Martha Hill and the Making of American Dance

A Summer School for Dance, 1934

A Summer School for Dance, 1934 If “everything fell into place in the journey to Bennington for Martha Hill and Mary Jo Shelly, as a posse of two,” as Ben Belitt said, “that place was very chary.” The February 1934 issue of the Bennington College Bulletin stated the new program’s intent (penned by Hill and Shelly): “The Bennington School of the Dance will be initiated during the summer of 1934 as a center for the study of the modern dance in America . . . designed to bring together leaders and students interested in an impartial analysis of the important contemporary trend in the dance.” Further, a variety of viewpoints among artists would reveal “the essentials of modernism in the dance, . . . the modern dance, in common with the other arts of the period, as a diversified rather than a single style.”1 The opportunity was “the best dance news to be had,” according to Bessie Schönberg.2 Norman Lloyd concurred, “Aside from Perry-Mansfield, there was nothing like it in the country. The timing was right.” Today hundreds of colleges offer a dance curriculum that very much resembles Bennington’s first summer offerings. In 1934, at that historic beginning , the “program of work” for a full session of six weeks included Fundamental Techniques, Dance Composition, Music and the Dance, Teaching Methods and Materials, and Production as well as a survey of dance history and critical theory under John Martin’s direction. Enrolled in the first season of Bennington’s summer dance program was a small but valiant army ready to serve in the name of a rapidly growing American art form. Those registered were all women: less than one-third were actually undergraduate students. Those who were undergraduates came from colleges such as New College at Columbia, Connecticut College, Purdue, Sarah Lawrence, Skidmore, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley as well as Bennington. The rest were teachers (Ruth Alexander from Ohio University; Ruth Bloomer, University of Oregon; Marian Streng, Barnard; Marian Van Tuyl, the University of Chicago; and Marion Knighten, Sarah Lawrence; Hood, McGill, Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, Swarthmore, and the University of California also were among the colleges represented). The directors correctly figured that this impressive array of “professional” women would return to their respective colleges as serious advocates, multiplying the impact of the cause. “If the highest percentage were teachers of dance, the true diversification was one of personalities and aptitudes,” Shelly asserted, adding that out of the 103 enrolled, “no two went back where they came from with an identical sense of accomplishment but, for certain, none went back unaffected by so intense and kaleidoscopic an experience.” In that first cool New England summer in Vermont, the beauty of the location and the accommodations would far surpass each student’s expectations. As the Up-Flyer pulled into the quaint North Bennington train station, transport was waiting for dancers and their trunks. Hill and Shelly gave an eightpage memo to each new arrival, covering everything from the cleaning of rooms to film-developing services. Making their stay even more appealing, a five-dollar fee covered six weeks of golfing, swimming, and tennis at the Mount Anthony Country Club. (To an amateur champion golfer like Marian Streng, this was unbelievable good luck.) Clear warnings against guests in the dormitories were stated so as not to cause havoc with housekeeping; however, meals were available for visitors at forty cents for breakfast, fifty cents for lunch, and seventy-five cents for dinner. “There are no house rules,” the memo states. After the 1:00 a.m. doors-locked curfew, the night watchman provided a key. A “hairdressing” shop was open six days a week. Students danced for one-and-a-half hours daily under the direction, in Shelly’s words, of “the up-and-coming modernists for a new dance.” Sessions divided students into groups with “little or no previous experience in the modern dance” or “a foundation in the modern dance.” As the mimeographed handout for the first session explained, each week one of the artists and their assistants would present their own approach “to the modern dance through technique, analysis and discussion” with emphasis on the “consideration of dance as an art form.”3 Graham, Holm, Humphrey, and Weidman were soon labeled The “Big Four” and each felt the weight of their mission. With Graham the leader of the pack, Hanya Holm was chosen as the distinguished exponent of Wigman’s influential style of German modern dance. Martha Hill later explained, “Hanya brought...