Thao Phuong Huynh - CWID: 899301717 |
Research Paper: Ted Shawn – Father of American Dance
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Class: Dance 301 |
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Biography of Ted Shawn – Male Pioneer, Father of American Modern Dance:
It was almost 80 years of Jacob Pillow Festival, which is the most popular American summer dance festival. Ted Shawn, father of this American dancers’ pride, was credited to be the father of American dance as well. It was also Shawn who was the male pioneer of American modern dance. According to Lillian Moore in the book of “Artists of the Dance”:
“Isadora Duncan liberated the dance, but Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn were the first to build a new theatrical form based upon the broader conception of the art of dancing which Duncan’s emancipation had made possible.” (Moore, 281)
Shawn opened to American dance a new way of dance, a new era of male dancing which was unbelievable before Shawn. How come a dance’s newcomer at college age, who recovered from paralyzing, could become one of the most significant one in American dance? It was absolutely a miracle.
Ted Shawn was born as Edwin Myers Shawn in Kansas City, Missouri on October 21, 1981 under a family in which his father was a successful newspaperman of Kansas City Paper, and his mother had relation to Booth family, a famous family of actors in Kansas those years. Shawn was born to be a preacher in church. He had been planned to be Methodist minister. His career of a male dancer had never appeared in his mind since he was a child. Male dancer was Later, in his dance career, dancing for church services is one of the most significant very first stages.
Shawn inherited, from his father who was a successful newspaperman, through blood lines, the creativeness, inventiveness, and writing ability which would give him free-lancer of writing articles and stories for newspaper, and later, the famous books such as “Gods, Who Dance” (1929), “Dance We Must” (1940) “Ruth St. Denis: Pioneer and Prophet” (1920)… etc....