WEBVTT

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This is tape number 11, it's 20 March 85, the tape number will be 0311, this is with

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Ruth Page for TNT Productions, the diploma is doing the interviewing, this will be a

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little bit more to it.

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What's she going to ask me next?

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What's she going to ask you next?

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What's that?

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That's the putty that goes on your, that holds your mic to your boss.

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Something else.

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The, back again still, we're still talking about the Ravinia operas, wasn't it a great

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deal of choreography Ruth? It looks as though you would do seven or eight operas a season

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plus the children's matinees, I mean, it would be rather a lot.

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Yeah, not a lot.

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You must have been very busy.

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I was, I enjoyed it.

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A morning till night kind of thing.

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What was your life like at that time? The house was filled with dancers, did you live

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in the house in Winnetka and Howard Woods?

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No, we didn't have the house in Winnetka yet, we just rented a house in Ravinia.

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And Tom would be there, would come out.

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That night.

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And was Tom in any way yet involved at this period in your life in organizing contracts

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and things like that or not yet?

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No.

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Not until you really had your own company.

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In 1928 was when you went to Japan.

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Japan, yeah.

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Now, it's obvious that it was very important to you to go, you've said that before.

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Is there something you can put your finger on that was important about Japan to you?

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Well, I liked all countries, I was interested in every country. I wanted to go every place.

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And so Japan was just an exciting opportunity, there was nothing special about the Orient?

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Well, I always, Japanese art always appealed to me, Japanese prints, you know, and I liked

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the Japanese theater. And I don't know, Japan was always a beautiful country, the

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Inland Sea is so lovely. And at that time, Tokyo was a very interesting place.

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You danced, I think, 25 performances in Tokyo. And some of the dances were very American.

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American?

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They were not, they were not, there was, what do you remember about a dance called The Shadow

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of Death, which you premiered there?

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Oh, I think it was by Mussorgsky, wasn't it?

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Right about here.

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Mussorgsky. Well, that was sort of a serious dance. I don't know, I think, I can't

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remember it very well, I didn't do it very much.

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There's not very much information about any of these dances that I've been able to find

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anywhere. How about something called Diana?

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I did all kinds of Diana's. I did a Hindemith, one by Hindemith, and what other Diana's

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I did? The subject of Diana always I thought was fascinating. So I did a Diana with a bow

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and arrow, I think. Yeah. A Hindemith, and who were the other composers I used for Diana?

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I can't remember, but Diana was always...

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The Huntress, the figure for mythology, always an interesting...

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Yeah.

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Something called the American Indian Eagle Dance was also premiered in Tokyo.

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Oh, well that was the American Eagle Dance. Have you ever seen it?

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No.

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Oh, it's a marvelous dance. It's real Indian, and I just learned it and did it as close

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as where they did it as I could.

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And something called Ballet Scaffold.

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That's that picture on the cover of that book. And it wasn't much of a dance, but it was

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a terribly interesting costume.

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That's the fantastic costume.

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That's right.

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Right. I know the one you're making.

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And the dance, I couldn't do much in that costume, but it was sort of, well, it was

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a scaffolding, you know, a basic ballet. Sort of it was a basic ballet.

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What an earth. I mean, I'm sure you remember the costume and I do too, but here we go.

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I mean, Ruth, you could barely move in a thing like that.

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No, I move very easily in it.

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You could, even with the...

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Yeah. You had to... There's nothing difficult about that costume.

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But it had to be stylized. It was something very stylized.

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I think it was an interesting dance.

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Prokofiev.

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Prokofiev, I was just going to say Prokofiev.

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And you did the choreography for all of those dances.

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Yes.

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You must have had to put it together in quite a hurry.

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Your partner for this was Edwin Strawbridge.

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How did you put it all together? Because it was, there wasn't, I shouldn't have thought,

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a great deal of time. The Ravine season ended in August of 1928 and you sailed on September

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5th.

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Oh, I'd been preparing for it a long time before that.

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You hadn't, before the summer.

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Oh yes, of course. And there were the dances that I'd always been doing.

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You weren't just composed just especially to go to Japan with.

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Mm-hmm. Strawbridge and the rest of the people in the company were people you'd also danced

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with before.

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Mm-hmm.

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Where, they weren't quite, certainly the Edith Bohn troupe at all.

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No. Had they been dancing with you at Ravine or?

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I can't remember. Maybe they did. I don't know whether they did or not.

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There were two girls. I can't think of their names even. But he was nothing special.

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He was...

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Strawbridge.

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Yeah, he was all right, but nothing special.

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I noticed you never worked with him. I don't think very much.

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Well, in 1929 you danced with him again, but I guess that was, that was a little...

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He was not a particularly strong or good partner.

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He was all right. You know, nothing special.

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As a choreographer, he didn't do any of that.

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It was all yours.

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Mm-hmm.

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Now, in some ways it would seem that very quickly in terms of choreography, you had

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perhaps outstripped Edith Bohn as a choreographer. What is your...

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I mean, he did do choreography. Bohn did.

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Oh, yeah.

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Yeah. What was the nature of his choreography?

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Well, I think the Birth of the Infanta was the biggest thing he ever did. He did that

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here in Chicago. That's what brought me to Chicago was in 1919. And he was the dwarf

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who was in love with the infanta. And John Olin Carpenter wrote the music. He was a Chicago

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composer. And we did it, it must have been at the auditorium, I guess. It doesn't matter.

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Anyway, either there or at the opera.

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You'll get it.

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I think it was probably the auditorium, wasn't it? Oh, no, maybe it was the orchestra. I

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don't remember.

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I don't know. It was for the Chicago Grand Opera Company, and I don't have a note right

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here, but we'll find out.

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Anyway, but he also choreographed for the Ballet on T.M. and...

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He did all kinds of small ballets and big ones. He did lots of choreography.

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How would you contrast his choreography with your own?

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I don't know. His wasn't... Mine was nothing like his at all.

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His was, it seems from the descriptions I wrote of it, not terribly inventive or original?

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He was... I don't know. I really... It was his pupil, you know. I looked up to him a

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great deal and thought everything he did was wonderful. But the one I thought was the best

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was certainly the Birth of Infanta. That was the biggest. And he had... I don't know where

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he got the money to do it. I have no idea. It must have been very expensive.

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And maybe John Olden Carpenter got the money from... I don't know. He was a very important

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man here. His wife was a very attractive person. There was a very, very well known here in

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Chicago when I first came.

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He was a good partner, a good teacher in some ways. But his choreography, you would say,

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really did not influence you one way or another that you felt you wanted to do different things.

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No. He didn't influence me at all.

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Did you feel that by the time you went to Japan that in some ways you were ready for

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growth for a change that you had outgrown this whole bone period?

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Yes. You know, like everybody outgrows their parents. He was sort of like a father figure

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to me. And so of course I wanted to break away.

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And you did.

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And I did.

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And then there was that wonderful long trip back by ports, the eight month trip back.

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I can't believe it was that long, but maybe it was.

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Well...

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Well, it doesn't matter.

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Well, it was that long. It was from November... the Far East, the Middle Eastern Europe.

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I guess it's eight months only if you can't... well, October to April you can't,

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because the whole month of October you were dancing.

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You came back in April of 1929.

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Back to do Oak Street Beach.

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For the children's matinee, you did it.

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I did it for Virginia, I guess.

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What can you remember about Oak Street Beach? Is it ballet and how it worked?

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Well, I remember mainly from the pictures in that book.

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You know, it took place on a beach and we were all dressed in sort of various amusing...

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it was a little comedy.

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And there was... the interesting part about it to me was that the skyscrapers were right

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there on the beach practically.

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And people weren't used to seeing realistic movement in ballets then.

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And it was just exactly... it wasn't exactly like what people do on the beach,

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it was based on what people really do on the beach.

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You know, sunning themselves and dancing.

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There's a lot more dancing in it, of course, than there is on the beach, but that's what it was like.

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Real movement.

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How is it similar, if it was in any way, to the Flapper and the Quarterback?

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It was very much the same thing. They did it about the same time.

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Yeah, the Flapper and the Quarterback was in 1926.

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And this was in 29.

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And the Flapper and the Quarterback was actually the first...

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there are a lot of firsts in your life, Ruth.

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It was the first Americana ballet by an American choreographer.

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I guess so, I think it was, yeah.

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And so Oak Street Beach was similar in that it was realistic movement.

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That's right.

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And real... it seemed like real people.

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And what role did you dance in it? You were one of the girls on the beach.

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I don't remember dancing in it at all, frankly.

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Oh, maybe you didn't.

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Maybe I didn't. I don't remember dancing in it.

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That same year, 1929, that same summer at Revenia,

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you also did a ballet, which I bet you did dance,

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called the Flapper Goes Oriental.

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Oh, yes, that wasn't very good.

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Was it?

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The Flapper... you know what a flapper is.

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Sure.

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Well, the flapper was trying to do Oriental dances,

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and it was supposed to be a comedy, but it wasn't very good, I don't think.

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I didn't do it very much. It wasn't very good, I didn't think.

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It wasn't, to any degree, sort of a reflection of your trip to the Oriental,

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you as a sort of a flapper having that part in,

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sort of an autobiographical ballet, as it were.

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Yeah.

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At the same time, you also did a ballet called Japanese Print.

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Yeah, that was... I learned dance in Japan,

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and I had this beautiful Japanese kimono made,

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it's all in black and white, and I brought a Japanese wig back,

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and it was copied exactly as close as I could get it

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to the Japanese, their own dances.

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So there wasn't any great creation on my part,

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it was just trying to do something Japanese.

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But certainly it was new, wasn't it?

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I read something that you wrote one time that most what passed in this country

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for Oriental dancing was American ideas of what Oriental dancing would be like,

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and it was nothing like real Oriental dancing.

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So that was new, to some degree.

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Well, maybe. I don't know. I didn't do it very much.

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It was pictorially interesting that it was against a gold screen,

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and it was on a platform so that you could hear the beats on the hollow floor.

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Oh.

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Mm-hmm. And I used little musical instruments that I beat together.

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So it was pretty.

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And then later, in the fall of that year, for the Chicago Women's Club,

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you first performed a ballet you did called Two Balinese Rhapsodies.

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Yes, that was the pleasure dances and the religious dances.

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Oh, those were really, those were the dances, and those were, again, authentic.

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Yes.

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Now, how were they received by the audiences?

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Well, I think they were interested.

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The costumes were beautiful, and they hadn't seen anything like that before,

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so they were very interested.

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It wasn't anything wildly creative on my part.

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It was just copying what I saw in ballet.

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The Balinese dancing, from the descriptions of it that I've read,

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the Balinese dancing that you saw when you were there, was extremely stylized?

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Oh, very.

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Difficult to do?

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Yes, very difficult and full of hard steps and very fast and all kinds of bends and twists.

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They were fascinating dances.

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How did you manage to, did you teach them to other dancers,

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those dances that you had learned in ballet, did you, you know, did you teach them to others?

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No, they were mostly solo dances that I did.

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What did you do about the music? How did you?

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I brought the music home with me. I got tapings made of it.

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Oh, and so you played the tape with the real ballets?

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I think that Horace was very good at taking native music and making it, playing it for the piano, you know.

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Oh, that one, was that, I'm not sure, but I know that you had a very long and good association with Horace,

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and that was about the time that it began?

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I think so, yes, I think it was.

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The, the balladese dances, must think that have been very difficult for you to do, or is there so,

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I mean, what are they actually like? It seems like the finger movements are sort of disappointed.

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Well, the finger movements, they do all kinds of things, well, like that with the fingers holding,

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and then they wiggle these, and then they do that, and all kinds of, lots of finger movements.

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They're, they're fascinating, their hand movements, I thought.

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And then there's one dance, I don't think it's either of these, but there is one religious dance that they do

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with a fan sitting down, so that the dancers' movements are all...

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Oh, well, they, they use a fan sort of in a funny position with their elbows bent way up and fluttering it all the time.

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They use a fan a lot. It seems to be part of their dances, they use them a great deal.

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Then this one man, Mario, he went to Paris, so people knew what it was like in Paris,

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and said Mario was a great dancer, and he danced with his legs crossed over underneath him,

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and never got out of that position, and he bounced all over the floor, and he'd hit the instruments,

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and his head was going, it was a fascinating dance, difficult.

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I've never seen anybody do anything like it, but he did go to Paris, I know that, and became very popular there.