STAGE DANCING
The Skirts of the Drama
A case lately came on for trial in Paris relating to a quarrel that
arose a long time ago. Incidentally, it may be observed that "the law's
delay" is even greater in France than over here, where, indeed, until
the most august regions of the courts are reached procedure is
comparatively rapid, and on the Chancery side cases are tried as hats
are ironed, "while you wait." The question in Paris raises one of
importance, but in itself is mere matter for merriment.
Mademoiselle Sarcy sued her manager because he tried to make her depart
from traditions; and, although she is a prima ballerina, required her to
wear flowing petticoats in the ballet of _Hérodiade_. The matter stirred
Paris prodigiously.
With us, of course, the ballet has ceased to be of importance. In
Mademoiselle Genée we had a dancer as well entitled to immortality as
those about whom our fathers raved, and Russian dancers of brilliance
have appeared, but opera and the legitimate theatre pay no attention to
ballet except at pantomime season; and whilst probably the average keen
playgoer of Paris is acquainted with the names of the orthodox steps,
and is aware that in the ballet one begins as _petit rat_, then becomes
a quadrille ballerina, develops into a coryphée, blossoms into a minor
subject, grows into a subject, and eventually emerges and reaches the
stars as a prima ballerina, few of us know anything about the subject.
The whole fight in Paris raged round the question whether, regardless of
period or nation or style of music, the prima ballerina is entitled to
wear the scanty parasol skirt and petticoats in which she delights. The
ladies of the ballet, with modern tradition on their side, resent any
alteration in costume. The matter is not one of propriety in the
ordinary sense of the word; the propriety of ballet costumes is out of
the range of rational discussion. No one can doubt that if we had never
seen anything but ordinary society drama and a ballet were launched at
us in customary costume the police courts would take up the matter.
It is even known that there was a time (not Sir Henry's) when the Lord
Chamberlain interfered at the Lyceum and was defeated by ridicule.
Custom has settled the question of propriety, and it may be confidently
asserted that it never occurs to the mind of the prima ballerina that
any human being could regard her costume as indelicate. The trouble in
Paris was that, despite the wish of the other persons concerned in the
ballet, the star insisted upon proving lavishly to the public that she
did not resemble the traditional Queen of Spain. She went further: she
demanded her pound of flesh--or padding--she wished to exhibit what in
technical slang is called _le tutu_, a term descriptive of the
abbreviated costume and possessed also of a secondary meaning, which may
be imagined by taking the ordinary tourist's pronunciation of the words
and translating it. Trilby's "the altogether" in connexion with tights
explains the matter.
The question is one of art, and here lies its humour. It is not physical
vanity on the part of the ladies, for they know that sculptors would
hardly choose as subjects the lower portion of women whose legs have
been over-developed by a training so arduous that it is found almost
impossible to get English girls to go through with it. But--and here's
the rub--the dancer has a respect for her craft, which, like the actor's
devotion to his art, tends to produce erroneous ideas, and this is why
the fight has taken place.
At the bottom, it becomes a question of virtuosity. Art has suffered
appallingly in every branch from the mania for cultivation of dexterity
in accomplishment. To the prima ballerina the dancing is more important
than the dance, to the actors the playing than the play, to many
painters the _facture_ than the picture, and so on. Music has been the
main sufferer, particularly on the vocal side, and certain kinds of
opera have been buried under the vocal acrobatics of the singers. One
sees occasionally in shop windows, and, it may be, in human habitations,
a species of abominable clock that has no kind of casing to conceal the
works; it suggests the image of a prima ballerina. With the perfectly
modest immodesty of the little boy cited in discussion by Laurence
Sterne, she delights in exhibiting the works; more truthfully than a
once famous conjuror, she insists upon showing us "how it is done"; and
that really is quite the last thing a person of any taste wishes to
know, or, rather, desires to have forced upon him.
Obviously, it is the duty of everyone who pretends to be educated to
have some acquaintance with the mechanics of the different branches of
art, but he does not want to be taught in public. Unfortunately the
performer displays a natural desire to show his own cleverness rather
than that of the dramatist. He treats himself as the cart when he is
only the--horse.
Drama has suffered severely from this; indeed, in our theatres we have
reached the topsy-turvydom of having the dramatist write for the players
instead of having the players act for the dramatist. Sterile art is the
general outcome. A great form of architecture perished with the
architect who, forgetful of noble design, indulged in desperate _tours
de force_ and offered to the stonemason the opportunity of executing
miracles in stone lacework.
Dancing has stood still since the dancers have gyrated frantically in
order to prove their mechanical dexterity, and drama is in the doldrums
because the players, with the assistance of the press, have induced the
public to regard their performance as more important than the work which
it is their duty to represent. The last statement is becoming
inaccurate. It is hardly extravagant to say that when a play is written
at the dictation of an actor the acting will be more important than the
piece, for but little good work comes out of drama concocted under such
circumstances.
The dancers are really dancing on the ruins of their art. They have
lessened their skirts and their popularity at the same time. Old
pictures show (and I believe that old measurements are preserved to
indicate the fact) that in the days of the famous _pas de quatre_--not,
of course, the one at the Gaiety--skirts were worn far longer than the
modern _tutu_.
The costume of the prima ballerina assoluta in our grandfather's days
was something like an umbrella and a pair of braces: the umbrella shrank
to the _en-tout-cas_, and the _en-tout-cas_ to the open parasol; unless
the movement is arrested, in the course of time a lampshade will be
reached, and ultimately, say, fifty years hence, the Genée of the period
will have nothing more of skirt and petticoat than some kind of fringe
round the waist, indicating, like our coccygeal vertebrae, or the
rudimentary limbs of the whale, a mere useless atrophied apparatus.
It was once possible for the poses and movements of the dancer to be
graceful--the phrase "the poetry of motion" had a meaning. With the
stiff _tutu_ sticking out almost at right angles, elegance is quite
impossible. The present "star" resembles in outline one of the
grotesques used by Hogarth to illustrate his theories in his "Analysis
of Beauty," and one is inclined to laugh at her awkwardness when she
walks; nor is it easy to admire when she whirls round like a dancing
dervish, the _tutu_ mounting higher and becoming more and more
rectangular the faster she goes.
Mlle. Genée, delicious and graceful, in some flowing character-costume,
and then ridiculous in the _tutu_ that she adores, proved this more than
any amount of written explanation. She was such a great performer, so
perfect in mechanism, so harmonious from little foot to dainty head, so
brilliant in her miming, that one was forced to say sorrowfully "_Et
tu-tu_, Genée." Unfortunately the virtuoso mania is irresistible, and,
so far as graceful dancing is concerned, there is no hope that we may
see such a _pas de quatre_ as won fame in the palmy days of the ballet;
we have reached the reign of the _pas du tutu_, and, almost wish we had
arrived at the _pas du tout_.
During the last few years there has been a great stir in the dancing
world. Some time ago Isadora Duncan gave a private exhibition at the New
Gallery of certain dances in a style intended to be a revival of old
Greek dancing.
A little later Miss Ruth St Denis presented in public some strange,
quite beautiful, performances consisting of dancing, miming and
posturing supposed to suggest ideas of Indian life, and her finely
restrained, truly artistic work deeply impressed both the critics and
audiences.
Afterwards came Miss Maud Allan, alleged--no matter with what degree of
truth--to be an imitator of Isadora Duncan, and she made a great "hit,"
her most popular performance being a "Salome" dance, which was
considered by some people to be indecent. Certainly of her costume the
French phrase "_qui commence trop tard et finit trop tôt_" might justly
be used, for she carried nudity on the stage to a startling degree. In a
good many other dances her work was rather pretty and quite
unobjectionable, but vastly inferior to the art of Isadora Duncan or
Ruth St Denis.
Isadora Duncan
The theatrical season of 1908 ended in a blaze of--dancing. At what is
generally deemed about the dullest moment in the year Isadora Duncan
appeared at the Duke of York's Theatre, and kept it open and well
attended for almost a month. The affair is unique in the history of our
theatre. One can imagine a playhouse running on the basis of a big
ballet, with a story, popular music, magnificent scenery, gorgeous
costumes, huge _corps de ballet_, half-a-dozen principals and immense
advertisement. In this case we have had more or less isolated dances to
music generally severe; for scenery only a background of subtle yellow,
taking strange tones under the influence of different lights; for
costumes only some beautiful, tranquil, simple Greek drapery; for _corps
de ballet_ a few children; for principals one woman, with an intelligent
face, but certainly no great beauty; and in the way of advertisement
very little, except some honestly enthusiastic press notices, and
fortunately nothing in the form of photographs of nudities or
half-nudities.
There has been a triumph of pure art under austere conditions, such as
can hardly be recollected on our stage, unless in the case of
_Everyman_--pure art akin to the theatrical, indeed parent of the drama.
The word histrionic is derived through the Latin from an Etruscan word
which means "to leap" and was originally applied to dancers.
Historically, the matter is interesting. Drama began in dance and
developed from it, dance and drama going hand-in-hand for a long while;
then a separation came, and dance has tended more and more to become
meaningless and conventional, and, in the chief school of dancing,
purely technical. The Spanish school is still alive, reinforced by the
North African, and in the main showing some tendency, often perfectly
restrained, towards the indecent. Our own step-dancing remains popular,
and for a while the hybrid skirt-dancing triumphed, chiefly because of
the genius of Kate Vaughan and talent of her successors, one of whom,
Katie Seymour, worked out a clever individual compound of styles.
The "Classic" school, classic in quite a secondary sense, which has been
represented by what one can conveniently call the ballet, year after
year has worked towards its extinction by the over-cultivation of mere
technique, of execution rather than imagination.
The greatest artist of this school in our times is Genée; natural
grace, a piquant individuality, and a fine power of miming, have lent
charm to work the foundation of which is really acrobatic, and consists
of remarkable feats made too manifest by an abominably ugly costume.
Isadora Duncan goes back in style to the early Greek; dancing, however,
necessarily to more modern music, for the reason that we do not know how
to reproduce much of the old, and possibly would not like it if we
could. To her work one may apply the phrase of Simonides, that "dancing
is silent poetry." Preferable is the term that has been used concerning
architecture: Schelling, in his "Philosophie der Kunst," calls it
"frozen music," a term ridiculed by Madame de Staël. Peter Legh wrote a
book on the topic, published in 1831, with the title "The Music of the
Eye." The book is poor, pretentious stuff, but the title seems nicely
applicable to the dancing of Isadora Duncan. To a deaf man her work
would be entirely musical--to a Beethoven or Robert Franz, deaf after,
for a while, full enjoyment of sound, her dances would, I believe,
represent complete, delightful, musical impressions.
It may be that sometimes in her work she attempts impossible subtleties,
endeavouring to express ideas beyond the range of melody--for it is
difficult to imagine that any dancing can be more than expressive of
melody, though no doubt to make this true "melody" must be understood in
a large sense. How far away this is from dancing which consists in the
main of executing more or less complicated steps "in time" with the
music, or such appalling vulgarities as a cake-walk. It must be admitted
that one of the Tanagra figurines is sadly suggestive of a
characteristic pose in the cake-walk--though it may well be that it is
a mere pose which led to none of the abominations with which our stage
has been deluged!
In the case of Isadora Duncan we have seen poses and movements of
extraordinary beauty, exquisitely sympathetic with fine music. No doubt
occasionally she has made a concession, as on her first night, when she
danced to "The Blue Danube" waltz by way of an encore, putting, however,
her own interpretation on the music and her sense of it. Those who are
acquainted with Greek sculpture and with some of the classic drawings of
the old masters will see that to a very large extent her work is a
revival rather than an invention; but this fact--which she
acknowledges--in no degree diminishes the merit of her performances, for
the execution is of wonderful beauty and the application of the old
ideas to music of a different type is very clever.
Her work alone has well repaid the audiences, many members of which have
made several visits to the theatre; it has, however, been supplemented
by dances in which young children were the performers, dances so pretty
in conception and delightful in execution that one has felt the whole
house thrilling with pleasure. Nothing like these children dances,
nothing of the kind half as charming, has been given on the stage in our
day.
The one complaint possible against Isadora Duncan is that she has
rendered us immoderately dissatisfied with what had once moderately
contented us; and the fear is that we shall promptly have a host of
half-baked imitators, who will copy the mere accidentals of her system
without understanding the essentials, and will fancy that the whole
matter is one of clothes and music, and prance about bare-legged,
meaninglessly. It is hard to see how this is to be avoided until there
has been time for her pupils to grow up; it is certain, however, that if
the new idea, the new-old idea, takes root, there will be a revolution
in dancing, which may have far-reaching effects.
Drama of the strictly intellectual type will remain unaffected; possibly
there will be a new development of the musico-dramatic. It has been
suggested that musical comedy is waning, and the period has been reached
when the average piece of this class spells failure. There is, of
course, nothing in the work of Isadora Duncan which limits it to one
principal, and naught to prevent the combination of singing and dancing.
Off-hand it seems rash to suggest that spoken dialogue could be
harmonized with these. It is imaginable that the authors of _Prunella_
could see their way to combine with work somewhat on the lines of their
charming piece such ideas of dancing as have been suggested by Isadora
Duncan. The result should be a novel, delightful form of art, not
necessarily hybrid.
After Isadora Duncan's public performances came the deluge and the
country was flooded with women indecently unclad, who flapped about on
the stage displaying their persons and their incompetence lavishly. The
authorities have been very lax as regards such performances, many of
which were so obviously crude and clumsy that it was clear that a
_succès de scandale_ was sought deliberately. Of course some of the
performers may have had merit. Later on (in 1910) there arrived some
brilliant Russian dancers whose work is of too great value and
importance to be dealt with in a single paragraph.