| Chapter 2: | Legacy for Dance as a Discipline: 1917–1967 |
|
|
The evolution of what would become to be termed American modern dance—especially as emergent artists like Graham were creating technically challenging and artistically sophisticated versions of the amateur, creatively generated, and individually oriented work H’Doubler was teaching at Wisconsin—blurred the boundaries between what was professional—and what was educational—in dance.
On a broader level, H’Doubler’s tough stance on professional values ran up against cultural trends that were starting to frame higher education as vocational education—as job preparation. H’Doubler’s rejection of the artist’s importance to dance in education was a rejection of vocational opportunity. By ignoring the values of the professional world, she snubbed the artistic importance and vitality of dance in the larger culture, and the possibility that students of a university dance program might have a subsequent life beyond teaching dance. To be sure, H’Doubler was not alone in her opinions—as we shall see later in this chapter. But because she was understood as the pioneer for dance in education, H’Doubler’s strident––even iconoclastic––dismissal of professionally oriented performance and technical standards in the college dance curriculum, classroom, and studio ultimately led to her marginalization as a leader in the field.
Another significant factor in the weakening of H’Doubler’s legacy for dance in education was the fact that as programs developed at other colleges and universities, the degree to which dance was valued as a full partner in women’s physical education varied widely. Unlike the program at Wisconsin, where dance held a position of importance, in other departments the dance educator was just one of many faculty members, most of whom were interested in athletics or sports, kinesiology, or motor development. The dance educator had to be particularly committed, informed, and consistent in her advocacy, or she would find her classes lumped in with other recreational and sports activities. Add to this the fact that modern dance was poorly understood and even viewed as, “ugly, morbid, and un-childlike” (Hagood 2000, 142), and conditions were not especially right for the development of dance arts within physical education.