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The Untamed Women of Modern Dance
by Sara Veale
The untold tale of the extraordinary women who drove the modern dance movement, boldly confronting cultural narratives about sex and power.
In Wild Grace, Sara Veale profiles nine of the pioneering North American dancers at the heart of this movement. She shows how Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller fearlessly rejected nineteenth-century paternalism and how Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus battled to recenter marginalised histories with Dunham leading America's first major Black dance troupe and Primus breaking down doors as the first Black student at New York's New Dance Group.
Each of these dancers redefined the meaning of grace in their art and their lifestyle, conveying vital truths about what it means to walk the world as a woman. Veale brings to life the stories and artistry of these remarkable individuals and reveals how, in their refusal to conform, we can find urgent lessons for today.
"Opening a door into the rich world of modern dance...Enthusiastic profiles of dancers set within insightful social history." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"With evocative prose, Veale vividly highlights how famous and lesser—known female dancers remade an often exclusionary art form while expanding the ways that art can be used to pursue sociocultural change. It's a captivating chronicle." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Written with love ... this pithy, passionate volume is a hymn to the American female dancers from the early 1900s on ... a valuable and often fascinating document." —Sunday Telegraph
"[An] ardent debut ... Rigorous research matches with a zesty turn of phrase ... while broader insights emerge organically into how a person might move through the world with authentic grace." —Observer
This information about Wild Grace was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sara Veale is a London-based writer and editor focusing on dance, feminism and design. She studied literature and dance as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and holds an MA in English: Issues in Modern Culture from University College London. Veale has been a freelance dance critic since 2013, reviewing major international dance companies, covering arts festivals across the UK and Europe and interviewing industry giants. She has written regularly for the Observer, The Spectator, Fjord Review and DanceTabs. Her dance criticism has also appeared in Gramophone, Auditorium, Exeunt and more; her literary criticism has appeared in The Literateur, Fiction Uncovered and Review 31, where she was the fiction reviews editor from 2014 to 2020. Veale is also a member of the Dance Critics' Circle.
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