Music: High Priestess Returns

It was a curiously mixed crowd—aging ladies in purple velvet and flowered hats come to recall a bygone day, brash youths come to scoff at a legend. Silver-haired Ruth St. Denis, 67, high priestess of the dance, was returning to Manhattan's Carnegie Hall stage, with Ted Shawn, 53, her husband and partner from whom she had separated 13 years ago.

From their 20-year-repertory, the pair danced the pastoral Tillers of the Soil, the romantic Josephine and Hippolyte. St. Denis soloed her Indian Rajput Nautch, and Shawn whirled through 540 gyrations in his Mevlevi Dervish. At the end, after a Brahms waltz, which...

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