… almost every page offers provocative commentary on the aesthetics and politics of modern dance. -Signs

… [an] important step … in the ineluctable dance by postmodern historians across a bridge that spans the gaps among disciplines, between theory and practice, and betweeen present and past. -Theatre Journal

This complex and important book needs to be read by anyone interested in dance history or the cultural politics of dance. -Dance Theatre Journal

Mark Franko’s Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics is challenging, groundbreaking, insightful, and, I believe, an important contribution to the field of dance scholarship. -Dance Research Journal

A revisionary account of the evolution of modern dance in which Mark Franko calls for a historicization of aesthetics that considers the often-ignored political dimension of expressive action. Includes an appendix of articles of left-wing dance theory, which flourished during the 1930s.