As a founding presence at Jacob's Pillow from 1931 to 2001, Barton Mumaw embodied much of the institution's history, brought into the light by episode host Lisa Niedermeyer with Mumaw's own words.
As a founding presence at Jacob's Pillow from 1931 to 2001, Barton Mumaw embodied much of the institution's history, brought into the light by episode host Lisa Niedermeyer with Mumaw's own words.
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I'm Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it's my pleasure to introduce Lisa Niedermeyer who has a deep Pillow history, including work on developing our Dance Interactive website. She was one of the last seasonal staff members who intersected directly with Barton Mumaw, an important Pillow fixture for seven decades. And here she talks about how Barton’s legacy lives on.
LISA NIEDERMEYER: Barton Mumaw was groundbreaking in so many ways. He broke ground as the lead dancer in the first all-male dance troupe in America. He broke ground with his own hands on the property of Jacob’s Pillow through his stonework and cabin building. He broke ground by writing in his memoirs of intentionally private parts of his own history becoming intentionally public. And as a teacher, he inspired dancers to break our own ground by reconnecting us to our humanity. Today we sit with Barton Mumaw to hear first person accounts of a few of these moments in dance history. As you tune into Barton’s smooth and thoughtful voice, allow yourself the luxury of the pacing of his thoughts. I will offer pause along the way, for us to stop and notice from our own perspectives. To notice what has changed since the time of Barton’s dancing life, and to also notice what perhaps is still very similar. Now let’s begin by putting ourselves into the shoes of a 21-year-old dancer in the first all-male dance troupe touring rural America in the 1930s. Almost one hundred years ago.
BARTON MUMAW: There weren’t any groups of men dancers. Uh but at the same time modern dance was uh rearing its head in New York. Soloist and uh company that was Denishawn, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn were at the height of their careers when they decided to separate. And this was in the bottom of the Depression and Denishawn House had already been built and there was growing concern. But they were not at a place that they wanted to continue together, and Ruth was going to stay with Denishawn with uh the school in New York and Shawn was interested in men dances. And at that time, he wanted to uh do some new things for himself. And it all kind of fitted together so that the men dances made, which he could do and like and want to do on his own, to establish dancing for men throughout the country. And it was a place that we went and fathers would come back to us and say, I don't want my son to be a dancer. I would rather see him dead. And I have had men come to me after the performance and try to uh convince us that we were on the wrong road. But men kept coming back and they kept coming uh in spite of their parents and in spite of who uh their position in towns and it began to grow in the dance studios, slowly.
LISA NIEDERMEYER: As the dance troupe known as “Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers” continued to tour and teach, the newspapers started to review their performances. But it wasn’t necessarily in the arts section. Here Barton explains further:
BARTON MUMAW:Well, there were no dance critics. And if uh we were coming to town and some reporter had nothing to do, he'd be sent to review the performance, whether he knew anything about music or dance or pictures or theater or anything. He would be sent to review the performance. And what we wanted were people who knew what we were doing. And a sports writer does, because he's interested in movement and knows what's going on, and he knows what technique is involved. So we were very happy. Not only that, but because it meant that it was uh it was in a masculine field.
LISA NIEDERMEYER: When off the road from touring, the Men Dancers would live and train at Jacob’s Pillow. Here in a 1981 interview with filmmaker Ron Honsa, Barton exudes satisfaction in rock building with his own hands and shares accounts in a day of training with Ted Shawn.
BARTON MUMAW: Shawn and I both loved to do cement work and rock building. And we built the terrace all around the front of the house, which still exists and is unbroken to today. There was uh a marble quarry in Lee and we would go in and buy the broken pieces for practically nothing. But it is a marble terrace. But the day in the studio would begin [clears his throat] at say like 8 o’clock and we would have to be up at 6 to get ready for studio day. And there would be 4 hours of class. These were scheduled usually of course in uh beginning exercises and warming up and in barre and in phrases of music uh phrases of movement. And then the second half would be devoted to new creative work. Then we would have lunch, which was responsibility of one or the other others [chime sounds in the background] and this all had to be scheduled so that uh if we were in the studio and it was time to go to the kitchen to get the next meal. We would leave the studio while the others still went on working. And if there was sun and it was a pleasant day, uh we would have lunch on the platform outside the studio in the sun. Shawn was a great sun worshiper and he would read to us. He would read to us uhm disparate sources: he would read to us from Greek philosophers, from Archie and Mehitabel, from Newsweek, from classics, whatever he seemed to be interested in at the time. He would share with us and this was also part of our education and part of opening us out to life.
LISA NIEDERMEYER: Here is Barton in 1998, in conversation with filmmaker Núria Olivé-Bellés and archivist Norton Owen on the relationships among the men dancers, including his own partnership with Ted Shawn, which wasn’t publicly disclosed until Barton wrote his autobiography in the 1980s.
BARTON MUMAW: Well, we lived like brothers. You know. And the uh how many of them got married? [a background voice says “most”] Most. So it was not a company of uh we weren't frank with the sexual situation. Certain things we knew and certain ones we knew, but we went out any outward semblance of having any of this show in our outside context. And of course, Shawn and I were very close. And I was always thankful nobody in the advertisement and in the newspaper field, made anything of it. But people who were in that kind of thing knew about us. It didn't make any difference in the way we acted. Because we, I was just one of the company to Ted uh when we were with people. Because that would have ruined the whole bit. You can imagine what a tightrope we walked through that whole period.
LISA NIEDERMEYER: At one end of the tightrope is the mission for dance to be an accepted artform and profession for men, and on the other end is American culture’s very narrowly defined roles for men. Homosexuality was a crime in the 1930s. In this moment, I’m struck by the place in history, not just dance history, that Ted Shawn, Barton Mumaw and this group of men represent. In our final excerpt Barton is close to 85 years old. He is teaching students in the Men’s Dances repertory workshop in 1997. Barton shares what he believes to be missing from dances being made at that time, and in highlighting that gap, offers his advice for these dancers moving forward.
BARTON MUMAW: I was at a party in St. Petersburg a few years ago, well some years ago, where there we a lot of elders there. And someone asked to be introduced to me, and I went to this older lady and she said “Oh I saw the Denishawns,” and she started to cry. “It left so many pictures in my mind, that I have remembered it all my life.” And I miss this kind of a conception of dance in modern work, because while it’s so interesting and so developed, it has not yet reached our public. And I think we are going ahead of them somehow, I don’t know what we are doing today. And while it’s uh a way forward it’s also a way that has lost a lot that we must remember. Every little movement has a meaning all its own. Every thought and feeling by some gesture may be shown, and if you watch people, if you will watch each other, if you will watch what’s going on around you and see what movement does to people in ordinary life. You can always build on it instead of always on your imagination. Your imagination can be fluid and can be very uh wonderful too but I think uh oftentimes we forget that we are prophets of an art which should have more power over our lives than we give it. Now that’s enough, right? [sound of the group of men dancers laughing with Barton]
LISA NIEDERMEYER: In the summer of 2000 I had the honor of sitting next to Barton as he autographed copies of his memoir Barton Mumaw, Dancer written by Jane Sherman. I was the bookstore manager that summer and had been encouraged by Norton to read the biographies of Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn and Barton Mumaw. In. that. order. Which I dutifully did. During the book signing I witnessed Barton embody this very advice we’ve just heard him impart. I could feel that his every movement and gesture had a meaning. I watched Barton connect with each individual, his body language and expressiveness that was not a performance and yet it was elevated, intentional, unforgettable. Barton can be found both in the earth and the sky at Jacob’s Pillow. Barton’s ashes were interred at the Pillow Rock during a memorial service in 2001 and he dances above all our heads as the figure on the weathervane atop the roof of the Ted Shawn Theatre. And through his book and the extensive Barton Mumaw Collection in the Pillow Archives, he continues to speak to us.
[Music begins, composed, and performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob’s Pillow we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at DanceInteractive.jacobspillow.org and of course through live experiences during our Festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us again soon, either online or on site.