Margaret H’Doubler: The Legacy of America's Dance Education Pion ...

other contemporaneous texts (e.g., Gertrude Colby’s 1922 Natural Rhythms and Dances), to see that here was a great leap forward in the articulation of a conceptual approach to dance education.

Once discovered, H’Doubler’s road in life became her own—fully and completely. She let the weight and gravity of events and circumstances cascade her down her particular path, on to her particular pedestal, and into her particular niche in dance history. H’Doubler did not simply complete her charge and then move on; she completed her charge and accepted the life-long vow. To borrow a phrase coined by Miss H’Doubler’s contemporary Martha Graham, Margaret seems to have been “doom eager.”

So, it may be that the intensity and drama of H’Doubler’s early discoveries about “the creative side of movement” and the “other directed” means by which she became a dance educator have deflected historical interest in the longer saga of her professional and personal life. Yet, while these special circumstances have focused what little historic attention there has been on the first years of her career, when one considers the whole arc of her professional life and the history and evolution of dance as an academic discipline, there may be other important reasons why Miss H’Doubler’s history has largely been left out of the canon.

During her career H’Doubler draped herself in the robes of academic, educator, humanist, and scientist. Early on, H’Doubler attached a significant and deeply layered intellectualism to the study of dance. One thought about what one did in H’Doubler’s classroom; you used the language of science to describe your movement experiences. H’Doubler rejected notions of educational dance as a professionally focused ‘art-dance’ for the more liberal idea of dance as the “creative side of movement.” She also rejected the notion of H’Doubler as central to a method or style. Her teaching and writings always returned the focus of the work and the story back to the doer, back to the student-practitioner. By intellectualizing dance, by not donning the robe of ‘artist,’ and by rejecting explicit recognition of her presence and importance in changing the field, H’Doubler effectively cut herself out of the story of dance in art and in the academy.