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48 Eventually, Taylor learned to trust his own instinctive love of movement, going from anti-dance and avant-garde to creating plotless dances of great joyous—and even athletic—movement performed to classical and popular music. As a dancer/choreographer, he did not become frozen in the experiments of one era, although he did occasionally slip some of his earlier experimental ideas into his later work. Twenty years after his Epic exploration, Taylor’s 1975 work Esplanade sent his company walking, running, jumping, sliding, and repeatedly falling to Bach in a glorious burst of lyric dance where ordinary movement became balletic.

Louis Horst was Denishawn’s musical director from 1915 to 1925 and would go on to accompany, compose for, and collaborate with succeeding generations of modern-dance innovators. The impact of this quartet lay in the future; for the next 15 years, their lives would be intertwined with Denishawn, and their personal visions would be submerged in its high exoticism. The Spread of Denishawn Unlike Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan, St. Denis and Shawn were interested in finding an audience in the United States.

Then,” he observed later, “Ruth St. Denis came to the Orpheum Theatre in Lincoln, with her pageant of India, Egypt, and Greece, and there was my history of dancing before me. ”39 Shawn gave him a couple months of instruction and then sent him on the road. Weidman survived his sinkor-swim introduction to performance and went on to create dances himself during the Denishawn years. Shawn capitalized on Weidman’s gifts as a mime, creating amusing dances such as Danse Americaine for the Denishawn repertory.