Shall we dance?

UCLA FIRSTS Every other Friday, The Bruin will
highlight social, political and scientific advancements that
originated at UCLA and set standards for both the university and
the nation.

By Dharshani Dharmawardena
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Times were exciting when Judy Mitoma began attending UCLA as an
undergraduate dance student in the 1960s.

“Everything was unfolding and developing during the time I
came in,” she said. “Even though I was very young, I
could feel that I was part of something that was
historic.”

At the time Mitoma ““ who became chair of the World Arts
and Cultures Department in 1982 ““ started college, UCLA had
just established the first university dance department in the
nation.

Initially listed under the Department of Physical Education,
dance classes began their history at UCLA in 1932, not long after
the university finished building the Women’s Gymnasium, now
renamed Glorya Kaufman Hall.

First nestled among a handful of women’s sports, which
included basketball, swimming, field hockey and fencing, these
dance classes later became a major in the ’50s under the
guidance of then dance chair Alma Hawkins, who came to UCLA in 1953
and was a leader in modern dance education.

UCLA Archive Dancers perform "A Game of Gods" in 1959 under the
Physical Education Department. UCLA’s dance department wasn’t
developed until 1962. In 1962, when UCLA established its College of
Fine Arts, initiating the birth of departments in art, music and
theater arts, former Chancellor Franklyn D. Murphy invited Hawkins
to begin one in dance as well.

Hawkins, who completed four books during her lifetime, once
wrote that dancing helped people harmonize with nature as well as
their inner emotions.

“Dance is one of man’s oldest and most basic means
of expression,” she wrote. “Through the body, man
senses and perceives the tensions and rhythms of the universe
around him, and then using the body as an instrument, he expresses
his feeling responses to the universe.”

For Mitoma, however, the introduction of a dance department
within the College of Fine Arts moved beyond personal expression.
It also settled a feminist question.

Traditionally, art and theater department had mainly attracted
male students while dance remained a woman’s field, Mitoma
said.

To include a dance department with these two departments put
women on a more equal footing with men.

After its establishment, the Department of Dance offered degrees
in dance/movement therapy, theoretical studies in dance history,
aesthetics and education, as well as choreography and performance,
according to the Web site.

The social changes taking place during the 1960s and early 1970s
convinced Hawkins and other members of the university’s dance
department to answer students asking for a more liberal education
in the arts.

According to WAC Professor David Gere’s article “All
the World’s a Stage” featured in “UCLA
Magazine” in Dec. 1998, student pressure for a more
diversified liberal arts program inspired officials to form the
Ethnic Arts Program in 1972.

Later becoming the Department of World Arts and Cultures, the
Ethnic Arts Program delved into such subjects as art, music,
theater, anthropology and folklore and mythology.

Also during the 1970s, a Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled
Hawkins to establish the Graduate Dance Center, according to the
WAC Web site.

Toward the end of 1967, Hawkins tried once again to put dance on
an equal footing with the rest of the departments in the College of
Fine Arts.

During that year, she helped start the UCLA Dance Film Archives,
saying that just as art and music students don’t merely
depend on written word for their studies, dance students need
visual representations of dance movements to improve their styles,
according to a 1967 “Christian Science Monitor”
article.

“Dance cannot be understood… unless it is directly
available to the kinesthetic senses,” Hawkins said in an Oct.
1967 issue of “Benchmarks,” a magazine of the UCLA
Alumni Association.

“Nor can it be accurately recorded for posterity except on
film,” she continued.

With the development of the department and graduate studies in
dance, directors of the program also saw the need to connect
academia with professional experience, according to the article
“Dancing Through the Years,” which commemorated the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the UCLA Dance Company.

“We had offered dance concerts from the beginning, but as
the graduate programs were established, the quality of student
performances improved tremendously,” Hawkins said in the
article. “To further that growth, we wanted to provide a
forum for our advanced students to work directly with professional
choreographers.”

Despite all of Hawkins’ groundbreaking achievements, the
dance department began unraveling during the early 1990s, and
eventually merged with WAC in 1995.

Although some people may say the integration sacrificed the
independence of the dance program, Mitoma said the transformation
was not acrimonious.

“Any change like this is going to provoke a good
discussion,” she said. “And that’s exactly what
happened.”

Today, UCLA students can take dance classes offered through the
WAC department and receive two units of credit.

And they can participate in an environment unrestrained by
explicit definitions of dance as an art form.

In fact, the birth of the dance department at UCLA started a
progressive trend at the university, a movement that eventually
challenged the idea that only a set standard determined traditional
meanings of art.

“In the ’60s it was modern dance,” Mitoma
said. “Now there is no strict authority with regard to
art forms or practice of art making ““ there are multiple
forms.”