Sara Veale first encountered modern dance, she writes, “as a teenager in the 2000s, an era of tight, toxic fashion that goaded girls into seeking out attention while insisting we hated ourselves for wanting it”.
Veale’s book, Wild Grace, is a fast-paced tour of nine dancers who rebelled against the constraints of classical ballet, from Victorian-era Isadora Duncan to the more contemporary Pearl Lang. Theirs is a revolution engendered by unbinding toe shoes and casting off tutus.
Some contributions are obvious – the celebration of the female body in all forms, the inroads made by marginalised groups such as Jewish, black and queer.
Other examples more provokingly transgress boundaries. Take Maud Allan, whose Salome, decked out in “bejeweled belly-baring chiffon”, was copied by showgirls and socialites alike. Given that Salome ordered the decapitation of John the Baptist, one might consider Allan’s own brother, hanged for murdering and mutilating two women in their family’s San Francisco church, a bleak biographical twist.
Veale is blessed with a ravishing vocabulary; her prose capers off the page. “Silks swish,” she writes, “violins judder.” At times, Wild Grace can be too persistently exalting. Choreographer Anna Sokolow was “a roaring bullhorn, a racing pulse. She trekked the dark to find the light”. Veale’s book may celebrate radical feminist power, but she is so broadly glowing about women that the nuances and contradictions of feminism’s rich history are scraped away.
There are delightful kernels of information to be had, for example that Martha Graham had a sense of humour. It is interesting to learn that the book’s most academically accomplished figures – Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus – were black women educated in the 1930s and 1940s. Because Veale is such a stunning writer, I wished more balance to her rapture. (Even her family, to whom the book is dedicated, is “luminous”.)
Ultimately dance is an art of illusion, which in turn is only possible when there are flaws with which to contrast it. The dancer Loie Fuller, dubbed by fin-de-siècle Paris as a “priestess of pure fire”, once made a child cry in dismay. “This one here’s a fat lady,” the child said. “It was a fairy I saw dancing on stage.” I hope that Veale can use her enviable prose to cast, as the women in Wild Grace do, shadows as well as light, the fat ladies alongside the fairies.
