Ted Shawn | Finale from "The New World" / 1936 [dance film]

gesture as dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ted Shawn (director) Finale from The New World / 1936 [dance film]

 

Performed evidently only 2 times, this all-male dance, using the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of the “Finale from The New World” by Antonín Dvořák as its accompaniment, is far less effective than Shawn’s 1935 ballet, Kinetic Molpai, filmed like this work, at Jacob’s Pillow in 1937.

     Here, the small male group, led once more by Jack Cole (only a guess), the male group, evidently struggling to great the new world, feature three of the dancers who gesture and point out that brave new world to what appear to be a far more reluctant gathering of six recalcitrant figures, perhaps sailors, not at delighted in what is before them.

     But quickly their leader excites them in a series of spinning vortexes of the dancers in what lies before them, until finally at the crescendo each in their own way works out their expressions of fortitude and joy for what lies ahead.

     The dancers here, however, unlike in the iconic Kinetic Molpai, look more like amateurs, despite their impressive spins. And the dance itself seems composed of more gesture rather than inner emotional expression.

 

     Yet, one cannot help but recognize that despite its attempted pageantry, the real focus here is on the male body, presenting it up as a homoerotic focal point that is not terribly far from the later wrestling matches of Bob Mizer and other physique magazines of the 1950s and 1960s.

     This work was reconstructed and synchronized by Daniel Callahan in 2011.

 

Los Angeles, August 26, 2024; reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).