Rare footage found - pioneers of modern dance at Bennington College, 1938

Dance Magazine, Jan, 2004 by Wendy Perron

THE SUMMER OF 1938 at the legendary Bennington School of the Dance might have gone the way of all memories. But Oceana Wilson, a reference librarian at Bennington College, recently unearthed an unmarked film from that summer. She slogged through it for hours, frame by frame, in order to identify thirteen minutes of precious footage of modern dance pioneers.

Included are fleeting moments of Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Charles Weidman, Erick Hawkins, John Martin, and Ted Shawn, hanging out on the Bennington campus. But the actual dance sequences, all taken outdoors, are revelatory. Doris Humphrey, wearing a red dress, skips and skitters with a windblown lightness. Jose Limon, so young that he looks unsure of himself, is already using his shoulders with the deep axial twist that gave him such emotional sensitivity later on. A dancer in white demonstrates the oppositional pull of Hanya Holm's technique, one arm pressing down as she springs off the ground. Jane Dudley demonstrates Graham technique, including the "pleading." In what seems like the mother of all contractions, her movements erupt from the center of the body and pour outward, thick as lava. The contrasting styles might lead one to observe that Humphrey's element is air, while Graham's is earth.

THE FILM was shot by Doris Ewing, a student in 1938 who later taught modern dance at Hillsdale College in Michigan. Her nephew, Wallace Ewing, donated the film to Bennington in 1997. It lay in a locked cabinet in the Crossett library until Wilson discovered it in 2002 and got curious. Sali Ann Kriegsman, Don Redlich, Mary Ann Santos Newhall, Ann Vachon, and Humphrey's son, Charles Woodford, helped identify the dancers.

Kriegsman, author of Modern Dance in America: The Bennington Years, (unfortunately out of print), says this home movie "gives a sense of the vitality, the original impulse and the bursting forth of this [then] new dance." Very few other films exist from the Bennington School of the Dance, which was a precursor to the American Dance Festival. "Seeing these images now, in light of all the revivals and changes," continued Kriegsman, "is a potent reminder of how difficult it is to recapture the original intent and spirit of these dances, those times."

A copy has been lodged with the Dance Division of the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts. For information contact Oceana Wilson at 802.440.4606 or library@bennington.edu.