High Priestess Returns

It was a curiously mixed crowd--aging ladies in purple velvet and flowered hats come to recall a bygone day, brash youths come to scoff at a legend. Silver-haired Ruth St. Denis, 67, high priestess of the dance, was returning to Manhattan's Carnegie Hall stage, with Ted Shawn, 53, her husband and partner from whom she had separated 13 years ago.

From their 20-year-repertory, the pair danced the pastoral Tillers of the Soil, the romantic Josephine and Hippolyte. St. Denis soloed her Indian Rajput Nautch, and Shawn whirled through 540 gyrations in his Mevlevi Dervish. At the end, after a Brahms waltz, which showed her still-youthful white body shimmering under turquoise veiling, he carried her off stage, just as he had done many a time long ago. One sentimentalist in the audience whispered: "Maybe they'll go home together." It was sentiment, but not romance, that had brought Ruth St. Denis from California to help Shawn raise money for scholarships on which returning soldiers could attend his Jacob's Pillow (Mass.) Dance Festival.

Rhythms for Hymns. Ruth St. Denis was a Belasco dancer in 1902 when she saw a figure of the Egyptian goddess Isis in a cigar-store window, and turned to oriental dancing. In 1914 she married Ted Shawn, a Methodist divinity student. They explored native American dancing, trained such successors as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman.

Then St. Denis turned mystic, dreamed vaguely of a Christian dance church in which body rhythms would replace orthodox hymns and sermons. Shawn was more interested in Indian lore and athletic male dancers. They disbanded their Denishawn partnership. "Ted and I are not divorced," she said, "only esthetically separated. I am full of temples and he is full of boy ballets."

St. Denis danced the Resurrection in one Manhattan church, the 63rd Psalm in another, moved to California to build her temple of the dance. She worked in the graveyard shift (from midnight to 8 a.m.), sorting parts in an aircraft plant. Now she is rehearsing the 1 50th Psalm for a Hollywood Bowl performance in July.

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