Teacher loved all who came to dance
is open to the public, though RSVP is requested, and it might fill to capacity because ShawlAnderson teaches more than a thousand dancers — between ages 2 and 92 — each week.
“There was an essential sweetness and generosity about Frank,” says Ruth Bossieux, a dance professional who worked with Shawl for 50 years. “It was reflected in the appreciation he had for anybody who walked through those studio doors.”
Bossieux first walked through when she was 23. She’d seen Shawl and Anderson perform with the May O’Donnell Dance Company in Wheeler Auditorium at UC Berkeley in the late 1950s, shortly before the two men left the company and turned up in Berkeley.
Their first space, above College Avenue Liquors at the corner of Alcatraz Avenue, wasn’t much. It had a support post down the middle of the floor that they had to work around. Anderson would play the piano and Shawl would teach, and if six people showed up for a session it was a crowd.
Then one day in the late 1960s, Shawl looked out the window and saw a twostory Craftsmanstyle home for sale. He and Anderson bought it and removed the bedrooms upstairs to make way for studio space. In 1980, they added a studio building in the backyard.
“Frank could make a set of dance moves for a student who had no training and it would be beautiful,” said Bossieux, now 83 and still training at ShawlAnderson. “What they created has endured. People who study there are connected to the lineage of early modern dance through Frank and Victor.”
Born and raised in New Jersey, Shawl became enthralled with dance when he, still a preschooler, was taken by his parents to a Fred Astaire movie. When he was 5, he was tapdancing at home, so his parents decided it best to divert all the noise and energy in studio classes. By 17, he was a New York City professional with steady work dancing four shows a day, seven days a week between movie screenings at the famed Roxy Theater.
In 1951, Shawl was cast in the male lead opposite Gena Rowlands in “All About Love,” which ran for a year. Among its attendees was Frank Sinatra. In 1954 he joined the May O’Donnell Dance Company, where he met Anderson, who hailed from Oakland. They split off to form their own company and toured nationally for 16 years.
The classes they offered above the Berkeley liquor store cost $2 and for years the two men taught them all. Now there are 50 to 60 parttime instructors offering 120 classes a week.
“Frank’s biggest gift to the Bay Area dance community was being able to see the potential and passion in budding choreographers, performers and teachers,” said Jill Randall, artistic director at ShawlAnderson.
Among the talent to come through the school is Kate Weare, now a New York choreographer with her own company, and Nina Haft, who also has her own company and is a professor of dance at Cal State East Bay. She had come to Berkeley from New York in the summer of 1984, found ShawlAnderson and never left the Bay Area.
“Frank was one of those mentors who instead of grooming his students to be like him, drew them forward to be themselves,” said Haft.
When she took Nina Haft & Company on a twoweek tour to the Middle East in 2010, Shawl invited himself along and paid his own way just to be a part of it.
“He could easily have just told me what to do in order to light and stage my pieces,” Haft recalled, “but instead he coached me in how to collaborate with the technical staff in every new city.”
Shawl kept training and performing into his 70s and took ballet barre courses into his mid80s.
“Frank showed me how to age well by the way that he lived,” said Weare. “He was artistically porous and let young people in. I hope I can age like Frank Shawl.”
He is survived by his sister, Margaret Maralla of Wayne, N.J.; four nephews and nieces; and six greatnephews and greatnieces.
Donations in his name may be made to the Frank Shawl Legacy Fund at ShawlAnderson Dance Center, 2704 Alcatraz Ave., Berkeley, CA 94704. To RSVP to his memorial, go to www.shawlander son.org/frank.