Ted Shawn | Kinetic Malpai / 1937 [dance film]

rough territory

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ted Shawn (director and choreographer) Kinetic Malpai / 1937 [dance film]

 

Born in 1891, future dancer, choreographer, and writer Ted Shawn suffered from diphtheria while studying at the University of Denver at the age of 19, resulting in a temporary paralysis from his waist down. Seeking physical therapy, he turned to dance under the tutelage of Hazel Wallack, a dancer who had performed with the Metropolitan Opera.

     In 1912, Shawn moved to Los Angeles where he worked for the exhibition ballroom dance troupe, partnering with Norma Gould. After moving on to New York in 1914, and meeting dancer Ruth St. Denis, he married her two months later, the couple founding Denishawn School in Los Angeles, with a shared notion of various principles of the French theater orator, singer, and physical coach, François Alexandre Nicolas Chéri Delsarte,* to meld body, mind, and spirit. St. Denis’ interest also in North African, Spanish, American, and Amerindian dance influenced the company in a manner new to US dance companies.

    For the next 15 years, their activities in connection with their Denishawn Company literally changed the course of US and international dance history. There Shawn and St. Denis first realized the talents of Martha Graham, who performed in their Julnar of the Sea, Xochitl (1920) and introduced dancer Charles Weidman, who performed Danse Americaine (1923), while also housing as students such notables as later actor Louise Brooks and the renowned dancers Doris Humphrey and Jack Cole. For years after, US dancers would trace their legacy back to the Denishawn School and its methods.

     Realizing the potential of Graham, Weidman, Humphrey, and Cole, Shawn promoted the school and the company, while St. Denis recognized that she herself was a source of inspiration (“I can inspire like hell.”) It was Shawn, however, who made the school a truly cross-country success and created it as a business enterprise.

      In 1930 the couple broke up, partially over Shawn’s increasing homosexual activities, and the school closed down in 1931. That same year, Shawn bought a rundown farm near the town of Becket, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires known as Jacob’s Pillow, and, culling students from a local college, mostly from the athletic department of Springfield College, Shawn established his School of Dance for Men, in which he sought to present a truly masculine vision of male dancing relating back to Nijinsky and forward to Hollywood dancers such as Fred Astaire and, in particular, Gene Kelly.

      Challenging Western social stereotypes about male dancers, Shaw nonetheless put his male company through the rigors of what was clearly a homoerotic if not entirely homosexual culture, wherein the dancers lived and worked together, rehearsing their dance numbers entirely in the nude. At Jacob’s Pillar they grew their own produce, worked in their vegetable gardens, and danced nude in nature.

      Among their many remarkable dance performances were Maori War Haka, Ponca Indian Dance, Hopi Indian Eagle Dance, Sinhalese Devil Dance, Kinetic Molpai, and Dyak Spear Dances, which Shawn and his company performed around the country, in Canada, London and Havana, Cuba.

      Having established a community of male relationships among the company, Shawn himself quickly fell in love with one of his dancers, Barton Mumaw, with whom from 1931 to 1948 he had a 17-year-long relationship. He also formed a homosexual liaison with his stage manager, John Christian, with whom he would develop a relationship until Shawn’s own death in 1972 at the age of 80.

 

     Fortunately, at least one of these dances was filmed, Kinetic Molpai a 1935 dance which was recorded in at Jacob’s Pillow in 1937, with music added later to the video by Jess Meeker and John Saure in 1985. In 1971 it was revived, with the help of Barton Mumaw, at the Joyce Theater in New York city, and a year later was revived as part of the repertory of the of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater.

    The very first image we see in this film is the clapboard barn at Jacob’s Pillow, where suddenly lead dancer Jack Cole enters alone, calling up a series of male dancers from both right and left of the screen, all dressed as he is in a loose pair of pants and shirtless, as they gather round him creating what might be seen as almost gangs of young men on either side. Arms outstretched vertically and then horizontally, he might at first be seen as blessing them in a communal situation, but just as quickly pushing them away into two groups of four men each who play out notions of male aggression and reception, one group putting their arms up as if ready to go into the battle, the other moving their heads away as if they might almost already feel the slugs and pommels of those hostile hands.

     The “other” group, however, soon retaliates, and the first group gesturally prepares for just the violence the originals have first referenced. Both groups now are involved in the violent gestures, with one member being forced to spin out between the two of them as a kind of sacrifice (certainly reminding us today of Tony and Riff in the horrific gang fight between the Jets and the Sharks in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story of 1961 on film), and just a soon, as the sacrifice to their battle, they together take up his body almost as a pietà, the image so very important in the early A version of coming out tales of the 1940s through the 1970s and 80s in openly gay-coded cinema.

     Malpais refers to the rough and barren lava flow of the Southwestern US, but here, in the plural “mulpai,” it becomes the symbol of what is often referred to as simply “rough territory.”

     It is truly almost eerie how similar is the last scene of this dance as they take up the body of the male who has dared to move between both groups, not only reminding us of the last scenes of West Side Story but of the images in Curtis Harrington’s, Kenneth Anger’s, and other early gay films of the late 1940s, providing us with links between the gay coming out films and the horrific events of macho behavior in the later primarily heterosexual battle turf concocted by gay artists Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim. So connected are these scenes that it forces me to go back to the 1961 film and reevaluate it.

     In Ted Shawn’s 1937 film, we seem to witness so much of the gay imagery of later independent and more recent international cinema involving the male image already present in Shawn’s 1935 dance that we can only recognize it as a highly influential piece of dance and filmmaking that, to my knowledge, has never before been discussed in gay cinematic criticism.

 

*To read more of Delsarte’s theories and effects, see my essay on “Paul Swan and the Aesthetic” from 1965 on Andy Warhol’s film Paul Swan.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).