It was really a response to her just boldly possessing her own sexuality and not being comfortably containable for men at the time. 

There's something especially cynical about that case, because I think whoever was the big woman in the spotlight at the moment might have been the target of some of [Billing’s] ire. He admitted himself, “I'm a libeller. I libel people so that I can get on the stand and then, you know, have a forum to say my horrible views.” There's no evidence that he ever even saw Allan’s show or really knew that much about it. But that, yeah, that chapter was crazy. Maud Allan was someone who'd always captivated me. She certainly didn't have the same kind of footprint as some of these other people, and she’s often explained away as an imitator of Isadora Duncan. But when I read about her, I just thought, “Oh, that's so reductive.” Her cultural cachet was very important, if you see how wildly popular she was, how incredible her story was, and how sad it was that it all got squashed by a horrible man. 

When we move into the book’s Act Two, women have the vote. And of course, you start this Act with Martha Graham. Then you move on to Anna Sokolow and Sophie Maslow, and the contrast between them was so interesting. You talk about the integrity of Sokolow’s honesty about dark themes, her reputation as “the prophetess of doom,” her dance about the Holocaust. She’s such a contrast with Maslow, who’s working with Woody Guthrie and has this grassroots optimism. I appreciated how you framed the ways Sokolow and Maslow were pitted against each other. You have this quote from the press in praise of Maslow: “The day of gloomy grotesquery, when modern dancers drove their points home with hammer blows, is gone.” And you write “For me, putting these factions in opposition creates an unnecessary hierarchy when really each had its own strengths and tenacities, especially in terms of highlighting the humanity of the underclass. [ . . .] Maslow didn't divide the movement, but rather diversified it in sync with her broad-minded vision of the American character.” That was where I started to notice a recurring theme in your book of speaking against false binaries.

With that second act, I was working with the idea of rising political consciousness. Anna Sokolow, among three women covered in that act, was certainly the most political with a capital P. But even she was not as revolutionary as the agit prop dancers that were fully out on streets, not at all really interested in concert dance. I was considering all of these different types of dance jostling up against each other. You start to see that even the critics are finding ways to create hierarchies.

I found a similarity as we move into the third act with Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham: there's a pitting of them against each other, in the same way Isadora and Maud Allan were compared to each other. I think part of it is just this obsession with, I don't know, “There can only be one woman on top.” There's always seems to be competition put upon women: especially if it's a woman of color, there’s a sense that there can only be one. And I did find it interesting to parse those instances and ask if it is really fair to put these two things in opposition or create hierarchies, when the artists were just doing different things, fulfilling different quests.

So in Act Three, you're moving into the ’50s. Women had experienced some access to jobs, Rosie the Riveter in World War II. But then right after World War II, the message is, “Oh no, now you need to get out of the factories, get out of the jobs, go home and double down on the ‘woman's place’ again.” And I loved how you framed the way political conversations and political consciousness was shifting around racism. This brings us back to criticism, which both you and I are practitioners—how the critics praised Pearl Primus and Dunham, but in a separate category of “Black dance.”

That was not a history I had known about. And to backtrack a little, the shift to championing diversity was overdue. It comes at a point when modern dance is finally becoming institutionalized. Schools have been started, and now it's suffused into the community, it’s a thing the public is aware of, especially in the US and in New York, Chicago and LA. Then you have dancers speaking up: “This doesn't include my voice at all, this doesn't represent me at all.” 

And especially with dancers like Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, for different reasons, they were facing a lot of racist critiques of their dancing. It's the same idea from ballet, the idea that Black bodies move differently, somehow, that they're capable of certain things and not capable of others. And even when you had well-meaning critics at the time who liked these dancers, they would still bridle them within this purview of, “Well, they're doing really well for a Black dancer.” As though there were no way for them to just unequivocally say this is a really brilliant dancer who's doing really brilliant things. And it's fascinating to see the different directions that Duham and Primus then go in. Because Dunham was just, by all accounts, you know, a show woman. She had the “it” factor; you just couldn't take her eyes off of her. Which in a way is a shame, because there's so much going on in her productions that you miss by focusing on just her performance. And then, you know, Pearl Primus was so longing and earnest about the attempt to bring the issues of racism to the stage. But both of them, on top of dancing and creating incredible work, were leading serious academic careers. Both are such accomplished scholars. And their writing alone leaves an incredible legacy. And the critics had the audacity to dismiss what they were doing or to bridle it within unfair terms.