Tales of a Terpsichorean Traveler

This chapter focuses on Shawn’s extensive travels abroad during the height of the Denishawn enterprise in pursuit of learning and adapting authentic “foreign” or “ethnic” dances for the American stage. It details Shawn’s trips to Spain and North Africa (1923), where he traveled in search of the Ouled Naïl, the nomadic tribe of bejeweled dancing girls that had captured the imagination of Romantic artists and writers. It also covers Denishawn’s groundbreaking eighteen-month tour of the Far East (1925–26), focusing on the company’s status as “America’s unofficial ambassadors” and revealing Shawn’s artistic exchanges with local artists, royalty, and colonial officials. The chapter explains how Shawn translated his experiences abroad into dances that filled his repertory for years to come—as well as into business practices that helped him build an arts empire with school franchises, a mail-order dance business, and its own Denishawn Magazine.

Introduction: Firsts and Foremost

This chapter introduces the reader to Ted Shawn and to the reasons his life deserves a critical reappraisal. It examines how a narrative of his life was constructed over his more than fifty years in the public eye, including the compromising depictions of him in the biographies of his wife Ruth St. Denis and his most famous student Martha Graham. It also considers his many own attempts to write about his life, especially his memoir One Thousand and One Night Stands (1960). The chapter argues that homophobia (including Shawn’s own) clouded the narrative of Shawn’s life and obscured his place in dance history and thus proposes a reconsideration of his life, writings, and dances based on sources that had thus far not been given full consideration.

Jacob’s Pillar

This chapter focuses on Ted Shawn’s role in the development of Jacob’s Pillow from a summer dance training camp into an internationally renowned dance school and festival. Through Shawn’s wartime letters to his lover Barton Mumaw, the chapter relays an insider’s view into the early years of the festival, including the building of the first theater dedicated to presenting dance in 1942. It then focuses on Shawn’s later choreographic output as well as his many programmatic achievements at the Pillow. And finally, it looks at Shawn’s twilight years, especially his attempts to document the story of his life in relation to the emerging gay rights movement he saw intensify around him, including the publication of the Kinsey Reports, the influential study of American sexual culture, in which Shawn participated with profound liberating results.

America’s Greatest Male Dancer

This chapter examines how Ted Shawn’s attempts to fulfill his vision of a “Greater Denishawn”—a physical and artistic expansion of the company and dance school into a full-fledged arts colony and dance guild—was thwarted by a number of personal, artistic, and financial factors, most especially the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic crisis. It also elucidates Shawn’s first serious relationship with a man as well as the unraveling of his marriage to Ruth St. Denis and the parallel dissolution of Denishawn, the company and school that they had founded together. It then follows Shawn to Germany where he attempted to rebuild his career as a solo artist with the financial and artistic support of Katherine S. Dreier, modern visual artist, philanthropist, and the founder of the Société Anonyme, as well as his return to the United States where he laid the groundwork for what became his all-male dance company.

The Making of Personality

This chapter explores the formative influences on Shawn’s decision to become a professional male dancer. In particular, it examines how a serious, paralyzing illness during his adolescence led him to study dance, thus derailing his plans to become a minister. It also considers how his early sexual experiences and the premature death of his parents and brother fueled his determination to become an artist. The chapter also details Shawn’s early appearances on stage (including his debut as a cross-dressing “Oriental sissy,” his move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film, and his experience choreographing the “first all-dance film,” Dances of the Ages (1913), for the Thomas C. Edison Company, which gave him the confidence and finances to travel to the East Coast in pursuit of becoming a professional dancer.

Seven Magic Years

This chapter focuses on the “seven magic years” of Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers (1933–40), the first all-male dance company that performed a repertory of hyper-masculine dances throughout the college and sorority circuits in the Depression-era United States. It elucidates the groundbreaking company’s history through details from the correspondence between Shawn and Lucien Price, an editor at the Boston Globe and one of the earliest and most vital supporters of Shawn’s all-male experiment. Price mentored Shawn in the codes of gay history, culture, and literature, all of which made their way into Shawn’s choreography. Based on details from Price’s private journals, the chapter reveals their shared vision and pursuits to liberate societal attitudes toward homosexuality. It also explores Shawn’s ongoing attempts to gain critical attention within the sphere of modern dance, especially from New York Times dance critic John Martin.

An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics

This chapter examines the formation and early years of Denishawn, the first American modern dance company and school. It argues that the newlywed Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn harnessed the cultural fascination with eugenics—the science of race betterment—to catapult their unique brand of theatrical dancing into public renown. A cultural phenomenon, Denishawn appeared in magazines from National Geographic to Vogue, fast becoming a sensation among Hollywood directors, vaudeville producers, and high society elites. Denishawn’s meteoric rise was curtailed by World War I and Shawn’s enlistment in the army as well as the interpersonal conflicts between St. Denis and Shawn, which led the couple to seek marriage counseling from Havelock Ellis, a pioneer of the British eugenics movement, while in London in 1922 with their company.