2008 Theses Bachelor's

Imagining the Dance of America, Regenerating "The Race": The Eugenic Fantasy of Ted Shawn

Burke, Siobhan Frances

This thesis examines how the work of Ted Shawn, pioneering American modern dancer, intersected with discourses of eugenics and evolutionary thought in the early 20th-century United States. I argue that in his efforts to elevate his art and win public acceptance, Shawn built his artistic vision around a “eugenic fantasy" (a term I borrow from the scholar Betsy Lee Nies), putting popular strains of racist, nativist thinking into practice. Looking not only at eugenics but also turn-of-the-century, pseudo-scientific beliefs about whiteness and masculinity, I trace the emergence of Shawn's creative projects as microcosms of a so-called "ideal race": first, a race of eugenic youth at Denishawn, the school he founded with his wife, Ruth St. Denis; and later, a race of muscular Anglo-Saxon men, in the form of his all-male company, the Men Dancers. It was only through exclusionist ideologies that Shawn sculpted the American dancer, particularly the male dancer, into an ideal that white Americans could admire—a model, even, to which they could aspire.