Orienting Myself: Finding my way through Ruth St. Denis’ archive

This article takes the 2013 evening-length dance Ruth Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which was loosely based on the life and career of pioneer Ruth St. Denis (1878–1968), and examines it from an auto-ethnographic point of view, tackling two main issues. The first stems from the piece’s own central question and is a self-reflexive examination of Orientalist practices within contemporary dance-making, particularly the author’s, engaging St. Denis as a foil and a sounding board. The second question driving the work is an investigation of the influence that an archive, in this case St. Denis’s and her early twentieth-century corpus, can have on a contemporary choreographic investigation. The writing here is from an artist’s perspective, seeking to uncover how historical approaches to choreographic structuring can interface with current dance practices and uses of the body.