Person
Biography
Daniel Nagrin performed as part of the Ted Shawn Theatre's very first season in 1942, partnering modern dance pioneer Helen Tamiris, who was then his wife. In a 1998 video interview conducted here, he asserted that it was an error to bill Tamiris in that appearance as part of the "Second Generation of American Concert Dance". Instead, he stressed that she was one of modern dance's founders, having presented her first solo concert in 1927. In the same interview, he remembered being "absolutely awed by the theatre" when he first danced here. He was inducted into the army soon afterwards, and served alongside Barton Mumaw at Keesler Field, where they were both part of a division dedicated to entertaining the troops. Their lives were to intersect once again when Mumaw took over Nagrin's prominent soloist role as "Wild Horse" in
Annie Get Your Gun on Broadway, choreographed by Tamiris. Nagrin returned to the Ted Shawn Theatre to present some of his own solos in 1958, when John Lindquist took this photo of his iconic
Strange Hero. His last Pillow experience was in 1998, when he co-directed a School program on Choreographing Jazz with Danny Buraczeski. The Pillow library contains three of his books, one of which he inscribed, "To Jacob's Pillow: I hope your future will glow even brighter than it does now." He died in December 2008 at the age of 91.
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