I
The Greek of old was wise in his generation and poetic as was his habit,
when he imagined nine muses and when he feigned that each of them was to
watch over a separate art, and to inspire those who might strive to
excel in this. It is true that nowadays we cannot help feeling that the
sister-muses of Tragedy and of Comedy have been a little derelict to
their duty, if they are really responsible for all the plays of our
time, not a few of which seem to be sadly lacking in inspiration. But of
late another of the sacred nine appears to have aroused herself out of
her lethargy and to have awakened to a fuller realization of her
opportunity. At least, there are many evidences now visible in the
United States that Terpsichore has been attending strictly to business,
and sending out travelers with many diverse specimens of her wares.
Indeed, there has probably never been a time when so many different
varieties of the dance have been on exhibition before the American
people. It was once remarked by a shrewd observer that there were only
three kinds of dancing, the graceful, the ungraceful, and the
disgraceful. And in the United States we have had presented to us in the
past few years specimens of all three kinds.
In the middle of September, 1910, the Playground Association of America
held an outdoor session in Van Cortlandt Park, in New York, and three
hundred persons, mostly children, took part in the exercises. The most
interesting feature of the program was a series of national folk-dances
executed by boys and girls from the public schools. New York is the huge
melting-pot where all nationalities of Europe meet to be fused into
Americans; and these children were, most of them, executing the dances
of the countries their parents had come from--dances for which they had,
therefore, a traditional and hereditary predilection. German girls in
the costumes of the Rhine, gave a peasant dance to the simple tune of
'Ach, du lieber Augustin'; and colored children, in perfect rhythm,
moved thru a reel to the music of the 'Suwanee River.' The wild
Hungarian _czardas_ was carried off with a splendid swing by men and
women born on the banks of the Danube; and an Irish quartet displayed
their agility and their precision of time-keeping in a four-handed
country-dance. And at the end, all the participants in the several
national dances took part in a general harvest-dance. This was an
effective spectacle, possible only here in America, where
representatives of many peoples come to mingle, even tho each of them
retains a sentiment of loyalty to the old home it has left forever.
Here in the open air, in a public park, at this meeting of the
Playground Association, there was this joyous and wholesome revival of
the folk-dances of a dozen different races; and at the same time, in one
or another of half a score of the theaters of the great city,
ill-trained and half-clothed women were vainly capering about the stage
in doubtful efforts to suggest the Oriental contortions of Salome. These
were, most of them, consciously and deliberately inartistic, appealing
directly to the baser instincts and to the lower curiosities of man.
Nothing could have been in sharper contrast with the folk-dances of the
foreign-born children, which were gay and healthy and spontaneous. The
exercises in the park were examples of the kind of dancing which cannot
help being graceful, while most of the performances in the theaters were
specimens of the kind of dancing which can fairly be described as
ungraceful, even if they cannot all of them be dismissed as disgraceful.
While the folk-dances of the children would fill the heart with a pure
delight, the sorry spectacle presented in some of the theaters was not
to be witnessed without a certain loss of self-respect; it recalled the
gross pantomimes of the later Roman theater, righteously denounced by
the Fathers of the Church.
Yet it is only just to record that in other theaters there were then
other spectacles to make amends for these sorry exhibitions. There were
several interesting attempts to recall the severe beauty of Greek
dancing. Lithe figures with free and floating draperies sought to
recapture the irreclaimable charm that lives for us in the lovely
Tanagra figurines, or that flits elusively around the sides of Attic
vases. Ambitious efforts were made by one dancer and by another to
translate into step and posture and gesture the intangible poetry of
Shelley and the haunting music of Mendelssohn. Unfortunately, the result
was rarely commensurate with the effort; and, in fact, a complete
success was not possible. The muse of dancing has no right to endeavor
to annex the territory of her sisters, who are charged with the care of
poetry and music. The several arts are strongest when each remains
strictly within its own limitations. For example, program-music is not
yet assured of its welcome, and program-dancing is far more difficult to
follow with complete comprehension.
And there was a further defect in these efforts to revive the classic
dances and to devise more modern interpretations of poetry and music.
Success, if possible at all, would be possible only to a highly trained
performer, mistress of every device of the terpsichorean art and
elaborately schooled in pantomimic expression. Now, it is not unfair to
say that no one of the performers of these so-called classic dances had
undergone this severe schooling. No one of them had the lightness, the
ease, the perfect mastery of method, the floating grace of the true
dancer, who has been taught from childhood, until all the tricks of the
craft are second nature. Without this arduous training any one who
attempts an ambitious display can scarcely fail to reveal instantly the
lamentable fact that she is not mistress of the technic of the art she
has undertaken to practise. She does not know how to get her effects;
she does not even know what effects are possible. She is almost certain
to appear amateurish, and she is likely to seem awkward also, not to say
ungainly. As Pope put it tersely: "Those move easiest who have learned
to dance."
These well-meant attempts to link dancing with poetry and music could be
entirely satisfactory only to those who have given little consideration
to dancing as an art, or who have small opportunity to see any really
beautiful dancing. There is no wonder that any effort to spiritualize
dancing, to give it a soul, to elevate it to the lofty level of the
lyric, should be welcomed by those who have been disgusted by the ugly
and vulgar high-kicking of the so-called pony ballets. The acrobatic
contortions of these athletic performers were wholly without charm, as
unalluring as they were violent. And equally unacceptable are the
frequent exhibitions of toe-dancing, sheer gymnastic feats, difficult,
indeed, but essentially uninteresting. Of a truth, these pony ballets on
the one hand, and these toe-dancers on the other, are exponents of
eccentricity. What they accomplish lies outside the true art of dancing.
It is not inspired by Terpsichore, and the saddened muse must veil her
face when she is forced to behold these crude exhibitions of misplaced
energy.