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Along with H’Doubler’s formal writings, are included her mottos, small sayings that encapsulate philosophical tenets at the heart of what came to be called the “Wisconsin Dance Idea.” Many of H’Doubler’s mottos have come to be at the center of dance education pedagogy and philosophy, often without acknowledgment of their origin. These include “In dance, you are your own textbook, laboratory and teacher” and “Man fashions as he knows.” We hear H’Doubler speak of educating the whole person, individual dignity, integrated wholeness, discovery, and dance as part of living based on inner impulses and needs, biologically sound and what it did for the lives of the students.
We hear details of Blanche Trilling sending H’Doubler to New York City to bring back dance that could be taught to young women at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. H’Doubler reveals in her own words what she found, what she thought of it, and why she chose to return to Madison and begin her own personal journey with dance as an educational/academic discipline in higher education. H’Doubler is presented as an intersection of dynamic trajectories in art, education, philosophy, culture, and history filtered through H’Doubler’s personal vision. Through this volume we see how her work often seems at home in what we now think of as bodywork, floor work, constructivist pedagogy of contemporary education, and therapy. H’Doubler made an everlasting and dynamic impact on anyone who worked with her, and as we discover more we see the clear lineage of the work through the generations of teachers in dance education-experiences that have continued both as concept and practice.
The book achieves its stated goal to present a “holistic portrait of this interesting, plain, driven, modest, unyielding, flexible, committed, some might say eccentric woman.” Along with vast amounts of praise, we also hear about other aspects of being human such as issues of sexuality, unyielding moments on certain concepts, being “too kind” in student critiques, and that she was intellectually progressive but socially conservative. We see a fellow human being who had great gifts to be sure, but also with all great people, was at a point of connection and confluence that enabled a great mind to take advantage of opportunities.