Dance: A Sense of Ministry

A pair of clasped hands appeared from the wings, followed by the arms. Then the dancers were onstage, silhouetted against the dimly lit blue back drop. Gliding slowly upward across a ramp, they moved forward, swayed back, moved forward again. At last they reached the top and stood there as though gazing serenely at a sunlit land.

The starkly simple duet lasted only minutes, but to the mesmerized audience it seemed to have gone on for an enchanted eon. In a way, it had. For the couple onstage, last week’s duet climaxed a full half-century of love and labor in which the dance had finally taken root in the U.S. theater, to grow and to flower until its inventive brilliance influenced the art in every corner of the world.

As they acknowledged five tumultuous curtain calls, it was hard to believe that Ruth St. Denis is 87 years old, that Ted Shawn is 72. Yet the dance they performed, choreographed by Shawn, taken from a poem by St. Denis, was in honor of their 50th wedding anniversary. It was the latest of countless new works that have been premiered at Jacob’s Pillow, the sylvan retreat in Massachusetts’ rolling Berkshire hills that Ted Shawn founded 31 years ago.

Grand Acclaim. To mark the event, scores of famed artists and friends packed Shawn’s rustic theater. No matter that Papa Shawn and Miss Ruth had been “esthetically separated” — he lives in Florida, she in California — for more than 30 years now. Their Indian-inspired duet, entitled Siddhas (Angels) of the Upper Air, was an act of celebration and remembrance.

It was in 1914 that they met and married; a year later they merged their talents and names in the Denishawn Dancers. In its 16 years the company won grand acclaim the world over. The Shawns were among the first to create ballets drawn from American themes. Their chain of Denishawn dance schools groomed such prime movers of modern dance as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman. Their proudest accomplishment, individually and together, was to help vanquish the puritanical mistrust with which most Americans had traditionally viewed the dance, to make their art part of the nation’s cultural life.

Face Change. Neither set out to be a serious dancer. Ruth—who was born plain Ruth Denis in Newark—made her stage debut as a vaudeville hoofer in 1893, later turned to acting. Then she became interested in the Far East and its sensuous dances. Her 1906 New York dance debut was in a daringly original Oriental program that shocked the tutus off the ballet world. “That year,” she remembers, “the face of the dance world really began to change.”

For Shawn, life changed forever in 1910. A pious, bookish student at the University of Denver, he was studying to be a Methodist minister when an attack of diphtheria left him paralyzed from the waist down. Ballet lessons were prescribed to aid his recovery. Private therapy was one thing. But dancing in public? When Shawn actually danced a waltzy pas de deux at an arts ball, faculty members were shocked and fraternity brothers sniggered. “Men,” he was quietly informed, “don’t dance.” Shawn quit the university, and has viewed his art ever since as a logical “continuation of my sense of ministry.”

Summer Cycle. Shawn points out that when he began, “dance choreography was predominantly feminine; it was like music with nothing but strings and woodwinds. It needed the brasses and drums of the male role.” So in 1933 he set out to supply them. Picking his first all-male crew for sheer muscle—they included football players, trackmen, gymnasts—he installed them at Jacob’s Pillow, a rundown, 150-acre 18th century farmstead he had bought three years before. There each summer he honed the troupe with dancing all morning, farm chores all afternoon. “I wanted to see,” he says, “if the American man in plain brown pants and a bare torso could speak profound things.” He could. Since then, the Jacob’s Pillow summer dance festival has become the most famed event of its kind in the U.S., and a prestigious summer school for promising young dancers (current enrollment: 66 girls, 14 boys).

Miss Ruth’s influence during all those years was chiefly as a performer and innovator. Last week’s premiere marked the first time that she and Papa had danced together in ten years, and it was a faultless performance. When it was all over, Ted Shawn’s thoughts turned characteristically to the future. “Things go in cycles,” he said, “like the seasons of the year. I feel this present renaissance of the dance is just about early summer. Before autumn and decadence set in, it may be another 200 years.”