FLASHBACK

DANCING GIRLS IN THE PAGES OF VANITY FAIR Vanity Fair kept a keen eye on modern dance, from the very serious to the very silly. During the magazine's early days, outdoor dancing was the rage.

Modem Outdoor Dancing

Freely Versified by GEORGE S. CHAPPELL Woodcut by Hogarth, Jr.

WT’S really upsetting,

The way we’re getting M. Our dancers, lately,—

Not draped,—sedately,

Nor gowned, nor hosed,

Nor bound, nor enclosed,—

But—just like the photos in which they’re disclosed, Often underdeveloped and overexposed Why! one never knows where A young lady bare

May bound from the bushes, or leap from her lair,

Here and there, “en plein air,” everywhere, I declare, Till I fully expect to find, in some bally ’bus, Grandmama,—puribus naturalibus!

Or to spy, on my lawn, some DuBussy fawn Having five o’clock tea with Miss September Morn! Now, staid maiden-aunties disport as bacchantes,

And uncles show ankles sans shame and sans panties. Heaven knows why they’re so anxious to show them, l Funny old dears! by their shins ye shall know them. Still, those who expose in the gay hula-hula Say "The dance to the clothes is the warmer the cooler” While frantic first-nighters, expiring with joy,

Cry, "Stripping for tripping is ripping, my boy!” Where will it endf In jail, I guess.

Note from a friend (Sweet Mrs. S.),

"Dinner at eight, Just us. Don’t dress.”

Impossible interview

Sally Rand vs. Martha Graham

SALLY: Hello, Martha. Still doing the same old intellectual striptease? MARTHA: I beg your pardon, Miss Rand, I do not think we have anything in common— SALLY: Forget it, kid, we’re in the same racket, ain’t we? Just a couple of little girls trying to wriggle along. MARTHA: But my dancing is modern—classical—imaginative. If you leave anything to a customer’s imagination, it’s because

he’s near-sighted. SALLY:Sure, I come right out in the open. I put my best points forward. MARTHA (haughtily): You should learn to bare your soul. SALLY:Say, I got to keep something covered. MARTHA: In your dancing, you should seek to interpret— SALLY: That’s where you’re wrong. I always let ’em put on their own interpretation. They like to try to read between my lines. MARTHA: I don’t know what they see in you. SALLY : Neither do they. They only think they do. That’s why I’m always surrounded by so many fans. MARTHA: I’m sure you’d be frowned on in the ladies’ clubs. SALLY: And you’d be a flop in a cooch concession, kid. From now on, we’d better split fifty-fifty. You take the ladies, and I’ll take the men— MARTHA (enviously): For plenty.

Ruth St. Denis takes a puff between acts. In the first decade of this century, her vaudeville performances elevated exotic dancing to a new art form; she based her dances on the legends of the Orient—Egypt, India, and Byzantium. Here she is in 1919, at age forty, dressed as an Ouled Nail, an Arab prostitute and dancing girl. Even though she

and her husband, Ted Shawn, were by this time among the most revered figures in American modern dance, Ruth St. Denis clearly had not lost her vaudevillian's sense of theatrical style. She exudes the stage savvy, humor, and high chic that had made her a sensation with popular audiences.