1900 A Doorway to Revolution.

The revolution in dance that was underway in 1900 mirrored the upheavals to come in this century.

When looked at from where we are now--almost the year 2000--Western dance a century ago seems like the calm before the storm, a placid surface about to be broken by new and wild versions of the art heaving shockingly into view. Or rather, that would have been the outlook in London or Paris. Those two capitals then served as centers of taste, places where artists went to be recognized, certified, and declared an event--every artist except dancers. By 1900, French and English dancing had paled from an earlier glory to become a kind of quaint entertainment. Both capitals, though, were about to be invaded by provocative, colorful, dramatic, and daring performers from borderlands at the edge of European consciousness--America to the West, Russia to the East. As the century began, the Western world's perception of what dance could be was undergoing a revolution.

The American dance invasion of Paris had already begun. At the Paris Exposition of 1900, one of the attractions was a low, cavelike theater that bore the name of the American dancer-sorceress who was all the rage, Loie Fuller. Once a child temperance lecturer, Fuller had "invented" a theatrical spectacle with herself whirling in the midst of yards and yards of silk, illuminated to make her appear to be a woman in flames, or a butterfly, or any number of uncanny apparitions. And she had caught the notice of poets, painters, and sculptors--Mallarme, Yeats, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin--who recognized, in the images she was making with fabric and light, a kinetic miracle that they themselves longed to create.

Also present at the exposition, not yet as official attractions but merely as members of the crowd, were two more American women who were quietly, separately formulating the "new world" dance revolution. Ruth St. Denis was in Paris as an actress, taking in the sights after performing in David Belasco's sensational play Zaza. She was just beginning to match her own past metier as a vaudeville dancer with the aura of serious theatricality that she secretly longed to embody. Isadora Duncan had come to Europe with her mother and brother on a cattle boat; she was in Paris as a bohemian pilgrim in "Greek dress," studying Renaissance art in museums, dancing for party guests in private salons, and dreaming as well of some purer, grander use for herself in the theater. Fuller's example gave a powerful thrust to the longing of each woman.

Meanwhile, the other dance revolution was starting to take form on the stage of the Imperial Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Russia, the last absolute monarchy in the Western world, had protected its ballet and allowed it to retain the expressive power of French ballet a half century earlier. Its dancers, choreographers, and even ballet students had always been given special status and rewards by the czars. Now, at the turn of the century, that secluded ballet world was stirring with a longing to be innovative, to be recognized, to make a connection with the wider art world in Russia and beyond.

In 1898 Michel Fokine graduated from the imperial ballet academy and joined the Maryinsky, followed in 1899 by Anna Pavlova (described as having "the face of an innocent Spanish girl"). These two dancers already contained within their bodies a whole new ease and naturalness of phrasing, a different aesthetic for the use of classical ballet. Also in 1899, a reform-minded nobleman, Prince Serge Volkonsky, took over as director of the imperial theaters and tried to put some modernity into the ballet training and repertory. To this end, he invited a young connoisseur-about-town to join his staff, Sergei Diaghilev of the perpetual top hat. And Diaghilev and his circle managed in 1901 to get Sylvia, a ballet of theirs, onto the Maryinsky stage. This dance idyll was the first expression of the union of action, decor, and charm, the sort of classical imagination rooted in the past yet reaching toward the future that would animate the productions eight years later of Diaghilev's legendary Ballets Russes.

America and Russia--such different places in 1900, hosts to such different kinds of radical dance thinking. The American modern dance movement emerged from a country with no formal dance traditions (the Metropolitan Opera didn't acquire a company of dancers until 1909). Fuller, Duncan, and St. Denis were acting on the assumption that American dance was a void they themselves could simply step into. In Russia, by contrast, the dance revolution came out of an almost two-centuries-old ballet tradition that was hierarchical and ritualistic in the extreme. And the pioneers within Russian ballet always retained a firm grasp, even when it eluded their audience, of traditional technique and stage etiquette.

And yet the two dance revolutions had more than a little in common. Both were gripped by a collective hallucination of precivilized ancient Greece, of nymphs and fauns and satyrs and dancing deities that seemed to crop up everywhere in Western art then. (That worldwide longing for a preclassic freshness enabled the Russian ballet public to embrace the seemingly anarchistic Duncan when she first performed in Russia in 1904.) Both dance revolutions, too, were sparked by individuals--young women on the one hand, impresarios and feted dancers on the other--who held passionately to the belief that dancing could be a more powerful form of theatrical expression than anyone had yet imagined, that it was the right one for the coming century.

What's more, the new dance in both places wasn't just a rafifed movement off in a comer of the art world; it was bound up with the social and political movements of the time. Dance is usually seen by historians (when it is noticed at all) as a decoration on the face of serious events. But a dancing human body can become, in a way that's utterly mysterious, emblematic of the deepest forces stirring within any given historical moment.

Closely examined, these American modern dance pioneers can be seen as products of post-Civil War political thought. During that divisive period, the debate about slavery and civic morality galvanized the nation. But after the war, with the North victorious, this one transcendant debate splintered into several smaller liberation movements--women's rights, dress reform, atheism, temperance, and public hygiene. The first modern dancers emerged from the bohemian culture of those reform movements. Fuller came from a temperance family. Duncan's mother was a militant atheist. St. Denis's was a believer in health reform. You could say that the daughters of these families performed a kind of alchemy; in their dances, political thought became aesthetic vision made manifest in powerful dance solos--Fuller as a master of natural forces, Duncan as a Greek deity, St. Denis as an Asian temple dancer. They were touching the deepest wishes of the audience.

In Russia, too, the changes in ballet were linked to that fascinating point in a society where political thought intersects with the aesthetic impulses felt and realized by artists. But instead of embodying the liberation dreams of a brash new country, such as the U.S., the art of Russia contained a knowledge of the coming end of life as it was known, a tragic consciousness of the fact that whatever the country or civilization, art is the only realm where freedom can be trusted. Thoughts on political freedom within the Russian empire had veered wildly back and forth in the years leading up to 1900. A burst of liberalism in the 1860s (when the Russian serfs were freed two years before the American slaves), ended after revolutionaries assassinated Czar Alexander II on a Petersburg street in 1881.

The last czar, Nicholas II, had tried disastrously to extend his father's absolute role; and ballet, like Russian poetry and painting, was bearing witness, in part unknowingly, to this czarist twilight. When Diaghilev, in an uncanny speech at an art exhibition in 1905, raised his glass "to the mined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic," he was already imagining the mixture of historical nostalgia and futuristic bombast that would characterize the ballet he would soon bring to the West.

We all know what happened after that eerie pause of 1900 to 1905. Duncan and St. Denis conquered audiences all over Europe and America and made dance the talk of the civilized world. Diaghilev unleashed the fantastic energy of the Ballets Russes on an astonished Pads in 1909. Fokine, with his Polovetsian warriors leaping toward the edge of the stage and his drooping sylphs of Les Sylphides (evoking the Parisian romantic ballet that had been forgotten in the very place it had flourished) created a modernism that everyone could see and hear and absorb. Collaborating with the radical musicians and designers of his time, Diaghilev soon made dance the major art of the twentieth century.

It was a century that would bring terrible cataclysms to the West--word wars, massacres, revolutions, holocausts, abominations. A key part of the dance world--the dancers left behind in Russia--would be imprisoned in a historical time warp that is only now, at this century's end, coming undone. But if we look back at the rest of the Western world in the last century, we always see, floating among the rains, the dancers--the American "free" dancers, the Russian displaced ballet dancers--taking their art all over the world, putting down roots in places where dance had never existed, trying again and again to capture, in the corporeal power of this wordless medium, some of the savagery and the beautiful physical longings of the century that gave them birth.

ISADORA DUNCAN (1877-1927) began creating her own dance ideas in revolt against the few ballet classes she had taken in her native San Francisco. Shown below at age twenty-one, in a costume made from her mother's curtains, she would eventually gain international fame for her impassioned solos in Greek-inspired dress and for a personal life equally defiant of social conventions.

LOIE FULLER (1862-1928) was not considered a dancer by many critics, but her solo performances as flames, butterflies, and other natural forms, created as much by her ingenious use of lighting and fabric as by movement, would influence a generation of dancers. A souvenir of her 1892 Folies-Bergere debut is shown here.

RUTH ST. DENIS (1879-1968) was inspired to abandon David Belasco chorus work to achieve the exoticism of a poster of Isis she saw in 1906. Her repertory of Asian-inspired solos included Radha, Dance of the Five Senses (above). With Ted Shawn, she founded the Denishawn school (1915) and company which nurtured such pioneers of modern dance as Graham and Humphrey.

MAUDE ALLAN (1873-1956) is seen above in her Vision of Salome (1903) in which she made her debut, in Vienna, dancing to music by Marcel Remy. Born in Canada, she decided to become a dancer while a music student in San Francisco. Like Duncan, she was inspired by Greek art and performed barefoot in flowing gowns.

MICHEL FOKINE (1880-1942), chief choreographer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, leans on the piano at a 1910 Firebird rehearsal. Igor Stravinsky is at the keyboard; Tamara Karsavina, creator of the title role, is at center. They are preparing a revolution.

ANNA PAVLOVA (1881-1931), the most famous ballerina of the period, in Fokine's The Dying Swan. Created for her in 1907, this solo became Pavlova's signature piece and a touchstone of the ballerina repertory.

VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE had gained transatlantic fame for their suave ballroom dancing in revues and clubs before World War I. By way of tribute, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939).

Elizabeth Kendall is a contributing editor of Dance Magazine and author of American Daughter, a memoir of her mother, to be published by Random House.