The pioneering women of modern dance

Arms outstretched, head thrown back, flounced skirt rippling over a raised leg. The 1942 photograph of Sophie Maslow dancing in her own creation Folksay makes her look as if she is performing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or some MGM musical spectacular. Yet Maslow was a radical artist, who asserted that modern dance was a transformational power for good, and devoted her 50-year career to the belief that it belonged to everyone. In Folksay, she danced to the Dust Bowl ballads of Woody Guthrie, conjuring an inclusive version of America by reshaping the view of its pioneer spirit.

She told Dance Magazine in 1946:

This is the Age of the Common Man. And it is the common people who are the backbone and the strength and hope of our civilisation and our culture. We as artists, and above all as thinking people, are touched by problems of our fellow man because they are our problems… In our dancing we try to express a common emotional experience. If we succeed, then we have helped make the modern dance healthier and more vital as an art form.

They are words from another age; a reminder that the America of the early 20th century really was a different country.

Maslow is one of the lesser-known figures profiled in Wild Grace, a collective biography of nine women who played a role in forging modern dance. ‘Each pushed boundaries in her own questing way, finding inspiration within herself and the wider spheres she inhabited,’ Sara Veale writes.

Some of her subjects are better remembered. The book begins with Isadora Duncan, who ‘directed her ire at ballet’s aerial preoccupations and responded by leaning into the swerve of gravity’, earning notoriety and legendary status for her uninhibited movements, revealing clothes, tragic private life (two children drowned) and awful death (strangled by her scarf catching in the wheels of a car).