Ruth Page: The Woman in the Work

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 DL La Guiablesse, Frankie and Johnny, Billy Sunday, Revenge, The Merry Widow, Camille, Carmina Burana, and Alice DL 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 with 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 ClavÃ(c)), and companies (Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Ballets des Champs-ElysÃ(c)es, 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.

Joellen A. Meglin, long-time editor of Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts and Professor Emerita of Dance at Temple University, has published extensively on Ruth Page and American ballet. Her re-imagination of Page’s solo Expanding Universe was recently presented at the
92nd-Street Y and the Noguchi Museum in New York.