Politics & Power Quote by Ruth St. Denis

There is something seductively stage-lit about Ruth St. Denis's promise that self-understanding can dissolve "national and racial dissonances" into the "universal rhythms of Truth and Love". Coming from a pioneering modern dancer, the language is doing choreography: conflict becomes noise, transcendence becomes music, and the self is cast as the gateway drug to social harmony. It's a beautiful move, and also an evasive one.

St. Denis rose to fame in an early-20th-century America intoxicated by mysticism, Theosophy, and "Eastern" aesthetics, a period when white artists routinely treated non-Western cultures as spiritual costume. Her diction - "universal", "rhythms", capital-T Truth, capital-L Love - carries that era's faith that art can bypass politics, and that the body can lead where policy fails. The specific intent reads like an artist's manifesto: dance (and the disciplined inwardness behind it) isn't entertainment but moral technology.

The subtext is more complicated. Calling race and nation "dissonances" implies they're temporary clashes in an otherwise harmonious score, not power structures with material stakes. "Forgotten" is the tell: the solution offered isn't justice, repair, or redistribution; it's transcendence. In a dancer's mouth, that's not cynicism so much as a sincere aesthetic theology - the belief that if enough people tune themselves correctly, the world will retune.

The line still lands today because it captures a persistent American temptation: to substitute personal enlightenment for collective accountability, and to imagine that feeling aligned is the same as making things right.