'The dance of the intelligence': Dancing bodies in Mina Loy

Mina Loy’s engagement with dance in her writings exemplifies how a woman writer could use this corporeal art as a means to articulate a feminist sensibility. In a period when dance was undergoing similar seismic shifts to those transforming the written and visual arts, Loy drew on ballet and modern dance, and their expressive kinaesthetics, to examine the gender politics of the dancing body and explore the performative energies of the written word. This article examines Loy’s published and unpublished work, from early poems on Italian futurism to her long poem on Isadora Duncan, and the dancing that inspired them. It argues that Loy draws on dance to interrogate and experiment with the way meaning is made with the body and how the body can be part of the meanings of language