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Havelock Ellis's Essay “The Art of Dancing”: A Reconsideration

Since its publication in 1923 Havelock Ellis's essay, “The Art of Dancing,” found in his book The Dance of Life (pp. 34-63), has had a special place in the hearts of dance lovers from all walks of dance life. In the past several years Ellis's essay has been reprinted in three anthologies: Dance, in the quarterly periodical Salmagundi (1976:5-22), edited by Martin Leonard Pops; The Dance Anthology (1980:238-254), edited by Cobbett Steinberg; and What Is Dance? (1983:478-496), edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen. Their collections, claim the anthologists, contain the best available writing on dance; thus, they include Ellis's essay. In their introductory remarks Steinberg as well as Copeland and Cohen emphasize Ellis's comprehensive view of dance. Both their books contain a section entitled “Dance and Society” where Ellis's essay is presented. Only Pops accurately identifies Ellis, along with most of the other authors in his collection, as an enthusiastic amateur. Since its publication, ideas from Ellis's essay have been quoted by many writers on dance: critics Walter Terry in The Dance in America (1971), Walter Sorell in Dance Through the Ages (1967), John Martin in America Dancing (1936), and Carl Van Vechten in his essays “The Land of Joy” and “Spain and Music” (1974:135-167); educators Margaret H'Doubler in Dance: A Creative Art Experience (1940), Elizabeth Selden in A Dancer's Quest (1935), Roderyk Lange in The Nature of Dance: An Anthropological Perspective (1975), Frederick Rand Rogers in Dance: A Basic Educational Technique (1941), Richard Kraus in History of Dance in Art and Education (1969), and Sondra Fraleigh in Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetic (1987); historian Selma Jeanne Cohen in Next Week Swan Lake (1982); and philosophers Theodore M. Greene in The Arts and Art Criticism (1940) and Francis Sparshott in Off the Ground: First Steps in a Philosophical Consideration of Dance (1988). Early modern dance pioneers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn imply in their writings that, because Ellis once again identified dance as an art, his status and erudition validated their own ideas about the value of dance (Terry 1976:43). These artists and authors regard Ellis as an authority. To introduce this reconsideration of Ellis's ideas about dance, the ideas these authors select to quote or cite from Ellis's essay will be examined.