The dearth of remarkable dancers is due to the inexorable fact that
dancing is the most arduous of all the arts; its technic is the most
difficult to acquire. Indeed, this technic can be acquired only in early
youth, when the muscles are flexible and when they can be supplied at
will. It is early in her teens that a dancer must begin her training if
she aspires to eminence in the art. This training is very severe, and it
must never be relaxed. Rubinstein used to say that if he omitted his
practise for a single day he noticed it in his playing; if he omitted it
two days his enemies found it out; and if he omitted it three days even
his friends discovered it. The apprentice dancer can never omit a single
day of hard and uninteresting toil. Incessant application, during all
the long years of youth, is the price the ambitious beginner must pay
for the mastery of her art. She can have no vacations; she can have few
relaxations; she must keep herself constantly in training; she must be
prepared to surrender many of the things which make life worth living.
And it is no wonder that so few have the courage to persevere, and that
there is only one Rosita Mauri, only one Adeline Genee, and only one
Anna Pavlova in a quarter of a century. It is no wonder that the
inventor of terpsichorean spectacles nowadays finds himself compelled to
get along as best he can without a satisfactory soloist and to rely
rather on his handling of a mass of inadequately trained dancers.
But even if the highly accomplished soloist, absolute mistress of all
the possibilities of the art, is very rare, there are certain forms of
dancing which do not demand this ultimate skill and which call for
little more than grace and ease and charm, combined with a knowledge of
the simpler steps. For example, the Spanish Carmencita, whose portraits
by Mr. Sargent and by Mr. Chase now hang in the Luxembourg in Paris and
in the Metropolitan Museum in New York--Carmencita was not a skilful
dancer; she had undergone no inexorable schooling; she glided thru only
a few elementary movements. But she made no effort; she did not pretend
to what was not in her power; she was simple and unaffected. Her charm
was not in her singing or in her dancing; it was in her personality, in
the alluring and exotic suggestion of her individuality.
Nor could anybody venture to assert that Miss Kate Vaughan and Miss
Letty Lind were dancers in the same class with Mauri, Genee, and
Pavlova; but then they did not pretend to be. They knew only a few steps
of obvious simplicity, and they displayed no unexpected dexterity. But
the skirt-dance as they performed it was a memory of delight, with its
grace and its ease, with its perfect rhythm and with the swish of its
clinging draperies. It had a fascination of its own, quite different
from the fascination of the more poetic and ethereal ballet-dancing of
Rita Sangalli and Rosita Mauri. It was not of the stage exactly, but
almost of the drawing-room. It gave the same pleasure which we felt when
we were privileged to behold a court minuet led by the late Mrs. G. H.
Gilbert, who had been a dancer in the days of her youth. There is one
perfect beauty of the best ballet-dancing and there are other beauties
of different kinds in the skirt-dancing of the two Englishwomen and in
the languorous swaying of the Spanish gipsy.
Beauty of yet another order there was in an exhibition which was called
a dance, perhaps because there was no other word for it, but which
demanded no skill with the feet and which necessitated rather strength
in the arms. This was the luminous dance of Miss Loie Fuller, when she
swirled voluminous and prolonged draperies in lights that came from
above and from below, and from both sides--lights that changed by
exquisite gradations from one tint to another, the figure of the dancer
spinning around, now slowly and now swiftly, while her arms weaved
fantastic circles in the air, revealing unexpected combinations of
color, controlled by perfect taste. This may not have been dancing, by
any strict definition of the word, but it was decorative, artistic,
imaginative, and inexpressibly beautiful. It supplied a glimpse of
unsuspected delight; and probably Terpsichore would not disdain to claim
it for her own, however vigorously she might repel the suggestion that
she had any responsibility for the violence of the toe-dances, for the
vulgarity of the pony ballet, or for the ungainly caperings which
pretend to recapture the free movements of the Greeks.
(1910-1915)