| Chapter : | Part I: Introduction |
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
Kitchen’—located on the building’s first floor. Conversations were lively and would often turn to stories of origins and the people who had given so much to dance and physical education at Wisconsin over the years. Many of the people sitting around that table had been students or colleagues (or both), of H’Doubler’s. I was soon learning a great deal about ‘Miss H’Doubler.’
I enjoyed the stories told—the ‘remembrances.’ Personal recollections about H’Doubler were full of interesting anecdotes, sidebars, detours, vivid portraits, and active juxtapositions of one character against another. The stories I heard made H’Doubler come alive in my imagination. They were told with relish and with a sense that these stories were important. Each teller’s sense of pride at having been there to witness history was evident. It was in the substance of these stories that I first learned about Margaret H’Doubler the person; accounts not found in the dance histories I read. The stories of how remarkable a woman and teacher H’Doubler was coupled with the thoughtful and intelligent discourse those who had been her students engaged in when talking about dance, led me to want to know more about her ideas, methods and points of view. I soon found myself much more willing to read her work; to push myself to find out whom this first of dance educators was and what she had to teach me.
In the department office one could pull and read the sometimes amazingly dense, other times readable and fascinatingly simple, even eloquent statements Miss H’Doubler left in her stencils. (For our younger readers, who may never have had the pleasure of using a mimeograph, or of typing, let alone typing to make carbon copies, stencils were master copies of syllabi and other instructional materials teachers created and filed away for future ‘mimeo’ copying). I pulled many of these documents and spent time poring over their contents, ever more amazed at the intellectual depth and breadth of Margaret H’Doubler’s legacy to my field.
Since leaving Lathrop Hall, I have continued to investigate the story of this remarkable woman. As a dance scholar the larger scope of my work has been focused on dance and its origins and evolution in higher education. Investigating H’Doubler is central to this