There, she formed dance groups in London, taught dance-mime at Dartington Hall School in Devon, and choreographed and produced dance-dramas on contemporary topics.

Dance historian Garry Lester has explained, "The work was called 'dance-mime' for very clear reasons: the choreography clearly had movement as its basis, valuing and using the attributes of modern dance (in terms of the form it took, the structuring of component parts and the movement style), and relied equally on finding and sustaining through improvisation the character of the protagonists within each of her works.

[11] Barr choreographed works for large groups: Browne described seeing a performance by about forty or fifty people whose occupations included schoolchildren and teachers, clerical workers and farmers, housemaids and stonemasons.

1 in E Minor;[11] Song of Young Women;[11] from 1934: The Family, with music by Rubbra;[5] The Three Marys; The Three Sisters,[4] in which three women (a prostitute, a spinster and a young girl) show their reactions to war;[5] Epithalamium (inspired by an affair Barr had with Dorothy Elmhirst's 16-year-old son Michael Straight)[11] and Colliery (for which Barr visited a coal mining community in Northumberland).

[6] Her works from this period carried pacifist and communist-derived political messages,[4] and were set to music by contemporary composers such as Edmund Rubbra and Michael Tippett.

W. A. Darlington, reviewing a performance at the Arts Theatre, London, described it as "nothing better than posturing and pattern-weaving ... [despite] "moments of sheer beauty — especially in The Three Sisters and in a little Hebridean scene, The Storm ... immense pains and skill were being wasted".

[17] Dance critic Fernau Hall described many of Barr's works from the Dartington and London periods in his 1950 book Modern English Ballet: An Interpretation.

[24] Barr became the first movement tutor at the newly established National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in 1959,[4][23][25] a position she held for seventeen years.

[7][25] A participant in the 1961 NIDA Summer School of Drama described Barr as "a dynamic woman in a black leotard, her gestures like those of the Winged Victory, her commands like those of a Sar'-Major.

[26] In addition to her work at NIDA and with the dance-drama group, Barr was called on to develop choreography for other productions, including The Royal Hunt of the Sun for the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1966.

[7] She attributed to Martha Graham the new "vocabulary" of her dance, "a carefully worked out series of staccato postures and relaxed gestures designed to express the whole range of human feeling.

[33] Depending on the concepts being conveyed, dancers sometimes moved all or part of their bodies in one place,[36] held positions,[36][33] or travelled across the stage, walking, running, jumping, shuffling or crawling.

One critic described this as "a vocal and visual partnership",[54] and explained that "Movement came first, but as [Barr] found more and more she wanted to say — tackling the work and concepts of poets and philosophers — the words had to be added.

[54][55] The scope of Barr's oeuvre has been described as "seemingly boundless";[5] her obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald mentioned "topics as diverse as the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Margaret Mead, drought and the Melbourne Cup.

[4] During the approximately forty years in which Margaret Barr choreographed and produced dance-dramas in Australia, she was "talked about, not always with much comprehension or even friendliness.

"[47] A male reviewer wrote that he found it "difficult at times to agree with her simplistic and emotive views of right and wrong and a world which is exclusively inhabited by heroines.

Some reviewers saw this as detrimental to the performance, as "no great technical proficiency and no stylistic development is possible",[29] so Barr "suffers from the inadequacy of her part-time dancers' technique which has little resiliency of power.

"[84] Several reviewers commented on her "beautifully sculptured groups",[80] "varied and ingenious patterns",[42] and "control of spatial relationships",[33] but there was also criticism of "diffuse, meaningless running about",[80] and the "dangers inherent in Miss Barr's unflagging endeavours to capture every possible permutation of design from the human body.

[8] A reviewer commented that "Going to see performances by her group was like observing dance history in a living form: themes were current, the way of moving was from another time.

"[8] The reviewer felt that some pieces, such as The Three Sisters of Katoomba and Coming of the Rains, were "more problematical for a contemporary audience",[8] but others such as Processions, Hebridean Suite and Judith Wright — Australian Poet, were still effective and moving.

A documentary called Margaret Barr: Hebridean Suite, with dancer Diane Wilder performing the piece, was broadcast on ABC TV on the Sunday Arts program in 2007, and repeated in 2008.

[104][105] Different opinions have been stated about the influence of Barr's dance-drama group or her seventeen years of teaching movement and improvisation at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, from 1959 to 1975.

"[29] Theatre critic Kevon Kemp wrote, "It is with the redoubtable Miss Barr that all NIDA students explore the meaning of movement, and it is thanks to her world-class teaching that after their courses our young actors and actresses are coming forward with such mastery of the physical aspects of their art.

"[34] Reid Douglas, a drama tutor with the Arts Council and contributor to The Bulletin, observed that experiments and innovations by Barr were adopted by other choreographers some years later.