Word: denishawns
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...pleasantness was not the idea. The mists & veils of Denishawn soon gave way to High Priestess Martha Graham's surrealistic fence-act. Frontier, and to stylized swaying and leaping by dead-pan Grahamite assistants. Favored by streamlined technique and by an early position on an anti-climactic program, mask-faced Graham's parsimonious convolutions drew bravos. So did the following Theatre Piece, in which Pantomimist Charles Weidman skittered in black tights while Doris Humphrey caressed a purple cube before a background of dismembered limbs and torsos. For a moment things looked better for the tired businessman when symbol...
Martha Graham became a leading Denishawn dancer, a Denishawn teacher. Still she felt frustrated, broke from the California studio to teach at Rochester's Eastman School of Music, left Rochester determined to free-lance her way no matter what the odds. The way at first was vague. She had had no contact with Laban or Wigman. Yet she felt the same urge to escape from pretty dancing. Striving for a vital, spontaneous expression, she took to lunging and prancing, projected a sincerity almost severe. In 1926 with $11 to her name she gambled on her first Manhattan recital. Chronically...
...other modern dancers appeared on the scene, Martha Graham seemed less of a freak. Mary Wigman visited the U. S. for three successive seasons, left pupils in her wake. Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman are Denishawn products who have gone far on their own. Helen Becker, who calls herself Tamiris, dances with rare drive and energy, stomps her heels as does no one else. Harald Kreutzberg was hailed as a modern at first, partly because he was one of the early Wigman pupils. Now, despite his amazing virtuosity, purists consider him too theatrical, too obvious with his miming...
...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...
...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...