I have used my body

As a gleaming sword

To cut outlines of beauty

On the mind of the world.

Ruth St. Denis returned to the concert stage Thursday night to give a dance recital in celebration of her golden anniversary on the stage. Miss St. Denis has not been active for over a decade, and her Jordan Hall concert was something of an historical event. Her audience, made up for the most part of devotees and the curious, seemed pleased at the opportunity to witness a performance by this pioneer in the modern American dance.

Miss St. Denis is now in her late sixties--an age at which most dancers would prefer to sit quietly in the dark. Happily, however, a great many of her dances involve very little footwork and age has not yet withered Miss St. Denis' talented and talkative hands. All of the dances performed in this concert were executed with the hands and, usually, a piece of cloth.

Miss St. Denis' art seems to me a secondary one. She is probably without equal in this country in her hand-and-arm technique--it seems like a form of withcraft the way she can make her arms turn into writhing cobras, or her hands become slowly-opening lotus blossoms--and it is no less fascinating to see her make a piece of fabric tell a story. But all of these things seem to belong to the decorative arts, not to the creative. However, every dancer, indeed every interpretative artist, could still learn much from her, as many of our most famous dancers have.

Her Jordan Hall program included many of her most famous solo dances: "The Cobras," "White Jade," and "The White Madonna." In the last named, she was assisted by a young man named Billy Ross, who also alternated solo dances with Miss St. Denis during the evening. His "numbers," whether entitled "Sailor's Entrance" or "Whither Man?," were not dances at all but rather more party games or charades. Mr. Ross is no dancer, but he is a grimacer par excellence.