1930
If there is such a thing as a natural teacher," says Lou Wall, director of the University of Alabama dance program " Phoebe Barr is one. She has an extraordinary ability to communicate her own excitement to others." That ability to try harder, to practice longer, and to be better than they think they can be, has made Phoebe Barr an prominent figure in the University and Tuscaloosa dance community for more than thirty-five years. Phoebe's enthusiasm for dance is so infectious, in fact, that it has been caught by such a non-dancers as University administrators, local civic groups, and others who might be in a position to make dance available to larger audiences. "Almost everyone who talks to her, " says Professor Wall, "comes away excited about the possibilities and better educated about what dance can and should be." Since 1947, when her husband, Scott Barr, joined the University's physics faculty, Phoebe has been conveying her enthusiasm for dance to others. First she taught in the physical education department. Then she became director of stage movement for the University Theatre. She taught private classes for adults and for children, and was a central figure in the formation of the Tuscaloosa Community Dancers. She established a dance group on campus that was the forerunner of the University Dancers. In 1980, the University Dance Program recognizes her contributions by establishing the Phoebe Barr Dance award, and in 1981, the Alabama dance Council presented her its Heritage honor ward for her contributions to dance in Alabama. Fifty years ago, if someone had told Phoebe Baughan that her life would be intimately interwoven with dace, she would not have believed them. In 1923, she was a freshman at North Carolina College for Women (now UNC- Greensboro), and she had never seen a dance concert. Music, literature, and painting were art forms with which she was thoroughly familiar, but as far as Phoebe knew, dancing was not an art. It was a "frivolous activity" of which her parents, like many Americans of their generation, disapproved. A dutiful daughter, Phoebe had never seen a ballet, not had she ever been permitted to attend ballroom dances. It was with considerable indifference that she decided one evening to attend a concert on campus given by the Denishawn Dancers. She did not know then, of course, that the troupe she would see perform that night was the best America had ever produced, or that the lead dancers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, wee pioneering figures in modern American dance. Nor did she know that their concert would prove to be a turning point in her life. The evening was "magical," she remembers, and one dance in particular remains vividly in her memory today. Ruth St. Denis, dressed in a flowing white gown, danced a story of unrequited lobe to the music of Liszt's Liebestraum. At one point in the performance, Miss St. Denis "swept around the stage in a great circle and then pierced the heavens with an upward gesture of reaching" that left young Phoebe in tears. When the concert ended and the house lights were turned off, she sat there alone in the darkness, having been "uplifted and transported into another world." "I knew then that I had to learn about dance-that kind of dance," says Phoebe. "But I didn't want to read about it. I wanted to do it." The next morning she was delighted to discover that the college had an excellent dance teacher, Helen Robinson, who introduced Phoebe, during the next few years, to the highly regarded dance techniques Margared H'Doubler had developed at the University of Wisconsin and to the dance theories with which Martha Graham was the experimenting at the Eastman School of Music. That experience only whetted her appetite for more. During her senior year, she applied to, and was accepted by, the internationally-acclaimed Denishawn School of Dance and Related Arts in New York. She was ecstatic. Her parents were not. Reluctantly, Phoebe's mother finally gave her consent. It was not approval, certainly, but is was enough, and so in the fall of1928 young Phoebe "sort of numb and some scared." Boarded the train for New York. Denishawn House at 67 Stevenson Place, Manhattan- a spacious Moorish structure dominated by a forty- by- sixty- foot dance studio- had been the home of the Denishawn school and concert company since 1924 when Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis transferred their base of operations from Los Angeles to New York. It was in Los Angeles that the Denishawn School first established its reputation as a haven for dancers and other performing artists who wanted to be associated with the vanguard of modern American dance. It was here that D.W. Griffith had sent his silent film stars-Mabel Norman, Lillian Gish, among others-to learn "emotional expression through movement." Here, too, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman, who would become the leaders of the first generation of "modern dancers," came to study and perform. By 1924, when Shawn and St. Denis moved their school to New York, Denishawn had become a major cultural institution with branch schools in a dozen American cities. "For an entire generation." writes dance historian Suzanne Shelton, "Denishawn symbolized highbrow dance at its most accessible, colorful and spectacular." Virtually unknown to most Americans a decade earlier, concert dancing had come a long way. Credit for the rapid flowering of this new art form is generally given to two American women-Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan. Duncan, however, pursued her career abroad, while St., Denis found her art and her audiences at home. Ironically, St. Denis, the American dance pioneer chose for her dance sources Oriental, Egyptian, East Indian, and other exotic themes. Her first concert in 1906 shocked the American audiences with her sensual-yet-chaste dancing and her elegant-but-revealing costume. "BOSTON GASPS." one headline proclaimed, "AS RUTH ST. DENIS." Following a successful European tour, however St. Denis found American critics and audiences more appreciative, and from 1909 to 1914, she enjoyed the peak period of her solo career. Then she met and married Ted Shawn, a talented dancer eighteen years her junior. The St. Denis-Shawn union, although sometimes turbulent privately, was successful professionally from the beginning. Shawn brought to the company his own vocabulary of dance (grounded in ballet) an interest in American and primitive themes, a solid business sense, and a theatricality that made him the most popular male dancer in America. By 1926, when St. Denis and Shawn returned from a successful fifteen-month tour of the Orient, they had brought the reputation of their school and their company to its peak. Not long afterwards, in 1928, Phoebe stepped off the train at Pennsylvania Station. She had come to dance. And dance she did. Classes were held six days a week. St. Denis taught Oriental dance, Shawn taught ballet, and guest teachers instructed students in Dalcroze Eurythmics and in Hawaiian, Spanish, and other ethnic dances. Practice sessions continued for hours during the day. For Phoebe, who had far less dance experience than the other students, these sessions usually continued late into the night. "I knew so little," says Phoebe, "but all the students were so good to me, and company members would help anyone who asked. I asked." When not in the studio, Denishawn students took advantage of the city 's cultural offerings. The darlings of the New York art world, they received free tickets to major events. Sundays meant trips to museums and major art galleries. Saturday nights frequently included studio parties at which the city's most prominent artists and patrons mingled. On week nights, Miss St. Denis and Papa Shawn, as they were called, gathered their family of dancers around them in Denishawn's spacious dining room for dinner. In this congenial atmosphere, Phoebe learned quickly. When Margharita Wallmann, the head of the famed Wigman School-Berlin, came to teach at Denishawn, Phoebe discovered to her delight that Wigman's techniques were compatible with her own abilities. "It was wonderful for me," she says. "It fit me more." Wallmann must have agreed, because Phoebe was one of two Denishawn students she selected for her lecture demonstration classes at Hunter College and at other Schools in and around New York City. "This was an exciting time in the dance world," says Phoebe. "Work that was to refresh and revitalize dance was going on in small studios and lofts in New York. In light of history, I know that my time at Denishawn was during its decline. New approaches and forms were emerging with the work of Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman." Because these artists had broken with Denishawn under less than pleasant circumstances, Denishawn students were not permitted to attend their concerts. "But we did," Phoebe admits with just a hint of mischief. She had allowed herself only a year and a half of study and by 1929, her time was running out. She auditioned for Doris Humphrey's new production of Lysistrata. Then-during the course of one day-she was notified of her acceptance by Humphrey and she received in the mail an invitation from St. Denis and Shawn to join their company. "I was stunned," says Phoebe. Both invitations were impressive tributes to her dancing skills and dedication, and represented a remarkable achievement for someone who had studied dance only a few years. After much thought, she signed with Denishawn. "I decided that I wanted to be associated with the ground that enriched the genius of Humphrey, Weidman, and Graham, rather that go to new ground that was being cultivated," she says. Phoebe has never regretted that decision. She toured with Denishawn up and down the East Coast, bringing modern dance to thousands of Americans who-like herself only a few years earlier-had never had the privilege of seeing it. When Shawn and St. Denis separated personally as well as professionally, Papa Shawn asked Phoebe to continue with the troupe for the 1932 tour. She did, but by then she had met and married Scott Barr, a young man intent on becoming a physicist, and her priorities changed. Although the 1932 season was to be her last professional tour, it was by no means the end of her dance career. While her husband pursued his doctorate at Chapel Hill, Phoebe directed stage movement for the Carolina Playmakers. She taught dance classes and "Phoebe Barr and Her Group" presented concerts in Chapel Hill's indoor and outdoor theaters. From 1936 to 1947, while her husband taught on the physics faculty at Tulane, she took her enthusiasm for dace to New Orleans' Metairie Park Country Day School, where she taught for ten years, and to Newcomb Art Schools, where she introduced and taught a class in action analysis for art majors. Some of her students later pursued professional dance careers, and one of them, Walter Terry, became America's foremost dance critic. His 1956 book, The Dance in America, is dedicated to Phoebe Barr: "the first to lead me along the pathway to dance." Today, Phoebe is in her seventies. She still has the shape and moves of a dancer. Occasionally, she visits Lou Wall's dance class on request and astounds the students by demonstrating a particularly challenging passage of movement. For her, dancing is still an "adventure," a "privilege," an "art." The spark that Ruth St. Denis ignited in that darkened theater nearly fifty years ago is still there. Like the born dancer and teacher that she is, Phoebe Barr is still passing it on.
