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Where they danced: patrons, institutions, spaces: Institutional forces and the shaping of dance in the American university

It is customary to think of dance in academia and dance on the stage as being very separate. In many respects, however, the imprint of the university on modern dance in America has been both extensive and profound. This imprint dates from the start and the several social and institutional forces, expectations, and pressures that surrounded dance as it entered American higher education at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in the summer of 1917. The rules and needs of the academy fostered, harbored, and transformed dance into a uniquely configured art-academic discipline (1). Dance in the university in early twentieth-century America existed at the crossroads of several institutional stories. On the one hand it was conceived of as a new curricular means to address institutional and social needs concerning women in the workplace, and particularly as a way to strengthen women physically so that they could withstand the rigors of intellectual study. At the same time, however, dance was envisioned in the curriculum as an expedient for socially containing women’s behavior and aspirations, of “disciplining” the very bodies it had set in motion. In other words, the goal was liberation with strict limits, physical freedoms with social constraints. The result would be the birth of a body with some social sanctions lifted and others firmly in place. One might search for evidence of a similar reshaping of a visual or performing art by the university curriculum, but I suspect that dance reveals more readily than other art forms and disciplines the social and institutional controls acting on it. This is because the medium of dance is the human body, and our bodies are where institutional contracts between society and its citizens are enacted (2). Historically, our bodies have also been where social gestures of containment and purification are displayed, reinforced, and established. Such