Shawn - Ted Shawn - Editorial

Dance Magazine, June, 1998 by Richard Philp

June, filled with sunlight and sweetness, brings us those longed-for first fruits of summer--and that means the opening of summer festivals, programs, schools, and other activities. By my own informal, finger-to-the-wind reckoning, there must be more summer dance events this year than ever before. The days of seersucker and straw hats, woodsy walks and impromptu picnics are also opportunities for growth, learning, additional income, and relaxation.

The Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, which opened May 22 and runs through June 7, offers a nice range of performances including opera and theater; symphonic, choral, and chamber music; as well as dance. This will be held in conjunction with Dance/USA's National Roundtable, a four-day symposium with seminars and workshops on planning, audience development, marketing, management, and preservation. Jackson, Mississippi, is the setting for the sixth USA International Ballet Competition (June 13-28) in which dancers from around the world compete for the gold; and this year, Jackson (held every four years) features performances by eight regional dance companies. The American Dance Festival celebrates its 65th anniversary season (June 11-July 26, in Durham) with thirteen world premieres and a program, The Doris Duke Millennium Awards for Modern Dance and Jazz Music Collaborations, made possible by a three-year grant of $1.8 million from the Doris Duke Foundation. ADF, founded in 1934 at Bennington, is our second-oldest summer dance festival.

Faced with insurmountable debt and Merrill Ashley's unexpected withdrawal as head of his summer school, executive director Henry Young closed the curtains on DanceAspen, a twenty-nine-year-old festival, in March (see page 24). The number of dancers and companies now out of work for this summer is another sad consequence of this melancholy event. We are reminded, again, just how fragile existence can be for arts organizations. Here one day, gone the next. They can fade away suddenly like the grass. More than ever, charitable foundations such as the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Foundation or the newly active Doris Duke Foundation (with a specific mandate to assist dance) are needed to take on even larger roles in providing support. Dance depends desperately on the essential kindness of its philanthropists.

The granddaddy of summer dance festivals is Jacob's Pillow (June 23-August 29). I have a special fondness for this festival; many do. (See pages 60-63.) The Pillow is not so much a place as a state of mind. It represents a point of view, a way of life. During the darkest days of the Great Depression, Ted Shawn (1891-1972) bought an abandoned farm (named after a large pillow-shaped rock behind the house) in western Massachusetts, and the Pillow still offers an eclectic mix of training and performance so favored by its controversial founder. By the time Shawn acquired the Pillow, his stormy marriage to the famous dancer Ruth St. Denis had ended, and this also had killed their cash cow, Denishawn (1915-1931), the first American institution to combine performance and touring with a school. (And Denishawn was the only respectable school to which parents could safely send daughters, such as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey!)

In what is undoubtedly one of the most curious and remarkable chapters in the history of American dance, the resourceful Shawn launched in 1933 his company of Men Dancers, who used the Pillow as a base and toured for seven years until they were drafted into World War II. The prejudice in America against men dancing professionally was a powerful roadblock in the evolution of the art, but Shawn, driven by necessity, challenged the status quo and became a closeted pioneer for the rights of men. When his all-male company disbanded, Shawn claimed victory in the battle against prejudice, although later generations might disagree. After the war, the Pillow become a welcoming retreat where dancers could go for the summer to study, work, and perform. (The American Dance Festival, in nearby Bennington and then in New London, was another--but Shawn considered ADF "enemy territory," because in those days it primarily showcased American modems, with whom Shawn often disagreed.)

Shawn made some powerful enemies, including Agnes de Mille and Martha Graham (both of whom spent summer idylls on his hospitality at the Pillow), who both said and wrote a great deal to damage the pioneer's reputation. He probably was capricious and vindictive, at times. And the extant films (he filmed everything) show a chunky, older man who by that time had become a better administrator than performer. But he was courageous, and a relentless advocate for dance. He encouraged the moniker "Papa" Shawn--as in "the father of American dance." (And, by the way, if he wasn't the father of American dance, then who was?) Some people may not have liked his aggressive confidence or his success, but those qualities served him well when the going got rough, as it often did.