ABSTRACT
American Delsartism, along with the health and hygiene reformist movement and the fads for physical culture, helped to dissemble traditional attitudes towards the body and to promote a new anti-formalist body aesthetic. However, as Ruyter (1979) has pointed out, American Delsartism tended to remain within the confines of amateur salon performances and was not directed explicitly towards the creation of a new theatrical dance art. Nevertheless, as Kendall (1979:30) has argued, in the 1890s Stebbins, Russell and others were representative of a number of new concerns that were beginning to enter the British and American theatre ‘by the back door of art and reform’. The presence of a woman wearing a Greek or oriental style gown performing alone on the stage was becoming a consuming image on both the amateur and the professional stage around this time. Being in the forefront of the ‘art as life’ movement, Russell, who was similarly at ease in the ‘fashionable salons of London, New York and Newport’, dressed in loose Greek style robes, pinned by large brooches at the shoulder (which she called her ‘brain costume’) and ‘served as an inspiration to rich Edwardian ladies on two continents’ (Kendall 1979:30).
