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Introduction I believe that an understanding of where schools have been and of what social forces affect them at present is extraordinarily useful for interpreting our present state of affairs. Without an historical perspective our analyses are likely to be naive and misguided. Elliot Eisner, keynote address, Pennsylvania State University, I989 IN THE SUMMER OF 192 5, THE NEWLY LAUNCHED AMERICAN THEATrical dance quarterly, The Denishawn Magazine, carried a three-page review of a new book on dance education, The Dance, and Its Place in Education. The Denishawn Magazine had been begun a year earlier, primarily as a vehicle for two of the leading American theatrical dancers of the time, Ruth St. Denis and her husband and partner, Ted Shawn, and their own professional schools of dance, Denishawn.I The review was unusual on two counts: first, it presented St. Denis devoting pages to a book by another dance teacher, and second, St. Denis not only seriously considered but praised the work of this teacher and author, Margaret H'Doubler, a physical educator.2 Although both the fields of American modern dance and dance in American higher education were in their infancy in the 1920S, already there was some tension between the two disciplines.3 For reasons of territoriality as well as survival, H'Doubler had defined her educational dance as distinct from the modern dance of the stage. A full rapprochement would be years in coming, but St. Denis's gesture in reviewing Margaret H'Doubler's first book was an acknowledgment of her esteem for this woman who was on her way to becoming the doyenne of American dance 3 Introduction education. St. Denis's "review," therefore, is fascinating for what it reveals of this division between the educational and modern or theatrical arenas ofdance and what it coincidentally suggests about the role ofa determined individual's sensibility in affecting educational change. St. Denis begins by situating her review as a platform for disagreement. She objects to an observation H'Doubler makes in the opening of her book, that the stimulation for the emerging curricular field of dance education has come from a scholarly interest in physical education.4 "Not so!" St. Denis declares. "Nearly all phases of music interpretation and of what is loosely called 'Greek Dancing' [educational dance] in this country, owe their genesis to Isadora Duncan."5 This question of the provenance of dance education was crucial and, as became apparent over the subsequent seven decades, profoundly divisive. For any art form in education, the context of whether one is training students to be artists or training students for life profoundly shapes the whole enterprise of the classroom. "Let us not forget that art leads, and education follows," St. Denis cautions. "First there is always the new circle drawn by the philosopher, the inventor, the poet, the artist; then education in its orderly classification and practice follows."6 In fact, both women were right; they were describing the truths for their respective areas of dance, theater, and academia. H'Doubler's search for and discovery of dance was motivated by her supervisor Blanche Trilling's direction and her own desire to broaden the university's physical education curriculum for women. St. Denis, by contrast, saw herself, along with Isadora Duncan, as introducing an American voice into concert dance. Behind both these innovators lay similar late nineteenth-century systems of physical movement-Fran~ois Delsarte's methods and the German turnvereine gymnasiums, most prominently. The differences between St. Denis's and H'Doubler's viewpoints on dance played out with particular clarity in their approach to dance teaching . The Denishawn schools were an important part of the major cultural empire known as Denishawn, which, during the period of 1922 to 1925, franchised dance schools in a dozen American cities. As a means of identifying and training performers for the Denishawn company, these schools were also an efficient way to earn money to help support the tours of the performing group.7 H'Doubler, in contrast, saw herself as giving students the power to link emotional and physical understanding in order to become better adjusted and more efficacious individuals in the world. These were vantage points that would be central to this dialogue for the next eighty years. Ruth St. Denis and Margaret H'Doubler were both pioneers. St. Denis had turned her back on the popular-culture musical theater of the time in favor of more elite entertainment, and H'Doubler never personally 4 [18.119...

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