Johnson: The thing that's hard to describe is the hunger for dance there was. It's so spread out over the country now, which is good, so that everybody has a chance if they're interested in dance and seeing dance and taking dance classes. But if you were interested in dance there was just so little, and if you wanted to work in the field you had to come to Bennington.
Goldner: What about the hunger factor? How does that compare, winter and summer? Which was a hungrier time?
Johnson: Oh, the summer people of course. Because those were people who hoped to be professionals or people who were professionals; or the teachers who were going out, and succeeding in creating dance departments and then eventually dance majors.(Johnson interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Johnson1979, 99)
The above excerpt is taken from the oral history transcript of the interview between Nancy Goldner, the interviewer, and Hazel Johnson, the interviewee, and is a part of the Bennington Summer School of the Dance Project: Oral History, 1978–1979. Johnson's evocation of the difficulty of describing, of metaphorical hunger, of the summer school and the distinction between the professionals and the teachers lays the foundation for this inquiry into the sensory worlds of this voluminous oral history collection.
In this article I seek to understand the challenges of the project conducted by the Oral History Research Office—its official title in 1979 and today known as the Columbia Center for Oral History—which was sponsored by Bennington College and directed by Martha Hill. I propose to analyze the participants’ ways of being a part of or apart from the summer school world and specifically to identify shifts in the experience of sensory perceptions for dance teachers and professional dancers. Inspired by the works of the French cultural historian Alain Corbin, who points out that “there is no other means for understanding people from the past than attempting to see through their eyes and live with their feelings” ([1988] Reference Corbin and Phelps1994, vii), this work is grounded in the premise that recovering the sensibility of a dancer will offer a new perspective for a more intimate approach to dance history.
I argue that while conceived of under the directorship of Martha Hill as a field study to produce materials for a book on the Bennington Summer School, this oral history collection is a history of sensibilities. A form of cultural history, the history of sensibilities focuses on the primacy of the various modes of perception and feeling, the terms and forms in which objects were conceived, experienced, and represented in the past (Wickberg Reference Wickberg2007, 662). It is a history of sensibilities without however being yet analyzed as such or possibly even having been meant as such by its authors, Nancy Goldner and Theresa Bowers. Although the book project never came to fruition, due in large part to a lack of funds, I argue that, more important, what contributed to this silence is the participants' dissident opinions about their experiences at the school.
The study of Bennington, as well as this oral history collection, has received a great deal of attention in the Anglo-Saxon dance scholarship since the early 1980s with the pioneering volume by Sali Ann Kriegsman (Reference Kriegsman1981), the most meticulously researched book to date on the topic. In addition, dance scholars have published parts of these oral histories as evidence to support their specific research projects: Julia Foulkes (Reference Foulkes and Nadell2003, 216–217) on Helen Tamiris's absence from Bennington, Susan Manning (Reference Manning2004, 8) on the presence of African-American dancers in Bennington, Victoria Geduld Phillips (Reference Geduld Phillips2008, 59) on the New Dance Group, Janet Mansfield Soares (Reference Soares2009, 48) on the summer school, or Mark Franko (Reference Franko2012, 14–44) on Graham's American Document. The recent compilation of writings and interviews published by Elizabeth McPherson (Reference McPherson2013) represents yet another attempt to revisit the history of the school through a mosaic of photographs, anecdotes, and new primary sourcesFootnote 1 with a descriptive approach rather than a critical one.
It could be considered that this collection and this particular topic have been exhausted and that nothing more can be recovered for either the oral history field or Dance Studies. Indeed, this article is not concerned with reexposing the myth of the Big Four, a revisionist perspective already undertaken by Foulkes (Reference Foulkes and Nadell2003) and Manning (Reference Manning2004), or with tracing an account of the school's canonization or with in approaching this collection as a mere complement to chronology, and it is even less concerned with treating oral histories as recollections and anecdotes, as the possible backdrop to a bigger picture.
Rather, my interest is in the voices of the dancers themselves and particularly in the physical education teachers who were less known and largely marginalized by the professional concert dancers and choreographers. Yet, it is their voices that emerge as a revelatory “place for history” (Farge Reference Farge1997, 67) and center this study on the students’ individual experience, rather than on the school. Thus, by drawing extensively on the transcripts of the interviews, I set out to explore these students’ experiences of devotion, belonging, and allegiance to a single group (Graham, Humphrey, or Holm). I approach this oral history archive as “an organized topography” (Farge [1989] Reference Farge and Scott-Railton2015, 30) in order to interrogate dancers’ reflections on the moments of leisure, intense training, and colliding with authority, and I will examine the ensuing effects this time at the summer school had on their practice.
I first embarked on the study of this collection with questions pertaining to dancers' experiences with the lesser-known figures in dance history because they are presented within the oral history collections of the pioneering institution in the field, the Columbia Center for Oral History. I joined the community of scholars through a fellowship at the Institute in 2014 led by Mary Marshall Clark and Alessandro Portelli. While not directly involved in the Bennington project, Portelli's ([1979] Reference Portelli, Perks and Thomson2003) seminal text on the importance of oral archives was instrumental in conducting this research.
The critical corpus that informs my thinking in this article is primarily located in the following scholarly research: history of sensibilities (Corbin ([1988] Reference Corbin and Phelps1994, [1994] Reference Corbin and Thom1998, Reference Corbin2000); social history, challenges of the archive and responsibilities of the historian Farge ([1989] Reference Farge and Scott-Railton2015, Reference Farge1997); research on dance microsocieties (Charmatz and Launay ([2002] Reference Charmatz and Launay2011); analysis of integrating oral sources into dance scholarship (Launay Reference Launay2007; Louppe (Reference Louppe1997, [1997] Reference Louppe and Gardner2010), and the ongoing research projects of my home community of scholars at the Université de Paris VIII and the Laboratory on Dance Discourses and Practices (Launay and Pagès Reference Launay and Sylviane2010).Footnote 2
The Context for the Project
The collection of the Bennington Summer School of the Dance Oral History Project 1978–1979 comprises seventy interviews and 5,423 pages of transcripts that give voice to a period of history for which oral sources are almost totally lacking on both sides of the Atlantic. Housed today in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Columbia University, this voluminous collection includes interviewsFootnote 3 with choreographers (Anna Sokolow), dancers (Jean Erdman, Sophie Maslow, Claire Strauss Miller, Bernice Van Gelder Peterson), physical education teachers (Claudia Moore Read, Ruth Murray), administrators (Martha Hill), composers (Ray Green), musicians, teachers (Martha Wilcox), and young dance students (Natalie Harris Wheatley), who participated in the Summer School of the Dance, 1934–1939, and the Summer School of the Arts, 1940–42, at Bennington College.
The interviewees are pooled according to a nomenclature that lacks in rigor, as the criteria applied to the establishment of different categories are not well defined. There are seventy-one intervieweesFootnote 4 and twenty-six categories from “teacher” to “poet” or “administrative assistant.” What distinguishes these categories is not clear (“dance teacher,” “modern dance instructor”) and the interviewees may belong to many different categories at the same time (“dancer,” “teacher,” “choreographer”). Within the established categories, the majority of interviewees are represented by the “dancers” with up to 44 percent, then the “teachers” with up to 32 percent, followed by the “choreographers” with up to 15 percent, and lastly the “students” with up to 6 percent. If many of the interviewees are world-famous, others are less so, which attests to the authors’ desire for an all-encompassing and exhaustive vision of the mission.
The project was conducted at a particularly interesting time, both in the context of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office and the rising attention given to dance oral history projects in New York. Together with the major initiative that the New York Public Library launched in the 1970s to collect and make available to the public the voices of a number of significant dance figures in America,Footnote 5 1978 also marked a turning point in the history of the Columbia University Oral History Research OfficeFootnote 6 when the first recordings of what was to become the office's largest dance oral history project commenced.
In oral history scholarship, 1979 is significant for the publication of Alessandro Portelli's seminal text What Makes Oral History Different ([1979] Reference Portelli, Perks and Thomson2003). Challenging the skeptical Italian academic community that viewed the discipline as pure dilettantism, Portelli argued that orality, narrative form, subjectivity, and the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee were strengths rather than weaknesses. While intrinsically different from the written sources, Portelli insisted on the fact that written and oral sources were not mutually exclusive.
In the Bennington community, the late 1970s were marked by a sense of urgency because the dancers were getting older: “Time is running out for many of the original group. To get this project done is a now or never proposition” (Hill Reference Hill1978, October 10). When Martha Hill wrote these words, forty-four years had passed since she had been appointed director of the first Summer School of the Dance at Bennington College in Vermont in 1934. The project she referred to was publishing a book about this “significant and catalytic enterprise,” (Reference Hill1978) based on oral histories, the primary source material, which would not be accessible to the public until the book's publication.
According to the Oral History Research Office archival documents,Footnote 7 the project had its origins in the early 1970s when Mary Jo Shelly, who was at the same time assistant to the first president of Bennington College, Robert Devore Leigh, and also the administrator of the School of the Dance, started to explore resources for a book to be written together with Martha Hill. After Shelly's death in 1976, Martha Hill and William Bales continued the project and examined the materials at the Bennington archives. They quickly realized they would need a professional writerFootnote 8 and that the task of producing a robust history of the summer school would prove vastly more arduous and time-consuming than either had anticipated. Therefore, both enthusiastically supported President Joseph Murphy's suggestion that Bennington turn first to Columbia University's Department of Oral Historyfor the collection of primary source material and then to a professional writer with wide experience in dance criticism and in publishing. This person was Nancy Goldner, dance critic for The Nation, Dance News, and the Bennington Review, and associate editor of the Dance Research Journal.
Together with Goldner, who was to be the principal researcher and who conducted a number of interviews, the project team consisted of six consultants who began to meet at the beginning of 1977: Martha Hill, a former dancer with the Graham company from 1929 to 1931 and head of both the School of the Dance and the Summer School of the Dance at Bennington College; William Bales, a performer with the Humphrey-Weidman company from 1936 to 1940, and a teacher at the Bennington Summer School from 1941 to 1942; Roger Kimball, who was present at the early meetings in 1977, graduated from Bennington in 1975, and then became the editor of The New Criterion; Thomas Brockway was at the time, in 1977, writing a history of Bennington College. Louis Starr was a journalist, teacher, and author, and, most important, had been director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia since 1956, and served as the scientific guarantor of this project. Lastly, Theresa Bowers served as the principal interviewer and oral history consultant. A Barnard graduate, she was a catalog copywriter and an assistant at the Oral History Research Office at Columbia at the time the project began.
The purpose of the project, according to its authors,Footnote 9 was twofold. First, they aimed to create a record of the voices and recollections of the artists, teachers, students, and administrators still living who had played a major role in the Summer School of the Dance. They were especially interested in those artists whose work, both at Bennington and subsequently, contributed significantly to the development of the art of dance. Secondly, they aimed to produce a book that, because of its basis in the oral history interviews and because of its intrinsic importance to the field, would meet the scholarly need for a definitive history of the summer school and would also address the growing public interest in modern dance.
Studying this oral history collection as a primary source for a “definitive history” is therefore not only an inquiry into the history of dancers’ sensibilities of the 1930s but also an exploration of the interviewers’ and interviewees’ priorities, presuppositions, hesitations and inconsistencies in this project and, most important, of their contributions. As Portelli emphasized, the importance of oral sources lies in the fact that they tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did ([1979] Reference Portelli, Perks and Thomson2003, 67). Since these oral histories were recorded in the late 1970s, they reflect the concerns of those times rather than those of today and reveal today a subtext of the 1970s as much as they inform about the 1930s.
The Interview: A Safe Place
Goldner coconducted nineteen interviews with BowersFootnote 10 (with the prominent figures of Thomas Brockway, Martha Hill, Gertrude Shurr, Marian Van Tuyl Campbell), while Bowers did the vast majority by herself. Martha Hill was, along with Bowers and Goldner, also actively involved in the interviews with Ben Belitt and Barbara Morgan. Sometimes there were four people involved in the interviews, when in addition to the two interviewers, the interviewees’ husbands also took part: for example, Sophie Maslow's husband Ben-Max Blatt, and Sidney Peterson, Bernice Van Gelder Peterson's husband.
At first glance, this collection of interviews seems to be more a project by the school, being tightly controlled by the school's executives and teachers. The longest interviews are those with the executives (Martha Hill with three interviews running to 146 pages) or teachers (Norman and Ruth Lloyd, running to 218 pages). In keeping with the school hierarchy, with Hill as the director, there is, at times, the replication of “vertical teaching,” that is, a power hierarchy, when she replied to Bowers's questions. Even though Goldner and Bowers were from the dance world, they had not taken part in the summer school personally, and on occasions Hill addressed them in a tone that suggests she considered them newcomers.
Hill was the project leader and controlled not only the list of potential interviewees but also how certain aspects of the workings of the summer school should be understood. In her own interview, Hill did not hesitate to say to Bowers, as the representative of a whole new generation, “You people don't realize that now” (Hill interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Hill1979, 98); she tried to give the right tone to the interviewers’ actions saying, “No—you make it much more formal, Terry” (93). While maintaining the necessary distance from her witnesses, Theresa Bowers occasionally shared her ambivalent frustration with Hill with other interviewees such as Bessie Schönberg: “Well, she said some things to me that … if anybody else had said them, I would be hurt or insulted or whatever. She has a way of delivering a line. Like: ‘I'm too busy to talk to you right now.’ She has a way of doing it so that it's okay” (stated in Schönberg interview by Bowers Reference Schönberg1979, 20). These oral histories are also archives of what was not supposed to go on record and are documents of the interviewers’ dealing with “the supervisor,” giving the reader access to the project from their perspective, in which the difficulties and occasional tensions were not hidden but were a part of the working process that accompanies such a vast undertaking.
The method based on the semidirective interview used at the time in specialized interviewing is part of the tradition of the Columbia Oral History Research Office. Life story is privileged and elicited with tact and patience; the interviewers let the dancers talk at length about their life before Bennington. The interviewers began with the safe “Can we start by your giving me a thumbnail sketch of how you first began to be involved in dancing?”. Then they moved on to ask “Who were your first teachers?”, and then they introduced the central topic, tracing the beginning of the adventure, “Can you tell me, how did you get to know Bennington?”. Interviewers were very careful about how they worded any questions about the challenges of working among artists with big egos, about racial issues, and about self-criticism. From today's perspective, the lack of more direct questions clearly represents one of the shortcomings of the project. It would have been beneficial to know Hill's as well as other participants’ opinion on integration and male as well as female dancers’ views on same-sex intimacy at the summer school, among other issues. Beginnings of answers to such questions sneaked into very few interviews through half-words and hesitations, with interviewees sometimes checking if they were off the record. Most important, the interviewers’ priority was creating a safe place for their narrators. Bowers reassured them that they could correct and change the transcript afterward, in compliance with the Columbia Oral History Research Office's methodology of the 1970s.
Bernice Van Gelder Peterson's two pages, written as a complement to her transcript, are most striking: appalled by the guardedness and the impression of being namby-pamby that she gave of herself in the interview with Bowers, she wrote six months later that she could not withdraw her statements but felt the need to add to what she had said regarding her feelings about the Bennington experience (Van Gelder Peterson, additional notes to the interview by Theresa Bowers, Reference Van Gelder Peterson1979b, 1). As a member of Doris Humphrey's auxiliary group, Peterson was aware that she was having a new experience in dance and in choreography while a student at Bennington. However, she raised the issue of the dancers’ fragility in the difficult atmosphere created in the working out of a piece and described the feeling of only existing as a cog in the machine. She went as far as saying, “It became for me no dance experience at all, but a severe endurance test” (1). She concluded her statement by giving a delightful portrait of Charles Weidman's rehearsal atmosphere, describing him as the antithesis of Humphrey, “a drill sergeant” (2).
Not only did Peterson go out of her way to provide more information to the project, but she was also a fearless witness who defied the idea of unanimous testimonies that perpetuate the greatness of Bennington and the Big Four without any sort of critical distance. It is in answers such as these that the importance of these oral histories is found. Both Bowers and Goldner had the ability to put their interviewees at ease and create an atmosphere of trust. The narrators were reassured with the breadth of knowledge that the researchers seemed to have about the summer school and did not hesitate to say, “You know your Bennington—real good [sic]” (Moore Read interview by Bowers Reference Moore Read1979, 34). Indeed, the interviewees were clearly studying the interviewers who “studied” them. In “What Makes Oral History Different,” Alessandro Portelli ([1979] Reference Portelli, Perks and Thomson2003, 71) draws our attention to the fact that it is only in this collaborative and cooperative spirit that a project can find success.
Along with the presence of additional written documents with reformulated and more precise descriptions accessible to the public, another peculiarity of this collection is the fact that today only the transcripts of the oral histories are available to scholars. Yet, the original aim of this project, according to the archival documents, was to create a record of voices. What was supposed to be the heart of the project, the primary source material that is the voice, above all the tapes, is unavailable. With the exception of Jane Dudley's recording, which exists on a small tape and can be listened to with a tape recorder, the remaining sixty-nine interviews are unavailable for listening because they were recorded on reel-to-reel. The Columbia Centre for Oral History no longer has a functioning reel-to-reel player and has been relying on grants and the kindness of patrons to digitize the remaining reel-to-reels in its collection.Footnote 11 A researcher wishing to listen to the recorded voice and analyze the nonverbal communication that such a source offers would need approximately $5,520 to enter this costly and time-consuming process.
All ingredients for a successful project seemed to be in place in 1978 when the first interviews began: the qualified interviewers and researchers, the grant that was allocated from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the endorsement of the Bennington College and Martha Graham and, most important, the numerous witnesses willing to actively contribute to the collection of the oral histories. However, after two years of work, the book was never published for the reasons I suggest below.
According to a few dozen letters and memos held in the Columbia Center for Oral History Archives and dating back as far as December 1976, this project was from the very beginning closely linked to Sali Ann Kriegsman's research that was to become the book entitled Modern Dance in America: The Bennington Years, published by G. K. Hall in Reference Kriegsman1981. When a researcher looks for the information on Goldner's book project, references to Kriegsman constantly come up, which suggests a competition that started very early on.
Kriegsman had commenced her project as far back as 1967, as she explained in her preface detailing the stages of her long research for the book. Kriegsman's preface casts a light on what it was like to undertake such a project in the late 1960s, a project that would run for more than fourteen years and have numerous successes and difficulties. Between 1976 and 1978, Kriegsman conducted thirty-six interviews, and the ones quoted extensively in her book are the interviews with Merce Cunningham, Bessie Schönberg, Eric Hawkins, and Alwin Nikolais.Footnote 12 For years, Kriegsman's meticulous documentary history of the School of the Dance from 1934 to 1942 remained the only one on Bennington. However, it was written without the blessing of Bennington College or of Martha Hill and without the support of Martha Graham, who refused to grant Kriegsman an interview. Hill was protecting her own project, and this is the reason why the oral histories were closed to the public during that time. Today, however, thirty-eight years after the beginning of the Oral History Project and after the death of Helen Alkire in 2015, the last living interviewee, these oral histories are all open to researchers.Footnote 13
While this story remains quite complex, what the available documents at the Columbia Center for Oral History Archives tell us, is the following: a couple of articles in the press at that time provide a glimpse into the lively debates surrounding the two projects (The Washington Star 1979; The Washington Post 1979) and the fight over Bennington, over having both of these projects carried out simultaneously. Ultimately, the projects sparked an ongoing debate on ownership of dance history from the insider's or outsider's point of view. It seems that a collegial and comradely consensus at this particular time was not an option in spite of the many efforts made inside and outside the dance field. This resulted in a freeze of funds instituted by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the eventual abandonment of the Columbia project, which left Martha Hill without the book.
The Summer School as a Microsociety
For analyzing and understanding the summer school, the writings of the French dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz and the historian Isabelle Launay offer particularly valuable insights. In their book on contemporary dance practice, the authors analyze the concept of group spirit and state ([2002] Reference Charmatz and Launay2011, 182) that contemporary dance produces something that can be likened to secret societies, a form of human gathering that is the offshoot of a particular relationship to the body and a particular mode of exchange. The group work that takes place within the company or a school is also linked to a whole lifestyle. In some ways, these gatherings could be described as diverse, more or less unstable “tribes” that come about through a specific relationship to the body that sometimes goes hand in hand with a particular diet, particular therapeutic practices, and a particular economy, even perhaps with a particular form of eroticism, specific modes of exchange in certain places, discursive forms, beliefs, and values.
Groups and schools, microsocieties such as Denishawn, Monte Verità School of Art, and the Laban Workshop among many others, all seemed to have a life project that needed to be established to allow an artistic project to develop. As a microsociety, the Bennington Summer School was a place for creation and residency, a living space that grew out of society as a whole but was in tension with it rather than just removed from it. Following Charmatz and Launay's analysis ([2002] Reference Charmatz and Launay2011, 183), the summer school provided students and artists the opportunity to select a new family, a new school, a new enterprise, instead of, or in the absence of, preexisting ties.
According to Martha Hill, what the professional artists needed was to get away from all the demands of the city, to have a group that was well-fed, well-housed, and available twenty-four hours a day to create work for the next season. In addition, what made the school invaluable was the fact that the school would provide them a music composer to compose a new work, a costume designer to design costumes and have the costumes made there on campus (Hill interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Hill1979, 89–90). This was a state of mind that Anna Sokolow, a Fellow in 1937, referred to as invaluable freedom “to work whenever we wanted to, and do whatever we wanted.” (Sokolow interview by Bowers Reference Sokolow1978, 28). It was not the move from the city to the countryside that produced this state of mind for Sokolow (22), but rather the luxury of a mental space in which to create work: “For us it was marvelous, because most of us were very poor, and to have this sort of atmosphere was very generous and very conducive to work” (11).
In this microsociety, dancers tended to want to state clearly in their replies where they stood in relation to other people. “I was the periphery people,” said Jane Eastham, and continued, “I really enjoyed the things that were going to be part of me as a teacher rather than the dance itself” (Eastham interview by Bowers Reference Eastham1979, 20). Or Hermine Sauthoff Davidson, replying to Bowers’ question about identifying the insiders, “I never considered myself an insider because, well, I'd left you see” (Sauthoff Davidson interview by Bowers Reference Sauthoff Davidson1979, 61). A central figure like Martha Hill said of herself that she was “very suspect” because she had been with the Martha Graham Dance Company and also because she came from a ballet background, which was so very suspect in the eyes of the modern dance people, especially those who were not Graham aficionados. This was the time when one gave one's allegiance to a single group. Hill had to build trust with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, whom she did not know intimately, only professionally, and they did not know how much they could trust her (Hill interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Hill1979, 78). Hill quickly gained their trust, and it was taken as a matter of course that Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, Doris Humphrey, and Hanya Holm were a complement for the school. In aesthetic terms, they all had one thing in common: having one single aim for their dancing (Hill interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Hill1979, 79–80), a definite, developed body of codified technique.Footnote 14
Different Experiences: Physical Education Teachers Versus Professional Dancers
However, what separated the participants most clearly throughout the interviews can be found in the narratives of the teachers who came to the summer school from various physical education departments around the country and who would teach dance after Bennington. “I leaned toward the people who were already teaching dance in physical education departments because that was what I was going to do” (Moore Read interview by Bowers Reference Moore Read1979, 16), said Claudia Moore Read. From the very beginning these narratives offer a distinct experience. A graduate in physical education from the North Carolina College for Women, Moore Read was one of the youngest students in 1934. She recalled arriving for her first summer in Bennington:
I get there and, as I say, very tall, a little pudgy, southern, quiet, wouldn't believe it now but very shy—like Johnny Carson, very shy—and suddenly put down in amongst these city slickers, sophisticated, long-haired. They didn't wear jeans, but the clothes were typical of what would have been the jeans. … . Bohemian. … . Dirty. Dirty, according to southern standards. You see—I hate to say these things, especially on tape because it's going down in history, but if you understand, and if you come from the South where it's so hot and so muggy, one bath a day is not enough; it takes two sometimes, and of course your clothes are worn three hours or four hours and washed. And here I am with all these city folks and that's just different. (10–11)
The class distinction went beyond the obvious difference between the New England girls and the Southern girls. Moore Read's position as an outsider coming from the physical education world rather than dance shifted with time and largely thanks to Hill who knew this milieu particularly well and who developed a specific course to introduce them to different techniques and shield them from injuries. As Moore Read stated:
I later went back to Bennington so many times that I felt like I owned the place or belonged to it or something, but anyway that first summer … I was the only one fresh out of college, with a job to teach modern dance and had never had any, and I felt very much like a fish out of water, I really did, so I went to class, I kept my trap shut; I just listened. We had, of course, the first week of Martha Hill. Then we had a week with Martha Graham, and a week with Doris Humphrey, a week with Charles Weidman, and a week with Hanya Holm, and the sixth week you ended with Martha Hill who kind of pulled things together. (11–12)
Hill's role with the physical education teachers was indeed crucial. As Janet Mansfield Soares points out, it was Martha Hill's “Techniques” course on teaching methods designed to unify and “hold the school together” that was of great importance and much needed (2009, 55). Hill's prolific knowledge of both the dance techniques and pedagogy enabled her to be a facilitator and interpreter between the frequently metaphorical language used by the Big Four that sounded impenetrable to the physical education teachers who needed a more physiological, anatomical, and analytical perspective.
Moore Read describes Hill's course as a “safety valve” that gave them “a good scientific, anatomical warm-up. … . If we had been thrown—people like me—into Martha Graham the first week, the muscles would have been in a state of constant contraction and charley horses and we'd [sic] have had sick children on their hands, really” (Moore Read interview by Bowers Reference Moore Read1979, 30).
With great perseverance, what Moore Read excelled at during her full-time sessions at the summer school was the lessons in Dalcroze eurhythmics with Greg Tucker which gave her “some confidence” because she was “no good in the technique classes” (14). This training in “rhythmic acuity” was the very concrete material that Moore Read recalled being able to take back with her and use all the rest of her professional life: “It was beating your arms in time to a beat and doing a different rhythm with your feet. … You beat 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 with your arms, or 6/8, and he played a pattern on the piano and you came in a measure behind. It was the best training I have ever had” (32). Hanya Holm's technique complimented Moore Read's background and provided useful directions for her future lesson plans.
Of Graham, Humphrey, and Holm, Moore Read liked Holm's class best “because of its educational value. Hanya's work was solidly grounded in German gymnastics, coming from Mary Wigman” (25). How challenging it must have been for the physical education teachers to attend the summer school and to continue learning under the immense pressure of having to teach afterward the very techniques they were just starting to familiarize themselves with. Moore Read explained that at the end of the sessions, Mary Jo Shelly had a community meeting.
We all sat around and they said: “All right, now, you've been here, what are your thoughts?” And me, I'm just sitting there listening not saying a word and finally—I don't know if it was Mary Jo or Martha Hill—they said. “All right, Claudia, you're the only one here who just got out of college having never had any modern dance and you're going to teach it. Now what are you going to do?” I said, “Well, I'll tell you in about six months. I really don't know.” I had no idea what I was going to do. I had copious notes as all dance teachers have done for years is write everything down. No notation to use, just your hands and gymnastics’ symbols and stuff. And I went out to Nebraska. (24–25)
After the summer school, Moore Read went on to teach for the next forty years. Looking back at her time at the school, she praised the variety of dance styles she encountered, the overall view it gave her, and the possibility to pick the style she wanted (154).
Fostering the Links with the Physical Education Teachers
Much older than Moore Read, Ruth Murray was also a physical education teacher. She graduated from Detroit Normal School and studied with Gertrude Colby and Margaret H'Doubler in the 1920s. Together with five other colleagues from Detroit, she came to the summer school in 1934. Her oral history introduces the reader to that first summer with a more nuanced account. Rather than feeling as the outsider, she saw the other participants, the dancers, as curious creatures:
One of the things about that summer that some of us found very strange, (chuckles) when you came into any class, the girls that were “in”—if you know what I mean—would be down on the floor doing their stretches and doing the Graham technique. As soon as they came in they would be there, just working so hard. And the rest of us were used to—oh—relaxing on the floor and listening to music in Miss H'Doubler's classes, or working on our little dances in Colby's classes, or just socializing when you came into class as you'd stand around. … In fact we thought they were quite eager beavers, you know (laughter). But we soon learned that if we wanted to get any place with Graham technique we would have to spend all the extra time getting it in our muscles, stretching our muscles. (Murray interview with Bowers Reference Murray1979, 32–33)
This shift in perception was also due to the fact that Murray was in her thirties and knew Hill and Shelly from the professional circuit and considered them as peers and was much more experienced than the younger colleagues such as Moore Read. In spite of this observation, however, Murray also insisted on the fact that physical education teachers worked a lot and, while some may well initially have misread the summer school flyers as inviting them to a lovely vacation site, there was no time for swimming or golfing for that group.
On the other hand, Murray pointed out Louis Horst's general rejection of the teachers who were thought of in those days as “old maids and kind of spinsterish” (43). She explained that Horst made it clear that he preferred teaching the artists. However, Murray's perception shifted; with the benefit of distance and humor, she noted that he eventually became a beloved teacher. Murray agreed with Theodora Wiesner, present at this interview, that in spite of all the criticism Horst “loved his summers with those gals … old maids (laughs)” (46).
More important, Murray, who was active with the Physical Education Association dance section that she established with Dorothy LaSalle and Mary O'Donnell, emphasized the legacy of the physical education teachers at Bennington in her interview:
All of these teachers in the colleges around the country, having had this experience, having met Martha, having seen some of the things that her group could do, and that Humphrey-Weidman did, and Hanya Holm did, went back to their colleges and just pestered everybody until they brought them on campus to perform. That's what caused what they call the “gymnasium circuit” which kept these companies going financially during the thirties, and that came directly out of Bennington; it really did. … That's where all the college teachers got inspired with the modern dance “virus” (laughs) and either got terribly involved with Martha and what Martha was doing or, over on the other side, in love with the Humphrey-Weidman work and so on—and Hanya. Hanya toured a group around for a long time. We brought her to Detroit. (65)
Having developed from Horst's “rejects” to being instrumental in supporting professional modern dance through the “gymnasium circuit,” the physical education teachers in the student body were of great importance for Hill and Shelly because the teachers were the ones who disseminated the methods of the Big Four across the country. Indeed, two thirds of the student body in the first summer school of 1934 were physical education teachers (thirty-five college and university teachers and twenty-two high-school teachers, according to the Bennington College archival documents).Footnote 15
Like Murray, the physical education teachers (from high-schools, colleges, and universities) had considerable movement experience having worked with Margaret H'Doubler in Wisconsin or Gertrude Colby at Columbia, and therefore they did have a dance foundation. What they did not have was an introduction to the Graham or Humphrey technique because these artists were in New York while the physical education teachers were scattered all over the country (Murray interview by Bowers Reference Murray1979, 42). Coming to the summer school was a necessity to get that training in one centralized place. In response to the question on how they incorporated Graham's or Humphrey's teaching into their own, Murray said:
I must confess that I used Martha Hill's technique combined with my own at first. Then I took Martha Graham's June course and the next year I taught pure Graham, early Graham, practically, as far as technique was concerned. But then I adapted both with other movement patterns I had found successful and built my own technique. I didn't have enough of Doris’ work to say that there was very much of Doris’. Well, yes, yes, the falls, her falls. Falls were new; a new thing in dance. And Martha used them and Doris used them tremendously. (96–97)
Steeped in the dance culture, teachers such as Moore Read and Murray went out to teach for the rest of their professional lives. The oral histories suggest that being part of the “outsiders” provided the physical education teachers with a “shield” from the pressure the professional dancers experienced.
Halfway through the interview with Murray, a question that Bowers asked introduced the topic of loyalty to Graham and Humphrey-Weidman. While this phenomenon was nothing new, the way the oral histories were composed suggests, interestingly, a correlation for Bowers between the ease of certain techniques for certain bodies with allegiance and loyalty:
Bowers: You said that you're partial to the Graham technique and that Doris had been your first modern teacher. Did you find that your body felt more comfortable with one or the other techniques, and did most people kind of fall into one or the other of the triumvirate?
Murray: In the first place—you probably will hear this and you probably know it—there began to be, after the first summer, controversy. Well not controversy exactly, but people who were very loyal to Graham: anything Graham did was perfect and fine and wonderful; and others who felt the same way about Doris and Charles. I think one could say that the people that were “Grahamites” (laughter)—don't use that word because I'm just making it up now—but those people that were loyal to Martha Graham were aggressively loyal; and those perhaps not so strongly involved on the other hand … I don't remember anybody, or a very few people, that felt that Hanya was “the” person. … She was sort of out of the controversy, if you want to call it that. The two contrasting groups—as far as loyalty was concerned—were those students that felt that Martha was queen (laughs) and those that the Humphrey-Weidman approach appealed more to. (67a–68)
According to Murray, this “sense of aggressive involvement” was more true of the professional dancers and assistants than of the Big Four themselves. Indeed, the dancers’ experiences were very different from those of the teachers. Becoming a professional dancer through the Bennington Summer School brought with it a great deal of pressure.
Clashes of Sensibilities
What is striking about the interviews is the way dancers were asked to take a clear stance and, in a way, to repeat the Big Four “camps”, take sides, declare allegiance. The collection in a sense replicates the school. It seems difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a dancer as a kind of an amalgam or fusion of different approaches as suggested in The Plan:
The purposes of the School and the proposed means of accomplishing them were to offer a program of dance study which should constitute a non-partisan cross-section of significant contemporary trends and which should extend to those related aspects of the dance, such as music, which would reveal the whole structure of the art. The expected outcome of this program of study was that the individual student would, on the basis of a comprehensive survey of the art, be in a position to formulate for herself a well-founded point of view for criticism of her own and others’ work in the dance. (Hill and Shelly Reference Hill and Shelly1934 October, 1)
The mission statement emphasized a progressive approach to education that placed the individual student, not yet called “the dancer,” at the center of the school. At the same time, the school sought to train a well-rounded artist, while the figure of the teacher was secondary. However, the oral histories seem to offer a different perspective on the Bennington Summer School.
Jean Erdman, who was in the Martha Graham Company, explained in her oral history how each of the Big Four had a very distinct pedagogy and that she was fascinated with all of them (Erdman interview by Bowers Reference Erdman1979, 33). At the same time, however, she recalled being duty-bound not to like Humphrey-Weidman's rhythmic accent as well as the fall and recovery material or Hanya's curves and circles “too much” (35). The ambiguity of Hill's plan seems all the more visible now. What did it mean to create a “point of view” for a student in these conditions? Did a student really have a choice amidst these power struggles, and who really decided on a point of view if everything was set from the start? As Erdman went on to say:
Everybody who was in one camp was tearing down everybody in the other camp. It's too bad but anytime when one of us would get too admiring of any of the other camps, we'd hear something negative. So the negative things about the German school were this total relaxation principle and this philosophical formalism. (38)
The dancing body had no choice but to stand firmly behind one person, one camp; there was no real possibility of experimenting, of losing one's balance and moving into a different posture that had been seen in a class that one was not meant to peek in at. This rigidity at the beginning was probably necessary in the early stages of coding technique development. And yet, surprisingly, when looking at the footageFootnote 16 of technique demonstrations by each of the “camps” filmed in the open air by Doris Isabelle Ewing in the summer session of Reference Ewing1938, during which Holm, Graham, Weidman, and Humphrey were all in residence for the full season, the viewer is struck by the similarities in the quality of movement in their approaches, rather than by the differences.
Other participants shared at length their critical views on different “camps” and throughout the collection, the interviewers paid great attention to these narratives. Ray Green, who composed American Document for Graham, explained (Green interview by Bowers Reference Green1979, 43) how he was always alert because fraternization with anybody from Humphrey-Weidman or with Holm was frowned upon; the sense of competition was very intense, making this a hallmark of Bennington. Others, such as Bird Villard, went further and said that one was disloyal just by peeking into somebody else's class (interview by Bowers and Goldner 1979, 62). This was clearly the exact opposite of The Plan and its mission statement that sought to offer students a panorama so that they could then develop their own critical point of view. What students experienced was not “point of view,” a technique panorama, a place from which to see all that dance could be, in the best possible way; rather, it was more of a tunnel vision, focused on a single way of doing things.
This vision was further reinforced by the sensation of a relationship between a certain body type and the group the dancer belonged to. Together with the attitude of “grin and bear it,” there were bodily considerations behind the choice of this or that class that come across very strongly in the oral histories. There is the idea of the optimal correspondence between a body type and a given choreographer/teacher. For Martha Wilcox, who danced with Holm, for example, the explanation why she could not execute Graham technique was her very small, tight pelvis and tight muscles (Wilcox interview by Bowers Reference Wilcox1979, 26). Bernice Van Gelder Peterson went as far as saying that Humphrey (and she was not the only one) inflicted her anatomy on the dancers, who had to be long-legged and willowy like Louise Kloepper, for instance (Van Gelder Peterson interview by Bowers Reference Van Gelder Peterson1979a, 83–85).
Helen Priest Rogers recalled that it was a small body that was the best for any type of dance, that could embrace all the techniques, a body such as Marjorie Mazia's, who “had one of the most beautiful little dancer bodies … small, tight-knit, she was slight. But everything she did seemed so effortless because she was so together” (Priest Rogers interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Priest Rogers1979, 45). This was in contrast to the people who were “big and loose-jointed” who had trouble in holding the body together in dance (45).
If this was something students realized at the time, it would mean that predetermination according to body shape contributed to an idea that was the opposite of the experience of the diversity of techniques and different aesthetics at the school. Since this was recalled from a forty-year distance at the time of the oral histories, of course it is more difficult to come to definite conclusions. What is clear is that the idea of having a two-week class with one teacher and then with another, as stated in The Plan, in order to experience different ways of moving and using one's body, in other words, the experience of a diversity of techniques, remained very limited, as is evident by observing how the students regarded their own bodies. It was made even more limited by the unwritten obligation to choose allegiances. With this idea of taking a stance and identifying with the group, the oral histories raise another important aspect of the daily functioning of this microsociety, as discussed below.
Archives of the Senses: Devotion, Leisure, Meals, and Moments of Pleasure and Rest
The summer school, as part of the progressive Bennington College for Women, which opened in 1932 during the Depression, had among its students newly married women, such as Sophie Maslow, Jane Dudley, and Jean Erdman. However, there was a code of conduct that was more or less respected, whereby the students could not have their husbands stay over.Footnote 17 “Martha [Graham] knew” (Green interview by Bowers Reference Green1979, 38) that this rule was indeed broken, is a sentence that came up regularly. The infantilization of young women as well as de-eroticization seemed to be a prerequisite for a devoted group in this boarding school setting. Erdman reported that Martha [Graham] was worried about the concentration and commitment of the students. Students should not have had any emotional commitments other than the commitment to dance (Erdman interview by Bowers Reference Erdman1979, 44).
Not only were the students cut off (loosely for some, depending on the relationship they had with their choreographer/teacher) from their nearest and dearest, they were also faced with a different daily routine. The summer school had no real timetable. Even if dancers recalled a tight schedule, time was fluid, with endless days but also endless nights. Bennington students lived in a place where day and night were interchangeable. There were rehearsals at any time, and dancers were up at two o'clock in the morning to work, as Eve Gentry explains:
We were completely devoted. We would have gone to rehearsal any day, night, hour, that Hanya needed us. We would rehearse as long as she wanted us. We never said, “Are we going to be paid or aren't we going to be paid?” or “I have a headache” or “‘My toe hurts.” We just worked. We just gave. And of course, because of that, we got something that you don't get unless you are completely devoted. (Gentry interview by Bowers Reference Gentry1979, 71–72)
In this, as it turns out, very classic vision of students’ devotion and submission of body and soul to the teacher, which is so reminiscent of the academic ballet structure and the relationship between the master-teacher and the disciple, there was little space for bodies that would get more from working less. The hunger for dance went hand in hand with descriptions of strenuous training. One of the youngest students, Natalie Harris Wheatley, wrote to her parents, “I've been terribly busy these last few days. It's really beginning to get a hold of me so that every spare minute I have to lie down and get steady again. I sort of load up on aspirin, dash some cold water on my face, and start in again. I guess it must be the night rehearsals because they're the hardest” (Harris Wheatley interview by Bowers Reference Harris Wheatley1979, 21–22).
The interviewer did not add the closing quotation marks and the reader is suddenly lost in a fog of voices. Was it Harris Wheatley in Reference Harris Wheatley1979 commenting or Harris Wheatley's voice from her 1930s letter? This unique interview reveals another archive to the reader: correspondence read out loud that she sent home from Bennington. Bowers's interview shifted here into a conversation around this written document.
Leisure—or rather the absence of it—comes across in the words of many of the dancers. Some knew that they would not pursue a professional career in dance: for example, Jane Eastham enjoyed the six weeks for what they would bring to her teaching career and also for all the time she was able to spend not dancing but instead discovering the mountains and hiking (stated in Eastham interview with Bowers Reference Eastham1979, 20–21). For everyone else, however, free time was a luxury. Occasionally, Sophie Maslow said (Maslow interview by Bowers Reference Maslow1979, 144), “We'd have a free day … we'd go for rides in the country, and we occasionally went swimming at Lake Parran though not too often. The days were pretty full.” For Natalie Disston Terrell (Disston Terrell interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Disston Terrell1979, 35–36), there were moments of relaxation, there are pictures of people out on the grass after lunch, lying about before going to class, but she insisted that Bennington was not an easy-going place because people were working too hard.
In their compelling chapter on dance training, Boris Charmatz and Isabelle Launay ([2002] Reference Charmatz and Launay2011, 89) argue that the dancing body may also benefit from periods of not working. In fact, Hill had advertised the summer school as a vacation setting in the heart of Vermont. However, in the end, the setting was a mere backdrop, rather than the opportunity to learn outside of the studio. For example, Helen Priest Rogers recalled Graham giving them “great admonitions about not having any other kind of activity. Other members of the school could go out on the Commons and play baseball and they could go swimming and they could play tennis and they could do other things; but we were told no, not anything else, just our classes, because she didn't want any sprains from anything, like sports activities” (Priest Rogers interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Priest Rogers1979, 18–19). Thinking ahead of the performance, Graham also warned them not to go out in the woods, nature was seen as potentially dangerous, distracting, and poisonous (19). As in any traditional class setting, the learning took place inside the studio.
If narratives abound in the details relating to the way the dancers’ bodies and minds suffered and were under extreme pressure, dedicated as they were to the group and to the teacher, there are also long passages about, and immense importance given to, moments of pleasure, especially through recollections of meals. Beyond the dimension of pleasure, this is testimony once again to the relationship to the dancing body. In an endeavor to understand daily life at the school, Bowers consistently asked about free time, meals taken in the group, and the social aspects of eating together. The exactness of details about glorious food and “Vermont maple syrup on top of huge pancakes in the morning which we always ate with great relish” (Nikolais interview by Bowers Reference Nikolais1979, 45), and infallible memory when it came to describing it, is fascinating. The reader is drawn into these archives of sensuality and, almost literally, invited to taste the Bennington “hot melba toast and kippered herring” (Eastham interview by Bowers Reference Eastham1979, 21). Meals were the parentheses between long hours of dancing. They also constituted an enchanted time, contrasting in some sense with the hardship of New York and its lack of food and livelihood in the Depression years—a theme that was vividly present in the histories.
Following on from enchanted time and moments of rest and respite, the oral histories can surprise the reader with descriptions relating to the rehearsals of Panorama. Goldner and Bowers systematically asked the participants for details about choreographic pieces created and presented at Bennington, particularly the 1935 Panorama. It is striking that when the dancers were asked what they remembered from that experience, they recalled very little to begin with, but when they did, it was the people rather than the movements or the intention of the piece that they talked about. For one of the dancers in Panorama, Dorothy Bird Villard, it was the presence of Muriel Stuart that came to mind, not for her dancing but rather because she had a special relationship with Martha Graham.
The group dynamics seemed to overshadow the dancing. Aside from relentless counting, a lot of knee work and traveling in and out, what Dorothy Bird Villard remembered is the fact that Muriel Stewart was not like the rest of them: having a private rapport with Martha, “She was allowed to laugh” (Bird Villard interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Bird Villard1979, 10). Or, in response to Bowers’ statement about Panorama “being done twice and happily left at Bennington” (Maslow interview by Bowers Reference Maslow1979, 138), Sophie Maslow speculated:
First of all, Panorama had a lot of people in it who were not in the company, additional people from the student body, which would have made it not practical to do in New York. Whether it was that, I don't know. I don't think Panorama was as good a dance: that's basically probably what it was. (138–39)
While it would have been interesting to hear the participants’ views on the reconstruction of Panorama years later,Footnote 18 the focus of this particular analysis lies in the shift of perception that these rememberings offer.
Oral histories that were meant to recover the past move toward what surrounds the choreographic creation, and at first glance this removes the reader from Panorama even further. The memory of the past on which the narrative of Panorama was constructed seems to be about everything except what constitutes the work: dancing. Claire Strauss Miller recalled, while still in school in 1935 giving all her savings (five hundred dollars) to Martha Graham for the Calder mobile she used in the choreography. She recalled Graham hardly thanking her for it, but also recalled receiving from her a little Navajo silver ornament and an autographed photo that she still cherished (Strauss Miller interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Strauss Miller1979, 15–16). Marian Van Tuyl Campbell, who was in Panorama, did not remember anything about it beyond the difficult counting and long rehearsals, there being hordes of dancers and the heavy costumes (Van Tuyl Campbell interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Van Tuyl Campbell1979, 48–50).
However, reading Kathleen Slagle Partlon's recollections, the work involved in dancing and rehearsals such as those for Panorama acquire another meaning. She evoked the mobiles hanging from the studio ceiling: “And when we'd been working very hard and would lie down and take a few minutes to lie on our back and rest we could look up at them, and it was very restful” (Slagle Partlon interview by Bowers Reference Slagle Partlon1979, 35). Along the same lines, Helen Priest Rogers continued reminiscing, “We would be rehearsing for a while and then she would stop us and have time to think and be quiet. We'd all lie on the floor with our legs sticking up along the wall to rest our feet and change the circulation” (Priest Rogers interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Priest Rogers1979, 19).
These are the only testimonies verging on a description of a resting body that I could find. In opposition to the dominant narrative of constant intensity in Graham's work, the experience of rehearsing Panorama can be seen as an experience of rest, a certain quality of respite. Essential in the work of dance yet rarely verbalized in such a way, moments of rest are an interesting response in the context of trying to retrieve as much information as possible of a choreographic work.
The Summer School: An Experience of Diversity of Techniques and Aesthetic Approaches?
Returning to the theme of devotion, these oral histories raise another important question, that of a group spirit, of a collective adventure that characterized a number of progressive educational and artistic projects in the 1930s. Was there time and space for collaboration between choreographers? If we look again at the The Plan of the School, we read:
The opportunity for the experience represented by this program has previously been available only by means of many separate contacts with persons and places of work and under conditions which reduced the desirable effects of drawing comparisons and seeing relationships. The integration possible in a single enterprise such as the Bennington School of the Dance, was, therefore, its primary purpose. For this purpose the curriculum was definitely planned to include the most important and strongly contrasting points of view on modern dance in all its aspects, with specific provision for revealing common elements and emphasizing relationships. For the presentation of this curriculum, the School brought together in its faculty all of the recognized leaders in the field. (Hill and Shelly Reference Hill and Shelly1934 October, 1).
However, as has already been established throughout the interviews, what is striking is the demand for the students to take sides. This sort of restaging of the Big Four “camps” matched the impossibility of collaboration between the choreographers. How different would it have been to have had a paragraph in The Plan stating, for example, “one week of collaborative choreographic work” and even, to be overly idealistic, “a collective production by all the choreographers”? Such an experience for the students as well as the choreographers could have contributed hugely to the experimental side of the modern dance experience.
If mechanical and anatomical predetermination won over aesthetic choices and a given body morphology made a dancer more or less suitable for one or the other aesthetic battalion, this leads to another issue: Bennington Summer School as an experience of otherness, of the movement of the other.
According to Charmatz and Launay ([2002] Reference Charmatz and Launay2011, 94), a fundamental characteristic of a modern school is the way it explicates its aesthetic project. How, then, did these predominantly anatomical considerations and the lack of recollections in the oral histories about the forces underlying the aesthetic projects of each teacher contribute to the experiment of modernity that Hill set out in The Plan? Dancers did not venture as far as analyzing the different choreographic productions of which they were part at Bennington because the interviewers did not necessarily lead them to elaborate on this and also because they were preoccupied with other things. Contributions by “The Absent Four” would clearly have helped to understand this better as well as understand the strength of aesthetic frontiers and their inability or unwillingness to collaborate with one another.Footnote 19
Lastly, another fundamental aspect of the modern school lies equally in its ethical project. The question of the absence of African-American dancers permeates the interviews though the interviewers did not raise direct questions on this subject. The summer school consisted primarily of white, middle-class, young women. In the oral history of Francis Fergusson, who was the head of the drama department at Bennington and Graham's collaborator, he states that there was no racial problem at Bennington, “No, because we had no negro problem anyway. There were no negroes around” (Fergusson interview by Bowers Reference Fergusson1979, 54). However, there were African-American dancers among the attendees. Claire Strauss Miller recalled the summer of 1938 and being excited to meet Florence Warwick, the only other modern dance teacher from Atlanta. She shared with the interviewer how their friendship caused all kinds of problems back home in Atlanta, as Warwick was a black girl from Spelman College. Strauss Miller could not remember who Warwick had trained with but said, “She wasn't a Graham person” and remembered her being involved in a different sort of work back home, in large productions put on at college level (Strauss Miller interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Strauss Miller1979, 25–26).
According to Susan Manning (Reference Manning2004, 8), Florence Warwick and also Charles Williams and Charlotte Moten Kennedy attended Bennington. Furthermore, Manning speculates on Warwick's silence about her Bennington experience in contrast to her fellow students, who used it as a credential; her presence caused a minor scandal at the school. While Florence Warwick is indeed listed in the archival documents pertaining to the year 1938 as a dancer in Hanya Holm's Trend, paradoxically, after reading over 5,000 pages of these oral histories, the Dance Oral History Project of the Bennington Summer School does not offer a clear picture of who the African-American dancers were, when they were there, what their artistic contribution was, or what Martha Hill's and Mary Jo Shelly's position on integration was at the time. Even if there is a note in the archive listing the students, according to which Bowers did reach out to Florence Warwick, to whom some interviewees refer as a “passing black dancer” (Reyher Jackson interview by Bowers and Goldner Reference Reyher Jackson1979, 45), Bowers did not get to interview her, and from the archival documents available, it is not clear why this was the case. In the period 1978–1979 this did not seem to be a priority for the project and clearly represents one of its limits from the perspective of defying the dominant monolithic vision of Bennington.
At a time when this essay is written, the Columbia Centre for Oral History has still not undertaken the digitalization of the collection. Access to the actual voice and informative nonverbal communication that would allow to challenge this double silence around Warwick's passage at the summer school as well as around Warwick's silence of her own experience as a dancer and choreographer,Footnote 20 was not possible and remains yet to be done. Writing history of the Bennington Summer School of the Dance that takes the African-American experience as a starting point would significantly contribute to a reappropriation of the school by its students, truly fulfilling its mission of modernity.
Conclusion
In this article, I have discussed the Bennington Summer School of the Dance Oral History Project 1978–1979 in order to raise two points. The first one concerns the importance of the context and the analysis of the oral history interviews in the late 1970s, and the second deals with the reception that this collection may have today as a history of sensibilities.
Martha Hill, Theresa Bowers, and Nancy Goldner, after the extraordinary amount of work put into this project, never managed to write their book, which was supposed to be the insiders’ account and at the same time the counterproject to Kriegsman's book.Footnote 21 One can only speculate about the direction of their book and how far the oral histories would have gone beyond a dance history built on linearity and chronology rather than on a thematic and analytical approach. As Arlette Farge rightly states:
The traditional/old-school historian is drawn towards homogenization, overview, and a certain idea of the overall process. He or she is much less readily drawn to the strangeness of singularity—the connotations of a word that is not really part of the argument and whose simple presence might be distracting or even misleading. (1997, 69)
With the evident appeal for the praise of Bennington that the authors set out to achieve, the collection in its current stage as an unfinished book project inevitably invites the researcher to follow suit and do the same, namely, join in the praise. Some thirty-eight years later, it is indeed very easy to drown in its 5,423 pages, to be a part of this sea of words, to revive Bennington, even in a way to go back to school and write a paean of praise for Bennington. However, if the researcher follows Alain Corbin's thoughts on the importance of humility that consists in listening to the women and men, and in this case, in reading the voices of the dancers of the past with a view to detecting, rather than dictating the passions that stirred them ([1994] Reference Corbin and Thom1998), quite a different history of the summer school emerges. The researcher is there in the presence of an extraordinary oral history collection that constitutes archives for a history of sensibilities. As I have demonstrated, after describing the ways of being “in” or “out” of the summer school world, the interviewees (physical education teachers, professional dancers, staff members, and students) invite the researcher into a fascinating archive of the senses and provide highly specific and more intimate insights on the way this microsociety evolved. The notions of devotion, leisure, meals, and moments of pleasure and rest offer a different resonance to the dancing experience.
Through the lens of the history of sensibilities that thirty-eight years ago the project's authors most probably had not envisaged as such, the divergent oral histories of the Bennington Summer School of Dance Oral History Project, match in importance the perspectives on the new, modern dance that Martha Hill was hoping for in Reference Hill and Shelly1934. But contrary to what their authors had in mind, namely, a definitive history, these oral histories speak for an un-definitive history. According to Farge (Reference Farge1997, 70), words and bodies change meanings, orality breaks in, the singular dissimilarity is, first and foremost, object of history and subject of truth. It thus appears possible to say that this is a reluctant archive of rebellion: left in an unfinished state as a book project, this collection suggests a bottom-up history, where students take back the School.
