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9 Margaret H'Doubler's Legacy Dance and the Performing Body in the American University The task is to present the scientific facts of movement, and of the process of learning, and set up movement experiences in such a way that movement can become a self-directed and creative activity rather than a series of super-imposed stereo-typed movement patterns. Margaret H'Doubler, University of Wisconsin classroom handout, I955 IF MARGARET H'DoUBLER HAD BEEN ABLE TO FORECAST THE EVOLUtion of dance in the American university beyond her retirement in 1954, she would likely have been more disconcerted than surprised by what she found. Beginning with the dance boom in the late 1960s, dance training for performance emerged as the emphasis of most college programs. By the I 970S dance education had become the poor stepchild of dance in academia; increasingly college and university dance faculty members were individuals trained in technique, performance, or dance theory and history rather than dance education, and their curricula reflected this. What had begun for H'Doubler and Blanche Trilling as a single-class amendment to Wisconsin's physical education curriculum for women, and had blossomed rapidly into a change with profound implications for American higher education, was now finishing out the century as a bifurcated curriculum with dance education as one small program and dance as a performing art as the other, much larger one. For both women the idea of offering dance in the 1917 summer session must have seemed, at the outset, like a modest curricular addition. Initially it was probably regarded as no more eventful than adding tennis and an assistant coach to the women's swimming classes-two changes Trilling 201 Margaret H'Doubler's Legacy mentioned along with the new dance class in a winter 1917 memo to the chairman of the Physical Education Department. As far back as the 1915 summer session Trilling had offered two sections of "aesthetic dancing" as well as "Singing Games and Folk Dance material for Grades 1-5" and "Folk Dances for Grades 6-8," so obviously the concept of offering dance of some kind in the summer program of 1917 was not new.! What was novel was the type of dance offered and the manner in which H'Doubler would transform her classroom as she implemented it. In doing so H'Doubler initiated a complex tradition of continuity and change for dance in academia. Some of the challenges dance addressed explicitly at the outset-the bolstering and affirming of women's physical strength and well-being and the possibility for being feminine and physical-faded rapidly as issues. In contrast, others that were initially more recondite became prominent, such as dance's capacity to be a medium for bold social statement, enacted primarily on the female body, and the capacity of dance to model skills for critical problem solving and creative insight. That the former attributes are athletic and the latter aesthetic is significant, for dance, like many of the performing and visual arts, can be a chameleon discipline in higher education, serving social agendas such as promoting athletic opportunities for women and deemphasizing its artistic qualities when necessary. DANCE IN THE UNIVERSITY EVOLVES Within fifteen years of H'Doubler's first teaching of a dance class, a new alternative model of dance, dance as a performing art within the university, arose at Bennington College in Vermont. Well before the German-trained modern dancer Louise Kloepper began teaching at the University ofWisconsin, the field of dance in American higher education had begun to change. In 1932, after ten years of planning , Bennington College opened in North Bennington, Vermont, offering a bachelor of arts degree with a concentration in dance, the first such college degree emphasizing dance as a performing art.2 In 1936 the first three Bennington dance majors from this program would graduate. John Dewey was one of the many distinguished advisers who had participated in the college's planning, as was William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College at Columbia University,3 The stamp ofthese Progressive educators from the start was on the curriculum, a curriculum which presented the arts as equal to the other academic subjects. By 1936 dance had been elevated to a separate division within the college. Despite these educational ideals that valued dance as an art, it was reportedly the need for physical exercise and the lack ofa gym that initially led the wife of Bennington president Robert Devore Leigh to suggest that 202 [3...

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