Barton Mumaw

Barton Mumaw (20 August 1912 – 21 June 2001) was an American dancer and choreographer who performed in modern dance concerts and musical theater productions. He was the muse of Ted Shawn, pioneer of modern dance.

Born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and reared in Eustis, Florida, Mumaw began his dance training with a local ballet teacher when he was a boy of fifteen. He also took classes with Berte Rita Lipton, who taught him some fundamentals of modern dance, and he began to study ballet in earnest through a mail-order course from the Veronine Vestoff School of the Ballet in New York City. In 1930, at age eighteen, Mumaw attended a dance program by Denishawn, the company directed by Ted Shawn and his wife, Ruth St. Denis, which altered the course of his life. Entranced by the troupe's choreographic eclecticism and theatrical vividness, he resolved to go to New York to study at the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts.

An adept student with physical attributes well suited to dance, Mumaw progressed quickly under Shawn's tutelage. While serving as Shawn's driver and dresser, he joined the Denishawn company and performed in the company's last performance at the Lewisohn Stadium with the New York Philharmonic on 26 August 1931. After Shawn and St. Denis split apart and went their separate ways, the company disbanded, and Shawn retired to his farm in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts and began to teach dance as physical education at a nearby college. The farm, called Jacob's Pillow, after a large boulder in the woods, soon became the home of Shawn's all-male dance troupe, known as Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, and later the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, which continues to flourish there today. Mumaw joined Shawn's troupe at its inception in 1933 and remained with it until it disbanded in 1940, having toured extensively throughout the United States. The company's athletic style and powerful dances appealed to Depression-era audiences and did much to make dancing seem like a respectable profession for men. Although not billed as such, Mumaw was unquestionably the star dancer of the troupe.

In his memoir, Mumaw reveals that he was Shawn's lover for many years (1931–1948) and records how their involvement affected every aspect of their professional lives. Since same-sex couples were not socially acceptable at the time, the two took great pains to conceal the true nature of their relationship, so that no one could accuse dance of being morally questionable. In recognition of his importance in Shawn's life and career and in the development of modern dance, Mumaw is memorialized as the figure on the weather vane atop the Ted Shawn Theater at Jacob's Pillow.

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