From ragtime New York to the dance halls of Havana, Buenos Aires and London, ten dancers, teachers and one composer who turned partner dancing into a twentieth-century art. At the start of the twentieth century, partner dancing was either a stiff society ritual or a craze that respectable people disapproved of.

Ten dancers who took locking, popping, breaking, and house from sidewalks and club floors to the center of global culture. Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, dancers with no studios, no funding, and no permission invented an entire movement language.

Ten dancers who turned the movie musical of the 1930s to 1950s into the most joyful art form Hollywood ever invented. When sound arrived at the end of the 1920s, Hollywood discovered that the camera could do something the stage never could: put you two feet from a dancer and never let you lose them.

Ten rebels who tore up the ballet rulebook and built a new art form from the body outward, from Isadora Duncan's bare feet to Alvin Ailey's Revelations. Around 1900, concert dance in the West meant one thing: ballet, with its corsets, pointe shoes, and fairy-tale plots.

Ten dancers who carried ballet out of the imperial theaters and into the modern world, from Pavlova's dying swan to Guillem's impossible line. Ballet entered the 20th century as a court entertainment guarded by a handful of imperial theaters and left it as a global art form.

Dance is the only art whose instrument dies. That single fact explains almost everything about how it is made, taught, lost and fought over.