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It's those kind of people that have been like that to Ruth all those years.

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They're the kind of people, that's the kind of people who said, well Ruth, she can buy

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a company.

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Why does Ruth love that?

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Well, she can buy a company.

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Of course it wasn't true.

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Of course it wasn't true.

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But you can tell me and you can tell me.

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It's a complete misconstruing of the facts.

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But you can't convince people of that.

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To this day, I would say at least...

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From people.

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The point is, it's not just the people who are like that.

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Okay, let me put out the sticky.

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Come on.

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Did you punch?

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Punch you man?

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I don't really care about it in terms of the archives, but anything for the TV show.

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It doesn't look nice if you're smoking.

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No.

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I don't want you to look bad.

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No, I don't want to smoke.

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No, it's not nice.

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And now?

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Trick question.

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Okay, are we rolling?

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Okay.

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Okay.

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You frequently hear people say that Ruth was able to have a company because she personally

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was able to afford it.

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How would you respond to that?

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Well, I think the whole idea of Ruth only having a company and only being a choreographer

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because she could afford to pay for everything herself is really patently ridiculous.

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I think first of all, Ruth, from everything I've...

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I didn't know Ruth when she was a little girl, contrary to appearances.

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But everything I've read about, everything I've heard about Ruth in speaking with Ruth,

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Ruth I'm sure was a creator from the time she was an absolute baby.

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True.

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Yeah.

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That part, that's the beginning and the end of it all.

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Ruth is a creator, always has been.

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I don't think she's ever thought of herself in terms other than making dances from the

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very beginning.

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And I think she's thought of herself in lots of ways.

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Naturally, she's been a dancer.

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She's had a wonderful career doing other things besides making dances, but never once has

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she been without making dances.

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She's always made dances.

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And one doesn't make dances when one's a child because you can afford to make dances.

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You make dances from inside you because that's what you're about.

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You make dances.

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And I think first of all, Ruth was not...

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If she is now a tremendously wealthy woman, Ruth was not always a wealthy woman.

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But Ruth has always made dances.

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She's always made an effort to put things on.

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I know that, for example, when she did Hear Ye, Hear Ye, which was a very early ballet

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in her career, she paid $150 to Aaron Copeland for an original score.

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And I have seen letters at that time, written at that time, where she is commenting on the

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$150 at that time was a lot of money for her.

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Nowadays, one thinks of $150 for an Aaron Copeland score as almost ludicrously funny.

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At that time, it was quite a serious matter for Ruth to pay $150 to whomever for music.

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But she did it.

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I think if one looks at the body of Ruth Page's work, of which there is an enormous amount

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and a good portion of it recorded in some fashion, you have to say that here is an original mind,

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an original dance thinker, an original dance creator, regardless of whether she had money

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or whether she didn't have money.

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In a way, it's almost a pity that she became more comfortable in her later years.

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Because it's something I think that's interfered with people's perceptions of Ruth

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and her place in the dance world more.

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I think people don't look at her objectively because she has rather more comfortable

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circumstances now than she might have once had.

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Do you think that she's in general not underappreciated?

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Yes, I do.

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Why?

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Why?

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I think she probably would have been appreciated more if she'd been in New York.

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In New York, particularly in her time, although now it's not all that much different now,

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but particularly in her time, if one did real creative work in New York,

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there were first of all people in New York to appreciate it, to chronicle their appreciation of it.

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That's where most of the dance press was.

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That's where the dance histories were written, where the archivists were, where the dance historians were.

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It's where the majority of the activity was.

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If she had been there, she would have been in the center, in the kind of hive where the most creative work took place.

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I think because of that, if she had been there, it would have all been chronicled.

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I think her place would have been assured because she would have been where all of the histories were written.

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I think that's one thing.

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I think Ruth perhaps, for personal reasons, her marriage removed herself from that milieu.

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Although, I will say this, Ruth probably did an awful lot of work and I think is more greatly appreciated in Europe than she is in America.

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When she took Ballet des Americains there, for example, it was one of the first important incursions of American dance,

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this uniquely, generically American dance to Europe made a tremendous impression.

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I think that her place in Europe is thought of as very different than her place in America.

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Aside from those two things, it's hard to say why she is underappreciated.

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I think she definitely is underappreciated.

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I think her works have been underestimated.

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Her talents have been underappreciated.

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Things are getting better now because the works are being revived and they're being revived well.

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Companies are really taking pains with them.

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I think, for example, the many revivals that have been done of Frankie and Johnny and Mary Widow,

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two of her most popular works and two very, very different works add to it a lot.

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It's important that we do that, for example, so that someone can see those two works.

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They're absolutely opposite into the polls aesthetically, which is one thing.

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Another thing that I think is not appreciated about Ruth, every work that Ruth did had its own dimension.

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Her work isn't seen as Ruth.

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That is a Ruth Page ballet because every Ruth Page ballet is different.

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Every Ruth Page ballet is what that particular ballet demands.

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They're not all like Mary Widow. They're not all like Frankie and Johnny.

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Frankie and Johnny is like Frankie and Johnny because Frankie and Johnny wouldn't be any other way.

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The same thing with Mary Widow, the same thing with Fledermaus, the same thing with any of her ballets.

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Each ballet is absolutely unique. It's what that ballet demands.

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It's not just a formula that each ballet follows the same thing.

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You can see one and you say, oh yes, that's Ruth Page.

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You see another and you say, well, of course, you can tell that's Ruth Page.

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With her, you really can't.

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I wondered about that because unlike Balanchine or almost any choreographer that I can think of

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who finds a groove, gets into it, and stays there, Ruth didn't do that.

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No, not at all.

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In a way, I think probably she sees ballets like painters see a canvas.

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I guess a Renoir looks like a Renoir and a Picasso looks like a Picasso.

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In a lot of ways, I think when a painter paints a canvas, that painting is that way because that painting demands to be that way.

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I think when a painter looks, if he's painting a landscape and he looks out into the countryside or something,

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I think what he sees at that moment dictates how that painting is physically put on canvas.

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I think if he saw it at a different time, it would reflect differently on the canvas.

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I think that's the way Ruth did ballets, the way she was at that particular time with that particular ballet.

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She demanded and had to be executed in that particular way.

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To take it back in the other direction, is there anything among the whole body of her work with which you're familiar

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that you can detect, any one quality, characteristic that flows through that would be equally true of say, Oak Street Beach

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and Alice in Wonderland?

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Yeah. I think Ruth is first and foremost a humanist.

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I don't think Ruth has done, and I have performed in some ballets of Ruth's which she calls abstract or plotless ballets or

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I guess that would suffice.

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But whether she calls them abstract or plotless, they are always, always, always about humans, about relationships.

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There are always humanistic kind of qualities about her work that go through,

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whether the ballet is a comic ballet, a dramatic ballet, they're always humanistic.

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They're always very personal. They're never cold. They're never detached. They're always human.

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They're not abstractions at all.

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And that is, I think, the first, that's the thing that characterizes all of her work, I think.

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Good. Take me, if you will, through the period, because you were certainly there and played an important role in it,

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when the company ended and the school began.

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The company actually ended a year before the company ended, if that makes any sense to you. It doesn't.

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Our last tour was 1969, and that year Tom was very, very ill.

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And at that time he, I think, advised Ruth that she probably shouldn't do that last tour,

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because he wasn't able to assist her on the business end of handling the company.

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But Columbia, Ruth hesitated to, she really didn't want to close the company or disband the company at all.

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And Columbia talked Ruth, and probably Tom, into allowing them to kind of assume, to a large extent, Tom's duties for that last tour.

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They appointed a, we'd always had a company manager, but the responsibility of the company manager that last tour was greater,

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because he had to assume some of the duties that Mr. Fisher did, making contracts and that sort of thing.

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And I think from the moment that that transition took place, I think the company was really winding down in Miss Page's estimation.

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I think she realized that the company could not be the same without Mr. Fisher.

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It wouldn't be the same for her, it wouldn't be the same for the company.

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He had so much influence on the company and so much, his participation was so enormous in the day-to-day running of the company from a business standpoint.

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So we did that last tour, but at the end of that tour, I think it was quite evident to Miss Page that things couldn't kind of go on the way they were.

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And Tom was getting more and more ill. I think probably by that time she knew that the illness was terminal.

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And so at the end of that year, we were told that the company wouldn't be getting together the following year.

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It was a tremendous blow to us, because in a way, I don't think anybody really had ever thought that they would be doing anything else,

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that there was no necessity for us to ever really go out and try to find another place.

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Most of us were fortunate, and we did.

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My wife and I and Oren secured places with the National Ballet of Washington, a company in Washington, D.C., directed by Frederick Franklin.

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We were there for a year, and then I went as ballet master to Harkness Ballet of New York City.

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And I was with them for a year. I came back in 1970, Christmas 1970.

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I came back from Europe to visit Dolores. She'd been with me in Europe a good part of the time, but she came back to Chicago.

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And I came back to visit. And while I was in Chicago, naturally, I saw Miss Page.

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And she said at the time, darling, why don't you come back to Chicago? Let's try to do something here.

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I've made a foundation, which she had made, I believe, shortly after Mr. Fisher died.

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And she said, we'll use the foundation and we'll make us a wonderful school in Chicago.

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And we'll work toward having a company together in conjunction with the school.

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So this was in Christmas 70. So I went back to Harkness and explained the situation to her that I had decided to leave the company and came back.

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And in March of 1971, we opened the Ruth Page Foundation School of Dance as an arm of the Ruth Page Foundation in the Stevens Building downtown in the Loop.

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At the time, the last Nutcracker we had done, I think, was 1969 at McCormick Place.

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Actually, it was at the Opera House. McCormick Place had burned down.

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And when she disbanded the company, there was no Nutcracker then for two years.

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But when I came back in March of 71, just about that time, I said, well, Miss Page, we're back now.

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What do you think about trying to get Nutcracker together?

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She said, I don't know. It's awfully early. This was March. We had to do it that December.

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We had no company at that time. But we did it.

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We got together a company and we did resume doing Nutcracker then in 1971, Christmas 71.

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And we've been doing it ever since.

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The company, the school grew enormously. We finally, we started a little company, which Miss Page, for the most part, subsidized.

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We did school concerts and sundry performances.

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And in 1974, Miss Page and the Foundation bought the Moose Lodge at 1016 North Dearborn Street, where we sit today, where as we sit.

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And the rest is kind of from there.

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Now, when.