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

In the beginning H’Doubler separated dance from professional notions of art for secure reasons. Her colleagues, led by Blanche Trilling, rejected the idea of competition in college athletics, and went so far as to not list player’s names in handbills for team sports—for fear that identification of the ‘star’ players would negate the positive experience of the game itself for those not singled out. H’Doubler strived to keep the kind of dancing she taught a liberal and non-stratified, creative, learning experience. But by the mid 1930s, and largely as a result of the ‘Bennington Experience,’ dance in higher education was gravitating towards professionalism and identification with individual artists, their artistic styles, art values, and art ideas. By the time H’Doubler retired in 1954 dance and physical education were launched into their complex, arduous, and decade’s long separation from one another. Dance was leaving women’s physical education, and looking for a new academic partnership with the other fine and performing arts; Women’s Physical Education was turning away from attention to recreational and creative work in human movement and associating itself more fully with the rules and science of sports. By the end of her career Miss H’Doubler’s history represented the past, which for many dance educators was troubling about that past—the strained and uncomfortable remains of the relationship between the utilitarian, measurement focused, and sports mad nature of physical education, and the newer, aesthetic, art conscious, and ineffable nature of ‘modern’ dance. H’Doubler’s work sat right in the middle of that divide—creative, yet scientifically oriented; artistic, but not developed or practiced for performance; individually generated, yet strictly measured and recorded; ‘there’ and yet ‘not there’ in the eyes, bodies and desires of those who longed to dance. After a long struggle with its own identity, academic studies in dance had found their place with art, and going back to the thoughts and ideas of the person who so symbolized—and through her teaching embodied—the marriage of dance and physical education as two sides of movement, seemed not only old fashioned, but perhaps also wrong. These notions, coupled with the more mundane fact that educational dance has never been a central story line in written histories of dance have helped marginalize the contributions made to that tale by one Margaret H’Doubler.