A young girl in medieval Paris completes a manuscript illumination for her father. As the story unfolds, the reader learns how manuscript painters created their pigments and applied them to the prepared parchment.

In August 1960, Anna Halprin taught an experimental workshop attended by Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer (along with Trisha Brown and other soon-to-be important artists) on her dance deck on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco. Within two years, Forti's conceptually forceful Dance Constructions had premiered in Yoko Ono's loft and Rainer had cofounded the groundbreaking Judson Dance Theater. Radical Bodies reunites Halprin, Forti, and Rainer for the first time inmore than fifty-five years.

Dance was a fundamental part of the art world in the 1960s, the most...