The choreographer of soaring

In her autobiography, unfinished at her death in 1958, then edited and finished as a biography by the dance historian Selma Jeanne Cohen in 1972, Doris Humphrey recalled the beginnings of the Denishawn dance Soaring.1 Revived within the last decade and variously credited to Humphrey's mentor Ruth St. Denis as well as to Humphrey, this dance-which was very popular during the 1920s, when Denishawn was at its height as a performing unit-is exhibiting a gratifying durability. Therefore the exact attribution of credit for its creation must be faced by those interested in the relative contribution to American dance that these figures, St. Denis and Humphrey, made during the first half of the twentieth century, when dance became accepted as an indigenous art form in the American theater. Humphrey's autobiographical record gives the dance's beginnings as she remembered them thirty years later. In 1919, she recalled in the 1950s

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