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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Hill cancelled summer courses in teaching methods for dance after 1936. Teachers were using what they learned at Bennington indiscriminately, attempting to infuse a collection of ideas and practices they had little real understanding of into their teaching. It is here, in poorly managed attempts by women physical educators to imitate the techniques and aesthetic ideals of the artists with whom they had so briefly studied that dance education took a serious hit in the minds of many physical educators. Rampant imitation, the acceptance of practices with little (if any) serious analysis as to their efficacy, and the stark abstraction of their new movement choices left many physical educators scratching their heads, and wondering, what is this all about?

Kriegsman adds:

The School of the Dance granted no degree (although credits could be applied toward a degree elsewhere) and offered no certificate or grades. Nonetheless, because Bennington was the first coherent representation of the modern dance as a movement, it became something of a “Good Housekeeping Seal” for those who were affiliated with it; those who weren’t were left out. Moreover, Bennington and “the modern dance” had become synonymous, so that in a sense Bennington did promulgate a “method” or “approach,” that which was taught at Bennington. Given the school’s concentrated authority and success, and the geometric expansion of its influence through students, this was perhaps inevitable. Bennington’s curriculum, its methods, and its approach to training and composition, were widely imitated…
The curriculum was designed not only to foster greater technical proficiency but to get students to pay more attention to form and structure in dance making. Louis Horst introduced notions of discipline and historical model. He insisted that to dance meaningfully one must first learn the craft of choreography. Horst’s theories, based on musical form, and his teaching methods were powerful correctives to amorphous self-expression. But soon, in lieu of the dances he disparagingly called “collegiate plastique,” pale replicas of pre-classic and modern forms [course titles for Horst’s approach to composition.–Ed.] began to crop up across the landscape.