Martha Hill and the Making of American Dance

Juilliard, 1951–1952

Juilliard, 1951–1952 Ready for a new challenge, Martha happily began to design a training ground for dancers at Juilliard. Bennington’s public relations representative (who happened to be Mary Jo) reported Martha’s leave of absence. That fall of 1951, Mary Jo also left Bennington to become a colonel in the Air Force; at this time the services were trying to increase their recruitment of women for the Korean emergency. Although Martha had officially resigned from both Bennington and New York University effective 1 July 1951, separating herself from the summer festival activities would prove more difficult. After three years of modest support (that included some released teaching time for Hill), NYU administrators now used Martha’s resignation as a reason to pull out of the ADF equation. Disregarding her earlier report of the “exhilarating and penetrating . . . profoundly rewarding experience,” NYU board members saw no reason to stay in the project . As long as Martha was on the faculty, Jay Nash supported her every effort, but knowing that she would be resigning to take a job at Juilliard, he agreed that the school should withdraw its support. (Nash himself left NYU in 1953.) Rosemary Park and Connecticut College gladly took on the entire summer project for 1951: the school was reaping more national acclaim than she, or her board of trustees, had ever imagined possible. With the hiring of an office assistant , Rusty’s job was somewhat eased; yet it was Martha who remained irreplaceable . For the summer of 1951, the companies in residence were saddled with most of the teaching as well as festival performing. Bales, Dudley, Limón, and Maslow became the core faculty, each teaching in the studio during the day and rehearsing every night and weekend. Limón’s company now replaced Graham’s as the major contributor to the festival performances. The novelty of the season was the return of Charles Weidman who presented a new solo, A Song for You. But the larger ensemble works were Limón’s Tonantzintla (recently created while in residence at Bellas Artes in Mexico City,) and Humphrey’s revival of Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, performed by her repertory class. Perhaps the most important contribution was Humphrey’s creation of Quartet No. 1. (Night Spell), set to music by Priaulx Rainer for dancers Currier, Hoving, Jones, and Limón. As Juilliard’s founding director of dance for the 1951–52 academic year, Martha entered into the most difficult period of her career. With the position came the opportunity to develop a curriculum that would set a standard for dance training in the United States, unencumbered by the standards of academic disciplines outside the performing arts. Martha once mused about the problems of joining forces with a music school, with its demands for musical integrity and allegiance to classical repertory . It was a place where the choice of composers and scores needed official approval from the president with live musical performances always a necessity. Nonetheless, alignment with a music school appealed to her concept of training the complete dance artist. Hill and Schuman agreed about the importance of institutional support for the arts: their life’s work depended on it. They also knew that to achieve this at Juilliard, the new enterprise needed the best faculty of artist-teachers to be had. For modern, Graham, Humphrey, and Horst headed the list of “must-haves.” Martha recalled: Bill said, “Whom would you want?” I said, “[Antony] Tudor for ballet, Martha for modern.” . . . [This was] the first chance I got to do ballet and modern dance together. . . . The curriculum was conceived [from] what I had discovered in my own life of ballet, modern dance, music . . . I incorporated it all.1 Surprisingly, her vision for a new classicism in American dance meant training dancers in both ballet and modern dance idioms. The time for conflicting dance philosophies was over, she insisted. This combined training now became Hill’s mantra for developing the complete dancer. Having lived through that argument at Bennington, Martha was firmly convinced that strong ballet technique was essential for a professional dancer. “By the time I came to Juilliard, modern dance had pretty well established itself, but there was still great rivalry between ballet and modern dance. [B]ack then it was just assumed that they mixed about as well as oil and water,” Martha explained.2 She recalled harsh criticism with people saying, “It’ll never work to put ballet and modern dance together under the...