Pillow days.

Stanley Davis spent two golden summers at Jacob's Pillow with Ted Shawn and his all-male company.

During the summers of 1935 and 1936, Stanley Davis was the only student to take daily company class with Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers at Jacob's Pillow (known then as "the farm"). More than six feet tall and thin as a reed, with a generous smile and a genuine curiosity and enthusiasm for life, Davis at eighty-seven remains a vibrant, active member of community life after being an avid participant in the world of dance for more than half a century. He has nothing but fond memories of those two summers on the farm spent with one man who changed the face of dance in our country.

Shawn is inexorably linked to the beginning of the modern dance movement in the United States. From 1914 to 1930 he worked with Ruth St. Denis, first as a student and shortly afterward as both dance partner and husband. Together they founded the Denishawn Schools, which generated such eminent talents as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Agnes de Mille. St. Denis and Shawn toured extensively as partners and appeared frequently as a principal attraction of the Ziegfeld Follies. Their choreography was highly eclectic, with a penchant for mysticism, religion, the Orient, and ethnicity.

Though they remained close friends and confidants throughout their lives, St. Denis and Shawn separated in 1931. Shawn purchased a farm in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, converted the barn into a studio, and began recruiting the athletic young men he taught at Springfield College for participation in an all-male dance company. He was the first choreographer to form such a troupe. His goals were to improve both the image of men in dance and the audiences' understanding of dance as an art.

Beginning in 1933 Shawn and His Men Dancers toured every state in the Union as well as Canada, Cuba, and England. Playing everything from vaudeville houses to gymnasiums and private clubs, he and his eight-member company truly pioneered the concept of the self-contained tour by transporting everything - lights, costumes, and scenery - in two station wagons and a sedan. For seven years the company endured this arduous touring schedule from late fall until spring, when they returned to their home base, the Pillow, to begin preparing for a new season. Shawn's book, One Thousand and One Night Stands, chronicled the epic of those seven years.

When Stanley Davis came to the farm as its first student, his arrival foretold the festival that Jacob's Pillow would eventually become. Karl Heimrick, from whom Davis had taken a dance workshop, had been so impressed by his ability and enthusiasm that he recommended that he study with his friend Shawn. Introductions were made via correspondence, and Davis was invited to come backstage following a performance the company was going to give in Buffalo.

The Shawn technique and style immediately entranced Davis. Like most Americans, he had never seen anything quite like this company - male bodies boldly clad in shorts, moving elegantly with meaning and purpose. This new genre of dance was a far cry from the lighthearted vaudeville that had dominated the performance halls for decades. This movement was dignified, tangible, spiritual. After the performance Davis met Shawn in his dressing room; after a chat, he was invited to Jacob's Pillow to study. Davis began counting the days.

On July 14, 1935, he arrived at the Pillow and the next day was at work with Shawn and the company. He recalls the thrill of working in this studio, a renovated barn, as a "fabulously large space full of light from the many windows." His expectations were clear: "I hoped to become part of the men's group, the company. I realized that this was going to take a lot of experience that I didn't have. I was a neophyte, a babe in the woods with the world opening up in front of me. [After my first summer] I felt a part of the company. I lived, danced, ate, and worked with them. We did everything together. We went on outings, attended concerts at Tanglewood, and even saw the first Technicolor movies together. When the boys performed I was always backstage helping out."

A typical day started with breakfast on the patio at about 7:00 A.M., followed by studio work from 8:00 A.M. to noon. The first half hour was spent at the barre doing ballet exercises, followed by ballet work in the center. Then came Shawn's development exercises and progressive movements that included the famous "Shawn alphabet," which all members memorized. Much of the technique was focused on aspects of tension and relaxation as Shawn had learned it from studying the noted theorist of movement, Francois Delsarte (1811-71).

Davis remembers that the Berkshire mornings were so cold that the dancers would come to the studio wearing multiple layers of clothing that would be shed, one layer at a time, as the sun rose and the dancers warmed up. "Sweaty socks would get slippery and you'd take them off; your sweatshirt became too warm, so off it went; and so on and so forth until your trunks became soaking wet with perspiration and off they came too." The dancers would end up dancing completely nude and would retire to the sunny platform in front of the studio for lunch au naturel. "We thought nothing of it. It was just something we did. Why not? We were all men there, alone on a secluded farm in the Berkshires." While they ate, Shawn would read them poetry, philosophy, and aesthetics.

"After lunch we'd all scatter to do our chores," Davis recalls, "while certain company members would work with Shawn on a solo or new piece of choreography." Chores included rebuilding stone walls, gardening, preparing and serving meals, and constructing cabins, terraces, and other additions. Shawn disappeared to his rooms around four or five in the afternoon to do his correspondence, company business, and journal writing. Following dinner the men would talk for a while or go into town, but bedtime came early, as each day required so much of them physically and mentally. "Besides, we had no electricity," he says. "When it got dark you went to bed."

On Friday afternoons the men convened the barn into a small auditorium and prepared the platform with tables and linen for the infamous tea parties that Shawn started as a way of garnering financial support for the company. The onset of these informal lecture-demonstrations signaled the first chords of what became the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. Shawn would give a talk followed by a dance presentation, and afterward dancers served tea and sandwiches to the guests, who came to watch this dance anomaly of the Berkshires as well as to socialize.

At the end of the first summer Shawn told Davis that he was promising, and invited him to return the following summer. By the second year Davis was a member of the family, and Shawn was considering him as an understudy to tour with the company. As fate would have it, Shawn could not afford to hire Davis that second year, but asked him to stay at the Pillow until they closed up for the winter. Perhaps Davis would have returned for a third summer, but at the height of the Great Depression he enlisted in the U.S. Army; he eventually served in World War II, as did other members of Shawn's company. The war brought the close of an epoch for the Men Dancers. Davis married during the war and returned afterward to his hometown, where he joined his father in the family insurance business.

Throughout the four decades that followed his experience, Davis kept in touch with Shawn through frequent correspondence until Shawn died in 1972. Over the years, Davis compiled several scrapbooks of photographs, news clippings, dance programs, and correspondence that reflect the growth of the Pillow and Shawn's steady focus on the future. Though there are no more naked lunches at the Pillow, the intimacy remains. It is still one of the few summer dance institutions where students enjoy a very close relationship with their fellow dancers and have the opportunity to work and socialize with some of the most outstanding talents in the contemporary dance world.

As for Davis, he continued dancing but mostly as an exhibition ballroom dancer, performing throughout western New York. Shawn did give him the choreography for The Doxology and The Lord's Prayer, however, which Davis still performs on occasion at his Episcopal church in Jamestown, New York. Though he appears to have been born to dance, he'll be the first to tell you that it was Shawn who infused his life with a love and respect for meaningful movement and an understanding of dance as the most visceral, intimate, and spiritual expression of man.

Jari Poulin is a dance educator in Allegany, New York, and a free-lance writer about the arts.