Dancer-Weaver Honored as City Treasure : Arts: Ojai gives Anne Douglas Doucet a Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to modern dance and her 50 years of weaving.

A woman who has woven dancing and dog hair into a lifetime of achievement has been honored as an official “Ojai treasure” by the Ojai City Council.

Anne Douglas Doucet, 88, received the city’s 1990 Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award for her pioneering work in modern dance during the Roaring ‘20s and more than 50 years of award-winning weaving with natural fibers.

Mayor Nina Shelley bestowed the city’s bronze medallion on Doucet during its annual holiday dinner at the Ojai Valley Inn and Country Club.

“I’m two people, dancing and spinning,” Doucet said. “But there are so many artists in Ojai.”

Two prior awards have gone to ceramic artist Beatrice Wood and actor Robert Emhardt, an Ojai school board member. Recipients are recommended by the city’s Arts Advisory Committee.

Doucet said she was on her flamboyant dance tours of the Orient when she first felt the call of the loom.

“The weaving in India and China was fantastic and I thought someday I was going to try that,” she said.

Doucet was a member of the Denishawn Dancers in the 1920s led by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, called the mother and father of American modern dance.

Doucet appeared on stage with Greta Garbo and Martha Graham and danced at Carnegie Hall and the Imperial Palace of Tokyo, among other places.

“I accidently got into dancing. It was all I knew, so it was all I did,” she said.

Born in Seattle in 1902, Doucet took dance lessons as a schoolgirl when she was not on the road with her father’s animal carnival. At age 17, she left home to tour the United States with the Denishawn Dancers in the Pantages Vaudeville Theater.

After a decade on tour, Doucet settled in Manhattan Beach to operate a dance school with her sister for 25 years. In 1965, she was attracted to Ojai because of its reputation as an artists’ colony and because her second husband, Alexander Doucet, played trombone with the Ventura County Symphony for 10 years.

Since moving to Ventura County, Doucet has shared her knowledge with the Ventura College dance department, the Ojai Center for the Performing Arts and the Plexus Dance Theater in Ojai.