Ruth Emerson Wortis Collection

Born in Palo Alto, California on March 16, 1938, Ruth Emerson Wortis was a dancer, choreographer, dance educator, and a pioneer of postmodern dance. The photographs included here are from her fonds held by Special Collections and Rare Books.

Ruth had her first exposure to dance under the inspiring mentorship of Mim Rosen at University High School in Urbana, Illinois. As an undergraduate at Radcliffe College, she spent all of her spare time dancing and studied summers at the American Dance Festival in New London, Connecticut with Louis Horst and José Limon. After graduating from Radcliffe in 1958 with a BA in Mathematics, she took dance classes at the Martha Graham School, the Merce Cunningham Studio, and the Robert Joffrey School of Ballet in New York and performed with the Dancemakers in Boston. In New York she danced with the Pearl Lang Company. She was a founding member of the Judson Dance Theatre in 1962, where the formal, minimalist movement style now known as Postmodern Dance was pioneered.

In 1964, she married theoretical physicist, Michael Wortis, moving first to Berkeley, California, where she danced with Anna Halprin and then to Paris, France, where she performed and choreographed at the Theatre d'Essai de la Dance. From 1968 to 1973, she held a part-time faculty position in the Dance Department at the University of Illinois. She founded a dance company, Somedancers, Inc., which performed in Champaign/Urbana from 1974 to 1978. From 1981 to 1987, she taught dance and choreographed musicals at University High School while also holding a residency at the Radcliffe Institute from 1986-1987.

In the fall of 1987, Ruth and her family moved to Vancouver, B.C., and she helped to develop the first Provincial Dance Curriculum for B.C. schools and created and taught a program for student teachers. She also continued to perform and to choreograph locally. Ruth passed away on September 13, 2015.

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Attribution

Attribution/citation should be provided as follows: Image [insert image number here, eg. MSC-185-0-2-0-0-0-38] courtesy of the Ruth Emerson Wortis Collection, a digital initiative of Simon Fraser University Library. [Please include the website url when images are used in an offline or print-based context]. 

Acknowledgements

SFU Special Collections and Rare Books gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided by Michael Wortis to make this collection available online. Contributed by Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University Library.