Barton Mumaw, Dancer

Barton Mumaw, a soloist in Ted Shawn’s Men Dancers Company (1933 - 40), participated with his mentor in Shawn’s lifelong struggle to win respectability for male dancers within American culture. In this as told to autobiography, Mumaw relates dramatic stories of the company’s groundbreaking cross-country tours, of their building Jacob’s Pillow from pre-Revolutionary hardscrabble to preeminent dance festival, and tells for the first time of his intimate relationship with dance pioneer Ted Shawn. This is revealed through details of their lives together and apart, descriptions of their dances, and a stunning selection of rare photographs.

This exceptional memoir, first published in 1986, will engage the general reader and is bound to attract scholars who seek to conjoin the many current works in gay and lesbian studies with today’s equally numerous critical works in dance.