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Foreword
Back in 2002, I sat with Tom Hagood at a table in a restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland. We were discussing how to organize the information we were gathering for the National Dance Education Organization’s Research in Dance Education Project, a three-year process of finding, reviewing, and citing seventy-six years of dance education research and practices (1926–2001) into a database that we hoped would be useful to the field.
We were discussing what sort of time-based structure would be best to use when it came to organizing the studies. Tom banged his hand on the table. “1965,” he said. “The year the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was created, and the Dance as a Discipline conference was held.” Oh yes, that’s when everything changed, we agreed.
Before 1965 singular women taught dance classes in universities, wrote curricula, went to bat for dance education in the local schools, brought in guest artists to perform in gymnasiums and paid them, and browbeat university administrators until each campus became aware that dance was indeed a part of campus intellectual as well as artistic life. On top of that, dance was also physical education: deep, profound and inventive physical education, but deeply experiential nonetheless.