Page 8 - 1912 February - To Dragma

TO DRAG MA OF ALPHA 0 MICRON PI 77

FOLK DANCING AS A CIVIC MOVEMENT INNEW YORK

Dr. Luther H . Gulick, Director of the Department of Child
Hygiene of the Russell Sage Foundation, and leading exponent of
physical training in America, tells the story of a poor little girl, who
was found, half-starved and half-clothed, wandering about the
streets, and was brought into a neighboring settlement house. When
asked what she wanted most of all, the child whispered timidly:
" I f I could only have a pair of red shoes!" We can all agree with
Dr. Gulick that this incident shows a child's need of some share of
beauty and of pleasure in its little world. Human nature demands
pleasure—recreation; i f it cannot get the right kind of pleasure it
turns to the wrong kind.

But, how, one might well ask, was any pleasure, any beauty, to
touch die lives of the thousands of little girls in the crowded tene-
ment districts of New York? Let us see how Dr. Gulick solved the
problem. Recreation for the boys of the public schools had already
been provided for through the Public Schools Athletic League,
formed in 1903, an organization of which Dr. Gulick was Secretary.
He now took up the matter of girls' athletics, and in 1905 succeeded
in interesting a number of prominent New York women, who formed
the Girl's Branch of the Public Schools Athletic League, and en-
gaged Miss Elizabeth Burchenal, then of the Physical Education
Department of Columbia University, to find out, by careful study
and experimentation, a standard form of athletics for girls, the
primary object being to provide the city girl after school with vigor-
ous, wholesome, natural recreation and play, of which the city life
robs her. Miss Burchenal experimented with groups of little girls
in the largest public school in the world, number 188, in New York,
which accommodates 6,000 children. The girls were taught ex-
ercises, games and folk dances—the folk dances which are the
product of the civilization of the old countries, combining historv,
tradition and art. Miss Burchenal had been making these dances
a subject of original research and had been introducing them in her
normal classes in the Department of Physical Training at Columbia,
but she found no more ardent pupils than these little girls of the
tenements, who took to the dancing at once, and greedily. I t is a
fact that more people can express themselves by teaching than by
any other art; you can teach more people to dance than to sing,
play, write poetry or paint pictures.

When Miss Burchenal had discovered that folk dancing, since it
kept all the girls working at once, and needed no equipment, was the