On Jacob's Pillow

Down went the house lights, up came the footlights, and there before the curtain stood a tall, grey man whose daring dancing had once shocked the purists and made history in the dance. Ted Shawn, 63, is at home before any audience, but this audience was his special home--Jacob's Pillow, in the Berkshires near Lee, Mass., where he turned a weed-grown farm into the hub and Mecca of dancing in North America. Shawn introduced what he called "the apex of our achievement in presenting dancers at Jacob's Pillow," the Royal Danish Ballet. Then the Danes took over and proved it.

There were only ten in the company, the sets were all but nonexistent, and the orchestra of the Royal Theater in Copenhagen had dwindled to an offstage piano. But the world's second oldest ballet (after France's L'Opera) and Western Europe's second best (after Britain's Sadler's Wells) had no need of sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. Dancing a series of divertissements and set pieces from their repertory, they delighted packed houses of up-from-the-city balletomanes and matinee contingents from nearby girls' camps with the warm, old-fashioned charm of their style.

Success Without Ice. The Danes, who rarely venture far from Copenhagen, have a distinct style of their own. Its originator was the great Danish choreographer, August Bournonville (1805-1879), and a dash of Bournonville was what the balletasters came to Jacob's Pillow for. In two pieces, the dancing lesson called "Konservatoriet" and the pas de deux from the "Flower Festival in Genzano," they found it--gay, pretty romanticism instead of the drawn-steel tension of the Diaghilev tradition, verve and enthusiasm instead of icy perfection. Surprise of the program was a snippet from Coppelia, choreographed in 1896 by Danish Hans Beck after the French ballet-master, Saint-Leon. If the Delibes music was as familiar as an old song, the peasanty dancing was like hearing it sung in another language, and audiences loved the piquant combination.

Men Don't Dance. There was no question about it: the Danes were a success. Ted Shawn heaved a sigh of relief; his importation of the troupe represented a personal risk of some $10,000. But the acknowledged dean of U.S. dancing has been taking risks all his life. One night last week he leaned back in an old rocker on his farmhouse porch, poured himself a tall brandy and soda, and reminisced about it.

The first risk was in dancing at all. It was considered permissible for him to take ballet lessons in 1910, when he was studying for the Methodist ministry at the University of Denver, only because he was learning to walk again after an attack of diphtheria had paralyzed him from the waist down. But when the Denver Post sponsored a "Quatre Arts" ball at which Ted and his teacher performed a decorous waltz, respectable folk--Methodist or not--were horrified. One of Ted's fraternity brothers quietly drew him aside for a brotherly dressing down. "Men," he said with finality, "don't dance."

Shawn abandoned all idea of the ministry and went right on dancing, typing in an insurance office by day and sorting books in the public library by night to pay for his lessons. Ultimately he journeyed to Los Angeles, where he opened a school of his own.

One day in 1914, Shawn walked into the Manhattan studio of famed Dancer Ruth St. Denis. "I went to tea and talked so long I was invited to supper. Five months later we were married in City Hall. But Miss Ruth had ideas about marriage. One of them was that marriage was supposed to be fatal to a woman's career, so we kept it a secret. Nine months later Miss Ruth told a Kansas City newspaper woman about it in strict confidence, and the news landed on the A.P. wire." The headline, confusing Shawn with an esthetic dancer named Swan: RUTH ST. DENIS MARRIES THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MAN IN THE WORLD. It haunted Shawn for years.

The Dance Is Religion. The couple formed a school, Denishawn, which lasted some 16 years, until Ted and Miss Ruth separated (though not legally) in 1931. Shawn next flouted the opposition of backers and booking agents to rescue male dancers from general scorn as sissies and mere props for female dancers. From 1933 to 1940 he successfully toured the country with his troupe of male dancers. But with World War II the draft made short work of this project. Shawn himself danced and directed shows at Keesler Field, Miss. Since the war he has devoted himself to building up Jacob's Pillow as a combination summer festival of dancing and a "University of the Dance." Current enrollment: 60 boys and girls who study ballet, modern dance, and ethnic dance (Indian, Hindu, Spanish, etc.) under Shawn and a faculty of eleven.

As a dancer and dean of U.S. dancers, Ted Shawn still sees himself as the man of God he started out to be in Denver. "Art, as P. D. Ouspensky said, is the beginning of vision, seeing farther than human sight. And dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made. I never go onstage without saying 'Here I am, Lord, use me.' I have had almost a vocation from childhood to be a religious . . . The dance is religion. It is the finest symbol of the activity of God that we have in this world."

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