ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the work of Akarova and Margaret Morris, two dance artists who are mostly missing from canonical accounts of modern dance. Each turned away from ballet and, through contact with Raymond Duncan, developed their own individual approaches to modern dance. Through their partners, who were visual artists, they each gained access to intellectual modernist circles that enabled them to position their work as dance artists as serious contributions to modern art. What an examination of Akarova and Morris demonstrates is that modern dance developed simultaneously and independently in several metropolitan centres where there were modernist circles, and not just in Germany and the United States.
