MARTHA HILL: on early dance at bennington interview by REBECCA T. GODWIN
In 1934, modern dance pioneer Martha Hill founded the Bennington School of the Dance, which became a crucible for American modern dance. The School of the Dance fostered dancers who joined the companies of Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, and former faculty member Martha Graham. In 1951, Hill left to start the dance program at Juilliard. In the 1990s, Rebecca Godwin, faculty member and former editor of Bennington, took down Hill’s memories of teaching dance.
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always said, good dance is good dance, therefore you don’t water it down for education. You teach the top of music for music—Bach, Beethoven, Mozart as well as Charles Ives, and Bartok. And so in dance, we might not have been training virtuoso dancers—we were a liberal arts college, not a professional school—but we had to give them a glimpse into the best in the world. “We concentrated on modern dance, which has always prided itself on being, not a system like ballet at that time, but rather a point of view. That’s one reason it fit so well into Bennington.
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“Also at the beginning, because modern dance was not very well accepted and was thought ugly by people who were devoted to classical ballet, the first years of conflict were rather bitter. So we pushed modern dance more—more than we would have later on, perhaps—because we had to make the point. “Our first dance space at Bennington was quite limited. We used the third floor of Commons, which had a small stage and floor space. In the summer, we stripped the house living rooms and made them into dance studios. “The story was that we were thought of as a nudist colony by people in town, because here we were dancing in flesh-colored leotards—practically naked after the tutus of the ballet—all of which was pretty daring for the times. Linc Gillespie, a friend of the literature faculty, came up with a phrase to describe what we were doing; he called it ‘torsing around.’ “Martha Graham came the first year, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman the next; José Limón taught, too; and we finally got Hanya Holm to bring her company up. So the students got the flavor directly of leading schools in New York City, where they often studied during winter period or became apprentices. “These people were all highly individual artists, who were not ordinarily engaged in team play, who actually considered themselves rivals. And we were able to bring them here, have them work together. We offered them a season away from the City and its pulls, with their companies in residence and enough budget for themselves with total production provided. The artists were given—as well as giving—something important. “One unique thing about Bennington was that our performing arts productions didn’t depend on one discipline or one person. Everything was collaboration. We wouldn’t simply do a play—we did plays that combined dance, drama, music, literature. Ben Belitt and Kit Osgood were the main collaborators in literature; in music we had Gregory Tucker; Arch Lauterer came up with design and theater ideas. Faculty performed sometimes, too: Wallace Fowlie, who taught French language and literature, was in several productions. “We did the first successful Americana at Bennington before it hit Broadway—drama teacher Francis Fergusson’s The King and the Duke—and we toured