Hosted by Brian Schaefer, this episode is an exploration of how gay history is intertwined with the Pillow’s very beginnings, often hiding in plain sight.
Hosted by Brian Schaefer, this episode is an exploration of how gay history is intertwined with the Pillow’s very beginnings, often hiding in plain sight.
Related episodes of PillowVoices:
https://pillowvoices.org/episodes/barton-mumaw-a-cornerstone-of-the-pillow
https://pillowvoices.org/episodes/ted-shawn-jacobs-pillow-founder-in-his-own-words
*This episode was produced by Lisa Niedermeyer.
[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 our host, Brian Schaefer, a dance writer and Pillow Scholar in Residence. Brian leads us on an exploration of how gay history is intertwined with the Pillow’s very beginnings, often hiding in plain sight.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: I'll begin by qualifying that the "secret" gay history of Jacob's Pillow isn't really so secret. Much has already been written about the sexuality of the Pillow’s founder, Ted Shawn, and the relationships among his all-male group of dancers, some of which were romantic. Even Shawn himself, though he was private and protective of his image, didn't deny his sexuality. Toward the end of his life, he was even quite invested in the blossoming gay rights movement. For decades now, Jacob's Pillow has explored all of this in interviews with those who danced for and had romantic relationships with Shawn through articles written by staff members and scholars, and by promoting research that illustrates and expands upon this gay history. So I admit that calling it a secret history is a bit of a cheap trick. But it's sincere too because despite the acknowledgement and even embrace of this history, it remains an under the radar and underappreciated part of the Pillow’s identity. I don't think the average patron is aware that when they visit this vibrant dance campus, they're also visiting a site that began, for all intents and purposes, as a kind of early gay utopia. I certainly wasn't aware of that history when I first came to the Pillow. When I studied dance in college, decades ago in Southern California, the Pillow loomed large in my imagination: a distant dance nucleus across the country. When I finally visited, it felt like touching history. But what I never expected and what I didn't grasp for some time, was that in addition to dance history, coming here meant that I was touching a significant unsung part of gay history, too. I don't mean to suggest that every member of Ted Shawn's troupe of men dancers, or the students who trained here, were gay or that their attraction to this place, and to dance in general, was in any way related to their sexuality. I simply mean that the open, non-judgmental community that Shawn intentionally created here allowed for a degree of safe expression or exploration of same-sex desires that was simply not possible elsewhere at the time. To understand how Jacob's Pillow came to represent this ideal, we need to understand how dance informed Ted Shawn’s sense of gender and sexuality. The dance scholar Paul Scolieri, the author of a 2020 biography of Shawn discussed this in a 2019 PillowTalk.
PAUL SCOLIERI: Ted Shawn was born at a time with the term modern dance, male dancer, and homosexuality were not known to Americans. And his life really became a way of thinking about the coalescence between these three categories.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: And to fully grasp the context and origins of those three nascent identities, we must start by understanding Shawn's relationship with Ruth St. Denis, his artistic partner and later his wife. Again, here's Scolieri in the same talk, elaborating on how sexuality defined their unique partnership.
PAUL SCOLIERI: I will say I think the thing I want to stress, and this is not to mitigate the sort of... some of the perniciousness around some of the representation. We understand that. But I think the story for Shawn and even Ruth St. Denis, too, is to say that these dances and these traditions were ways for him to be on stage and for him to…there were certain viable models of masculinity that allowed him to be on stage. And for Ruth and Shawn, their lifetime of letters to one another, talking about their queerness. Though Ruth did not identify as a lesbian or...she did talk about her queer desire or the possibility that she might be a lesbian or the way she relates to men is not heterosexual, shall we say. And Shawn, the two of them wrestling in the teens and 20s, about trying to understand a way of relating to one another, that there was no language for or books about or models of, and it was through these dances that they came to understand something about their individual and their sexuality to one another.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: Another important factor in appreciating what Jacob's Pillow meant as a refuge for male dancers, with gay men among them, is to remind ourselves of the skepticism, and at times outright hostility that male dancers faced in the first half of the 20th century in America. To illuminate that fact, we turn to an unlikely source, the political commentator Rachel Maddow, who gave a talk at the Pillow in 2009, in which she looked back at the early years of the Men Dancers, and how they negotiated gender.
RACHEL MADDOW: Among the things they performed were the butchest possible things they could imagine. The Sinhalese Devil Dance, the Māori War Haka, the Dayak Spear Dance. They did a sports suite that included a dance called “Basketball Dance.” They were men dancers…
BRIAN SCHAEFER: And still, the response from audiences could be brutal…
RACHEL MADDOW: And people sometimes threw rotten fruit at them. One writer said that before he saw them for the first time in Burlington, Vermont, he thought "What? Men dancers? Must be a bunch of pansies."
BRIAN SCHAEFER: Even the so-called compliments were dripping with thinly-veiled homophobia.
RACHEL MADDOW: In their traveling heyday there was quite literally a headline in a paper in Atlanta—I think this was also like 1937—and it was about the Men Dancers and the headline, I'm quoting here, "Ted Shawn's Dancers Create Real Art; They Are Not Sissies!" And of course, some of them totally were sissies. And I mean that in a good way, but it is, it is...it's a reminder of the world they were operating in and the context in which they made these decisions.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: Given that kind of reception on the road, the existence of a protective and affirming home base was vital. In 1931, Ted Shawn purchase the Berkshires farm that is now home to the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. As the Pillow’s longtime Director of Preservation Norton Owen writes: "Shawn was itching to undertake a new enterprise of some sort, and the Pillow property presented just the right blank slate on which he could begin sketching out his dreams." As Scolieri points out in his recent biography of Shawn, the Pillow was modeled in many ways after the famous Denishawn Dance School that Shawn and St. Denis founded in Los Angeles in 1915. But he adds it also and sometimes moreso reflected what Shawn found most inspiring about other utopic art communities that he had encountered throughout his life. Here's Shawn in a 1969 interview with Jac Venza at Pillow, recounting his immediate attachment to this place.
TED SHAWN: And when I found it, I thought, Oh, this is mine. I've just got to have it. [Venza: Was the idea to have a theater, what…] No, an actual retreat. I wanted to get away from all of the heavy schedule of Denishawn and New York, and that whole life you know, and come off here alone with a pianist-composer and create in protective solitude.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: Of course, it wasn't only creative solitude he was after, it was a creative community. Shawn began teaching dance at nearby Springfield College, which was then all-male, and soon recruited a number of students to form a dance troupe. Among them was the former Denishawn dancer Barton Mumaw, who would become Shawn's lover and a staple of the Pillow for decades to come. But Mumaw and the others weren't merely company members who dropped in for rehearsals. They became in a sense the first architects and full-time residents of Jacob's Pillow. Here's Shawn again describing the construction and living conditions of the Pillow at its inception.
TED SHAWN: The men dancers built their own cabins. We built this outdoor platform. I myself did a lot of this cement on this place. And all of these dry stone walls are things I did with my own hands. And we cut our own firewood because we had only fireplaces and the kitchen cook's stove. And for plumbing, we had that one pump, and you'd get...on a sunny day, you'd get lathered and throw buckets of water over each other. You could hear the screams down in Lee, Massachusetts.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: In other words, from the beginning, Jacob's Pillow wasn't just a dance school. It was the physical manifestation of Ted Shawn's social philosophy. His company and its home at the Pillow were vessels for his ideas about and hopes for modern masculinity, however limited those could be sometimes. The Pillow was his laboratory, the controlled environment where the ingredients of art, labor and male love— both platonic and romantic— were intentionally mixed and allowed to grow and thrive, free from the contamination of judgment and prejudice in society at large. That sense of safety, possibility, and relief provided by a community of dancers, that's something I can relate to. I kind of stumbled into a dance major in college, just as I was also coming to terms with my sexuality. At the time, I was on my university's rowing team, which wasn't a place I felt comfortable coming out. The dance studios, on the other hand, were populated by curious, open people. There were spaces of personal and artistic exploration, where my sexuality was both celebrated and shrugged off as tangential to my overall character. In the studios I felt immediately, unconditionally embraced. And I imagine that Jacob's Pillow in the 1930s must have felt very similar to a group of male athletes looking for camaraderie and fulfillment without fear. A key figure in this effort, both as an intellectual contributor and observer was the writer and Boston Globe editor Lucien Price, who Scolieri notes, mentored Shawn in the codes of gay history, culture and literature, all of which made their way into Shawn's choreography. Price framed the early all-male community at Jacob's Pillow in historic terms, likening it to the Sacred Legion, also known as the Sacred Band of Thebes, an ancient army comprising 150 pairs of male lovers in the 4th century BCE. As Scolieri explains it, Price and Shawn shared the vision of that future, one modeled in spirit on the ancient Sacred Legion wherein male lovers were recognized as vital members of the social order. Or as Price wrote in his journal about Jacob's Pillow: I've seen the Sacred Legion dancing in the Berkshires. And part of what Price meant by this was not merely that the men performed together, but that they had created a self-sustaining colony, taking shared responsibility for all aspects of communal living. That of course required discipline which Shawn provided through a rigorous daily routine, which Barton Mumaw recounted in his memoirs: Days began with breakfast at 7am, followed by an hour-long dance class, then rehearsal until lunch at noon. For the next two hours the Men Dancers sprawled on blankets on the wooden porch outside the studio, sunbathing naked, while Shawn or sometimes Price read to them the daily news, Greek poetry, German philosophy, even quips from Groucho Marx. Following an afternoon rehearsal, the men would spend several hours tending to the farm, gardening, cleaning and repairing buildings before a home-cooked meal and evening leisure. That very full schedule illustrates how the Pillow’s first incarnation was intended to provide a total education connecting mind, body, and spirit. And sex was an openly-discussed topic. Sometimes Price lectured about sex from a social and historical perspective, arguing that the Greek ideal of human sexuality was an acceptable alternative to modern American moralism. He also saw their art as a tool in combating this moralism. As Scolieri writes: Price was convinced that through their beauty, Shawn's dances would liberate American attitudes towards sexuality. Shawn encouraged his dancers to speak frankly about sexuality, and to accept it as a natural, rather than shameful aspect of their lives. And Shawn made clear to them that at Jacob's Pillow they were free to conduct themselves as they chose, albeit quietly. The dance writer Walter Terry, a frequent Pillow visitor, observed: "Ted never visited a cabin unless asked. He never spied on any of his boys. He never quizzed them on their private lives. He demanded that they be gentleman in public, comport themselves with dignity, and never ever show one touch of effeminacy." That last bit makes me cringe now, and it's a reminder that while enlightened in some ways, Shawn also espoused and enforced a narrow brand of masculinity and sexuality. Perhaps it stemmed from his own fear of being outed, or it was reaction to the prejudices his company faced, as we heard earlier. Nevertheless, his rigid and prescriptive masculinity feels like a blind spot today. In any case, it's clear that Shawn's policy of not prying also protected him and his romantic involvement with Mumaw, which was well known within his inner circle but not publicly talked about. And in a 1998 interview for the Pillow, Mumaw reflected on his relationship with Shawn, as well as the delicacy around which sexuality was acknowledged among the Men Dancers in general.
BARTOM MUMAW: Well, we lived like brothers, you know. And the…how many of them got married, or [interviewer: "most"] so that it was it was not a company of… we weren't frank with the sexual situation. Certain things we knew, and certain people certain ones we knew. But we went on without any outward semblance of having any of this show in our...in our outside contacts. And of course, Shawn and I were very close. And I was always thankful. Nobody in the advertise… 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...I was just one of the company to Ted when we were with people. Because that would...that would have ruined the whole bit. You can imagine what a tightrope we walked through that whole period.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: He also credits the discretion of the media, who didn't dig too deep into their relationship.
BARTOM MUMAW: But I was...I was always thankful for the newspaper people, and of course they know everything. But no one ever even went near us as a twosome. And I thank the gods that be. And they must have had great appreciation for Shawn to be able to overlook what was common knowledge, not really common knowledge, but among people who were in that. And we never acted any differently in our lives and than we acted with the men.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: The Men Dancers disbanded as a company in 1940 with the onset of World War II, and many of the men, Mumaw among them, would serve in the military. Jacob's Pillow, after a period of uncertainty, found its financial and organizational footing and grew into the renowned festival and dance destination it is today. A celebrated pilgrimage for generations of illustrious dance artists that was built on a foundation literally laid by a sacred legion of young men who came in pursuit of physical, intellectual, and emotional harmony, who cooked and cleaned and built a small village, who lay naked on the porch contemplating art and history. Ted Shawn stayed involved until his death in 1972, but forever protective of his legacy, he remains largely closeted in official narratives of his life and work, even erasing references to his relationships with Mumaw, Price, and others in his diaries and correspondences. So the fact that the Pillow's gay history remains somewhat a secret is at least partly the fault of Shawn himself. He was a complicated man, who, for all his openness and support in some areas, was quite strict and guarded in others. He once wrote: "Perhaps during my lifetime, it will be impossible for me to be completely honest and free about many deeply vital phases of my life."
[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.