{"id":1165,"date":"2015-12-22T18:23:05","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T18:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theme-sphere.com\/smart-mag\/?p=1165"},"modified":"2016-07-05T15:44:01","modified_gmt":"2016-07-05T15:44:01","slug":"how-an-american-dancer-introduced-taichi-to-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.studymartialarts.org\/blog\/how-an-american-dancer-introduced-taichi-to-america","title":{"rendered":"How an American Dancer Introduced Tai Chi to America"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In 1954, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, a 51-year-old woman in loose, comfortable clothing moved through a series of movements. A crowd gathered amidst abstract paintings to watch her. With the grace of a dancer, she slowly raised and lowered her hands, shifted her weight from side to side, and bowed her head. Her face was calm and serene. This is the story of how an American dancer introduced Taichi to America.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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An American dancer<\/h2>\n

The woman\u2019s name was Sophia Delza. She was a dancer of some renown in the world of modern dance. When she first performed solo at the Guild Theater in New York at age 27, the New York Times\u00a0called it<\/a>\u00a0\u201ca distinguished debut\u201d that \u201crevealed her as an artist of individuality and authority.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the woman\u2019s slow pace would have bored a concert hall audience, her practiced movements radiated power. She moved like a coiled spring, full of harnessed energy. To the MoMA audience in 1954, Delza\u2019s demonstration was a novelty. Today, many Americans would instantly recognize that she was demonstrating tai chi, the Chinese martial art.<\/p>\n

Americans often don\u2019t think of tai chi, which is commonly practiced by senior citizens in public parks, as a martial art. Although many variations exist, tai chi fundamentally involves moving slowly and fluidly through postures with names like \u201cThe Snake Creeps Down\u201d and \u201cThe Golden Cockerel Stands on One Leg.\u201d Tai chi often looks more like slow yoga than judo or karate-two martial arts that involve kicking and grappling. For this reason, many people practice tai chi as a gentle exercise, without any interest in its martial component.<\/p>\n

\"20091004_tai_chi_Hong_Kong_Kowloon_6899\"<\/p>\n

Photo by\u00a0Jakub Haiun<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

Yet tai chi has been translated as \u201csupreme ultimate fist\u201d and \u201cgreat extremes boxing.\u201d As practitioners like Sophia Delza understood, tai chi\u2019s slow pace represents control-not weakness. Mastering the movements allows devotees to develop strength, balance, and a unity between mind and action. This is useful for both longevity and self-defense-and tai chi training that involves sparring and weapons.<\/p>\n

A pioner<\/h2>\n

In the 1950s, Eastern martial arts, and particularly tai chi, were not well known. Sophia Delza\u2019s 1954 performance at the Museum of Modern Art was likely the\u00a0first public demonstration<\/a>\u00a0of tai chi in the United States. Delza had studied tai chi with a master of the\u00a0Wu style<\/a>\u00a0while living in China. When she taught, demonstrated, and wrote about tai chi on her return to the United States, she was one of the first, if not the first, to do so extensively outside Chinese-American communities.<\/p>\n

This makes Sophia Delza a pioneer of American tai chi. Although she never achieved the fame of martial arts legends like Bruce Lee, she is worth remembering. Like tai chi, she had a gentle side that hid a powerful will. Delza loved dance, wrote academically, and de-emphasized the martial applications of tai chi. She was also one tough lady: Although American women did not have the right to vote until Delza was 17-years-old, she engaged in radical politics that made her a federal person of interest, and burst through barriers to forge a career in dance and, ultimately, as a mother of American martial arts.<\/p>\n

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History<\/h2>\n

Long before\u00a0Peggy Olson<\/a>\u00a0broke the glass ceiling at the Sterling Cooper ad agency in Mad Men, Sophia Delza \"expressvpn-sports-300x250-nfl-14a384f7c253b9b74adce4cef7bb7d89\"<\/a>lived the\u00a0mantra<\/a>\u00a0\u201cwell-behaved women seldom make history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Delza was born in Brooklyn in 1903, an environment likely to produce an artist, but not a martial artist. She majored in the sciences at Hunter College, a women\u2019s college, but pursued dance due to the influence of her older sister Elizabeth, who became a professional dancer and Sophia\u2019s first dance teacher.<\/p>\n

When Sophia followed her sister\u2019s footsteps, she had to\u00a0compete<\/a>\u00a0for a limited number of professional dance opportunities. She took a variety of jobs in plays and films until she triumphed with her successful solo performance at the Guild Theater in New York. When she next performed a series of original compositions, a New York Times reviewer\u00a0praised<\/a>\u00a0her \u201cstrong feeling for visual line\u201d and \u201cgeneral good taste.\u201d Delza also developed a performance style that mixed monologues and dance, studied composition in Paris, and traveled to Mexico to study folk dances.<\/p>\n

Her career was remarkable in an era when\u00a0less than a third<\/a>\u00a0of women worked. It is downright daring when you consider that her work was very political-and that she kept at it despite the risk of rabid anti-communist backlash.<\/p>\n

Delza did not study folk dance in Mexico merely out of artistic interest. According to scholar Ellen Graff, Delza\u00a0associated<\/a>\u00a0with a close community of artists who supported socialist and communist causes. Delza studied folk dance to make a proletariat argument for embracing traditional dances by\u00a0describing them<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cmass dances\u201d that could unite communities. When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936-and became a cause celebre among artists and intellectuals-Delza created and performed works that criticized the fascism of General Franco and raised money for the leftist forces in Spain that opposed him. Later in her life, Delza\u00a0donated<\/a>\u00a0time in her dance studio to radical dance groups.<\/p>\n

Today communism and socialism are only associated with the failings of the Soviet Union, but in the 1920s and 1930s, they represented progressive politics. The American Communist Party organized marches of\u00a0tens of thousands<\/a>\u00a0to advocate for the unemployed. Nearly every intellectual, including George Orwell and\u00a0Ernest Hemingway<\/a>, admired or supported socialism.<\/p>\n

The 1920s was also the beginning of the Red Scare and apocalyptic fears over the spread of communism in America. Both Sophia and her sister Elizabeth were the\u00a0subjects of reports<\/a>\u00a0for the House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated \u201cdisloyalty\u201d and \u201csubversive activities\u201d among American citizens and leftist groups. Sophia\u2019s brother Leo Hurwitz (Sophia had adopted Delza as a stage name), an award-winning documentary filmmaker, also appeared in the reports and was\u00a0blacklisted<\/a>\u00a0by the film industry in the 1950s due to his political views.<\/p>\n

This opposition to radical politics does not seem to have stopped Sophia or her siblings. In an interview, Sophia\u2019s nephew\u00a0explained<\/a>\u00a0that Sophia and his father Leo \u201cfelt\u2026 that they really could change the world.\u201d The Communist Party in America, he continued, \u201cspanned progressive causes like the desire to fight Fascism as it was growing in Europe, the growth of unions, the desire to stop people from being evicted from their houses, and the movement for racial justice.\u201dEast Meets West<\/p>\n

In 1948, at age 45, Sophia Delza was married and moved to Shanghai with her husband, Cook Glassgold. China was recovering from its occupation during World War II, and Glassgold had a diplomatic posting as Director of International Refugee and Relief Operations. During the couple\u2019s four year stay, however, Delza did much more than appear on her husband\u2019s arm at official functions.<\/p>\n

Delza engaged in a vigorous\u00a0cultural exchange<\/a>. She taught modern dance, which was novel in China, and studied and learned Chinese dance and theater. Her zeal for exploration changed her life during a trip to Beijing, where she discovered tai chi. Delza later\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0about the dramatic scene she stumbled upon at dawn in T\u2019ai Mizo Park:<\/p>\n

Dozens of people, young and old, were each doing his exercise, each clearly centered on himself. No outside sound of voice or instrument directed the movement. The slow, continuous flow of form and the impeccably even tempo seemed to come not only from some mastey within each one but also from the intrinsic nature of the action itself.<\/p>\n

Delza was fascinated. \u201cLooking amazingly light and stable at the same time,\u201d she recalled, \u201ceach person\u2019s movements seemed effortless.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

In context, it seems obvious that a modern dancer would be one of the first outsiders to appreciate tai chi. When Delza described her \u201cfirst unforgettable impression\u201d of the Chinese Theater in Peking, she\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cThe colorful creatures moved so quickly that it seemed the stage itself were revolving.\u201d Her recollection of the next scene marvels at the same slow, graceful aspects that struck her when she saw tai chi:<\/p>\n

A simple, elegant figure, entering from the upstage right corner, quietly took a deliberate pose. He balanced himself on one leg, and extended the other in easy lightness, head high. Then replacing his leg in slow motion, he moved diagonally across the stage with the restraint and simplicity and\u2026 grace of a fairy-tale god.<\/p>\n

At the Beijing park that morning, Delza quickly realized that \u201cit was not dance [she]was seeing.\u201d Yet she wanted to know more. She was introduced to Ma Yueh-liang, a famed teacher of tai chi in the Wu style, and his wife Wu Ying-hua, his co-instructor. She convinced the couple to teach her, and took up regular practice.<\/p>\n

As Ben Judkins notes in a\u00a0blog post<\/a>\u00a0about Sophia Delza, this put her in the unique situation of receiving several years of training \u201cdirectly from one of the most talented martial artists of his generation.\u201d She came to appreciate how,\u00a0in her words<\/a>, maintaining \u201ca consistently slow tempo\u201d in tai chi \u201cis an indication, not only that the body has acquired strength and control, but also that the mind is in harmony with the action.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Delza and her husband returned to New York in 1951, she had trained for years with a foremost authority on Wu tai chi, and knew more about the practice and philosophy of tai chi than almost any American.<\/p>\n

Introducing\u00a0Tai Chi to America<\/h2>\n

In the 1950s, the practice of Eastern martial arts existed in the United States, but it was not widespread.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of thousands of mainly Chinese immigrants\u00a0passed<\/a>\u00a0through San Francisco\u2019s Angel Island from 1910 to 1940, bringing with them martial arts like tai chi and judo. American soldiers stationed in Japan after the war returned to open dojos. Gene Lebell-who is now a mixed martial artist famous for teaching Chuck Norris and allegedly choking out Steven Seagal until he\u00a0soiled<\/a>\u00a0himself-won an amateur National Judo Championship held in the United States in 1954.<\/p>\n

But Americans like Lebell-who learned Eastern martial arts despite being outsiders to Asian communities-were rarities. Choy Hok Pang, a well-known, early teacher of tai chi in 1940s America, taught\u00a0almost entirely<\/a>\u00a0Chinese students until the 1960s. It was not until Bruce Lee and Hong Kong \u201ckung fu\u201d films exploded in popularity in the 1970s that Americans widely adopted martial arts training. Some casual histories of tai chi simply\u00a0write<\/a>\u00a0that it was introduced to the United States in the 1970s.<\/p>\n

When Delza returned to New York from China in 1951, it was in this environment in which martial arts, and particularly tai chi, were known but relatively unfamiliar outside Asian communities.
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The cover of Sophia Delza\u2019s book, the first tai chi book published in English<\/small><\/p>\n

Delza acted as a cultural emissary on her return, lecturing, writing, and teaching tai chi and Chinese theatre. Ultimately tai chi became her main focus.<\/p>\n

The initial response was modest. One early student at the tai chi school Delza opened in New York\u00a0regretfully recalled<\/a>\u00a0that her classes were poorly attended. When Delza performed tai chi at the Museum of Modern Art, it was the first demonstration of its kind, but also seems to have been a minor event. The demonstration does not turn up in the MoMA\u2019s\u00a0archived schedules\u00a0from 1954, and one author\u00a0credits<\/a>\u00a0Delza with giving the first public demonstration of tai chi in the United States two years later at the United Nations.<\/p>\n

This did not deter Delza, who kept teaching and writing. In 1961, she published the\u00a0first English language book<\/a>\u00a0about tai chi. As the popularity of tai chi and martial arts increased in the 1960s, partially thanks to her efforts, she appeared on television and her tai chi school thrived.<\/p>\n

Her influence in the 1960’s<\/h2>\n

Her influence can be seen in a 1960\u00a0Popular Mechanics article<\/a>\u00a0about tai chi that is unmistakably a trend piece. The author-who breathlessly writes that \u201cIn Shanghai, where matches have been held, no Western boxer has yet beaten a boxer who trained on T\u2019ai Chi to get balance and power\u201d-makes Sophia Delza the focus of his article. He notes that her television appearances result in hundreds of inquiries from around the country, and that her students include \u201cstage and screen stars.\u201d Another article from 1963\u00a0relates<\/a>\u00a0that tai chi schools are overflowing with more students than teachers like Sophia Delza can handle.<\/p>\n

If Bruce Lee-who more than anyone popularized martial arts in America through karate competitions and action films-was a Hollywood blockbuster or comic book, then Sophia Delza was an art film or New Yorker article. Delza taught from a studio in Carnegie Hall, which members of the Actor\u2019s Guild could attend for free, and instructed celebrities and famous actors. In a move that foreshadowed Americans\u2019 adoption of yoga purely as an exercise, Delza de-emphasized the martial aspects of tai chi in favor of its health and concentration benefits. Yet she always retained her academic bent, writing about the philosophy and history of tai chi in journals and books.<\/p>\n

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