Chipmunk at Jacob's Pillow

Many a U.S. dancer stashes away part of her winter's earnings in her tights, to satisfy a summer ambition. She wants to get to Jacob's Pillow, the Tanglewood of the dance. Last week, while city studios gathered dust, the thrifty, as well as the talented who can get scholarships, were doing their pirouettes, entrechats and extensions in the spruce air of a 200-acre Berkshire farm.

In past years, students at Jacob's Pillow had rubbed elbows in an intimate rural way (over dishes and housework) with such greats of the dance as Martha Graham, Alexandra Danilova, Founder Ted Shawn. This year they got a close-up look at another of the foremost U.S. dancers and teachers. Charles Weidman's name was not so well known to the U.S. as some with less talent. Sol Hurok had never ballyhooed him--but the experts will let him dance in their all-America team any time.

Slender, faun-faced Dancer Weidman, 46, is the son of a Lincoln, Neb. fireman. He joined Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis famed Denishawn group in 1920. On a tour of the Orient with them, it suddenly came over him how absurd it was for a group of Americans to perform classic Oriental dances for the Orientals. "I said to myself, 'Why am I here trying to do their dances. . . . They must wonder how we dance ourselves. How do we?' " In 1929 he teamed up with another Denishawn star, Doris Humphrey, and set out to supply an answer.

His talent was for dramatic dancing and pantomime, and he did it with a controlled, steel-spring grace. He and Doris

Humphrey built up a cult of admirers, but Weidman kept wondering "if the audience really understands this business." When Doris quit dancing two years ago, he decided to do a dance "as understandable and popular as the movies." His choice: Thurber's Fables for Our Time.

A fortnight ago at Jacob's Pillow, students saw a trial run of four of his new sketches: Weidman mugging and leaping grandly as the "owl who was God," or the harried male of The Shrike and the Chipmunks. Weidman hopes to dance the Fables on Broadway. Says he: "I'm not one of those arty people who think the dance is sacred."

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