In 1905, twenty year old Ida Rubinstein watched with admiration as Isadora Duncan danced on the St Petersburg stage. Duncan’s radical, free flowing modern dancing with Grecian robes and classical music was taking Russia by storm and Rubinstein was nurturing the beginnings of her own career and life-long passion for theatre, gesture and the dance. In their famed performances, the history of sexuality and the story of ‘the New Woman’ merge. The concept of the late 19th century ‘New Woman’ reflected changing ideas about female sexuality and the desire to step outside traditional gender roles. As Michel Foucault has shown, the same era saw the emergence of different styles of sexual prohibitions and the articulated notion of homosexuality as pathology, even disease. Medicine and sexology played a decisive role in enabling the emergence of the concept of sexuality which came to be increasingly regarded as a personality trait and a mode of sensibility (Davidson, 2001, p. 64; see also Beccalossi, 2011).1 Yet what looked like sexual anarchy in the context of fin de siècle anxieties, suggests Elaine Showalter (1992, p. 11), might also be viewed as the embryonic stirrings of a new order. With the emergence of modernism, images of the body, especially the female body, were being redefined and transformed while approaches to movement swung between the dichotomous kinaesthetics of industrial efficiency and artistic expressiveness (Veder, 2011).