Ted Shawn

Ted Shawn spent his career arguing that men should dance and built a farm in Massachusetts to prove it. He was studying for the ministry in Denver when diphtheria and its treatment left him briefly paralysed, and he took up dance as therapy. He married Ruth St Denis in 1914 after a short partnership and the two founded Denishawn in Los Angeles the following year - the first school in America to train dancers seriously in a range of forms, and the place Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman all began and all left. The company toured the United States, Europe and Asia and was for a decade the most visible dance organisation in the country. After it collapsed he founded Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers in 1933, an all-male company that toured for seven years performing work built on labour, sport and ritual, explicitly to break the American assumption that dance was unmanly. Their base was a farm at Becket called Jacob's Pillow, which he turned into a school and then a summer festival; it is the oldest dance festival in the United States and still runs. He and St Denis never divorced. He wrote several books, including a study of Delsarte, and lectured constantly on the history of dance. The Men Dancers performed over seven hundred and fifty times between 1933 and 1940 and disbanded when the war took the company. Jacob s Pillow opened its theatre in 1942 and has run every summer since, and the festival now presents companies from around the world. He directed it until his death. He and St Denis appeared together publicly for anniversaries into the 1960s, long after they had stopped living together.

• Lived: 1891 CE – 1972 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist