Radical Pedagogy: Margaret H’Doubler, Anna Halprin and American Dance, 1916-Present

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A new collection of photographs, visual art and film curated by Ninotchkha Bennahum, a professor of dance studies and intellectual history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, celebrates the significant contributions of pioneering dance educator Margaret H’Doubler. Propelled by H’Doubler’s forward thinking and the curriculum she created, UW-Madison launched the nation’s first dance degree program in 1926. The exhibit also features three UW-Madison alums who graduated from the dance program in the 1940s and made indelible marks on the cultural landscape: Anna Halprin, Mary Hinkson and Matt Turney.

press release: The University of Wisconsin-Madison Dance Department opens Radical Pedagogy: Margaret H’Doubler, Anna Halprin, and American Dance, 1916 – Present, Friday, October 11, at 4:30 p.m. in Lathrop Hall’s new Gallery Space, a stunning permanent exhibition made possible through a generous donation from  Jody Gottfried Arnhold ('65) and John Arnhold.

The photographs, visual art, and films that fill Lathrop’s Gallery Space bear witness to dance pioneer Margaret H’Doubler’s Radical Pedagogy and its inherently Midwestern Progressivism — when dance became a rigorous academic discipline and the body became the route to scientific inquiry, self-discovery, creativity, and citizenship. 

[Dance] serves all the ends of education –

it helps to develop the body, to cultivate the love and appreciation of beauty,

to stimulate the imagination and challenge the intellect,

to deepen and refine the emotional life,

and to broaden the social capacities of the individual

that [h/she/they] may at once profit from and serve the greater world without. 

– Margaret H’Doubler, dance pioneer who established

the first higher education degree program in Dance in 1926

Items selected for the exhibition are drawn from numerous public and private collections that document H’Doubler’s continued influence across generations of dance artists.

"Margaret H'Doubler and her colleagues graduated many important artists," said exhibition curator, Ninotchka Bennahum, Professor of Dance Studies and Intellectual History, the University of California, Santa Barbara. "In 1926, she was the first to hone an academic curriculum for a BS in Physical (Dance) Education and succeeded in extricating the study of dance from technique and creative practice only to dance education as a rigorous academic discipline."

This, Bennahum said, "offered students a professional future in dance."  

That legacy is clearly demonstrated by three prominent dance artists, also featured in this exhibition, each of whom have mobilized H’Doubler’s radical pedagogy and made remarkable contributions to American cultural history: Anna Halprin (‘42), Mary Hinkson (’46, MS ‘47), and Matt Turney (’47).

Halprin invented the ordinary body and task-based improvisation as material for a dance, ushering in postmodernism. Hinkson and Turney, co-founders of the Wisconsin Dance Group (1947-1951), became the first black dancers to join the Martha Graham Dance Company.

Hinkson was one of Graham’s leading dancers while with the company. In 1960, she became the first African-American woman to perform for George Balanchine in roles he created for her at New York City Ballet, she also taught at Juilliard, the High School of Performing Arts and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center.

Turney, who danced for Graham nearly two decades, was noted for her gift of stillness, which she demonstrated eloquently in Graham's "Appalachian Spring."

Professor Kate Corby, chair of the UW-Madison Dance Department who worked in consultation with Bennahum on the exhibition, said it is awe-inspiring to see the roots of dance in higher education – the UW-Madison's dance legacy – in the halls of Lathrop. 

"We are beneficiaries of H'Doubler's bold, progressive initiative," she said, "every student who has had the opportunity to study dance in college has done so because of her groundbreaking work and we are grateful to Jody and John Arnhold for their generous gift, making this exhibition possible."

Jody Arnhold (‘65), a dance advocate and educator, and founder of Dance Education Laboratory (DEL) at 92Y said that the UW-Madison was the nation’s first program to offer a major in dance "against all odds."  Although she was an English major at UW, she said the dance program "inspired [her] to pursue a life in dance education" because her "heart was and is with H’Doubler and her understanding that dance is not just predetermined steps; it’s a philosophy, a history, and a way of teaching children to find the artist within."

The exhibition is open to the public for viewing during regular Lathrop Hall building hours.

EXHIBITION CREDITS

Exhibition Curator: Ninotchka D. Bennahum, in consultation with Kate Corby

Photographic Curator: Ellen Crane

Installation Design and Graphic Art: Tim Laun, Scott Goodman, Rollin Fortier

Filmography: François Bernardi, NYPL – Lincoln Center

Film artist and performance historian: Douglas Rosenberg

Digital Media Installation: Paul S. Hundal, Adam Wiesenfarth, Lisa Marine, CAT Phan

Installation: Seth Klekamp

Digital Media Transfer: Boyd Hillestad

Printing: Star Printz

Framing: Paul Douglas

ABOUT MARGARET H'DOUBLER

Margaret Newell H’Doubler Claxton (1889–1982), educator, scholar, athlete, and public intellectual changed the place of dance in Americans’ lives, moving it from mere physical activity to an academic field of inquiry. In 1926, at the request of her mentor Blanche Trilling, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Director of Women’s Physical Education, H’Doubler imagined and institutionalized the nation’s first dance curriculum, the same year that dance modernist Martha Graham premiered her all-female company.

Closely aligned with the democratic ideals of Midwestern Progressivism and Women’s Suffrage, H’Doubler envisioned a pedagogical radicalism. A fusion of “the moral, the physical, and the intellectual,” in the words of H’Doubler biographer Janice Ross, H’Doubler’s empirical approach to dance developed students’ kinesthetic awareness, bio-anatomical understanding - the education of a whole person.

H’Doubler’s pedagogy shed dance’s Victorian associations and offered a suite of radical principles: dance as scientific exploration, dance as history, dance in the service of the body politic. This was the curricular synthesis of the feminist movement and rhythmic theories of Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Alys Bentley, and Gertrude Colby, and the social philosophy of John Dewey.  H’Doubler succeeded in creating a degree program in Physical (Dance) Education and asked the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s liberal arts faculty to accept dance education as a rigorous academic discipline.  

Between 1917 and her retirement in 1954, H’Doubler educated legions of “thinking dancers” to believe in the intellectual capacity of dance education. The dancing body, no longer a place of sexual anxiety, became in H’Doubler’s pedagogy the route to scientific inquiry and self-discovery, creativity, and citizenship.  

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This exhibition would not have been possible without the vision and generous support of dance educator Jody Gottfried Arnhold ('65) and John Arnhold and the following people and institutions: Anna Halprin, Janet Eilber, Artistic Director, the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Faculty and staff of the Dance Department at UW-Madison, Amy Gilman, Director of the Chazen Art Museum, the University Archives of UW-Madison, the Wisconsin Historical Society, Linda Murray, Dance Curator and Arlene Yu, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, the Museum of Art, Design, and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Nicole Klanfer, Eric Mills, Irwin Appel and the Department of Theater and Dance, UCSB, and many students and artists involved in the re-staging of an excerpt from Anna Halprin’s Parades and Changes (1965). This exhibition would not also not have been possible without the extraordinary scholarship of Sally Banes, Professor Emerita of Dance and Theater Studies and Chair of Dance (1992–1996) at UW-Madison, 1991-2003.