Dancers and choreographers have always been navigating disability within an ableist representational form. This article questions the ableist histories of modern dance in the United States and seeks to redefine how disability is conceived of within the field of dance. The article explores five themes found within archival research, including overcoming narratives, symbiotic and inseparability of dance and disability, denial of disability, changing choreographic practices, and disability aesthetics. Examples of these themes are found in primary source documents about and by Martha Graham, Ted Shawn, and Doris Humphrey and contextualized throughout the article with dance and disability studies theorization.

In the Gilded Age, Genevieve Lee Stebbins (1857–1934) became a dance soloist admired in New York City's theater world. Stebbins created a foundation from which a new “serious” dance aesthetic emerged and notably inspired the early dance work of Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan; however, she remains an overlooked figure within American dance history. This article chronicles Stebbins's innovations and clarifies misrepresentations of her work in recent scholarship. Unlike other American dance pioneers, there is no public archive dedicated to Stebbins, therefore this article draws upon newly available primary sources to explore Stebbins's foundational work.

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw a passing fashion for “Aztec” dancing in the vaudeville theaters of the United States. Russian classical dancers Kosloff and Fokine tapped the orientalist currents of the Ballets Russes, adopting the Aztec as superficial signs of the American. Conversely, works by Shawn and film director Cecil B. DeMille, which served as points of reference for the Russians, represented a continuation of equally orientalist attitudes toward Mexico's past, forged during the realization of the United States’ policy of Manifest Destiny. The emergence of a cadre of trained dancers from Mexico, trained by students of Kosloff and Shawn, would bring a distinctively different perspective on the presentation of their heritage to the dance stage, one that was no longer based in the imagination of an expansionist America.