From the book jacket:

In this imagination-stirring book Mrs. Hooper offers to dance directors and students, through her presentation of carefully researched background data and practical suggestions, that most desirable of commodities in the professional field: the saving of hours of time.

The swift-moving panorama of dramatic scenes takes the reader from ancient Egypt and Greece, through the Dark Ages in Frankish Gaul, the Moorish splendor of Spain in the age of Cross and Crescent, the Age of Chivalry, the Italian Renaissance, and down to our own Colonial, Revolutionary, and post-Revolutionary days.

For some of her story-frame material Mrs. Hooper draws upon Wahsington Irving's Legends of the Alhambra, Guillaume de Lorris' Romance of the Rose, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Notebooks.

Back cover:

Mrs. Hooper studied art...at the Art Students League in New York, where she worked under Nicolaides...It was her ability to present dance movement in drawing, as well as settings, that led to her success in preparing dance pageants...Mrs. Hooper did dance forms of the body in motion, in pencel, then in oils and sculpture...Then she turned to costuming.