Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education

Appendix 2: Dance Department Memorandum, December 1953

Appendix 2 Dance Department Memorandum, December 1953 Author's note: This Dance Department memo, written by Margaret H'Doubler, is in the H'Doubler Papers, University of WisconsinMadison Archives. December II, 1953 M.N.H'D To create a dance is to produce a new and unique construction out of the existing materials of the physical and psychical natures. The creative and imaginative mind builds new images out of meaningful experience, and with the will and energy the new images are executed motorly and brought into existence thus creating a dance that is an embodiment of emotional experience in expressive movement. The creative act is a building process that constructs out of consciously evaluated experience. Any dance in which the creative mind of the dancer has been permitted to organize and endow its materials with a specific structure and individuality that is its own, is the result of creative effort. Stated another waya dance is a designed entity-an embodiment of emotional experience transformed by thought and consciously given a movement form upon which the principles of composition have been imposed by the personality which was the subject of the experience. Subjectively, a dance is an ideal toward which the imaginative mind reaches; a dance is a movement reality so formed that it becomes a symbol of this ideal. It is the observable form of what the mind has created. A definition sufficiently broad to include the less highly developed forms, such as tap, folk, group, and ballroom dancing, might be stated as follows: A dance is the rhythmic motor expression of feeling states aesthetically valued, whose movement symbols are consciously designed for the pleasure and satisfaction either of expression and communication-or for the delight in experiencing rhythm inherent in the many dance forms. 223 ...