ABSTRACT
This chapter queries the process of assembling, choosing and interpreting documents from which dance histories can be told. Amy Koritz has emphasized these circumstances in her cogent research on dance and literature in early twentieth-century British culture. From a British perspective, she addresses the historical stature accorded to Maud Allan in comparison to some other contemporary dance artists. To begin a life story with childhood reminiscences has long been a narrative convention. Most dance artists use it in the same manner as Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan in order to point out how their future careers were decided very early in life, and they depict dance as a kind of 'natural' or universal force impossible to avoid. The Canadian-born dancer Allan exemplifies agency in a different manner. In an interview conducted by a Swedish journalist in 1908, Allan paints a nice and highly respectable picture of herself and her family, which artfully manipulates the truth.
