Dancer from the dance: Ted Shawn pioneered a homoerotic style of modern dance, a hunky all-male company, and the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, which turns 70 this summer. (dance).

Picture brawny, ripped men, scantily costumed as Indian warriors, Greek gods, and Olympic athletes. No, we're not talking about the hired entertainment at a gay circuit party but about Ted Shawn and his Men Dancers, circa 1933. Shawn and his all-male troupe revolutionized the way people saw male dancers when they performed all over the United States in the 1930s. The Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, founded by Shawn--one of the great pioneers of modern dance--is celebrating its 70th anniversary this summer from June 15 to August 25.

In an autobiography published in 1986 (and reprinted in 2000), Barton Mumaw, who was both Shawn's leading dancer and his lover for many years, wrote candidly about their passionate partnership. Shawn, who had been married to choreographer Ruth St. Denis (together they had formed the legendary Denishawn Dance Company), decided to go his own way in 1932 to show America that men could choose modern dance as a legitimate, masculine profession. Shawn hired and trained men, many of whom had been star college athletes, to dance his choreography with his new company, which was based at his farmhouse, called Jacob's Pillow, in Becket, Mass. The company endured from 1933 to 1940. The dancers were chosen for their athleticism and their looks, as can be seen from snapshots from the period.

"These photographs work incredibly well as homoerotic images in the year 2002," says David Gere, a professor of dance history and queer studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wrote the foreword to the 2000 edition of Mumaw's book.

Because it would have been impossible during the Depression to obtain professional credibility as gay men, Shawn and Mumaw kept their relationship closeted. Shawn also overcompensated for the sissy element by rejecting any softness in his choreography. "For better or worse," says Gere, "Shawn decided he was going to portray a kind of hypermasculine image. That was a rejection of the notion of effeminacy of the ballet dancer."

Mumaw, who died last year, was the only dancer in the troupe who spoke openly about being gay. And Norton Owen, director of preservation at Jacob's Pillow, says, "From what I'm able to determine, some of the men dancers were gay, but most were not." Still, Gere views Shawn's all-male artists' colony as visionary. "One of the remarkable things about that group is that there were these men, who in current terms would be identified as gay or straight, living and working together in a modality that was raising questions for everyone about sexuality, sexual power, and masculinity. And yet they just worked it out. It's a kind of wonderful brotherhood imagery."

The Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival began as a series of tea concerts given by Shawn's company for the local ladies of the community. The men, dressed in white bathrobes, served sandwiches to the patrons, then stripped to flesh-colored trunks and danced. The concerts were an unqualified hit, and the current festival at the Ted Shawn Theatre, an eclectic mix of dance, continues to be a summertime attraction in the Berkshires.

This year, a special reception for gays and lesbians called "A Night Out at the Pillow" is being held at Jacob's Pillow on July 19. The festival also includes engagements by the companies of five gay choreographers: Ronald K. Brown, Bill T. Jones, Wally Cardona, Mark Morris--and Richard Move, the 6-foot-4 performer famed for "channeling" modern-dance goddess Martha Graham, who was one of Shawn's protegees in the 1920s. It's hard to imagine what Shawn, who died in 1972, would make of Martha's new incarnation. "He would need to have lived through the last 30 years of culture in this country," says Owen, "to get to a place where he could have understood that."

Carman writes about dance for The New York Times.