Shawn's Way

When Dancer Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis chose separate ways three years ago, there ended a record partnership which even the fluttering world of the dance thought never to see dissolved. They had married 18 years before, when Ted Shawn had scarcely forsaken his plan to become a Methodist minister. When they separated the famed Denishawn School went out of existence. Now Ruth St. Denis heads a Society for the Spiritual Arts, keeps a ''temple studio" and dances abstractly in churches (TIME, Dec. 31). Ted Shawn sails for England this week with nine muscular young men.

The nine young men had been trained by Shawn to help prove his conviction that "dancing is not a sissy art." He set out to form an all-male troupe as soon as the Denishawn chapter was closed. He wanted real men, not half men. So to start clean he left Manhattan, went to the Y. M. C. A. College in Springfield, Mass., where he talked to trackmen, wrestlers, footballers. Dancing, he argued, was originally a male prerogative, forbidden to women. Primitive men have always danced as a natural part of their worship. The young athletes who followed Shawn to his farm in the Berkshires knew that they would often be ridiculed, that they were entering a life which, as Shawn said, "is like joining a church." The training was more tiring than football. For four hours each morning they lunged and pranced before mirrors. In the afternoon they tended the 150-acre farm, sawed wood, dug ditches. Those who went on tour had to be self-sufficient, truck their scenery, pitch and dismount it.

Sophisticated observers regarded the venture as a freakish experiment, pooh-poohed the idea that a troupe could succeed without women to decorate it. But in less than two years Ted Shawn has made a success. With no capital, he took to the road when times were darkest. In 1933-34 he and his dancers visited 115 cities. This season's record was 125, with sufficient profit for the dancers to go this week to London where they have hired His Majesty's Theatre.

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