Background
Ruth Page was born on March 22, 1899, in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. She was the daughter of Lafayette, a brain surgeon, and Marian (Heinly) Page, a pianist.
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Photo of Page Ruth
Ruth Page was born on March 22, 1899, in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. She was the daughter of Lafayette, a brain surgeon, and Marian (Heinly) Page, a pianist.
Having decided at the age of five to become a ballerina, Ruth waited until she was twelve to begin professional training. Her early instruction included ballet lessons with Andreas Pavley and Serge Oukrainsky and fancy and skirt dancing with Anna Stanton. After meeting fifteen-year-old Ruth, world-famous ballerina Anna Pavlova encouraged her mother to allow Ruth to take summer ballet classes in Chicago with Pavlova's company. Soon afterward Ruth Page joined the Anna Pavlova company on a tour of Latin America. On her return, she attended the French School for Girls, a boarding school in New York, while studying dance.
Moving to Chicago, Ruth studied with Adolph Bolm, a former member of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes who had settled in America and was staging productions both for Chicago companies and for his itinerant Ballet Intime.
In 1974 Ruth received an Honorary Doctorate from Columbia College.
Adolph Bolm provided Ruth with her first starring role in his 1919 production of "The Birthday of the Infanta."
As her life in the art of dance unfolded, Ruth Page established a record of being first by creating at the forefront of social, political, and artistic issues. For Page, the ballerina, to cross over and be featured in Irving Berlin's 1922-1924 Music Box Revue, a popular review, was astonishing for its time. She was the first American to dance with Diaghilev's Ballet Russe in 1925. In that spring, she was the first American to commission George Balanchine, another newcomer to the Ballets Russe, to create a ballet for her, "Polka Melancholique."
From 1926 through 1928, she became Ballet Director of the Ravinia Opera, danced with Chicago Allied Arts for Marie-Queen of Romania, and was the first American guest ballet soloist with the Metropolitan Opera. Also, Ruth Page was the international ballerina invited to perform in honor of the coronation ceremonies of Emperor Hirohito in Tokyo, Japan. During this time, the great composers Prokofiev, Gershwin, and Stravinsky played for Ruth's rehearsals, and Louis Horst was her accompanist at the piano during her solo concerts in Havana, Cuba.
By 1932, Ruth became fascinated with the modern dance revolution and embarked upon a long association of joint recitals and world tours with Harald Kreutzberg from the German expressionistic dance school of Mary Wigman. During this time, she gave Isamu Noguchi his first dance costume commission resulting in the body-concealing elastic sack costume she wore in Expanding Universe. In 1934, she provided Aaron Copland with his first ballet score commission for her courtroom ballet, "Hear Ye! Hear Ye!" The breadth of her passion was in her exploring everything in dance.
In the late 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Americana subjects, feminist ballets, and urban characters were topical in her work. A West Indian ballet, La Guiablesse, featured an all African-American cast (except for herself), starring the then-unknown Katherine Dunham and Talley Beatty. The original score was commissioned from the African-American composer William Grant Still. Ruth went after the offbeat and choreographed outside the standard classical repertory of fairy tales, swans, and princesses. She created the first Americana ballets titled "The Flapper" and "The Quarterback" in 1926 and "Sun Worshipers" (later titled "Oak Street Beach") in 1929.
As an outgrowth of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a unique government-sponsored Federal Theater Dance Project was formed. Ruth Page and Bentley Stone directed the Chicago Works Progress Administration (WPA) Dance Project and had significant success. American Patterns, conceived in 1937, took a serious look at women forced into restricted roles as mothers and wives. It is safe to say this was the first feminist ballet. During this period in 1938, Ruth and Bentley together created and danced "Frankie and Johnny," a "ballet cartoon" which used humor and pathos to display the passions of a woman wronged. The theme of the individual struggling against standardized conventionality was familiar, but it was not usually expressed in a ballet, or from a woman's point of view.
Following the WPA, Ruth and Bentley appeared in New York's upscale Rainbow Room dancing their humorous and romantic duets for the delight of cafe society. The Page-Stone Ballet was the first American ballet company to tour South America. No matter what political or economic changes were occurring in the world, Ruth was passionately dancing and living. Perhaps Ruth Page is to be best remembered for her tireless work in founding and operating dance companies in Chicago. From her first association with the Ravinia Opera in 1926 until the last years of her life (for more than 60 years), she took on the roles of a prima ballerina, choreographer, director, financial backer, visionary, and the grand lady of Chicago dance. Her vision, commitment, and involvement promoted the Allied Arts, Chicago Grand Opera Company, Ravinia Opera Festival, Federal Theater/WPA Dance Project, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Chicago Opera Ballet, Chicago Ballet, Ruth Page's International Ballet, and The Ruth Page Foundation and School of Dance. She served as choreographer/director of "The Nutcracker" at Chicago's Arie Crown Theater in McCormick Place when it premiered in 1965 until the mid-'80s. Ruth managed another dance world coup when she was the first American choreographer to employ Rudolf Nureyev after his defection from the Kirov Ballet to the West. He danced the grand pas de deux from "Don Quixote" with the Ruth Page Chicago Opera Ballet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1962.
She achieved another series of firsts as she adopted the librettos and recreated the operas and the music into her dance vision. Starting with Carmen by Bizet, she created "Guns and Castanets." Her second inspiration came from "Il Trovatore," which she titled "Revenge." Through lengthy contractual negotiations, she managed both brilliantly and beautifully to produce "The Merry Widow." It became a smashing success. She continued with more operas, completing the cycle with "Die Fledermaus."
These opera-ballet recreations inspired her to employ some great artists of the century to design and perform in her productions. A shortlist includes Sonia Arova, Eric Bruhn, Isaac Van Grove, Melissa Hayden, Barbara Karinska, Jose Limon, and Alicia Markova. The New York performances were such a phenomenal success that Columbia Concerts booked the opera ballets coast to coast for over 15 years. In making her art and following her pioneering vision, Ruth provided work for innumerable artists, launched careers, and provided the public with a consistent world-class experience.
"Page by Page" (1978), and "Class-Notes On Dance Classes Around the World" (1984), are two books she wrote that provide educational insights into her training, world experiences, and views on dance.
On retiring from active choreography, Page created the Ruth Page Foundation, which established a dance center.
Ruth Page was a Chicago-based dancer, choreographer, and director of ballet companies whose experimentalism, disregard for genre boundaries, and affinity for collaboration led her in directions at once cosmopolitan and modern. Her theatrical inventions were urbane and often risqué, leading to clashes with censors despite the popular appeal of her works. Regardless of their mixed critical reception, her ballets combined eclectic tastes with her unique sensibility as a woman drawn to the unconventional and offbeat for the greater part of the twentieth century.
A Chicago street is named in her honor. The Chicago dance community annually gives the Ruth Page Awards for outstanding dance achievement in Chicago, and a dance series is produced in her honor by Northeastern Illinois University and an annual Ruth Page Week of Dance is presented by the Ravinia Festival. The spirit of her choreography through recreation and by inspiration continues her universal vision.
In her long association with the opera as its Ballet Director, Ruth's ambition was to free the ballet from stiff traditions and create "opera into ballet" because, as she stated in her writings, "I was dissatisfied with the way operas looked, yet loved the way they sounded."
A closer look at Page's works over a lifetime reveals how she incorporated modernist currents: futurism, abstraction, primitivism, African-American jazz, and vernacular dancing, popular entertainments (circus, Broadway revue, floor show), cityscapes, syntheses of voice and movement in danced poems and dance-plays, and re-creations of operas as ballets.
Ruth Page was an independent spirit with a knack for marrying emotion with pragmatism.
Page married Thomas Hart Fisher, a lawyer, who worked as her business manager until his death in 1969. In 1983, she married a longtime friend, colleague, and artist Andre Delfau.
1863-1929
1873-1945
1897-1955
1901-1991
