Joellen A. Meglin, long-time editor of Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts and professor emerita of Dance at Temple University, has published extensively on Ruth Page and American ballet. Her re-imagination of Page's solo Expanding Universe was recently presented at the 92nd-Street Y and the Noguchi Museum in New York.

• Dedication


• Acknowledgments


• Overture


• PART I: INTERNATIONAL STIRRINGS


• 1. From Pavlovita to Première Danseuse


• 2. World Travelers: Chicago Allied Arts and Beyond


• 3. "Gone Modern": Skyscrapers, Sacks, and Sticks


• 4. A Surprising Partnership: Page/Kreutzberg


• PART II: BALLET AMERICANA


• 5. White She-Devil in an Otherwise Black-Cast: La Guiablesse


• 6. "Jungle Jazz": A Murder Trial in Ballet


• 7. "Ghosts of Harlem": A Blues Ballet


• 8. America's First Feminist Ballet: An American Pattern


• 9. Embodying "Lowlife" in High Art: Frankie and Johnny


• 10. Victory Garden: Danced Poems in the Time of War


• 11. Postwar Anomie: The Bells


• 12. Bible Stories Meet Music Hall: Billy Sunday


• PART III: COSMOPOLITAN CHOREOGRAPHIES


• 13. The Remaking of the Choreographer: Revenge and the European Market


• 14. A Woman's Will: The Merry Widow


• 15. The Woman Who Could Not Sleep


• 16. Grand Finale


• Key to Endnote Abbreviations


• Endnotes


• Index


• Poetry Credit Lines

In Ruth Page: The Woman in the Work, the Chicago ballerina emerges as a highly original choreographer who, in her art, sought the iconoclastic as she transgressed boundaries of genre, gender, race, class, and sexuality. In the process of discovering the woman in the work, the book also offers encounters with an international cast of dancers, composers, visual artists, and companies.