About BARBARA METTLER

BARBARA METTLER A Dancer's History Autobiographical Sketch 1 Page 1 of 7 I am a dancer whose entire life has been formed by my love of dance as the pure art of body movement and by my conviction that creative art activity is a basic human need. I was born in Chicago in 1907. My Father, originally from New York, was a practicing neurologist and teacher at the University of Illinois Medical college in Chicago. My mother was the daughter of a farm woman whose family had moved west in a covered wagon, and of a civil war major who pioneered in the development of prairie land in central Illinois. My only sister was 6 years older than I. When I was 4 years old my family moved to the village of Hubbard Woods, 25 miles north of Chicago, where they built a house on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, my home until I finished college. My early childhood was lived close to nature, in the woods and on the lake shore, with only birds and wildflowers and a few neighbor boys and girls as playmates. There was boundless freedom and creativity in our home. Everyone was expected to follow his or her own inclinations, with only one rule: moral accountability. My father played the piano, my mother acted, my sister painted and wrote poetry, while I danced. I danced indoors and out, summer and winter, inspired by my father's music or by singing my own songs. We rarely went to see others' art work. Art was something one did at home, naturally, like piano, which I loved and practiced a great deal. My preoccupation with rhythm in sound and movement, music and dance, was with me then as it is now. After this free, natural and happy childhood came 8 years of confusion: my years in high school and college. My mother, wanting "the best" for her daughters, sent us to a conservative, private girls' school (Roycemore) in Evanston, Illinois, then to a private women's college (Smith) in New England. Having no idea that dance could be a subject for serious study, I thought that music might be my field, but I received no support in this direction in either high school or college In high school, because I loved to move, I participated in sports and did fairly well, becoming president of the athletic association. For a short time we had a dance teacher from the University of Wisconsin. I was one of only two students who loved the dance classes, and we were ridiculed by our classmates who contemptuously called it "flitting". In college, dance had just been introduced as an extra- curricular activity. I enrolled in a class but, when I was put in a green frog costume and made to jump around on all fours under a tree to Tchaikovsky's music, I felt humiliated and gave up college dancing. If this was dance, I wanted none of it. My love of dance is the love of the language of pure movement and I have never been interested in theatrical uses of dance to interpret drama or music. next >>>