Shawn and His Men Dancers

              1935
TED SHAWN

Figure

AND HIS MEN DANCERS
PREVIEWS
INTERVIEWS
REVIEWS


NOW BOOKING
Season 1935-36   Coast-to-Coast Tour

FOR DATES, TERMS, INFORMATION
WRITE TO
Willmore & Powers
2 West 45th Street, New York City

All territory West of the Mississippi booked exclusively through;
L. E. Moyer, Vice-President The Horner Bureau
3000 Troost Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri

TRAINING CAMP   SHAWN AND DANCERS   P. O. BOX 87, LEE, MASS.




SHAWN
AND HIS MEN DANCERS
Will Give a Series of Dance Recitals
at
HIS MAJESTY'S THEATRE
LONDON
Beginning May 30, 1935

See Other Side for Interviews and Previews




THE BOSTON GLOBE
MAY 4, 1935

THE DANCE
SYMPHONY HALL
Ted Shawn and His Dancers
Presenting a program of new dances, splendidly conceived and executed and loudly applauded by the audience, Ted Shawn and his group of men dancers appeared last night at Symphony Halt.  It was in many ways the most notable performance Shawn has ever given in Boston and included at least two dances which perhaps exceed anything he has previously created or danced.

It was a program which in effect traces the more important phases of dance history from primitive times until today with a glance toward the future.  By the arrangement and selection of its numbers it conveyed a sense of unity rare in dance programs.

Most important of the dances were the Labor Symphony and Shawn's solo, The Hound of Heaven, the latter inspired by Francis Thompson's mystic poem.  This is a really magnificent rendition, in dance form, of agony and struggle and spiritual triumph—finely executed.  In spite of its length—it is one of the longest solo dances presented in recent years—it appeared to hold the audience.  At the conclusion Shawn was recalled several times.

In the Labor Symphony, the four movements are dances of workers—in the fields, in the forest and on the sea—and of machine labor.  The theme of each movement is danced by Shawn and then developed by the young men of the group.

In the dance of the field workers Shawn's genuis as a choreographer is most apparent.  Here on the stage of old Symphony Hall a living Parthenon frieze moved in swift beautiful patterns, a thing of exquisite composition yet purely masculine.

The music for both The Hound of Heaven and the Labor Symphony was composed by Jesse Meeker, the youthful pianist of the group.  The music literally grew as the dances grew.

Another outstanding feature of the evening was the remarkably brilliant dancing of Barton Mumaw.  This young man has progressed remarkably in the year since the Shawn group was last in Boston.  His Pleasantly Satiric Comment, with its gay and delicate parody and its casual grace, is a delightful thing to watch.  Excellent, too, is his dance of a Dayak hunter.  The other members of the company are well trained and competent and several promise future excellence.

Most popular with the majority of the audience were the dances on play motifs and folk themes.  Shawn was forced to give three encores of his inimitable Flamenco dances and also repeated his Dance Before the Cretan Snake Goddess.  The latter was one of the only two dances on the program ever performed in Boston before.  The music dances were effective and beautiful.




BOSTON EVENING AMERICAN
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 1935

Shawn Dancers Triumph Again
By HARRIS MORGAN

Ted Shawn and his Men Dancers received a warm welcome last night at Symphony Hall.

To one whose sole observance of interpretive dancing has been the customary lissome slave maiden of the revues who, only after great clanking and travail, frees herself from a pair of prop handcuffs, last night's performance was a pleasant revelation.

Beginning with a group of native dances, original Shawn creations on actual native themes, the Shawn troupe absorbed the interest of its audience through its labor dances and The Hound of Heaven, a religious interpretive study, to the final two groups, play motifs and folk themes, and the dance as an art form.

The Maori War Haka of the first group is recommended to those who class interpretive dancing among the too gentle arts.  The sight of these strapping young men fetching at one another with the Maori equivalent of shilallahs is like seeing a Dublin Easter riot in the nude.

The Hound of Heaven, based on Francis Thompson's mystic poem, was doubtless intended to be the feature of the evening.  Mr. Shawn performed it superbly, incorporating all the frantic religious doubt which the poem expresses with, at times, an expression of spiritual and physical weariness which could not have been more skillful.

But it was his Ferruca Triana, a Spanish Flamenco dance, that garnered the major portion of an enthusiastic audience's approval.  Mr. Shawn was called back for three encores and seemed due for a fourth, only forestalling the audience by appearing in a dressing gown with the sensible, but gracious, suggestion that, unless the show went on, it would be time for breakfast.




THE DETROIT NEWS, MONDAY, APRIL 8, 1935.

Ted Shawn Places Dancing Among the Manly Virtues
By RUSSELL McLAUCHLIN.

Ted Shawn brought his ensemble of men dancers to Orchestra Hall Saturday evening to expound his gospel that dancing is primarily a matter of male concern.  This idea, which has been in Shawn's mind for about 10 years, was put into actual, physical form about a year and a half ago and he and his dancers are now concluding their second season as a touring troupe.  Detroit obtained a tardy view and no very great crowd assembled.

That dancing should belong, by right and custom, to the male sex is scarcely a novel theory, for dancing was done almost exclusively by men, all down the long centuries until relatively recent times.  In the modern world—and, especially, in its regions where English is spoken—dancing is generally held to be a delicate and ladylike activity and male dancers are to be endured only as parts of the scene, so that women may have somebody to dance with.  Dancing as something hearty and virile—that it resembles in the smallest degree polevaulting or playing short-stop—is an idea which the contemporary English-speaking citizens deems too ridiculous for words.

Shawn, who is a very large, vigorous person himself, has set out to correct that notion—which has all the proportions of a prejudice—and to put on a show of dancing that requires athletes to perform it.  He was accompanied by six young men Saturday night.  None of them was as brawny as their famous boss but neither did any of them, by the broadest definition of the term, look like a sissy.  Their bodies seemed no less vigorous for being disciplined to grace.

And even this grace, remarkable as it was in the whole sextet, was not delicate.  The evening passed without one lily-fingered gesture, without a single mincing foot-step.

Shawn did a solo dance that totaled about the degree of endurance

Barton Mumaw
 required by two sets of tennis.  It was called John Brown Sees the Glory to the music of Jess Meeker, the evening's accompanist, and it traced, through almost 20 minutes of constant motion in every muscle, the long, eventful history of the fanatical hero of Harper's Ferry, from his beginnings as a youthful zealot, through his futile raid and execution, to a final, spiritual phase with his body a-mouldering in the grave and his soul marching on.  The brains and emotions behind Shawn's choreography—familiar to this generation all over the world—have not been more brightly demonstrated than in John Brown Sees the Glory and, as a sheer physical achievement, it seems to be the top in modern dancing.

Repeated from Shawn's older programs were several that fitted neatly into this new—or reborn—philosophy.  Sousa's sturdy Thunderbird was inevitably there and so was the quiet, devotional and very masculine St. Francis of Assissi, to the music of Respight.  He did a group of Spanish dances which used to adorn the Denishawn programs of yore.

His six young hearties appeared in all possible combinations and accenting nearly all possible approaches to the dance; excepting, naturally, the romantic, for this was a stag affair.  Two extremely popular ones were The French Sailor, danced slyly and impudently by Barton Mumaw, and Turkey in the Straw, done in cowboy regalia by Wilbur McCormack.  Even modern social questions were rhythmically considered in a group of Workers Songs of Middle Europe, done by an ensemble of four and indicating the restratification of society through modern economic pressure.

The program opened with important musio visualized in the familiar Denishawn manner but with the same, curious emphasis of vigor that ran through the evening.  There were two to the music of Bach, a sturdy, old Leipsic gentleman who would have been much surprised at the sight of four sturdy, young Americans dancing to music which he devised for the dainty clavichord.

There were Indian dances, Cuban cane-harvesters, Japanese rickshaw coolies, a tremendous spear-dance by Shawn and a horrifying African witch-doctor by Mumaw.  The evening was ended by visualized Negro Spirituals, with Swing Low, Sweet Chariot as its most notable component, and, finally, as a sort of combination of encore and benediction, Shawn and the ensemble did a brief dance to—of all music!—Old Hundred.





TED SHAWN



Left, Ted Shawn, who brought his troupe of men dancers to Philip Livingston Junior High School last night, appears in colorful regalia for the Hopi Indian Eagle dance.  He appears again on the right, signing his name at the request of Miss Lottie Lock of New York and Schenectady while Barton Mumaw, leading danseur of the Shawn ensemble, looks on.




KNICKERBOCKER PRESS APRIL 25, 1935

Shawn Dances a Revelation
Male Troupe Gives Wide Range of Interpretations at Recital for Benefit of Blind

Performing with the smooth grace of flowing water, Ted Shawn and his eight male dancers last night delighted an audience of about 1,000 persons, including many social celebrities, in the theater of Philip Livingston Junior High School.  It was a benefit for the Albany Home for Blind Women.

The nine young men, pioneers in the movement to bring male dancing back to its high status of centuries past, presented a thrilling medley of dances to music ranging from the savage beat of dull-throated tom-toms at the opening to a cultured rhapsody by Brahms at the conclusion.

The young men's bodies, molded in classis form by figorous training, were supple and graceful.  There was a certain vigor to most of the dances that left no doubt in the minds of the audience that male dancing is far from being a sissy, diversion.

Shawn appeared to be in tops condition His Hopi Indian Eagle Dance was a beautiful work of symbolism.  His The Hound of Heaven was startling in its changing effects, now black and sombre, now rosy and gay.

The fine swagger in his Spanish Flamenco dance lured the audience into a merry mood and long applause that had to be answered with an encore.

Barton Mumaw's solo appearances, in a spear dance, and later in a satiric comment, with a gay feather fastened over his brow, were hits with the spectators.

The Labor Symphony was striking.  So graceful and plain were the movements that visual images of sowing grain, felling trees and rowing a galley arose in the mind of the watcher.  The whirling cogs and sliding pistons symbolized in the abrupt, sharp movements of the dancers in the Mechanized Labor phase were grim and realistic.

Dennis Landers proved the most startling gentlemen of the group when he whirled out in a Mule Team Drivers Dance, skipped blithely over his 10-foot whip, then lashed it out over the audience cracking it with the rapidity of a machine gun.  A rollicking Pioneer's Dance brought out all the dancers in buckskin jackets and fur hats, and the whirling went on into the prespiration stage.

The last part of the program, danced to music by Bach.  Beethoven and Branms, was classic, and the striking art displayed won the acclaim of the large audience Jesse Meeker, composer of much of the music used in the entire program, was at the piano.




Ted Shawn's Dancers Please, Fascinate Albany Audience
By RAY A. MOWERS

Excitement, thrills and great beauty held the attention of hundreds last night in the Philip Livingston Junior High School with never-flagging interest.

The attraction was the first Albany appearance in several seasons of Ted Shawn, expert trainer of men in choreography, and a company of eight student dancers in a program of very vivid coloring and superb technical workmanship.

There can be no adequate review of the performance without mentioning near the outset the prodigious, almost heroic, contributions to its success by Jess Meeker, composer-pianist, who sat at the keyboard and provided an accompaniment of great breadth and power for the dancers.

Those who could permit their attention to stray momentarily from the dancers and lend special ear to Mr. Meeker's efforts could not but be astounded at the skill of this musician.  His complete sympathy with Shawn's objective and his masterly response to the exacting demands made upon his musicianship supplied easily half of the material for the fine choreographic fabric on exhibition.

Meeker's superb genius for composition in primitive as well as modern idioms were exemplified in full before the program ended.  At the same time he proved himself an expert in rhythmic interpretation of the classics.

The dance program, filled with color and dynamic, dramatic miming by youths of arresting physical beauty, trained and conditioned knife-edged fine, easily distanced anything ever offered hereabouts by Shawn.  And as no one ever attempted to contest with Shawn in his highly specialized field, this is equivalent to saying the attraction marks a new high in the history of dancing.

Many found Shawn's solo.  The Hound of Heaven, the apex of the evening.  Others, who may have found that too obscure in meaning, preferred to blue-ribbon the Labor Symphony.  Surely nothing the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe offered in its three local appearances of the season even approached this less protentious but more successful series of stories in rhythmic motion.

Wide variety in mood and tense marked the entire list of offerings and each was presented with superb attention to detail in acting, custuming, make-up and other departments of presentation — the hallmarks of Shawn.




Figure

Tulsa Art Association Is Sponsoring Appearance of Shawn in Tulsa

Greeks of Classic Period Were Quick to Recognize Great Art
By La-Vere Shoenfelt Anderson

WHEN TED SHAWN and his company of men dancers appear at Convention hall on the night of Saturday, March 16, Tulsans will have an opportunity to judge for themselves whether Shawn, who has been pioneering for years to restore dancing for men to its rightful standing, is succeeding in his ambition to bring the world to a recognition of the fitness and need for men in the dance.  Shawn believes that the creative dance is not only a permissible career for men but a calling as high as any of the great professions.  The art of the dance, he maintains, is like all other arts in that it cannot be balanced and complete until man, as well as woman, is fully expressed through this medium.

Shawn and his company of men dancers will appear here under the joint sponsorship of the Tulsa Art association and the Tulsa Civic symphony as a part of the program sponsored by these organizations for the benefit of an art museum fund and the civic symphony orchestra.

Although the idea of a company of dancers which excludes women has been a novel one for this country, the last year has found critics loud in their acclaim of Shawn's innovation.

The term innovation may be used today because America has looked upon dancing as a distinctly feminine art.  As a matter of fact, however, this interpretation of the dance is almost exclusively a product of north European civilization.  All the first dancers were men, Shawn says and gets out his history book to prove it.

GREEKS of the classic period recognized the physical and mental importance of dancing and used it as the principal physical training for their armies, says Shawn.  More recently the Japanese, who have much in common with the ancient Greeks, expressed their warlike emotions in terms of the dance.  In both cases the participants were the most noble and virile of the nation.  Even today in most parts of peasant Europe, the folk dances still in use give the greatest emphasis to the men and dancing is generally considered a man's art activity.

Shawn recognizes the contributions of great women dancers, Ruth St. Denis, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, but points out that no woman can adequately express emotions or use movements and patterns or interpret themes which are essentially masculine.  These, he maintains, are for men dancers.

Fifty per cent of the expression of life today is woman's, Shawn declares, but I claim that the other 50 per cent can be expressed only by men.

THERE, in brief, is the idea that has sent Shawn on the road with a company of men dancers all possessed with the hope of restoring dancing for men to its ancient and honorable standing.

The story that lays back of the finished performance Tulsans will witness here on March 16 is an interesting one.  It is the story of a youth with paralyzed legs winning through great obstacles to the point where such eminent dance critics as John Martin of the New York Times call him one of the leaders without whose insurgency the dance might not have developed to its present high status.

Born in Kansas City, Mo., the son of a newspaper man, young Shawn decided as a boy that he wanted to be a minister.  Possibly the death of his mother, followed quickly by that of several other close relatives, were factors in the decision.  At all events, when he entered the University of Denver he thought his future was decided.

But in Denver he caught diphtheria in a peculiarly virulent form and for weeks was not expected to live.  Either from the results of the disease or from the thousands of units of anti-toxin used on him he became partially paralyzed.

While I lay in bed there in quarantine, Shawn says years later, I thought myself out of the ministry.

WHEN he was released from the hospital unable to walk or stand alone he had of course one principal desire: to walk.  He tried various treatments and methods and

Above, at the left: Shawn's men dancers in the spiritual, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.
Center: Ted Shawn, with an international reputation as a dancer, is in the costume he wears in his specialty dance, The Hound of Heaven.
Above, at the right.  These members of Ted Shawn's troupe are posed in native costume from the dance Shawn has programmed as the Rickshaw Coolie.
 when he could move again took up dancing at first solely as a means of gaining strength.

Soon he was fascinated by dancing itself.  It became for him one of the primary and essential arts.  He believes today that dancing is healing to both body and mind and it was surely so for him.

By the time Shawn had recovered his strength, financial troubles in the family made it necessary for him to give up any idea of returning to college and go to work.  He was determined, however, not to give up dancing.  After securing an office job he continued his practice and his lessons, starting the former at 6 o'clock in the morning and working

Figure
 in the public library at night to get money for the latter.

Some months later he took a position in the office of the Los Angeles water department.  He went on with his lessons, making surprising progress and soon with a girl partner was giving exhibition dances in the evening.  A studio was rented and gradually as people he met asked for lessons he drifted into teaching.  He trained a small group of people for public appearances and with his partner began working on tangoes, then a novelty in this country.  Later he gave tango teas at a hotel, the first of the kind in Los Angeles.

SHAWN had a strenuous schedule.  He practiced dancing in the morning; reported at the office at 9; took 15 minutes for lunch so that he might be able to leave at 4; went to the hotel for the tango teas and a series of lessons at his studio which lasted until 10 o'clock at night, and afterward with his partner often gave exhibition dances at restaurants and clubs.

At that time Shawn was only 21 years old but he had money in the bank and was attaining a remarkable degree of success not only as a dancer but as a teacher of dancing.  He decided to go east to study.  He went by means of a tour with a group of pupils which, he remembers with pride, not only paid everyone's way across the country but sent the group back home with its return train fare.

There is no space to tell of Shawn's success in the east, where he studied with many famous teachers; accumulated a wide knowledge of various techniques; met, joined as a dancing partner and later married Ruth St. Denis; made innumerable tours; with his wife developed the Denishawn schools at Los Angeles and New York; and—most important of all to dance lovers in this country—became interested in the development of more and better men dancers.

ATOUR of Germany and Switzerland, after he and Miss St. Denis had danced together in public for the last time, as well as other experiences in this country, convinced him that a large number of people were interested in dancing by men and in Boston in 1933 during a week's engagement with a mixed company Shawn gave one program consisting entirely of dancing by himself and the male members of the group.  The program proved a success, critics generally commenting on the richness and variety of the program and the fact that the women dancers were not missed.

Shawn, who that winter had given a dancing course at the Y. M. C. A. college at Springfield, Mass., decided that the time had come to launch the all-men group.  For it he selected several men from his Springfield class and from his 1933 company With this little group he began a tour including 115 performances and covered 23,000 miles.  The tour, both in the character of the audiences and the criticism, proved enormously successful.  One Boston critic wrote: No monotony in an evening of dance in which no women shared left the reviewer wondering whether an ensemble of the more sensuous sex could achieve a dance evening so varied and sustained. A St. Louis critic declared it an interesting and superlatively varied recital—an attentive audience which packed auditorium and aisles responded enthusiastically.

So began the realization of an idea.  But there is still another story back of the performance Tulsans are scheduled to witness next month.

UP AMONG the low, long ridges of the Berkshire hills, beyond the lift of Jacob's Ladder, is an old farmhouse looking much like hundreds of other New England farms.  Purchased by Shawn several years ago and christened Jacob's Pillow, the farm is now the training camp for his group of men dancers and a few carefully selected pupils.

Under the time-colored beams of the old barn the men dancers create and work out new dances.  The barn is equipped today with a hardwood floor, an end wall formed of mirrors and a hard-working grand pianoforte.

It is a training camp that realizes the dream of so many artists.  Isolation and solitude except for the Friday afternoon teas when visitors are invited to watch the development off the dance in the making, maintains.

There is no telephone at Jacob's Pillow, no electric light, no radio, no central heating.  Fireplaces older than the constitution of the United States keep out the cold, and old-fashioned kerosene lamps provide a kindly light.  Except for the cooking, all work on the place is done by Shawn and the boys.  They cut wood, make garden.  Last summer they built a swimming pool.

The days' routines are like this: four hours of exercise and practice each morning, lunch followed by a sun bath when the weather is fair.  Then Shawn usually reads aloud from some book relating directly or indirectly to the dance.  From two to four in the afternoon the men are busy at work around the place while Shawn gives private lessons to visiting pupils.  Thereafter until dinner there is work on solo dancing.  Most of the evenings are spent in study, reading and talk.  Bedtime comes early save for the one evening off each week which is usually spent in the Berkshire playhouse nearby.

THAT has been the schedule followed during the past two summers by the men who will dance here on March 16.  During the winter season they go on tour, visiting every part of the United States and giving their interpretative dances based on masculine ideas and performer in purely masculine style.

Although it is often difficult to uproot an idea, Ted Shawn and his company of men seem to be succeeding in tossing into the discard America's former notion that dancing is exclusively a woman's art and unworthy of serious male attention.

Dancing, believes Shawn, is the art-form for men of action.  It is a strenuous athletics of body and mind.  Imbued with the idea and the firm resolution to restore dancing for men to the honorable and dignified position it once enjoyed.  Shawn is pioneering in a field that might have daunted less courageous and inspired men.





INTERVIEWS

ALBANY EVENING NEWS, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 1935
American People Must Pioneer in Art, Says Ted Shawn, in Albany for Recital
Dance Impresario Feels He Has Mission to Create Troupe

By PEG STEELE

Pioneering days are not over for America, but Americans now must pioneer in the world of arts instead of in land expansion, Ted Shawn said today beore dashing to his training camp at Lee, Mass., in preparation or his appearance tonight at Philip Livingston Junior High School.

America can no longer open uninhabited lands for exploration and settlement, and she is at the point where lasting contribution to the arts is in order. Shawn said For the first time in the history of the world we now have a means of preserving the dance for posterity through the sound motion pictures.  Formerly, a dance died as soon as an audience saw it

We are at the low ebb in the cycle of the dance at present, with erally thousands of women trained in rhythmic movement and but few men who are exponents of the art.

I feel that there comes a time when a person feels himself appointed to a certain mission in life, and mine seems to be to create a troupe of male dancers who will be able to express their artistic inclinations through dancing. Shawn said.  Dancing is not a sissy art.  It is just as virile as football, basketball, track, pole vaulting and swimming, and the young men whom I have in my troupe represent American manhood physically and idealistically.  Of course, I feel that women have a place in the dance too, but not in this sort of dancing for a while yet.

Eventually, when I feel that this group of male dancers has reached a point where they can go on for themselves, yes, but not yet.

I am attempting to create a dancing symphony so that a director can raise his baton and know that the symphony will respond to his desires.  My ambition is to be able to present Brahm's 'Second Symphony,' with 80 dancers and an 80-piece symphony orchestra.  The dancers will be 40 trained women and 40 trained men, each ready to take up his or her part, he said, looking off into space and visualizing with eyes half shut his dream of a new sort of dancing.

When we look over history we do not remember the richest men, the politicians and the kings half as often as we remember the artists, the sculpturers, the writers, poets, historians and novelists, Shawn says.  It is now high time that Americans contribute something lasting to this world of literature and art.  American men are active physically and some of them are artistically inclined as well.  Artists and sculpturers find expression for their art but are confined physically; dancers are able to combine art and physical expression in an ideal performance.


TED SHAWN


Shawn predicts.  I started to get this troupe together several years ago, and taught the dance at Springfield College for three months to show the students—most of whom became athletic coaches—that the art of dancing is not a feminine art.  From that beginning I now have Barton Mamaw, who has been with me for five years.  He's from Florida.  Then there's Frank Overlees, an Oklahoma man, who is also stage manager and who has an athletic record behind him.  Wilbur McCormick is a Connecticut wrestler and Dennis Kanders of Kansas holds several pole vault records.  Ned Copeland, the youngest member of the troupe, is just out of high school and is from Texas.  Bill Howell is a Knoxville, Tenn., man, and Fred Hearn is from Nashville, N. C.

Jesse Meeker, the pianist for the group, is from Kansas, and has composed the first three selections on tonight's program.  Foster Fitzsimons is from Atlanta, Ga., and completes the present troupe.

Mr Shawn is looking for more young men to train in the intricacies of the dance at their 150-acre training camp farm at Lee, following the troupe's return from an engagement in England, for which they sail May 15.  He expects to have at least 40 male dancers in the troupe before he considers his work has reached such a stage of completion with men that women may be added to the group.

Incidentally, none of the dancers is married and all have a routine of exercise and dancing to follow which would make ordinary football training look like dusting the family portraits in the parlor of a Saturday morning.

ey drive their own trucks, pack their own scenery and costumes and take care of most of it as part of their routine.  The idea that his dancers were pampered by having truck drivers to make their long hps amazed Mr. Shawn

They do it themselves, they're real men, he said.



Wednesday, February 27, 1935
University Daily Kansan
Official Student Paper of THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS LAWRENCE, KANSAS

Phog Allen Praises Work Done by Noted Group in Pioneer Field of Dance

Ted Shawn and his athletic troupe of seven male dancers will appear in a varied assortment of dances in the University Auditorium tonight at 8:30 p.m.

Schools of physical education are taking advantage of the recent awakening interest in dancing for men to foster programs and classes in dance forms that are adapted to male interests and physiques, said Dr Forrest C. Allen, director of athletics, yesterday afternoon.  Ted Shawn, pioneer in this field of dance form for athletes, has taken a group of college men, possessed of all the physical skills required in the athlete, precison, strength, fluid muscles, split-second timing, and trained them to dance masculine themes of labor, play, and religion.

Some of his critics scoff at the idea of men dancing; others do not know what to expect; but many physical educators and athletic directors feel that here is something in physical development for men that combines the appeal of an athletic exhibition with the inspiration and satisfaction of art.  Certainly the contribution of Shawn's group is significant and worth seeing.



St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, Wednesday Morning, January 23, 1935.

TED SHAWN AND HIS MALE BALLET TO APPEAR HERE

Figure


WHAT A ballet without women?

This idea which Ted Shawn is demonstrating at the Auditorium February 18 is just like saying, Yes, we have no bananas. Neither makes sense.  Yet Shawn has a precedent in the ancient Greeks, it seems, and this American equivalent of the Ballet Russe really came out of Missouri, according to F. Cowles Strickland, director of the Little Theater of St. Louis and the Berkshire Playhouse, at Stock-bridge, Mass.

Strickland was smoking before a log fire with Ted Shawn when the dancer first broached his idea of a virile modern ballet representative of the spirit of this country.  The two men are neighbors at Stock-bridge, where each has a farm near by, and there, before the summer season swings into its stride, they visit back and forth.  There it was, before Shawn's hearth, that they fell to discussing the art of dancing one night back in 1933.

After circling the world in search of dance forms with his wife, Ruth St. Denis, after years of experimentation with various phases of the art, Shawn had come to the belief that pernicious anemia was laying siege to his fort.

He resented the general assumption that dancing was not masculine.  And so, he told Strickland he intended to go back to some of the ideas of manual labor with which he was imbued in Kansas City, and transform them into dance forms.  Hurling the light fantastic into the scrap heap, he intended to present a ballet composed only of young men strong enough to do a day's farm work.  He wanted to put his profession on a manly basis.  The Greeks had that system for it, but in Stock-bridge, in the midst of the depression, Ted Shawn had grave doubts about the financial exigencies of promoting his revolutionary ideas.

Strickland suggested these young men who were to be recruited, not from dancing schools, but from gymnasiums and the athletic fields of the nation, should dance for the public there on the farm while their training progressed.

Well, I can't believe people would come over these bad roads to see us, said Shawn, but go ahead and announce a recital for Saturday afternoon, if you think it worth while.

So the announcement was made in the little Berkshire Playhouse and the next Saturday afternoon brought 250 people bumping over the crude roads to the Shawn farm.  The following Saturday 400 came, and when frost set in these boys who had spent the summer pruning fruit trees and dancing, building stone walls and dancing, tilling the soil and dancing, went forth, the first all-male ballet on record which has ever toured this country, for Europe and America had long ago come to believe that dancing was the prerogative of women who pirouetted into the arms of graceful handy men.

Shawn and his sun-tanned farmers carried their story into the Little Theaters of the country in that first tour.  Frequently, as in St. Louis, the overflowing crowd had to be accommodated at an additional performance, where standees packed the available standing room.  Before such audiences they presented their American epic, John Brown Sees the Glory, to music by Jess Meeker from Arkansas City, Kan., who obliged at the piano.  For the Stravinsky of this American ballet has not yet arrived at the position which may some day make him a symphony soloist.

Barton Mumaw, regarded by Strickland as the most promising dancer of the group, is the Florida boy who danced Fetish, Inspired by Primitive Africa Sculpture.

The boys come from all parts of the country—where they are going is a queer tale, for one boy who studied with the group is Springfield College's wrestling captain, who later wrote a treatise on the Shawn system of dancing.

The conventional system of fluttering hands, cabrioles and the like have been discarded by Shawn, to whom a feminine gesture by a man is anathema.  In their place he uses great sweeping gestures suggesting the conquest of the sea, the swing of the scythe, the fall of a sledge hammer.

These have taken the troupe into great electric plants to execute their dance of the dynamo.

And this year the popularity of the Shawn idea is taking the all-male company into real full-sized theaters for the first time to execute their all-American ballet.




Dallas Times Herald MARCH 10, 1935
SHAWN'S BALLET DEVELOPED FROM BOLD EXPERIMENT
Famous Dancer to Appear With Male Group on Symphony Program This Afternoon; Discusses Ideals.

By JOHN WILLIAM ROGERS.

The Dallas Symphony orchestra, Sunday at 4 p. m., will give its place upon the Fair park auditorium stage to Ted Shawn and his male dancers.  Settling itself down in the pit of the theater, it will join in what promises to be one of the most interesting programs it has ever offered.

In spite of such provocative experiments as Mary Wigman, music is an integral part of the dance, and the recent visit of the Monte Carlo ballet with its rather sketchy assembly of musicians, proved only too eloquently that even the most colorful ballet spectacle loses something without a fully symphony.

Of course, Mr. Shawn and his group are utterly different from the Russians, in spirit and approach to their art.  They rely for their appeal, not upon elaborate scenery and devices of the theater, but sheerly upon the moving qualities of the body itself, trained as an instrument to express a far wider and more personal range of emotions than were ever possible with the technique of the traditional ballet.  And the Shawn group is unique in that it is the first instance in modern times of a company of dancers to be composed entirely of men.



Experiment a Success.
In the past two years, Mr Shawns rather bold experiment in this respect has met with such a cordial reception from the public that his contention of the sound place of the male element in the dance seems clearly proved.  But just two years ago, when it was still rather experimental, he visited Dallas for a personal recital and told this writer in detail something of his ideals for such a ballet.

What he said in The Times Herald then is particularly appropriate for his appearance with his dancers today, and we reprint a part of it as the most helpful explanation and background to the program to be offered this afternoon, which has come to our knowledge.

The great impetus to the modern renaissance of the dance in the western world came from two personalities, Ruth St. Denis and Isadore Duncan, said Mr Shawn.  Practically all the extraordinary developments in this art in recent years, both in Europe and America, have been directly inspired by their magnificent achievements.  And Miss St. Denis with her work in teaching has so raised the general understanding of the dance as an art form, that parents who, a few years ago, would have been horrified at the idea, accept the fact of their daughters studying at Denishawn just as going to college.



Men and the Dance.
But the revival so far has been generally expressed through women.  Dancing in Europe and America is popularly considered the province of women and the male dancer has had and still must suffer ridicule and misunderstanding of the public at large.  This is an entirely false conception, a prejudice which we inherited from the middle ages, when the church frowned upon all forms of sensuousness and artistic expression as worldly.  The painters and musicians could turn their brushes and their instruments to religious expression and escape censure, but the dancer whose body was his instrument had no such recourse.  And so, while dancing had been even more a man's province than a woman's throughout all antiquity, and remains so in countries not dominated by European civilization, it lost for us its true significance and eventually became a minor secular activity which was dismissed as a pastime for pretty girls.

Dancing at its finest springs so deeply from the universal that it includes all that men and women can bring to it.  For many years, it has seemed to me it has been the world's loss that the masculine side of the dance has been allowed practically to disappear, and for a long time it has been a great ideal of mine to help restore it to its proper place.  In 1931–32 I began the experiment with the public.  With five young men who were associated with me, I included on my programs of both men and girls, a few dances for men alone.  The interested response in these was striking, and out of them came one definite result.



Has Farm in Summer.
The result to which Mr Shawn refers was that he was invited to teach dancing to the students of Springfield college, Springfield, Mass., and the following winter had classes of young men there which totaled 260.  It was about this time that he bought his present farm near Lee, Mass., not far from Pittsfield, and began a course of summer training for young men interested in his ideas.  For several summers this has been successfully maintained and he has gathered about him more than a score of younger dancers interested in his ideals.  With the most rigid program of work, this group studies under him, and from time to time offers informal afternoons of the dance which are widely attended by people living and wisiting in the neighboring country-side.

The dances offered in Dallas—after the general education we have had in recent years in the broadening scope and range of the dance—offer no particular difficulties for appreciation to the average intelligent audience of dance lovers.  For the most part the names themselves give a clue as to what to look for.  Probably the least obvious is The Hound of Heaven,' inspired by the poem of that name by the great English mystic poet, Francis Thomson.

In this dance, one will find the element of philosophic thought, which has been an insistent, underlying quality in Ted Shawn s dancing.  Since he first came into prominence as a dancer, and to our mind an important reason why he has lasted before the public while whole generations of dancers have passed into limbo Mr Shawn has eagerly and sincerely approached the dance through its capacity to interpret the deeper inner emotions which so inarticulately stir mankind.  While other dancers have been intrigued with the trivial and merely pictorial virtuosity, his work has been touched with a dignity and more than a passing fashion because as well as achieving a technique and theatrical effectiveness he has been striving continually to have something to say.  It is perhaps not without significance that he began his career, not as a dancer but as a minister.




Ted Shawn Dancers Have Important Mission
TULSA DAILY WORLD, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1935

Artist Expects His Work to Convey to the World the Need for Men in Interpretative Dancing

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