Ruth Leon recommends… Groups of Guys – Jacob’s Pillow
Ruth Leon recommendsGroups of Guys – Jacob’s Pillow
When Ted Shawn, the founder of Jacob’s Pillow, began his career in the early 20th century, it was a generally accepted premise that “men don’t dance” and he set out to disprove this assumption with his company of male dancers.
Groups of Guys is a fascinating collection of performances from the Jacob’s Pillow video library demonstrating, in this selection of some 14 different companies of male dancers, how wrong that assumption was.
These performances, a multiplicity of examples, have been collected to commemorate the very first all-male performance by Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, which happened in Boston exactly 90 years ago this month. Not surprisingly, it was entitled Men Dancers.
Very nice but not complete without Bourne’s Spitfire. It is much more than a parody. He is radically sincere, far beyond “I was a teenager you know, and I found ads for male underwear strangely exciting”. He asks all these questions — what is masculine? Feminine? How do you make an ad targeted at half of the world’s population, most of whom are not gay and many are homophobic? Why are we here at all and what are we doing? What is so attractive in dancing beneath the story, the music, the painfully acquired technique? Great work,, if you ask me.
The above link is just a generic front page link with no mention of the mentioned content.
You will need to click on the “Dance” link on the right and scroll way down to find the Ted Shawn article.
Is the link the correct one? I am led to an article on Handel’s Messiah and another article with a play with David Suchet. Nice, but not right.