Where I’m from, in the American South, grace is a virtue, and not just the religious kind. It’s about courtesy, dignity, decency, control. Staying cool and keeping the peace. It’s smoothing over the cracks, even when – especially when – you’re burning to prise them open.

As a dance critic, I find grace in suspended leaps and liquid poses, in lines that bend to the rhythm of a ragged primal scream. My own days as a dancer showed me how to take something alive and whip it back on itself, uncovering its elegant pulse. Dancerly grace, in its stillest moments and its stormier ones too, brings order to the wild topography of the body. It’s an organising of self that requires immense discipline.

Outside of the studio, though, away from the stage, grace can take on a different complexion, losing some of its warm animal potential. It’s mainly expected of women, in my experience, part of a broader pressure we face to stay composed in a world where flared tempers are reserved for important men in important meetings. Every day we’re asked to abide, appease and accommodate. To make ourselves smaller and less needy. To avoid giving anyone cause to think we are, even for just a second and in this one small way, difficult.

Our deepest reserves come into play as the elemental collapses into the systemic. For me, this means not self-combusting when I fathom women’s marginalisation in nearly every seat of influence, from government to tech to Hollywood. Four billion of us expected to swallow our own sidelining and go smilingly on our way. Even in the dance sphere, where women crowd the student, teacher and performer ranks, the directors and choreographers – the decision makers – are usually men.

I’ve always admired women who resist this cool exterior, voicing the unease we’re told is unseemly. It’s a radical act in a society that urges submission in the name of civility, a clutch at justice that’s as personal as it is political. See, it has a serious shrinking effect, all this indulging and obliging and taking in stride. It’s a chisel to your core, notching away steadily until you wake up one day and there’s a hole where your heart used to be.

I’ve gathered the subjects of this book as unbridled voices who defied the mindset that self-possession requires compliance and capit­ulation. As dancers and dancemakers, they channelled their disquiet into an explosive new art form championing fresh perspectives and unsung histories. They did this knowingly and incidentally, loudly and subtly, using their choices onstage and off to challenge expec­tations about the way they looked, behaved and created. Between them are classically trained graduates and self-styled soloists, grade school dropouts right up to PhDs, ambassadors for Black, white, Jewish and immigrant experiences. Together with hundreds of other innovators zipping around their orbit, these dancers redefined the meaning of grace in their art and their lifestyles, con­veying vital truths about what it means to walk the world as a woman.

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The story of modern dance is a story of subversion – of forms chal­lenged and hierarchies toppled in the pursuit of blazing artistic integrity. Starting in the 1890s, first-generation wavemakers rejected the aerial, symmetrical sensibilities of classical ballet in favour of ‘free’ dancing that revelled in its own iconoclasm. Early moderns flouted the usual hallmarks of stage-friendly femininity – from fluffy tulle to dainty port de bras – with a ferocity that cost them as many admirers as it gained them.

Over the next sixty years, their successors codified these raw, gravity-bound gambols into a range of techniques that could be taught, challenged and evolved. These varied hugely in tone and style, but were unified by an expressionist momentum and a resolve to reveal the effort so often disguised onstage. The moderns strove to find truth in the way we move through space and everyday life. With every technical reinvention came a conscious confrontation of the body and its social ramifications, including the long-held image of dancers as ornaments rather than creatives in their own right.

Throughout its lifespan,* modern dance flew the flags of originality, autonomy and egalitarianism. The same spirit of defiance that awoke the movement guided its practical evolution – who deter­mined its boundaries, whose visions were indulged. Before the moderns came along, male directorship was the mainstay of the concert stage. By conceiving and performing their own work, the female spearheads of modern dance upended the ranks of creative influence, a gear shift with an indelible impact. They made it possi­ble for women to dictate the terms of their art as dancers, creators and educators alike.

These schisms had powerful reverberations in the wider world, echoing and shaping new ideas around permissibility, especial­ly for women. Isadora Duncan’s embrace of short, thin tunics at the turn of the century, for example, was a pushback against the Victorian-era policing of female bodies – ‘the warp and woof of New England Puritanism’, in her words.1 She performed braless and barefoot at a time when corsets reigned supreme, challenging a stricture that bound women onstage and beyond. It’s one of many details in modern dance’s storied history that saw a break from cus­tom call attention to women’s emancipation.

Duncan was at the vanguard of a brigade of moderns who helped instigate critical conversations around the politics of womanhood – dress codes and beauty standards, anxieties around female sexuality, the rights of women as workers, activists and citizens of the world. Some tackled these issues in their studio practices, using their plat­form to push the dance world towards diversity and inclusion; others positioned themselves as storytellers of the female experience, intent on broadening their audiences’ world view. Themes, techniques, cos­tumes and casting all came into play, helping steer modern dance into a salient critique of the status quo. The language of their art, and the subjects they explored, united in powerful consonance to rewrite cultural narratives about power, agency and a woman’s place.

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Each of the nine women I’ve profiled in Wild Grace pushed bound­aries in her own questing way, finding inspiration within herself and the wider spheres she inhabited. It was a heady integrity that propelled Isadora Duncan towards a bespoke language of dance at the turn of the twentieth century – a bone-deep conviction that a new vocabulary was needed to convey the truths of existence. For her contemporaries Loie Fuller and Maud Allan, it was the pull of the theatrical, visions of concert halls ablaze with fresh mar­vels of form. Second-generation moderns Martha Graham, Anna Sokolow and Sophie Maslow harnessed their own impassioned urges to rewrite the dance chronicle in the interwar years, roused by the frictions of a fast-changing world; and come the mid-century, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus and Pearl Lang broke centuries-old ancestral chains with their own creative reckonings. These trailblazers dedicated their careers to recasting the contours of per­formance, each stirred by an intuition that the yelps and gasps in her heart were not incompatible with life on the stage. Their rec­ognition of the progressive possibilities of dance – the way it can, in the brilliant words of Agnes de Mille, serve ‘as recompense for all [we] find insupportable in woman’s traditional lot’2 – triggered a tectonic shift in dance history, rocking the canon with a bold new genre that embraced the wilds of womanhood.

Of course, these are just some of the players who helped change take root. Modern dance owes a debt to a vibrant ensemble of both men and women who introduced dynamic movement theories and radical subjects to the stage, not least Ruth St Denis, Ted Shawn, Mary Wigman, Doris Humphrey and Merce Cunningham – heavy­weights I’ve only glanced upon here but who were essential to the movement’s genesis and evolution. There were also bold fringe actors whose contributions amount to so much more than the quick refer­ences I’ve offered, especially in charting new courses of femininity, from Olga Desmond, who insisted on the dignity of the naked female form, to Noami Leaf Halpern, a bard for her Jewish fore­mothers’ triumphs. These changemakers encompassed a marvellous variety of methods, mantras and geographies, using the transcendent nature of dance to challenge the hard-bodied here and now.

While some of my subjects would relish the feminist aura I’ve invoked, I can imagine a few rejecting it out of hand – Duncan in particular, a ‘wild voluptuary’, as de Mille once admired,3 with a habit of bucking the labels foisted upon her. I chose their stories for their colour and vim, and the pressing way they sit on my chest. They remind me that autonomy isn’t a given, and that progress is neither linear nor inevitable; that I’m able to quibble the particulars of inequality because others before me have shown its prevalence in the first...