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Precedents DanceasEducation,Art,andCulture The beginning of dance as an intellectual discipline predates the organizations that are described in this book. The philosophical underpinnings and definitive issues that would situate dance in American higher education emerged in the early half of the century with the pioneering work of individual dancers and educators. The following account traces the efforts of some of these individuals and develops the idea that their work set physical precedents for dance as an epistemic discipline that shares affinities with theories of knowledge including contemporary poststructural discourse. It illustrates the intellectual, social, and structural context that would inspire the proliferation of dance organizations and frame the reason and role of dance in American culture at large in institutions of higher education, health, and art. DANCE AS EDUCATION The introduction of modern dance into higher education that began with Margaret H’Doubler at the University of Wisconsin in 1917 was an early epistemological challenge to the Cartesian dichotomies fundamental to European models of higher education, which separate theory from practice and mind from body.1 These dichotomies pervade epistemological and moral terrain, enforcing restrictive codes of propriety on movement, manner, and physical appearance, and devaluing physicalized expression on intellectual grounds. They influence how we behave, educate, and heal ourselves in the Euro-Western tradition. American higher education was and is premised on this model, but pragmatic philosophy and Progressive reform offered an ideological alternative to these dichotomies. Pragmatism , articulated in the work of philosophers William James and John Dewey, challenges the separation of knowledge from action. It became a basis for social and educational reform during the early twentieth cen8 1. An important precedent to this was Gertrude Colby’s curricula in dance education at the Speyer School of Teachers College, Columbia University, between 1913 and 1916 and at Teachers College between 1918 and 1932. Colby positioned dance not only as an activity, but as a democratic , individual, and artistic form of expression. See Hagood 2000:55–58 and 70–71, and the introduction to Gertrude Colby’s book Natural Rhythms and Dances (1922). Precedents: Dance as Education, Art, and Culture 9 tury, and was notably embraced on a statewide level by the governor of Wisconsin, Robert La Follette, in the early 1900s. La Follete collaborated with University of Wisconsin president Charles Van Hise to implement Progressive reforms, bridging knowledge and action at the university level. This opened the door for a physicalized, performative, and intellectual practice of dance (Ross 2000:196–197). Dance scholar and historian Janice Ross elucidates the ideological context during the first few decades of the twentieth century in her biography of H’Doubler: Not only the body politic but bodies themselves were the subjects of a new philosophy of organic unity. Long-standing hierarchical and, in the case of the body, puritanical beliefs about social order, male prerogatives, and the superiority of the intellectual over the corporeal, began to be challenged. (Ross 2000:138–139) In 1916, Blanche Trilling, Director of the Department of Physical Education for Women at the University of Wisconsin, invited basketball coach Margaret H’Doubler to find “some dance worthy of a college woman’s time” (quoted in Ross 2000:112). At the turn of the century, physical education was entrenched firmly in the Cartesian privileging of mind over body. Administrators and educators validated physical education through fitness alone, which at the time meant through medical testing of changes in students’ physical features. Trilling, who interpreted this testing as a means for controlling and demeaning students, envisioned physical education as the development of the whole person (Ross 2000: 77). She organized public performances of Delsartian physical exercises and rhythmic gymnastics to establish an academic credibility for aesthetic physicalized learning that would counter the prevalent tendency to associate movement with indecency and mindless work.2 Ross writes, Institutionally these open showings provided important groundwork for promoting dance, for they suggest almost a reinvention of the innocence of women’s bodies moving rhythmically in public. What might never have been possible in a big city of the time like New York, Chicago, or San Francisco , where dancing girls still evoked strongly negative moral associations, had slipped by in Madison. (Ross 2000:83–84) By helping to reclaim physical engagement as an avenue toward personal expression, education, and well-being, Trilling’s model laid an ideological 2. Francois Delsarte (1811–1871) developed a method of physical performance that connected inner emotional experience with a system of gestures and movement. The Delsarte method...

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