THE HIGH KICKERS
It is always interesting to observe the interaction of life and art. All
art is of its time, the greatest as well as the least. It may be
supposed that the dance has too slight a content to express to be under
the obligation of borrowing anything from the ideas of the age. But it
has always responded not only to the rhythm of personal emotional life,
but also to the larger social rhythm of the time. We have hinted at a
relation between the conventional ballets of the forties, with their
tranquil emotions, and the placid, domestic temper of the early
Victorian era, between the passionate style of Elssler and the spirit of
the Romantics. As the century waned, the older formal and unhasting
rhythms tended to break up; the pace quickened; the tranquillity which
the nineteenth century had carried over from the eighteenth disappeared
in the excitement of the _fin-de-siècle_ spirit. The temperature of the
blood was rising towards the fever-point of the “naughty nineties.” They
were probably much less naughty than they supposed themselves to be, and
they had an unfortunate tendency to mistake vulgarity for vice.
Something of the change of the social spirit was reflected in the dance.
Paris began to force the pace in the latter days of the Second Empire.
It was a somewhat feverish era, electric with the sense of political
change and hazardous speculation, echoing with _coups d’état_ and _coups
de bourse_. Something of the general unrest penetrated the spirit of the
dance. It took on a more exciting allure, became more disordered and
furious. The quadrille in particular was completely metamorphosed; its
elegance was exchanged for violent movements, resembling the
oscillations of a drunkard. In the form of the Cancan and the Chahut it
was the delight of the _bals publics_ of the French capital. Céleste
Mogador, Rose Ponpon, Clara Pomaré, with their _beauté de diable_, gave
a vogue to the new and more abandoned style of dancing. These stars
disappeared after a brief and noisy career, but the dance survived in
undiminished vigour. Its two principal strongholds were the Bal Bullier
on Mont St Geneviève and the Moulin de la Galette on Montmartre. The
transition from Empire to Republic did not have a sobering influence
upon the dance, but rather the reverse. Its natural violence was
stimulated by the revolutionary excitement. The fury of the barricades
animated its gestures. Students and grisettes, inveterate
_révolutionaires_, revelled in it as a kind of vague protest against
authority, the bourgeoisie, the spirit of order and propriety. Like the
impressionism of contemporary painting, it was championed by those who
were rather uncertain as to the articles of their artistic faith but had
a very strong sense of being “agin the goverment,” civil or spiritual.
It was an affirmation of revolution.
To the average home-staying Briton of the period, Paris meant
Montmartre, and Montmartre meant the Cancan. Even to-day the word
conjures up a vision of the old Moulin Rouge, with its sinister, winking
lights, its crude sensationalism, its wild fandango of forced hilarity.
In this hot-house atmosphere of feverish yet mirthless gaiety, the dance
forgot its ancient origin in hushed forest glades and laughing
vineyards, forgot its long sojourn in dignified courts, forgot its
strict discipline in the academies; it became little more than an
appetiser to the feast of debauch. But among the mob of flamboyant
bacchanales for whom the dance was merely a means by which they could
display their wares to the market, there were one or two dancers with a
distinct personality, who gave the _école montmartroise_ the vitality,
if not the dignity, of a kind of art. The chief of these were La Goulue,
Grille d’Égout and Nini Patte-en-l’air.
In her private _dossier_ La Goulue was known to the State as Louise
Weber. She is said to have earned her soubriquet by her gluttony as a
child. Doubtless she had the excuse of the stimulus of hunger, for she
was the daughter of poor working-class people.
[Illustration: CONNIE GILCHRIST
(THE GOLD GIRL)
_From a painting by Whistler_]
She had, however, all the impertinent charm of the _petite Parisienne_.
And, moreover, she had a passion for her métier. Small, fair,
intriguing, with delicately rounded limbs, ivory shoulders and a
mutinous little head crowned with light gold hair, she startled Paris by
her dancing at the Elysée Montmartre. To the abandon of the Cancan she
added in her rendering of it novel effects of an audacity that won her
immediate fame. She was to the eighties what Mogador and Rose Ponpon
were to the sixties. She became a person of note and the spoilt child of
the _jeunesse dorée_. The story is told of how she was invited to supper
at the Maison d’Or--she was an astonishingly vulgar little being in
those days--by a Russian prince. A well-meaning friend, wishing to give
her a genial hint to be on her best behaviour, wrote her a note, which
was handed to her on a salver by the _mâitre d’hôtel_. She opened it,
and with some difficulty spelled out the advice, to the amusement of her
host: “Speak very nicely to the Grand-Duke in order to strengthen the
Franco-Russian alliance!”
In her dancing there was no order, no method, but a sure sense of rhythm
and an ingenuous frankness and gaiety. To grace of movement she made no
pretension--the dance was a negation of it. It was a frenzy, a delirium,
a contortion. Her legs were agitated like those of a marionette, they
pawed the air, jerked out in the manner of a pump-handle, menaced the
hats of the spectators. She sought the _geste suspect_ with hand, foot,
and body, although at the Moulin Rouge she was obliged to cut discreeter
capers. Much of her popularity depended upon a purely personal
attraction. She had all the fascination of brilliant and irresponsible
youth: she was frankly proud of her charms and daring in displaying
them.
In personal appearance Grille d’Égout was in every way her opposite.
Dark, thin, with no claims to beauty--her upper jaw was prominent, her
chin receding--she resembled La Goulue only in her youth, her spirit and
her passion for the dance. In her ordinary movements she had a somewhat
gauche and embarrassed manner; hers was the type of the unassuming
bourgeoise. But at the first sound of the music everything was changed.
She launched into the dance with an astonishing assurance, verve and
directness of attack. She was more correct than eccentric, gay rather
than voluptuous, arresting by gestures that were droll rather than
exciting. Her dancing, a _délire des jambes_, gave a suggestion of the
antics of the Parisian gamin.
But the most striking personality of all was that of Nini
Patte-en-l’air. She was dark as the night, with a strange, mask-like
face of deathly pallor, eyes sunk in deep hollows overarched by thick
eyebrows, suggestive of Rops’ etching of “La Mort qui danse.” Her slight
body quivered with intensity of life--_la vie à outrance_--as though
charged with electric fluid. The rapidity of her movements was dazzling,
and every movement was unforeseen, incalculable, and executed without a
trace of effort. Five, ten, twenty times her foot flew above her head;
then it remained suspended at the level of her face; it twisted,
writhed, agitated, as though it possessed a life independent of the leg;
it was a prisoner and struggled to escape; the dancer watched its
contortions, an amused spectator of its restlessness; at last it was
released; it darted to the ground, recovered its strength and resumed
its command of the dance. Then, this by-play over, the dancer rested her
hand on the arm of a cavalier, and began a wild, grotesque and fantastic
career among the spectators. At every step her foot leapt to the
ceiling, her head was thrown violently back, her body maintained a
difficult equilibrium, her emaciated features shone with a delirious
excitement. Twice she made this frenzied revolution of the hall, then,
coming to a sudden standstill, her heel slid along the floor and she
sank abruptly in a final dislocation, her legs extended horizontally on
either side. It was the dance bewitched, bedevilled, a frenzy and agony
of movement, without a parallel except in the maniacal contortions of
the Aïssaouas or the revolutions of the howling Dervishes.
These dancers had their followers, of whom the names alone
survive--Folette, Rayon d’Or, La Soubrette, La Glu, La Cigale. The dance
of _école montmartroise_ was a variation upon one perpetual theme--the
dislocation of the leg. To name the variations is to indicate the
bizarre gestures which formed the stock-in-trade of the school--_La
Friture_, _Le Port d’Armes_, _La Jambe derrière la tête_, _Le
Croisement_--the latter executed by two dancers whose feet touched in
mid-air, describing a kind of ogival arch. It is unnecessary to comment
upon this style of dancing. In it the search for the sensational, the
incredible, the impossible, reached its limit. The aim of the dancer was
to escape as far as possible from the grace of natural bodily movement,
to caricature the human form, to imitate the convulsions of the
epileptic. It was an instance of one of those maladies which at times
afflict the arts. But it is a disease which cannot recur, for the world,
having once seen what the dance can achieve when it loses its sanity, is
not likely to wish for a repetition of the spectacle. Montmartre
remains--chastened, perhaps, if not repentant. It is possible that the
tradition still lingers and that there are dancers who, to the confusion
of the unsophisticated British or transatlantic stranger, can at need
give a dim suggestion of what the _école montmartroise_ was at the
height, or perhaps rather at the depth, of its fame. But the dance is
dead, and not only dead but damned.
England has always kept a circumspect eye upon the heights of
Montmartre, and no dance that was danced upon that hill could long be
hid. Needless to say, the Cancan in all its native freedom was never
performed in this country--for there are performances which depend for
their success, if not for their very existence, upon a certain
indefinable but quite perceptible _rapport_ between performer and
spectator, and in England there was no atmosphere for this sympathy to
ripen in. But in spite of this, England enjoyed for many years a very
sensational imitation of the Montmartre school. The Skirt Dance and the
Serpentine Dance, after they had lost the charm of novelty, began to
pall. Tired of the monotony of their limited movements, the public was
ready to welcome a dance with a wild gaiety and abandon which had all
the attractiveness of contrast. The appetite for sensation grows by what
it feeds on, and very soon a dancer who could not kick her legs higher
than the head, who had not cultivated the “splits” and the “cart-wheel”
to perfection, who did not, in fact, exhibit the art of dancing as a
series of grotesque contortions, could not count upon holding the
attention of an audience. The Cancan was not called by its original
name after it had crossed the Channel, nor was it danced as a quadrille;
but to all intents and purposes the famous dance which Lottie Collins
executed after singing her “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” song--a dance which
sent England and America hysterical with delight--was none other than
the famous Cancan, only slightly modified in accordance with Anglo-Saxon
traditions of modesty and decorum.
The anglicised version of the Cancan was closely associated with that
popular song, the last lamentable echoes of which have only recently
died away. The origins of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” have been discussed with
an interest worthier of a more classical literature. The melody has been
derived from an old German Volkslied; it has been asserted that it was
heard in a Potsdam tea-garden in 1872 and in a Parisian café a hundred
years ago, when it was played as the accompaniment to an Algerian _danse
du ventre_; it is stated to have been whistled and sung for generations
among the rice-fields of the Southern States by negroes whose ancestors
had danced to it in the barbaric orgies of Central Africa. Whatever its
origin, and the latter derivation is the most probable, it was Lottie
Collins who first introduced the tune to European audiences. The words,
of course, were entirely rewritten, but their barbaric originals could
not have been more idiotic than those which were composed to suit the
music-hall sense of humour. The dance which accompanied the song was,
however, the great feature of the entertainment. Lottie Collins burst
upon London just as a dull theatrical season was drawing to a close, and
for several years she held the audiences at the Gaiety and Palace
Theatre in the hollow of her hand. The rendering of the Cancan on an
English stage was a notable event, but Lottie Collins had the invaluable
instinct of knowing how far to go without ever once overstepping the
border-line of propriety. In spite of the storms of protest which it
raised in certain quarters, her dance was never even in its wildest
moments very shocking. The extraordinary jerks of her body, her sudden
and startling high kicks, her frantic pirouettes, were more astonishing
than indecorous; while the spirit with which they were executed and the
utter disregard of the sense of rhythm was a revelation to the English
public, which was held spell-bound.
In America Lottie Collins met with a repetition of her London success.
She began her tour with an unfortunate experience. Having to remain in
quarantine owing to a case of cholera which had occurred on the voyage,
in her exasperation she telegraphed to her manager the concise
aspersion,--“Hang America.” This indiscretion did not predispose the
American people, always sensitive to the appreciation of foreigners, in
her favour, and the moment when she made her bow to a New York audience
was not unnaturally a critical one. That her subsequent success in the
States was as great as it had been in London seems to prove that there
was something more attractive in her dance than those who know it only
by the melody could have imagined possible. The American idiom lends
itself to a description of her performance. “Lottie Collins,” so ran the
account in the leading daily paper of Kansas City, “has the stage all to
herself and she bounces and dances and races all over it in the most
reckless and irresponsible way, precisely as if she was a happy child so
full of health and spirits that she couldn’t keep still if she wanted
to. Sometimes she simply runs headlong all the way round the stage,
finishing the lap with perhaps a swift whirl or two, or a whisk and a
kick. Sometimes she simply jumps or bounces, and sometimes she doubles
up like a pen-knife with the suddenness of a spring lock to emphasise
the ‘Boom.’ She is invariably in motion except when she stops to chant
the gibberish that passes for verses, but the wonder is that she has
breath enough to sing after the first cyclonic interlude.” Mr Clement
Scott, the dramatic critic, writing of her in the _Daily Telegraph_,
confirms the impression of her antics so succinctly conveyed by the
Kansas City press. “Bang goes the drum and the quiet, simple-looking,
nervous figure is changed into a bacchanalian fury. But wild and wilder
as the refrain grows, half-maddened as the dancer seems to become, no
one can reasonably detect one trace of vulgarity or immodesty in a
single movement.”
Undoubtedly popular taste has undergone a radical change within the last
generation. The enthusiasm which Lottie Collins aroused is much less
intelligible to us now than the homage that in earlier days used to be
rendered to Taglioni. Occasionally in the obscurer theatres of the
provinces an agile young woman may still be seen throwing out her legs
in all directions, performing the “splits” and imitating the rotation of
a cart-wheel, but the sight leaves us wondrously cold. We find it
difficult to understand how a former generation could have gone
delirious with delight over such a display. _Autres temps, autres
mœurs._ ...
But lest we should wrap ourselves too closely in our self-complacency we
should recollect that, at all events so far as the more popular style of
dancing is concerned, we have possibly only exchanged vulgarity for
banality. The popular taste is a little more queasy than formerly; it
demands not lustiness, but prettiness. Prettiness, insignificant but
cheerful, is the peculiar note of the _école anglaise_, if such a thing
may be said to exist. Lottie Collins left a legacy of style behind her
which her successors possibly found to be a _damnosa hereditas_. But
they have prudently selected the prettier features and rejected the
rest. The most famous exponents of the English method are the girls who
have been trained at the well-known schools of Mr John Tiller, in
Manchester, London and Paris. So apt was this training to meet the
popular taste that the demand for pupils by theatrical and music-hall
managers, not only in England but on the Continent, grew with amazing
rapidity. The cry in the world of amusement was for Tiller girls and yet
more Tiller girls. It is impossible to mistake a Tiller girl. She is
invariably young, invariably pretty, and invariably cheerful, if with a
somewhat infantine gaiety; and, while she is free from the affected
mannerisms of an inferior ballerina, she is a conscientious performer,
with a thorough knowledge of her special though limited technique. She
usually appears in troupes of eight or ten. The most famous of these are
the Palace Girls, chiefly to be seen at the popular theatre of varieties
in Shaftesbury Avenue, London. Others with a marked family likeness,
better known perhaps on the Continent than in England, are the Houp-La
Girls, the Casino Girls, the Ohio Girls, the Snow Drops, the Cocktails,
Les Ping Pongs. No provincial pantomime is quite complete without
[Illustration: REGINA BADET
PREMIÈRE DANSEUSE OF THE PARIS OPERA
_Photograph: Central Illustrations_]
one or other of them. They are to be found in the Parisian Revues, and
on the stages of America, Germany, Austria and even Spain, where they
are welcomed as the typical representatives of the English school of
dancing.
Their charm is of the surface, depending a little upon their science and
a great deal upon their maturely immature graces. They go through the
same movements in the same manner, at exactly the same time, and with
the same unwearying smile. Occasionally they vary the performance with a
little singing--simple melodious ditties dealing with bees and
honeysuckle, nightingales and the moon, love and the Swiss mountains.
But vocal accomplishment is not their strong point. It is not the accent
of London or Manchester, but the freshness, the buoyancy, the cheerful
innocence, the absence of all excess, the easy execution of simple
movements, above all the unimpeachable prettiness, that constitute the
chief characteristic of this peculiarly English contribution to the art
of the dance.
It may have seemed that in England, at any rate until the recent
revival, the dance had fallen quite out of relation to the other arts.
It appears to have been familiar only with the music of the streets. It
has given no inspiration to sculpture or painting. It has been
shamefully cold-shouldered by serious artists. But perhaps it has not
been so entirely uninfluenced by popular British art as may seem to be
the case. It has certainly worshipped at the same shrine of prettiness
and gentle undisturbing emotionalism. It has always been laudably bent
on pleasing; it has shunned violence and extremes, even if in so doing
it has had to submit to be vapid; it has been artful only in order to
appear artless; if never profound it has always been respectable. Surely
in their rendering of happy incidents, their genial flow of spirits,
their easy and pretty accomplishment, many of the pictures of official
British art are inspired by the same spirit as that which animates the
Tiller Girls!