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 . Male attention 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 like Singapore and Rangoon, where she said “there wasn’t so much of startling interest to see, study or do”. In a letter to her mother from the ship, she said the shopping and “gadding” were fun but tended to get boring. “But I’m learning all I can and lookin.