|SOME of the Russian ballets take a material story and treat it in
terms of the dance. But what story is there in "Les Sylphides"? Even the
programme, seldom at a loss for a synopsis, has never tried to tell
us what it is all about. We hear preludes and waltzes, nocturnes and
mazurkas by Chopin, and hear them orchestrated audaciously, but for the
most part successfully, by distinguished Russian composers. We remember
that when we heard these lovely Chopin pieces on the piano, interpreted
by a Paderewski or a Pachmann, we had our mental dreams; we saw things,
but not with our eyes. When the curtain rose on "Les Sylphides" we were
asked to make our imagination abdicate its rights, to put away the films
of that little individual cinematograph which we had made with closed
eyes. The demand may have seemed impertinent to those who love the
interior visions given by musical sounds better than the most beautiful
spectacle that the theatre has ever presented. But "Les Sylphides" had
not progressed far before we ceased to be worried by
the antagonism between dreams and stage pictures. The grace of those
immaterial white figures, Victorian just so far as Chopin is Victorian,
became one with the grace of the music.
[Illustration: 0044]
Perhaps the rhythm of the music has never been better perceived than
through these well-ordered movements designed by Fokine. The appearance
of Nijinsky as a kind of dream Alfred de Musset in a romantic fair wig,
and dressed in black and white, among the impalpable Sylphides was both
inexplicable and inevitable. When he danced he seemed almost to play
Chopin with his feet, so perfect was his time. His steps seemed to be
the symmetry of the music--in fact its rhythm, for the rhythm of music
is symmetry in motion. And when he merely walked about with outstretched
arm, he recalled Ruskin's allusion to man "in erect and thoughtful
motion," to "the great human noblesse of walking on feet."
[Illustration: 0046]
But it is time we cried "place aux dames!" Miss Pamela Colman Smith has
well transfixed the bounding motion of Nijinska (sister to the "centre
piece of the mosaic") in the Mazurka; and the names of Karsavina,
Schollar, Will and Kovalewska excite happy memories of this romance of
style.