair, Denishawn was able to create spectacular awareness for ancient and particularly Asian culture. Their intuitive sincerity approaching Asia and the ancient was rewarded: it guided them to the source. 

The level of their cultural knowledge changed completely in 1925 and 1926 when Denishawn themselves made a nearly two-year performance and research tour of Asia. It was as grand a dance encounter between East and West as can ever be envisioned, as many if not most Asian nations, were then ruled by royal families and so had courts and the accompanying court dancers. Dances in Asia retained, to a large degree, their historical accuracy at that time, as well as established ways of transmitting extraordinary techniques of body and mind. Most of this was completely foreign to the West.

Conversely, the industriously creative Denishawn company, always making up new dances, was something foreign to most Asian dance traditions. Ted’s artistic research into the dances of the world was scientific, and his manner of recording the ancient dances he encountered was revolutionary and systematic at the same time. This was a critical time for ancient dance, with kingdoms soon to end and a new century taking hold. Where the Asian traditions variously depicted their dances for the sake of recording or remembering them, Ted Shawn brought a new way of recording them with film and photographs. . . and Denishawn dancers learning the steps! 

Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis were received at the highest levels everywhere they went. Glamorous as it sounds, there was no electricity, no running water, and they traveled by elephant, camel, rickshaw, gondola, rail and ship, performing at every stop. Ted Shawn knew more about the dances of the world than anyone in the world at that time, and perhaps still to this day. He was particularly interested to see Bugaku, an ancient Chinese Confucian dance, brought to Japan in the late seventh century and kept alive there ever since in the Imperial Palace of the Japanese emperors. The Dance Division has a 1978 recording, Court Dances of Japan: Bugaku, which was presented by Brooklyn College in cooperation with the Performing Arts Program of the Asia Society and produced, written, and narrated by Beate Gordon for the Asia Society (call number *MGZIDVD 5-5520).

The Emperor Taisho, who reigned when Ted and Ruth visited the Palace, was curious of the fashions, skills, and tastes of the West. The Taisho Era is known for the early inclusion of Western elements into Japanese design. Remarkably, but largely on account of the new ethos of the Emperor Taisho, they were invited to the palace. It is hard today to appreciate the level and type of fame lavished on American dancers Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. They were iconic worldwide. Ted and Ruth were dignitaries in their own right as leading ambassadors for dance. They were the very image of respectability everywhere they went, which is all the more astonishing considering how exotic and outlandish much of their work was.

Ted and Ruth did not see Bugaku performed at the Palace, as viewing was not allowed to the general public, but they did hear the accompanying music, the otherworldly Gagaku. I noted this from looking at the forward to Gagaku by Lincoln Kirstein, reprinted from Gagaku by Robert Garfias, in Ballet, Bias and Belief (call number *MGT 84-2222).

They were awed by this specter of imperial dance, and spoke how there was much to learn about dance from Japan. Mirroring the respect and admiration Ted and Ruth showed their ancient culture, members of the Imperial household allowed them to see a hand-painted, two-volume portfolio of Bugaku costumes, which revealed choreography along with the costume design. The American dancers were touched and marveled at the beauty of the images.

About eighteen months later, Denishawn returned to the United States using the same route through Tokyo by which they’d arrived. They were surprised to be invited to the Imperial Palace of the Japanese Emperor for a second time. This time, to their humble and complete delight, Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis were given a hand-painted copy of the two-volume portfolio of Bugaku costumes. It is the only known copy in the world of this Japanese Imperial treasure and  this account from  Shawn’s book Gods Who Dance is the only known reference to it.

I put the book down. One question lingered. Where is that Bugaku portfolio now, ninety years later? I contacted Jacob’s Pillow, the dance festival founded by Shawn, but they did not have it. I was directed to look for it at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts by my editor. There my journey with Shawn evolved in a way I could never had imagined. Yes, the Bugaku portfolio was there, but I did not find it on the first day. Instead I learned that every chapter of Gods Who Dance had a corresponding film. Java, China, Indonesia, Sikkim, Kashmir, Ceylon, India and the list goes on. You can see the films from this collection at the Dance Division, including Denishawn Oriental Tour, 1926 (call number *MGZIDF-3061), Ceylon, Singapore and Darjeeling dances (call number *MGZIDVD 5-175), and Denishawn Dancers in India (call number *MGZIDVD 5-116).

These are silent, black and white, short films. Some are newsreels for the folks back home. In fact the book Gods Who Dance is a compilation of articles Shawn sent back each month to be published in Dance magazine. The other films are the real treasure:  skillful documentation of the dances Shawn encountered in each place, a record of ancient dances unmatched anywhere. Some of the dances Denishawn encountered have become extinct since that time.

Shawn’s book and expedition came to life. In 1925 and 1926 everyone in film was a pioneer. In this case, filming a dance expedition across pre-modern Asia was an enormous achievement. Ted Shawn directed the films, and they were usually shot by Ruth St. Denis’s brother, Buzz, who had long worked with the company and knew well how to film dancing. Here was a treasure of recorded ancient dances as amazing in its own way as the Bugaku portfolios. Amazing too that the New York Public Library had both. One does not replace the other, rather, together they present a picture of dancers’ desire to preserve and remember their dances, to encode and so explore the nature of dance itself.  

The treasure was in good hands at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The films were easy to find in the dance research catalogue, delivered quickly, faster than I could watch them, and importantly, altogether, understood as a body of work. The Dance Division supplies convenient quiet places to watch these films as carefully and as many times as I choose. Just as Denishawn encountered treasures and experiences along their journey, so did I as I retraced their steps at Dance Division at the Library for Performing Arts. 

By visiting some of the other entries, and following associated keywords that appeared when I searched for the Denishawn artifact and films in the catalogue, I found an entry listed as Japanese Dance Drawings (call number *MGS-Res. ++ [Japanese]), and further described as coming from Shawn and St. Denis, and as a signed gift  from the Imperial household. It had to be the Bugaku portfolios.  I filled out the order slip and gave it to the desk to retrieve. Within half an hour, I was sitting with the hand-painted copy of the two-volume portfolio of Bugaku costumes belonging to the Japanese Emperor Taisho. I felt the New York Public Library had given me a cultural encounter as surprising and rare as the one experienced by Ted Shawn when he first received this gift. 

It was decades before American culture was able to absorb and appreciate the Imperial Gagaku troupe during their first visit to the West in 1959. Bugaku is the dance portion of Gagaku music performances. Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, championed the effort to bring the Imperial Gagaku to the United Nations. He edited and wrote an introduction for an elegant book for the occasion, written by Robert Garfias, Gagaku, The Music and Dances of the Japanese Imperial Household (call number *MGS [Japanese]).

It tells with authority the history, choreography, and repertory of these venerable dances. The publication includes haunting reproductions of a late eighteenth century Bugaku scroll owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was only one year earlier, in 1958, that choreographer George Balanchine with New York City Ballet presented his ballet Bugaku and with it initiated a conversation about both dance forms. Today, films of the Balanchine ballet are available at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division (call number *MGZIC-9-4313A), and beautiful Bugaku screens are available on the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Taken together: scroll, screens, films, portfolios, a lavish visual understanding dawns.

My experience of the Bugaku portfolios is simple for me, pure in a way. They are not mine to protect, as was the duty of Ted Shawn. The Jerome Robbins Dance Division protects this timeless dance asset with rigor and professionalism. It is very well taken care of. I can sit at a choice of tables. This book being from a special collection, I viewed it in the reading area of the third floor of the Library for Performing Arts dedicated to such materials. Large tables allowed me to open the volumes with stability and plenty of clear flat surfaces. I was left alone to study and admire these records of ancient dance to my heart’s content. I could return to pages as often as I chose, open both volumes to experience the full glory of the books, behold an ancient dance tradition remembered in painting.

It is indeed a fine example of Japanese aesthetics: precise and clean, decorative and making the profound seem simple. To see a comparable screen in a museum collection: http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/45264 ). These dancers were the sole figures on otherwise pure pages, suspended in an eternity of appreciation, something to behold. These two portfolios depict many dances. Bugaku costumes are multilayered and complicated. For this reason, dance steps were chosen in the paintings to reveal as much of the costume as possible. Accuracy was the purpose of the portfolio. Taken together, these two volumes are one of the most complete representations of the art of Bugaku in any visual form and also serve as reliable scientific records of bugaku performance in the pre-modern time.

The actual experience of using the Dance Division, handling the materials oneself, absorbing a dawning sense of history and those who made it, is the core of its value as a dance resource. It is a destination of the mind and spirit, a quiet and thoughtful place from which to take any manner of personal journey in dance. Away from the random infinitude of the Internet, here was a focused and professional manner of delving into a dance subject open to anyone; any dancer, any scholar. Going through the catalog itself is something that can be done online, and the New York Public Library website offers convenient ways to save lists of titles for future reference. This makes the experience at the library faster and focused on the objects.

By following related subject searches in the catalog entry for the portfolios, my personal search for treasure expanded to specific types of art, such as woodblock prints, paintings, drawings, or engravings. My searching had me, like Shawn, investigate an array of countries. I was faced with the fact that nations and kingdoms have fallen and disappeared in the last one hundred years. Taiwan was Formosa, Thailand was Siam, the Philippines were part of the United States. These works of art were given by people who were travelers, explorers, adventurers, lovers of dance and of Asian culture. Something about the works of art struck them; they brought the works safely to our shores with varying degrees of specific knowledge but insightful first-hand experience.

I also became fascinated with the documentation aspect of Shawn’s films next to that of the painted compendium of Bugaku dances. How is a tradition best remembered visually? Is there one answer? When dance traditions have spiritual techniques or rely on mysterious effects, is allusion better than representation?  The researching was simple in its way:  I searched through various media combined with a country. My search in "woodblock prints and Japan” brought me to the works of Japanese woodblock print master Tsukioka Kogyo. It was both serendipity and a research method.

Tsukioka Kogyo is a genuine heir in a lineage of Ukiyo-e printmakers and draftsmen. His mother remarried to a famous Ukiyo-e master Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and the boy became his apprentice. Later he studied with the painter and print maker Ogata Gekko, and so his training was complete and he was given the name Kogyo. What makes him unique among ukiyo-e artists is that he almost exclusively depicted the Japanese Noh theater, an otherworldly style of dance theater dating to the fourteenth century.

During the same period as Shawn was making his expeditions and films, and the Imperial household was painting a copy of the Bugaku record of dances, Kogyo was working on his third representation of Noh, a five volume portfolio entitled Noga Taikan (call number [S] *MGS-res Japanese + 79-302 ) to follow his two earlier sets, Nogakuzue (Illustrations of Noh, 1897-1902 ) and Noh Hyakuban (One Hundred Noh Plays, 1998-1903). In fact, Kogyo’s disciple completed the final twenty-four woodblock prints in this series. Noh plays, notoriously slow, profound, and beautiful, have climactic moments of spiritual dilation where a moment is frozen in time.

Kogyo’s woodblock prints seize on these moments of still transcendence, creating color woodblock prints of detail, complexity and enveloping environment. This is a watery use of color, a billowing use of imagery, human emotion immortalized in dance. Quite unlike the Bugaku portfolios, so crisp and precise in their antique stylized manner. Yet both of these multivolume portfolios were intended, as was Shawn’s book and films, as ways to record whole traditions of movement. 1926 was an important year for making records of Asian dances.

Shawn firmly believed in the universality of dance, and further the kindred nature of all dancers as insiders to one another regardless of origin or style of dance. The eventual encounter of actual dancers from the West with dancers from the East established a fraternity that could at last be based on knowledge of dance. There were other expeditions, photographers and early filmmakers, but none with the skill in dance theory and performance such as Denishawn brought with it. That doesn’t mean there was no awareness of dance by the early anthropologists, geographers, missionaries, diplomats, and others who traveled to cultures where dance was very old. 

By searching “engravings and Indonesia,” I came across the Claire Holt Collection of Indonesian art (graphic), 1952-1966  (call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41). The items collected by her during the course of a several trips to Indonesia from the 1930s through the 1950s include many photographs of dance from among the first photos ever taken of Indonesian dance. A scholar of art and anthropology, her collection came to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division by means of the Modern Indonesia Project of Cornell University in 1978. 

The treasures here are perhaps most significantly unpublished manuscripts about the dances of Bali and Java. While not a dancer like Shawn, Holt was a professional observer of culture and realized the significance of dance to the lives and religions of Indonesia. These are unrepeatable firsthand accounts, every bit as important as the first accounts of the South Pole or Mount Everest. The simple power of dance depicted in sequence, image by image, has a documentational value that transcends epoch, and unites all artists who employ the progression whether in painting, print or photograph. It is a kind of two-dimensional schematic applied to evanescent three-dimensional movement, appearing in almost every era of human history.

It should come as no surprise then that among the items in the Claire Holt collection are several different engravings of Dance of Otheite, as Tahiti was then known (call number *MGZDG Ind 1-12 ). This particular dance was deemed of interest because the costumes might suggest they were in some way influenced by European styles. It seems far-fetched, as the engravings are taken from a painting done when Captain Cook first traveled to these isles in 1773. The nature of an engraving is such that a metal plate is engraved based on a painting or drawing, and so takes on the artistic license and impulse of the engraver.

Claire Holt collected several different engravings based on the famous painting by Webber, the artist who traveled with Captain Cook. One engraving reverses the image, another exaggerates the Western line of the costumes. Taken together, the variations of engravings indicate the varied ways we looked at other dances “for the first time," and even two hundred and fifty years after the painting was done, we are still looking at documentational works of art to teach us, about ourselves as much as the subjects we chose.

An example of a Western attempt at objective depiction was found in the Holt collection. It was an extraordinary colored engraving of animal headed dancers of the Nouak Tribe (call number *MGZDG Ind 1-12 ). The sobriety of the engraving nevertheless reveals astonishment at things previously unknown and unseen. This original painting also had several engraved versions.

Perhaps my favorite item in the Claire Holt collection, however, is a simple and quickly executed pastel drawing of a dancer (call number *MGZDG Ind 1-12 ). It reminded me of the pastels of nineteenth-century French painter Toulouse-Lautrec, who drew furiously to capture the flamboyant dancing going on in front of him. It had an energy, a dance of its own, an immediacy that carries the observer of the painting into the observation of the painter. This little pastel drawing from Indonesia was so full of life, I felt the very joy of exploration and discovery expressed and preserved. It was that spark of life one cannot get searching the Internet. It was that feeling of discovery within the Dance Division that is its intellectual vitality. 

My researches at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division worked well with complementary online research. Invariably I would search online for some of the subject matter I encountered at the Library for Performing Arts. The added context and information only highlighted the quality and distinction of the materials at the library. Recently a famous and successful blogger Andrew Sullivan, decided to quit blogging. Not that there was anything bad about it, in fact it had been the best thing he ever did. But he wanted to “think slower, read longer, write more deeply.” The Jerome Robbins Dance Division allows an opportunity to do just that. Dance deserves better thinking, these days more than ever.

The list of prints and etchings, art books ,and specialist publications featuring Asian dances are enough to entertain a cultural traveler richly, to educate dancers visually, and expand public scholarship beyond words. Works of art, from Bugaku and beyond, produced heavenly moments for me in the Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Beautiful moments of thinking, of looking and being silent with objects of art as much symbols of the journeys they have taken as artworks in themselves. These art works represent a series of great personal encounters, and they provide the modern viewer with great personal encounters as well.

Joseph Houseal
Winter 2015
New York, Chicago

Items in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division

1. Denishawn 150, call number *MGZEB (Denishawn, no. 150).
2. Denishawn 390, call number *MGZEB (Denishawn, no. 390).
3. Japanese dance drawings, call number *MGS-Res. ++ (Japanese).
4. Japanese dance drawings, call number *MGS-Res. ++ (Japanese).
5. Japanese dance drawings, call number *MGS-Res. ++ (Japanese).
6. Japanese dance drawings, call number *MGS-Res. ++ (Japanese).
7. Noga Taikan, call number *MGS-res. Japanese + 79-302, vol. 5.
8. Noga Taikan, call number *MGS-res. Japanese + 79-302, vol. 5.
9. Claire Holt collection of Indonesian art, call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41.
10. Claire Holt collection of Indonesian art, call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41.
11. Claire Holt collection of Indonesian art, call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41.
12. Claire Holt collection of Indonesian art, call number *MGZDG Ind 1-41.

Joseph Houseal is the director of Core of Culture, a nonprofit organization working in cultural preservation, specializing in dance. His expeditionary work in the Himalayas has informed museum exhibitions across the globe and contributed to the NYPL Digital Collections as well. An internationally respected writer on dance, Houseal's association with Ballet Review, NYC, has lasted thirty years. Former artistic director of Parnassus Dancetheatre in Kyoto, Houseal also worked as artistic director for soul singer Chaka Khan and choreographer for the United States Naval Academy. In 2014, Houseal directed a project for Ballet Society, producing an app for mobile devices, engaging young dancers with the humanities and allied arts. In 2007 Houseal's work was awarded the Conde Nast Global Vision Award for Cultural Preservation.