| Chapter 2: | Legacy for Dance as a Discipline: 1917–1967 |
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Through her organization of the Bennington Summer School of the Dance (1934–1942), she turned the focus of college dance from amateur/liberal to professional/fine arts. This did not happen overnight, or even within the eight years of Bennington’s existence, but the trend had begun and because of the stature, prestige, and quality of the Bennington summer programs, the educational realm of dance was shaped more and more by the stronger identity of the professional world.
Alma Hawkins followed H’Doubler and Hill into the field in 1953, and it was she who considered how dance education could nurture and benefit from elemental aspects of each end of the continuum: amateur/creative to professional/fine arts. Her efforts to bring the field together in conversations and clarifications on matters of philosophies, standards, objectives and goals, curriculum design and advocacy for the notion of dance as a discipline––to meld the objectives of H’Doubler and Hill—were groundbreaking and forward looking. Hawkins was a remarkably clear thinker, and politically she was quite astute. She brought people together and helped create the contemporary field of dance—arts educators in the American university.
We are still traveling down the paths set upon by these three women. This essay is about the legacy of their efforts in the first fifty years of the journey.