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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That the student “made their own,” and “away from the pull of gravity,” one might work out “what really are the structural changes of position of the body” became the guiding principles for H’Doubler’s approach to dance education. The idea of dance as a creative art informed by understanding the science of human movement was hugely innovative. Yet the approach to teaching dance in the university she developed both served and limited her career over the next three-and-a-half decades.

H’Doubler’s educational perspectives were decidedly in favor of amateurism. Wisconsin alumna Beatrice Richardson contributed “The Development of Dance at the University of Wisconsin,” to the 1937 Physical Education Association’s Alumnae News Journal. Here, Richardson summarizes both H’Doubler’s epiphany in dance education and her rejection of a decadent professionalism:

But it was while working with Miss Alys Bentley that sudden realization, so common in genius, came to Miss H’Doubler. Although Miss Bentley was primarily a music teacher, she made approach to her field through bodily movement; and these two avenues of stimulation combined in some way to produce for Miss H’Doubler a clear concept of her goal—that goal, now as then, to be the expression of the individual’s experience in terms of artistic movement; to deepen finer concepts by such artistic expression; and always to bring about further development of the individual personality. One must realize that such a goal could never become confused with professionalism and competitive production which runs rampant in all professional studios and even now threatens decadence to professional dancers…Once realizing a philosophy and theory aimed toward the development of personality, the problem was to conceive a technique which would give the basic motor experiences essential to an art experience. (23)

Like most of her colleagues in women’s physical education, H’Doubler rejected professional values in sports and play, and believed physical education, dance, or any organized and thoughtful physical activity should primarily lend itself to “the development of personality.”