Books on the History of Dance: A Curated Reading List

The story of dance stretches from prehistoric ritual to the LED-lit stages of contemporary festivals, and the books that chronicle it are as varied as the art form itself. Readers walking into a Dymocks on George Street or browsing the shelves at Readings in Melbourne will find a section that, while modest, opens onto a genuinely global conversation. Choreographers, performers, and scholars have spent centuries trying to pin down what dance is, what it means, and how it has shaped human societies. The reading list below gathers some of the most respected and readable titles in this field.

For Australian readers especially, dance history has a particular resonance. The country has produced world-class companies such as the Australian Ballet, Bangarra Dance Theatre, the Australian Dance Theatre in Adelaide, and Sydney Dance Company, and the Sydney Opera House has staged everything from classical Swan Lake to cutting-edge contemporary work. Books that situate Australian dance within a global narrative, or that document Indigenous performance traditions on Country, are therefore not academic curiosities but living resources. They help make sense of what audiences see when the curtain rises at a Brisbane Festival show or a Saturday matinee at the Capitol Theatre.

Dance history is also a discipline that crosses borders easily. Ethnographic studies of West African drum-and-dance sit comfortably beside scholarly essays on Butoh, while biographies of twentieth-century modern dancers reference the same wave of experimentation that birthed the Australian modern dance scene. Picking up a volume on Bharatanatyam and then a memoir by a postmodern choreographer can be read as a single continuous journey rather than a series of detours. The books below were chosen for their authority, their lasting influence, and their ability to welcome new readers without overwhelming them.

The selection balances narrative histories with reference works, academic readers with memoir, and Western canon with cross-cultural perspective. Whether you are a tertiary student in Sydney or Perth, a dancer in training, or simply an art lover with a curiosity about how bodies in motion have shaped cultures, the titles below offer a solid foundation. Many are still in print and available through Australian booksellers or via the libraries at the State Library of Victoria or the National Library of Australia.

Title	Author	Era Covered	Approach
Apollo's Angels	Jennifer Homans	15th century to today	Narrative history of ballet from Renaissance courts to the present
No Fixed Points	Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick	20th century	Modern and postmodern dance across the West
The Oxford Dictionary of Dance	Debra Craine and Judith Mackrell	All periods	A-Z reference covering technique, biography, and terminology
Moving History / Dancing Cultures	Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (eds.)	20th century	Anthology of foundational essays in dance studies
Dancing in the Streets	Barbara Ehrenreich	Ancient to modern	Social and cultural history of communal celebration

Ballet and the Classical Tradition

A study of dance history almost always begins with ballet, and few books do this lineage as thoroughly as Jennifer Homans's Apollo's Angels. First published in 2010, the volume traces ballet from its Renaissance and Baroque origins through the French court of Louis XIV, the Romantic era of Marie Taglioni, the Russian imperial stage, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Balanchine in New York, and the globalised art form we know today. Homans, a former dancer turned critic, writes with the authority of someone who has lived inside the tradition she describes. The book is a long read but a rewarding one, and Australian readers will recognise the names of dancers who have toured with the Bolshoi or who joined the Australian Ballet on its founding in 1962.

For readers who want a more compact entry point, the Oxford Dictionary of Dance by Debra Craine and Judith Mackrell is an indispensable companion. The volume covers technique, choreography, companies, and key figures across centuries and styles. It is the kind of reference that earns its place on a studio shelf and gets pulled down whenever a name appears on a program that one has not encountered before. The entries are concise but precise, and many cite further reading for those who want to pursue a thread deeper.

Another essential title for the ballet devotee is David Vaughn's Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, a visual chronicle of one of the twentieth century's most influential choreographers. While focused on a single figure, the book opens a window onto the broader evolution of modern dance that runs in parallel to ballet. Pairing such a volume with the broader histories above gives the reader a sense of both the long arc and the specific moments of revolution that have shaped the art form.

Modern and Postmodern Choreography

The twentieth century brought a series of revolutions in how dance was conceived, taught, and performed. No Fixed Points by Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick is the definitive single-volume history of this period, tracing the development of modern dance from Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis through Denishawn, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Merce Cunningham, and on into the postmodern experimentation of the 1960s and beyond. The book is richly illustrated and written with a clarity that makes it suitable for both students and general readers. Australian readers will find useful context on how the local modern dance scene emerged in dialogue with these international developments, with figures such as Peggy van Praagh and later Graeme Murphy helping to shape national practice.

A complementary text is Ann Cooper Albright's edited collection Bodies of Thought, which gathers essays on the lived experience of dancing and the philosophical questions dance raises. The anthology covers questions of race, gender, and embodiment, and includes writing from perspectives that are often underrepresented in older surveys. It pairs well with the broader essays in Moving History / Dancing Cultures, edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, which has become a standard reader in many university dance programs across Australia and elsewhere. Together these volumes provide a strong foundation in how dance has been studied as a cultural and intellectual practice.

For those interested in the specifically postmodern turn, Sally Banes's Terpsichore in Sneakers remains a lively and accessible account of Judson Dance Theater and the downtown New York scene of the 1960s. The book captures a moment when choreographers began questioning every assumption about what dance could be, and its influence is still felt in contemporary practice around the world, including in the work of Australian companies operating at the experimental edge of the form.

Indigenous Voices and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Dance history has too often been written from a narrow geographic and cultural vantage point, but a number of recent books have worked to broaden the field. The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Dance by Halifu Osumare is a landmark study that traces African diasporic movement practices across continents and centuries. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in how dance has travelled, transformed, and carried cultural memory across the brutal geography of the slave trade and beyond. In Australia, Bangarra Dance Theatre under the artistic direction of Stephen Page has long drawn on similar wells of Indigenous storytelling, and the company's published reflections sit naturally alongside international works of this kind.

Cross-cultural studies of Asian dance traditions have also flourished. Janet O'Shea's At Home in the World: Bharatanatyam on the Global Stage explores how a classical Indian form has been taught, performed, and transformed in diaspora. Readers interested in Japanese postwar dance will find Sondra Fraleigh's Butoh: Cradling the Spirit a sensitive and readable introduction to a form that emerged from devastation and now circulates widely in international festivals programmed in Adelaide and Melbourne. These books show that the history of dance is not a single narrative but a network of traditions, each with its own logic and beauty.

Australian readers should also explore the growing body of scholarship on Indigenous performance on this continent. While much of this work appears in journal articles and exhibition catalogues rather than as standalone monographs, the National Library of Australia's collections and the AIATSIS holdings in Canberra offer rich starting points. Books that document corroboree, ceremony, and contemporary Indigenous dance are an essential counterweight to the European canon, and they remind readers that the longest history of dance on this continent is the one performed on Country for tens of thousands of years.

Folk, Social, and Communal Dance

Not all dance happens on a stage, and some of the most rewarding books in the field look at the traditions that have lived in village squares, community halls, and street processions for centuries. Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy is a spirited and wide-ranging exploration of communal movement from the ancient Dionysian rites through medieval feast-day processions, the repressed joys of Puritan New England, and the carnivals of the modern world. The book is as much about history and anthropology as it is about dance, and its reach makes it a perfect read for those who want to understand why humans move together.

For those with a specific interest in European folk traditions, Anthony Shay's Choreographing Identities and other ethnographic studies examine how folk dance has been used to construct national and ethnic identity, sometimes in troubling ways. These works ask how a simple circle dance can become a site of memory, resistance, or state propaganda. In Australia, folk dance societies in Melbourne, Sydney, and beyond have kept traditions from across Europe alive, and these scholarly volumes give context to what those groups are practising and preserving each weekend.

A more personal take on folk and social dance can be found in memoirs by scholars such as the late Andrée Grau, whose writings on British and European dance communities reflect a lifetime of fieldwork. While not a single monograph, her collected essays and those of her peers paint a vivid picture of how dance persists in everyday life, well beyond the footlights of any major venue.

Memoirs, Biographies, and Visual Histories

For readers who prefer the close-up view, the genre of dance memoir and biography is unmatched. Isadora Duncan's My Life remains a thrilling and tragic document of the early modern dance movement, written in her own distinctive voice. Agnes de Mille's autobiography Dance to the Piper and Martha Graham's Blood Memory offer contrasting accounts of two of the twentieth century's most influential choreographers, one writing with wit and self-deprecation, the other with the gravity of a woman who felt she had been given a sacred mission. More recent memoirs by Pina Bausch collaborators and by contemporary dancers who have survived injury and reinvention bring the reader into the rehearsal room and the wings.

Visual histories have their own particular value. The photographs of Edward Steichen, Barbara Morgan, and contemporary dance photographers fill volumes that can be enjoyed purely as art while also serving as historical record. Coffee-table books on the Australian Ballet, Bangarra, and Sydney Dance Company, often produced in conjunction with anniversary seasons, sit comfortably on this list and offer a vivid entry into local dance history. Titles published by Hardie Grant and the National Library of Australia in connection with major retrospectives are widely stocked at Readings and Dymocks and make a beautiful complement to the more text-heavy volumes.

For the Australian reader especially, the combination of an international survey with a local visual history is a particularly satisfying way to build a library. It allows the eye to recognise international choreographic vocabularies in the local dancers who have absorbed them, and to see distinctly Australian stories told through movement that has its own roots and routes.

Browse the catalogue at Krosos.org to find these titles and many more, organised by period, region, and style. Whether you are beginning a personal collection, building a syllabus, or looking for a thoughtful gift for the dance lover in your life, the curated shelves at Krosos.org offer a starting point for a lifelong conversation with the art of dance.