Hot, dusty and tiring: A young American dancer’s impressions of 1920s India
As a member of the famous Denishawn dance company, Jane Sherman spent over five months travelling around the subcontinent. This is what she saw.
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In the summer of 1925, when dancer Jane Sherman boarded the SS Jefferson in Seattle for a tour of Asia, she had no idea what awaited her. She was just 17, leaving home to be on the road for nearly a year and a half.
Sherman was a rising star in the dance company of the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, an academy founded by modern dance pioneers Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn. Her troupe was set to travel to Japan, China, Singapore, Burma (then a part of British India), India, Ceylon, Java and the Philippines before sailing back to the United States.
During the tour, the Americans learned local dance forms and improvised on them. India was their longest stop.
India’s peculiarities did not always endear it to Sherman, who found its living and travelling conditions challenging. She maintained a diary throughout the journey and regularly wrote letters to her mother, which were later compiled into a book titled Soaring: The Diary and Letters of A Denishawn Dancer In the Far East, 1925-1926.
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The dance company spent Christmas and New Year in Rangoon, before boarding the British India Steam Navigation Company’s SS Ellora for Calcutta. By this time Sherman seemed to have tired of places...
