Inspiration. (Kickoff).

THE CONCIERGE AT THE DESK SENT ME UP TO THE SIXTH FLOOR. OUTSIDE, A BRIGHT, WINDY AFTERNOON IN THE SPRING OF 1970. INSIDE, THE MIDTOWN HOTEL WAS DARK, A TWILIGHT OF PEELING WALLS, WORN carpet, and winding hallways. I knocked and waited. The youngest member of the magazine staff, I had been sent as messenger to pick up a manuscript from the author who, I was told, had once been a major figure in American dance. Despite seven years in universities studying theater and its history, I had not heard of him. I had to write his name on a slip of paper, not to forget.

The shuffling inside began. Paper slippers on wood. When the door opened, I looked down at a bent, stocky man with a bald pate covered with brownish age spots. He was wearing a bathrobe. I asked if Mr. Shawn had left a manuscript for me to pick up. "I'm Ted Shawn," he said, and told me to have a seat on the bed, the only available space not covered with papers. He finished his last paragraph on a banged-up Royal portable typewriter which, I learned later, had traveled with him around the world and had been used for thirty years to report on and promote the subject that drew us both together into this moment--dance. The paper shade flapped in the open window and the sun streamed in, reflected in a light film of airborne dust. That was the beginning of a journey that would end here, with this column, more than three decades later.

"Have you ever been to Jacob's Pillow?" he asked. I admitted that I hadn't. He finished his typing, arranged the pages neatly in a folder for me, and asked, "Perhaps you've heard of my world-famous touring group called Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers?" I hadn't, but it sounded interesting, if remote. "Ahhh, but you must have heard of my school and company called Denishawn?" I'm afraid not. "But surely you have heard of my even more famous wife, Ruth St. Denis?" No sir. I hadn't.

A broad, warm smile crossed Shawn's face, an embrace across space, as he turned now to give me his full attention. I had apparently said something that pleased him very much. "Then, young man, then let me tell you about Denishawn and Jacob's Pillow!"

And tell me he did, as he had told so many others in his endless, enduring efforts to inspire and stimulate interest not only in dance but in his pioneering work for the preceding sixty years, without which there would not be modern dance as we know it today. I suggested something exceedingly stupid, like how we should really write all of this down. He had, of course, written it down himself, having been his own press agent, manager, producer, teacher, promoter, performer, choreographer, designer, researcher, builder, gardener, sculptor, driver, plumber, booking agent, lecturer, and cook. You had to be all those things--and more--in the early days of American dance. And that apparently suited Shawn because he did it so well for so long.

Roll ahead to 1984. Jacob's Pillow is host to the first--and the only, as it will turn out--reunion of the Men Dancers, a group of young athletes picked from a dance class. Shawn was teaching at nearby Springfield College with Barton Mumaw's help in the winter of 1932-33. "We weren't very good, and most of us had never danced before," Mumaw said at the reunion. "But Shawn was a great dancer, perhaps the best-known dancer of the century other than Vaslav Nijinsky. Shawn taught us, he made us into an ensemble, and we toured from 1933 to 1939." During those years, the men would return in the summer to Shawn's remote Berkshire farm called Jacob's Pillow, which grew into the world-famous summer dance center we know today. But in the fall, they set out to tour through the winter in two vehicles, under the most rugged circumstances, in a Depression-era world reluctant to accept the idea of "real men" dancing at all. The courage that must have taken!

Shawn embraced many causes, but did he succeed in shaping public opinion about men dancing? As with so many other things he did, Shawn got the idea of men dancing started, made people start talking about the previously taboo topic. And once an idea is shaped into words, it comes into a life of its own.

Ron Honza was the producer and I was the writer for a TV documentary about the Men Dancers, and you can catch it occasionally on late-night PBS as The Men Who Danced: The Story of Ted Shawn's Male Dancers 1933-1940. I had a thought-provoking experience last winter when I was asked to speak to an audience in New York at a "historical retrospective" at which our 1986 documentary was screened. I learned that very little time passes before we ourselves become history, and I thought of Shawn on that windy afternoon in spring in the last years of his life, with his spots and his bathrobe and his manuscripts.

The 1986 book Barton Mumaw, Dancer: From Denishawn to Jacob's Pillow and Beyond was recently released in a second edition. Mumaw wrote it in collaboration with Jane Sherman, an important writer on Shawn and St. Denis, and it broke new ground as a frank and fascinating account of his years with Shawn as his principal dancer and lover. Mumaw's welcome frankness revealed deep human conflict in Shawn, a force that propelled him forward again and again. It is one of the few volumes that I recommend to every person interested in the evolution of American dance.

Both Shawn and St. Denis are ripe for renewed examination of their enormous contributions. Shawn was a dedicated teacher, more so than the glamorous but disorganized St. Denis. "The creative artist," she said of herself, "is not necessarily a good teacher. But," she was quick to add with a smile, "I can inspire like hell!" Both could--and did--inspire like hell, and we are here today because of them.

Richard Philp has written a column called Kickoff for thirteen years. He has been an editor with Dance Magazine since 1970, was editor in chief for many years, and is known for his strong support of the arts.