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Abstract
Ted Shawn’s all-male modern dance company, Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, toured extensively throughout the United States from 1933 to 1939 with the explicit goal of making concert dance a legitimate career for men. Shawn trained his dancers and choreographed their performances with careful attention to theme and movement aesthetic, proffering a version of modern dance meant to counter prevailing cultural prohibitions against men dancing. One of the company’s early works, Labor Symphony (1934), depicts the evolution of work from field to factory while critiquing the equation of the male body with labor power within capitalist economic systems; it also presents itself as labor, countering modern preoccupations with bodies enervated through repetitive movement or sedentary work, and with alienation from community through overly individuated tasks. The dance exemplifies Shawn’s novel movement aesthetic while expanding notions of productive labor by placing work itself in the context of performance. Emphasizing its status as productive work for men, the four sections of Labor Symphony display the Men Dancers’ strength, agility, and musculature prominently, exposing the piece as both means and end: it produces both the dance itself and bodies capable of performing it, much as agricultural and manual labor offer both product and a body disciplined to produce it.
Note on contributor
Harmony Jankowski, Ph.D., is a Visiting Lecturer at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research draws from the fields of modernist literature and culture, performance studies, and critical theory. Her current research considers how both modern dance and modernist literature, as experimental forms emerging in the early twentieth century, sparked new ways of thinking about the relationship between bodies, movement, and technology.
Notes
1 Shawn, “Program, 1938″ in Shawn (Citation1935); Foulkes (Citation2002, 83), explains that the company toured actively from 1933–40, offering 1250 performances in 750 cities in the United States, Canada, and England. Foster (Citation2001, 161) notes that though they often performed at small venues and colleges, the company eventually played celebrated venues including Carnegie Hall and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
2 While studying to become a Methodist minister at the University of Denver, Shawn contracted diphtheria and was given too much antitoxin, which resulted in paralysis. His physician recommended that he study dance in order to restore his body and retrain his muscles, and he began to study ballet and ballroom dance in 1910. His dance work eventually led him to Ruth St. Denis, whom he married in 1914, and with whom he directed the famed Denishawn Company from 1915 to 1931, when the two separated, though without ever legally divorcing. After Denishawn disbanded in 1931, Shawn attempted to tour with a short-lived all-male dance troupe, but after their tour was cancelled, he turned his attention to expanding dance education for men. He taught at Springfield College during the 1932–3 academic year, and formed the Men Dancers in 1933. This course led to the formation of Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, an all-male company that toured actively from 1933–40. For a full narrative of this period, see Maynard (Citation1965, 92) and Shawn (Citation1960).
3 Ramsay Burt (Citation2007) offers a concise and cogent discussion of early twentieth-century modern dance, and of ballet slightly earlier, as dominated by women who were integral to the process of making the work of their male contemporaries visible in his introduction to the second edition of The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, and Sexualities.
4 Shawn, “Dancing Originally Occupation Limited to Men Alone.”
5 Shawn, “Dancing Originally Occupation Limited to Men Alone.”
6 The emphasis on athleticism and strength as mutually exclusive of homosexuality and emasculation persist in the twenty-first century dance discourses, perhaps most notably in ballet: see Fisher (Citation2009, 31–48).
7 Susan Foster explains how “frames,” including descriptions of a dance and the images included in announcements and newspapers, on posters, etc., guide an audience’s interpretation. This “framing” continues in the theater, by virtue of its style and the proximity of viewer to performer; programs and program notes as well as the beginnings and endings of performances and the dancers’ gazes function similarly. All of this “arouse[s] in the viewer a set of expectations about the event: that it will be formal or familiar; sacred or playful; virtuoso, athletic, or soul-searching; classical, modern, or postmodern:” Foster (Citation1988, 59–65).
8 Chauncey (Citation1994, 111).
9 Chauncey (Citation1994, 112).
10 For a compelling argument regarding the fear of endemic physical fatigue in the early twentieth century, see Rabinbach (Citation1990).
11 Kimmel (Citation2011, 204).
12 Ted Shawn, to Lucien Price, Columbia, SC, November 21, 1933.
13 Untitled Review, Literary Digest, 27 October Citation1934.
14 The Men Who Danced, directed by Ron Honsa. VHS. Hightstown, NJ: Dance Horizons Video, Citation1990.
15 Ted Shawn to Lucien Price, Cleveland, OH, April 21, 1934.
16 Franko (Citation2002, 46).
17 Hewitt (Citation2005, 241 n. 29).
18 Marx (Citation1978, 307): “A thing can be a use-value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use-values, but no commodities.”
19 Labor Symphony has not often been revived. The archive at Jacob’s Pillow holds a DVD transfer of a film recording of the piece from the 1930s, with the original piano score restored by its composer Jess Meeker. In it, the stage is free of any set pieces. The piece creates readable representations of each section’s eponymous labors. Clips of the piece also appear in The Men Who Danced.
20 Franko (Citation2002, 44).
21 Hewitt (Citation2005, 152).
22 Shawn, “The Mimetic Approach to the Dance.”
23 Shawn, “1935 Program,” in Shawn (Citation1935).
24 Terry (Citation1976, 72) cites Denishawn’s The Tillers of the Soil (1916) as “very probably the first dance ever created on the theme of the labors of Men.”
25 Shawn, “The Mimetic Approach to the Dance.”
26 “The Mimetic Approach to the Dance” phrases the narrative differently: “The soil is most primitive. It is organized by tilling, plowing, sowing and a magic dance in which the laborer believes that the higher he can jump the higher the corn will grow. Then follows the harvesting, cutting, staking, gleaning and the threshing. In Athens, the threshing floor was a circular place where the men in stamping on the corn developed a rhythm. This produced a supernatural condition of emotional movement. They began to believe that God appeared to them. People started coming so they put in benches. Finally the rows had to be elevated, and thus the Greek theater and drama was developed. Of course, this is only the imagined reliving of the dance.”
27 In “Dancing Originally Occupation Limited to Men,” Shawn argues, “it is only in this western (European-American) civilization, and here only in the last 100 years or so, that dancing has ever been considered in any way more feminine than masculine.”
28 Shawn, “The Mimetic Approach to the Dance.”
29 The program notes offer a more detailed narrative for this section: “Labor of the Forests” is described as beginning “with the spirit of tall trees and deep forests where the little wild things pass their furtive, hunted lives; then the coming of man with his need of trees for shelter, and the animals for food and clothing. A pair of axemen enter, chop down a tree, and as they start trimming the branches, two others come to sawn the trunk into lengths. One of the axemen meantime has killed a small animal with a stone and has called his companion and the saw-men to see it. They are interrupted by a demand for help from the men with the chain, and they all join in dragging the log off.” Shawn, “Program Number Two” in Shawn (Citation1935).
30 Shawn, “Program Number Two” in Shawn (Citation1935).
31 The pre-performance lecture offers far less description, boiling this section down to simplest form: “The sea is also abstract. It shows movement in the human labors of launching the boat, rowing, casting the net and finally beaching.” Shawn, “The Mimetic Approach to the Dance.”
32 Shawn, “Program Number Two” in Shawn (Citation1935).
33 Ibid. Shawn, “The Mimetic Approach to the Dance” simplifies this narrative down to “express[ing] the use to which metals are put. It is the dance of the dynamo which generates speed until finally the machine gets away from the operators and explodes.”
34 Burt (Citation2007, 95).
35 Franko (Citation2002, 44).
36 Armstrong (Citation1998, 106).
37 Chauncey (Citation1994, 113).
38 Shawn, “Dance and Its Connection with Physical Education.”
39 Shawn, “Dancing Originally Occupation Limited to Men Alone.”
40 Foulkes (Citation2001, 117).
41 Maynard (Citation1965, 92).
42 Betty Poindexter did much of her dissertation research at Jacob’s Pillow under Shawn’s watchful eye. She was given a great deal of archival material with which to work in the hope that she would produce a comprehensive, but authorized, history of the company and its founder. Poindexter (n.d).
43 Poindexter (n.d.)
44 Shawn occasionally approached men in other situations as well. Former Men Dancer Frank Overlees reports having met Shawn in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1932 due to Shawn’s impression of Overlees’ “virility.” Frank Overlees, Interview, 50th Anniversary of Jacob’s Pillow, 1982. DVD. Jacob’s Pillow Archive. Transcribed November 4, 2013.
45 Gard (Citation2006, 60).
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 Shawn, “Program, 1935” in Shawn (Citation1935).
50 Shawn, “Dancing Originally Occupation Limited to Men.”
51 Shawn, “Dancing for Men.”
52 Foulkes (Citation2002, 89).
53 Shawn, “Dancing for Men.”
54 Shawn, “Dancing Occupation Originally Limited to Men Alone.”
55 Overlees’ inflection and facial expressions in this segment of the interview make it evident that he is imparting the prevailing mindset in the 1930s regarding men and concert dance, and not one that he shares. Overlees, Interview.
56 Overlees, Interview.
57 Burt (Citation2007, 96).
58 Foster (Citation2001, 163).
59 Marx (Citation1978, 74).
60 Shawn, “Program, 1938,” in Shawn (Citation1935).