Legacy in Dance Education: Essays and Interviews on Values, Practices, and People
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Legacy in Dance Education: Essays and Interviews on Values, Pract ...

Chapter 2:  Legacy for Dance as a Discipline: 1917–1967
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H’Doubler went to New York and struggled with her assignment. She had spent the last five years refining her skills in teaching player’s drills, strategic approaches to offense and defense, rules of play, and rules of sport—standard approaches. In the dance world of New York in 1916, H’Doubler found a polyglot of aesthetic and “natural” approaches, ballet, and franchised dance education programs like that of entrepreneur Louis Chalif (Hagood 2000). In the spring of 1917, a few weeks before her scheduled return to Madison, H’Doubler sent a desperate note to Trilling writing, “I shall never teach dance!” Trilling wrote back asking H’Doubler to go look at one more dance teacher she had gotten wind of back in Madison, a Miss Alys Bentley. H’Doubler went to Bentley’s Carnegie Hall studio and found what she was looking for:

Well, in April, she [Blanche Trilling] said ‘I wish you would look up a woman who does not teach dance but is a music teacher and has her students move in relation to music. Her name is Alys Bentley, if ever you happen to run across such a name.’ And she was a remarkable, creative teacher of music. And you may be interested in this little item—what she did with the children. They sang only their little songs. She did not teach them other songs or melodies, they made their own and she was interested. I told her what my problem was and she was interested enough to take me. She had a group of five to seven girls and one of them was Ruth David, who was quite an exponent of her work— a lovely mover—and I think her group was called a group of “dancers,” though they did not give programs, I don’t believe. Movement, as such, was not taught. She would say, ‘Now you do what Ruth is doing, that’s what I want,’ but here is the thing that I felt so beholden to her for. That is that she got us down on the floor and had us do some rotations and work with flexions and extensions—as we would say—but not talking to us or telling us why or anything about it. But then it came just like a flash: ‘Of course! Get on the floor where we’re away from the pull of gravity and then work out what really are the structural changes of position of the body when it can move freely!’ And then I commenced to get quite excited. (86)