Soaring

Winner of the De La Torre Bueno Prize (1975)

Winner of the prestigious de la Torre Bueno Prize for dance writing, this is an account of the author’s travels during her 15 month tour of the Far East with Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, and the Denishawn Dance Company along with Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Pauline Lawrence, among others. Letters, journals, pictures, and diary entries accompany this intriguing account. Beyond just a dance history narrative, this book accounts a vivid description of what it was like to travel and tour in the Orient during the mid 1920s.

Jane Sherman was a girl of seventeen in the fall of 1925 when she joined the Denishawn dance company on their famous fifteen-month tour of the Far East. She was by far the youngest member of the troupe. Throughout the trip Jane, an extremely sensitive and articulate young woman, wrote voluminous letters to her family and kept both a photographic record and a detailed diary of her adventures, impressions, and thoughts. It is these documents that form the major portion of her delightful story.