Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginnings of Dance in American Education (review)

Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginnings of Dance in AmericanEducation is an engaging and well-researched examination of the circumstances and events that led to the establishment of the degree program in dance at the University of Wisconsin, the first program of its kind. Author Janice Ross provides a thorough background of the program's founder, Margaret H'Doubler, who believed not only that dance was healthful exercise but that it also prepared students to live creative, productive lives in society. H'Doubler did not regard dance as an art form, and her classes did not prepare students for a dance career. Instead, she saw dance as an opportunity to develop an integrated, unique individual; it was a means toward development of the mind as well as the body. In a fluid and easily readable writing style, Ross posits that H'Doubler's antitheatrical bias and her focus on internal feeling became the basis for the dance revolution of the 1960s.

Margaret H'Doubler graduated from the University of Wisconsin in May of 1910 with a major in biology and a minor in chemistry and philosophy. She had been an enthusiastic participant in her physical education classes and upon graduation she was immediately hired as an instructor in the newly formed Department of Women's Physical Education. For six years she taught basketball, baseball, and swimming, even coaching a basketball team to a championship in 1912. In 1916 she requested a leave of absence for a year to study philosophy and aesthetics in the graduate program at Columbia University. Her chairman, Blanche Trilling, agreed with a condition; while in New York, Miss H'Doubler must discover and prepare to teach "some dance that is worthy of a college woman's time." H'Doubler was aghast at her new assignment: ". . . and I asked Miss Trilling, 'I? Teach dance and give up basketball?' Tears came into my eyes. I just couldn't think of that. I didn't know anything about dance" (112). Indeed, H'Doubler's only experience with dance had been undergraduate participation in the University's annual May Fete, an outdoor party that included a talent show and maypole dancing. Nonetheless, H'Doubler accepted the challenge.

While in New York, H'Doubler met and was influenced by the educational theories of W. H. Kirkpatrick and John Dewey. Ross examines Dewey's philosophies in depth, explaining that Dewey, who believed that reality is identified with experience and not eternal phenomena, had written an influential book titled How We Think, outlining his conviction that learning begins with a problem and proceeds, through the testing of possible solutions, to a resolution. Dewey believed strongly that higher education must be pursued for its own sake rather than as preparation for a career.

During her year in New York, H'Doubler visited dance studios; there, she said later, she found only poorly taught classical ballet or modern dance that had no sound theory or philosophy behind the movements being performed. H'Doubler was looking for a form of dance that was unencumbered by personal style and fixed vocabularies. She found what she wanted with music teacher Alys Bentley. Bentley instructed H'Doubler to lie on the floor and to work with flexion and extension of the limbs and rotation of the various joints removed from the pull of gravity. Bentley's teaching emphasized an understanding of body structure and movement based upon natural impulses for expression and individual inventive use of movement. Though H'Doubler only worked with Bentley "once or maybe twice a week for perhaps a month" (120), these were the ideas upon which H'Doubler would base her program of dance education.

Janice Ross uses her first hundred pages to outline carefully the context in which the dance program at University of Wisconsin was developed, touching on...