THE REVIVAL OF CLASSICAL[1] DANCING
When an art grows infirm, there always comes a time when the
practitioners hold council over the failing body and prescribe the
remedy. And the remedy is always the same--they recommend a return to
Nature. Art must go back to its nursing mother, nourish itself again
upon the elemental milk from which it drew its earliest life, and be
made whole.
Towards the close of the last century, the dance was sick with a fever,
sick unto death. The mild and genial palliatives of Mr John Tiller were
unavailing. In vain he taught his pupils to smile, to shun the movements
of delirium, to simulate a childish glee, to be cheerful even though the
heavens should fall. The result too often showed that a dancer might
smile and smile and be a failure. Her naturalness was not really Nature.
Her passion for honeysuckle and the mountains was as little sincere as
the morning blush upon her cheek. The dance could not be tricked back to
health by such artless deceptions. It demanded the more radical cure of
a genuine return to nature.
The goal was clear, but the way was not plain to be seen. For where was
nature to be found? All dancing is merely a refinement upon unconscious
bodily gesture. It is the poetic rendering of the prose of ordinary
human movement. But the modern world has lost the old graceful motions
natural to man in a less artificial state. The characteristic of
natural movement is undulation. Waters, winds, trees, all living forms,
obey a sovereign law of rhythm. Nature moves in curves and gradations
rather than by leaps and bounds. And man in his happiest
circumstances--when he lives close to nature, when his occupations are
genial and not arduous, when the processes of his labour are even and
uncomplicated, when his body is freely exercised and is not forced to
conform itself to a special and restricted task--moves with the regular
rhythm, the freedom, the equipoise, of nature itself. In that pleasant
tract of life, midway between the savage and the civilised state, the
occupations of man seem to have developed equally his vigour and his
grace. The ancient world had the instinct to know how far labour might
be saved without the labourer being sacrificed to the machine. The pause
and ictus of the scythe, the even swing of the oar, the circular sweep
of the sling, the balance of the seat upon the unbitted and barebacked
horse--such were the movements that formed a breed of men capable of all
the heights and depths of human grace. Civilisation--in the canting
sense of the word--means specialisation of employment, and such
specialisation in its turn too often means the deformation of the body.
In the modern civilised world the body is usually exercised either too
little or too continuously in a single occupation. The dependence upon
easy means of locomotion, the resort to labour-saving appliances, the
endless dull circulation through the rigid streets, the long periods of
inaction interrupted by sudden spells of haste, have quenched the old
buoyant and even rhythms. Human motion nowadays tends to be not flowing
but angular, jerky, abrupt, disjointed, full of gestures not flowing
imperceptibly one into another, but broken off midway. A return to
nature means a turning away from the precedents of art to the incidents
of contemporary life. The difficulty of applying this precept to the
dance lay in the fact that there was no nature to return to, or rather
that nature itself had become corrupt and sophisticated.
In this predicament what was to be done? Happily when nature fails us we
can still have recourse to a counsellor of almost equal authority and
wisdom--the art of the antique world. And whereas for some of the
modern arts--for painting and music, for example--classical art is but a
taciturn guide, for the dance it is full of instruction. Their interests
are one and the same--the body and bodily movement. Greek sculpture has
caught innumerable moments of freely flowing action, at a time when
action was probably most pure, removed equally far from the rudeness of
the savage and the inexpressiveness of the modern. All its salient
gestures of sport and war and of the emotional states are as clear to us
as if we had been the contemporaries of Pericles and Pheidias. The Greek
frieze has been described as a kind of incomplete cinematographic film
of the Greek dance. And the so-called Tanagra figures represent a whole
alphabet of the silent plastic speech of everyday life.
To recall the dance to nature by the way of Greek art was the work of an
American woman, perhaps the greatest personality who has ever devoted
herself to developing the art of the dance, Isadora Duncan. Her
interests ranged over a wide field of activities. There was a time when
she wished to initiate a reform of human life in its least details of
costume, of hygiene, of morals. But gradually she came to concentrate
her interest upon the dance. For her the dance is not merely the art
which permits the spirit to express itself in movement; it is the base
of a whole conception of life, a life flexible, harmonious, natural. In
the development of the dance she found herself confronted by the dilemma
which has just been alluded to. On the one hand was the limited
technique of the ballet, on the other the unnatural contortions of the
eccentric school. To return to the unconscious gesture of the
people--that is to say, the crude, stereotyped gestures of the
street--offered no way of escape. She found the solution in a return to
the natural gesture of human life as represented in Greek art.
In order to get at her point of view it is best to let her speak in her
own words--although, as she would say, one speaks better about the dance
in dancing than in commentaries and explanations.
“To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which
expresses the soul of these forms--this is the art of the dancer. It is
from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the
same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities. Rodin
has said: ‘To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the
works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of
nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which
they have interpreted nature.’ Rodin is right; and in my art I have by
no means copied, as has been supposed, the figures of Greek vases,
friezes and paintings. From them I have learned to regard nature, and
when certain of my movements recall the gestures that are seen in works
of art, it is only because, like them, they are drawn from the grand
natural source.
“My inspiration has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds, from
the sympathies that exist between passion and the storm, between
gentleness and the soft breeze, and the like, and I always endeavour to
put into my movements a little of that divine continuity which gives to
the whole of nature its beauty and its life.”
It must not be supposed that Isadora Duncan despised technique or
attempted to dispense with it. It was the technique of the current modes
of dancing that she found unsatisfactory. “I have closely studied the
figured documents of all ages and of all the great masters,” she says,
“but I have never seen in them any representations of human beings
walking on the extremity of the toes or raising the leg higher than the
head. These ugly and false positions in no way express that state of
unconscious dionysiac delirium which is necessary to the dancer.
Moreover movements, just like harmonies in music, are not invented; they
are discovered.”
It is a mistake, which some exponents of the “natural” style of dancing
have fallen into, to imagine that they can express the spirit that moves
them by any haphazard agitation of the limbs. To dance “naturally” does
not mean to dance impromptu, relying upon the inspiration of the moment.
In art the simplest effects are usually those which have cost the
greatest effort, and no effort is more severe than the attempt to
imitate the inimitable model of nature. The dance demands as rigorous a
technique as any other art. Without a technique it is inarticulate. Miss
Duncan
[Illustration: ISADORA DUNCAN]
has undergone a training as elaborate as any _prima ballerina_. From her
childhood upwards she has devoted twenty years to the study of the
dance. She had to invent, or rather discover, her own technique. Taking
for her models the poses of Greek art, she endeavoured to reconstruct
from a single attitude the whole continuous flowing movement, of which
the statuesque pose is of course but an arrested moment. She had to fill
in the gaps, as it were, in the interrupted cinematographic film, to
pass rhythmically from one gesture to the next. She found at first that
her body failed to respond. It suffered from the unpliability, the
general wrongness of movement, which is the outcome of modern conditions
of life and the loss of tradition. She found that she had to begin with
the elements of motion, to learn to walk, to run, to leap rhythmically
before she could dance rhythmically. She started therefore to learn to
govern her body, to recover a lost art of balance and flexibility, to
make each slightest movement a harmonious expressive gesture. For she
demands none but the finest gestures for the dance. Everything common
and contemptible she would exclude by a severe test.
“Every movement that can be danced by the side of the sea without being
in harmony with the rhythm of the waves, every movement that can be
danced in the midst of a forest without being in harmony with the
swaying of the foliage, every movement that can be danced, naked, in the
broad sunlight of the open field, without being in harmony with the
vibration and solitude of the landscape--all these movements are false
movements in that they are discords in the harmony of the great natural
lines. That is why the dancer must choose above all the movements which
express the strength, the health, the grace, the nobility, the languor
or the gravity of living things.”
The steps of the dance, therefore, have to be studied with a care which
makes even the elaboration of the technique of the ballet appear simple.
But the steps are not the end; they are only a means. The end at which
in Miss Duncan’s view the dance aims is “to express the noblest and most
profound sentiments of the human soul, those which come from Apollo,
from Pan, from Bacchus and from Aphrodite. To see in it no more than a
frivolous or agreeable diversion is to offer an insult to the dance.”
She is in thorough accord with the Greek view that the dance reacts upon
the moral mood. “The attitudes which we take have an influence upon our
soul. A simple throwing back of the head, done passionately, causes us a
sudden tremor of joy, of heroism or of desire. All gestures have a moral
resonance, and thus can directly express every possible moral state.”
Hers also was the Greek view that music and the dance should be mutually
interpretative. Before her time music had been regarded primarily as an
accompaniment, a time-keeper; she enunciated the theory that its
function was to give the keynote of the mood of the dance. Music and the
dance were to be two bodies animated by a single soul. She selected as
her prime composer Gluck, a master of simple and obvious melody. But she
not only interprets him, she enlarges and sublimates him. The handling
of musical themes in this way is of course a dangerous matter, and might
give rise to discussion which would be out of place in this book. It may
be maintained that a consummate composition, a symphonic movement by
Beethoven, is complete in itself. The best music is its own interpreter
and needs no elucidation. Music, moreover, is large and broad in its
emotional expression; it transcends words, and how therefore should it
not transcend gesture? It is as likely as not that a choregraphic
commentary may limit rather than enhance the musical conception. It is
possible that the movements of a dancer might not at all correspond with
the mood that a Chopin nocturne, for instance, awakes in us. To these
misgivings I do not propose to reply. The only adequate answer is to be
found in Miss Duncan’s dancing. On this debatable ground her tread is
sure. In each of her interpretations of music there is a self-evident
rightness which silences censure.
Miss Duncan at first suffered the lot of most reformers. Novelty is
usually found to be amusing; the public laughed because it failed to
understand. When she appeared some twelve years ago in New York, she had
already struggled long and hard to perfect
[Illustration: ISADORA DUNCAN
_Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd._]
her art and she sorely needed the invaluable stimulus of recognition and
appreciation. She performed a dance which was suggested by “The
Rubáiyát” of Omar Khayyám. The newspaper humorists made merry over her
work. One summed up the general verdict in the phrase: “Our public will
probably prefer Omar’s lines to Miss Duncan’s.”
When she came to Europe, however, Miss Duncan’s art met with speedy
recognition. In rapid succession she captured Berlin, Paris, St
Petersburg and London. London perhaps found the new gospel somewhat hard
to accept, but the educational authorities both in Germany and France
were anxious to obtain her services in the instruction of children. In
Paris she has trained a troupe of young children whose delightful
dancing charmed London audiences a year or two ago.
In the power of expressing the depth and subtlety of spiritual moods
Isadora Duncan is supreme. She is a poet no less than a dancer. Her
dancing is so deeply rooted in the soul that it ignores the superficial
and often coquettish graces of the popular dancer. And yet she is
feminine in her dancing, but feminine in the simple, calm, womanly
grandeur of the three fates of the Parthenon marbles. Hers is the
essential and eternal type of womanhood, the type of the Madonna, of the
peasant woman, breathing of the warm earth and the open air, of Ceres
rather than of Circe. Her dance has perhaps the beauty of full summer
rather than of spring. Its lines are flowing, but full of dignity and
restraint. There is perhaps still a suggestion of the frieze in it. A
new technique necessarily at first inclines towards rigidity.
There is no surer proof of the true greatness of her art than the fact
that it can produce in the spectator that sense of shock which only work
of an elemental character can give, a shock which sends the mind surging
forward down vistas opening up an undiscovered prospect not merely of
art but of life. This sensation has been well described by Mr W. R.
Titterton in a glowing pæan of praise. “I remember when I first saw her,
at the Theater des Westens in Berlin. My friends had led me to expect
something fine, and then the Duncan came and struck me like a
thunderclap. Will you believe me? I shuddered with awe. Once in a
century, in ten centuries, comes a New Idea, and here was I the
spectator of the latest born. In this idea--this free, simple, happy,
expressive rhythmic movement--was focused all I and a hundred others had
been dreaming. This was our symbol--the symbol of a new art, a new
literature, a new national polity, a new life. I saw crowds of happy
children, of happy men and women, dancing that dance on village greens,
in the green forest, on the green hill-tops. Pedants at their books,
pedants at their figures, pedants on their platforms vanished in smoke
before the exultant dances of this glorious woman. As the walls of
Jericho before the trump of Joshua, so before her the factory walls fell
down, the festering slums and ugly places of London crumbled to dust,
and away to Arcady we danced to the sound of her Shepherd’s piping.”
If Isadora Duncan propounded the gospel of the classical dance, Maud
Allan promulgated it with the greatest popular success. She won the ear
of England for the new word. Not that she was by any means a mere
copyist--her talent was too original for that. Coming after her great
predecessor, she nevertheless found her own inspiration in herself. With
a certain assurance in the strength of her own individuality, she
treated the classical dance with some freedom and boldness. She added
the personal touch that gained the applause of the crowd.
Miss Maud Allan is Canadian born, but she spent the best part of her
childhood and youth in the state of California. There she lived a breezy
out-of-door life, romping, riding, swimming, mountain climbing, drinking
in health with the virgin air--all unconsciously, no doubt, acquiring
the strength and suppleness of body that were to be invaluable to her in
later years. Very early she began the serious study of music, but even
in those early days she seems to have been conscious of the
possibilities of the expression of emotion through the medium of
gesture. When Sarah Bernhardt visited San Francisco, the art of the
great actress left a deep impression upon her. Shortly afterwards, when
she was playing at the piano, her mind still attentive to the rhythm of
the French artist’s gestures, her mother asked her of what she was
thinking. “Of Sarah Bernhardt’s wonderful talent, of the beautiful
movements of her body,” she replied. “She seems to express more with it
than with her lips.”
It was decided that Maud Allan should go to Berlin to continue her
musical studies at the Royal High School of Music. The next five and a
half years of her life were spent in an atmosphere of music, literature
and art. Her work was varied by travel in Italy and elsewhere. Her visit
to Italy was a turning-point in her artistic career. Already at times
she had experienced a feeling of being a prisoner while at the piano;
music was still an intense delight to her, but it was no longer
all-sufficing. A new idea took shape in her mind as she stood before
Botticelli’s “Primavera” in Florence, an idea that she too might render
her body eloquent to speak of the joy of spring and of the scented woods
and of emotions yet more various and profound. She returned to Berlin,
where she developed her idea, concentrating her interest on physical
culture, studying in museums and libraries the poses of classical art,
seeking to discover the relation between music and gesture. The new
interest so engrossed her that it allowed no time for any other pursuit.
She no longer had any doubt as to her true vocation. She left the Royal
High School of Music and began her career as a dancer. She gave her
first public performance in Vienna in 1903. Three years had elapsed
since the idea had crystallised before Botticelli’s picture in
Florence--three years of continuous training and preparation.
It is interesting to note that when Joachim saw the dance-programme of
his young friend, he called her aside and said: “Little girl, you may
dance anything you like, but, dear child, please don’t dance my
Beethoven!” It was another musician, however, Marcel Remy, the Belgian
composer, who gave her the greatest encouragement and assistance in the
prosecution of her studies.
The success of the new dancer in Vienna was immediate, and in the
following years she appeared in most of the larger cities of Germany,
Switzerland, Austria and Hungary. It was in 1907 that she received the
command to appear before King Edward VII. at Marienbad. “I remember that
it was with fear and trembling that I began my work,” so she tells the
story, “although when in the midst of any of my dances I am seldom
cognisant of any personality near. But I think I should be forgiven if,
that once, the thought of England’s King watching me gravely influenced
me and, afterwards I realised, favourably. I think it was the happiest
moment of my life when he took my hand with his calm, great dignity and
told me he considered my art a beautiful one, and my dances worthy of
the word classical.”
In the spring of 1908 Maud Allan first appeared before an English
audience at the Palace Theatre, London. Since that date much water has
flowed under the bridge, and it is not without interest now to recall
the notice that appeared in _The Times_ newspaper the following morning:
“There is little doubt that Miss Maud Allan will make a great success.
If so she will be the first to rouse London to enthusiasm with a kind of
dancing to which it has never yet taken very kindly--the dancing of
gesture and posture. As Miss Allan represents it, it is a thing of such
interest and beauty that it may even drive high kicking off the stage.”
The programme informed us in magniloquent phrase that the new dancer had
“ransacked the shrines of plastic beauty and worshipped humbly and
prayerfully before the Art of the Universe.” Little wonder, therefore,
that there was a hush of expectancy when the violin bows glided softly
into the opening strains of Chopin’s valse in A minor and, preceded by a
sinuous arm, the dancer slipped through the velvet hangings, drawn
forward apparently by the magnetism of the music. Her limbs and feet
were bare, her form lightly clothed in a loose classic drapery. A ripple
ran along her arms from the shoulder to the finger-tips, undulating like
a wave of the sea. When the music changed from the minor to the major
key, her body passed into the corresponding mood, suddenly becoming
brilliant with hope and delight. Then as quickly the joy faded out of
her face and limbs, and she relapsed with the music into a passive
despair. When the music ceased, her heart too seemed to have ceased
beating. Silently she glided back through the curtain. Already London
had capitulated.
Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” was an _allegretto grazioso_ chase of
[Illustration: MAUD ALLAN
_Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd._]
butterflies and plucking of wild flowers. With rapid sallies hither and
thither, now a-tiptoe, now on bended knee, she danced the joy of all
living things in the spring. The dream she dreamed before Botticelli’s
“Primavera” had become reality. A comparison with Pavlova’s “Danse des
Papillons” inevitably suggests itself, and it is hardly possible to
claim that in sheer brilliance of movement, in papilionaceous gaiety,
the “natural” school has yet outstripped a style that is founded upon
the older technique of the ballet.
But the climax of the performance was the “Vision of Salomé.” Many harsh
things have been said of this dance, from the propriety of the costume
of jewels and gauze to that of rendering a stage version of a Biblical
episode. It has been called by a respectable critic, “sensuous,
decadent, _macabre_.” It was stated that it preserved a nice balance
between the lascivious and voluptuous. Above all, the Corporation of
Manchester, believing that it would sully the immaculate atmosphere of
their city, prohibited its performance within the limits of their
jurisdiction--an action which resembles nothing so much as that of an
English duchess, who, when she was offered the translation of a French
play that she was witnessing, refused it, saying, “I do not wish to
understand.” It is to be feared, however, that the deputation of City
Fathers that was sent down to witness the dance was able only to
misunderstand. To state that the dance was as pure in intention as it
was powerful in execution would be a superfluous commentary. I cannot do
better than let the dancer relate in her own words the meaning of the
vision:
“Drawn by an irresistible force, Salome in a dream descends the marble
steps leading from the bronze doors that she has just flung to, behind
her frightened attendants. The sombre stone obelisks, backed by the inky
darkness of the cypress trees, shut out the silver rays of the moon,
and, save for the flickering red light of the cresset flames that the
slaves have lit, all is mystic darkness, and to Salome’s overwrought
brain all is fantastic, vague.
“She lives again the awful moments of joy and of horror which she has
just passed through. Alone in the gloom the poor child’s fancy assumes
dominion over her.
“Slowly, to the strains of the distant music, reminiscently she raises
her willowy arms. The movement thrills her whole slender frame and she
glides as if in a dream. A voice whispers ‘Your duty--your duty! Does
not the child owe obedience to its mother?’ On, on--wilder and more
reckless than ever before! She sees once more the greedy glittering eyes
of her stepfather--she hears again the whispered praises and encouraging
words of her mother, and Salome, child that she is, realises a power
within her and exults. She sees again her triumph approach, her swaying
limbs are in readiness to give way, when suddenly from out of the sombre
death-still hall the wail of muffled distress--and a pale, sublime face
with its mass of long black hair arises before her--the head of John the
Baptist! There is a sudden crash. She is horror-stricken! Suddenly a
wild desire takes possession of her. Why, ah! why should her mother have
longed for this man’s end? Salome feels a strange longing, compelling
her once more to hold in her hands this awful reward of her obedience,
and slowly, very slowly, and with ecstasy mingled with dread, she seems
to grasp the vision of her prize and lay it on the floor before her.
Every fibre of her youthful body is quivering; a sensation hitherto
utterly unknown to her is awakened, and her soul longs for comfort.
Hark! a sound of approaching feet. Frightened lest her treasure be taken
from her before she has solved its mystery, she stands guard over it,
and when the footsteps die away in the distant halls her relief knows no
limit! In the mad whirl of childish joy she is drawn again to
dance--dance around this strange silent presence. Soon exhaustion breaks
the spell. Salome, Princess of Galilee, lies prone on the cold grey
marble.
“The awakening is that of her childish heart. The realisation of a
superior power has so taken possession of her that she is spurred on to
sacrifice everything even unto herself to conquer. Reared in luxury--her
every wish granted since her days began--was it to be thought possible
she would subject herself to the will of another, a stronger and an
intangible force at that, without a fierce conflict?
“What passes in those few moments through this excited,
half-terror-stricken, half-stubborn brain makes of little Salome a
woman!
“Now, instead of wanting to conquer, she wants to be conquered,
[Illustration: MAUD ALLAN
IN _The Vision of Salomé_
_Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd._]
craving the spiritual guidance of the man whose wraith is before her;
but it remains silent! No word of comfort, not even a sign! Crazed by
the rigid stillness, Salome, seeking an understanding, and knowing not
how to obtain it, presses her warm, vibrating lips to the cold lifeless
ones of the Baptist! In this instant the curtain of darkness that had
enveloped her soul falls, the strange grandeur of a power higher than
Salome has ever dreamed of beholding becomes visible to her, and her
anguish becomes vibrant.
“She begs and prays for mercy of the stern head--alas, without response!
Salome flees in despair, and though her pride, her princely rank,
confront her, and she halts, it is but for a moment. The Revelation of
Something far greater still breaks upon her, and stretching out her
trembling arms turns her soul rejoicing towards Salvation. It is gone!
Where, oh, where! A sudden wild grief overmasters her, and the fair
young Princess, bereft of all her pride, her childish gaiety, and her
womanly desire, falls, her hands grasping high above her for her lost
redemption, a quivering huddled mass.”
It was a dance of a strange and haunting fascination, deriving no little
of its disquieting effect from the weird Oriental strains of Strauss’s
music. There were many who found themselves unaccountably drawn to it
and were compelled to return to the tragic vision night after night. Yet
as a presentment of tragic emotion, finer even than the “Vision of
Salomé,” or the rendering of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” was the dance of
“Ase’s Death” in Grieg’s _Peer Gynt_ suite. It was a study of mournful
poses, inspired by that grief which lies too deep and still to explode
in tumultuous and exciting gesture. There is, however, in her ecstasies
both of joy and grief just that lack of fire which makes intelligible,
if it does not quite justify, the somewhat harsh words of Mr W. R.
Titterton when he says of Miss Maud Allan that “she is the English Miss
in art. She is an ineffectual angel beating in the limelight her
luminous wings in vain. She has many pretty movements; she is light and
dainty, she has an elfin prance, with bent knee and waving hands, but
she has no temperament, and no presence; she is spectral; you think you
can see through her. And above all, she is monotonous. She repeats and
repeats and repeats. How she sickens me in the end, for example, with
that, at first, so beautiful ripple of the hands.”
The truth may possibly be that that freedom from convention in which she
glories is in reality a bondage. In her own words, “dancing is the
spontaneous expression of the spiritual state.” The dance is “not an
acquired but a spontaneous art, revealing the temperament of the
dancer.” She is compelled to acknowledge the necessity for technique,
but she fears that if it becomes excessive the art will no longer be
able to stir the soul. In this theory lurks a certain element of danger.
The dance, like all the arts, seeks the effect of spontaneity, of
inevitableness, but this spontaneity is highly self-conscious. And it
expresses itself most readily by technique--for technique, when it is
really fluent, does not hinder but facilitates the expression of
temperament. For us moderns the “spontaneous” gesture is the clumsy,
inexpressive movement of everyday life; the dancer requires a conscious
technique that comes more naturally to her than the unconscious
technique of the street, in order to be truly spontaneous and
expressive. It is perhaps her detestation of the stereotyped steps of
the ballet that causes her to incline to the opposite extreme. But she
herself would be the first to admit that her art has cost her pains no
less than that of the ballet-dancer. It is one of her complaints that
many suppose that she has learned to dance with no more than the
exertion of a fluttering butterfly. It is not for Miss Allan herself,
but for her imitators, that the theory that technique is relatively
unimportant is so dangerous a pitfall. The conventions of classical or
“natural” dancing are not yet so fixed as those of the ballet. Where the
path is less clearly marked out there is more danger of going astray.
Would-be dancers of the “natural” school, imagining that nothing is so
easy as to dance “naturally,” forget that they have to unlearn the
movements they are accustomed to before they can produce anything worthy
of the name of art.
If Isadora Duncan is a poet, Maud Allan is before all things a musician.
In the musical qualities of her art she has no rival. Apart from her
instinct for music, she has profited by a musical training such as
probably no other dancer has been equipped with. Her steps are to the
eye the exact equivalent of the notes which reach the ear. One of the
most felicitous of her accomplishments is her ability to pass with the
music from the major to the minor key, or _vice versa_. When a phrase
occurs first in one key and then in the other, it is repeated in her
dancing with just that modification of aspect and accent which expresses
the change of mood. Some of the movements in Grieg’s first _Peer Gynt_
suite gave her admirable scope for this beautiful art of transposition.
The faithfulness with which her movements follow the moods of the
composer is probably only fully realised by those who are musicians as
well as connoisseurs of the dance. Her translation of music has not
seldom that rare quality of translations of being finer than the
original, and there are not a few who, when they hear again,
unaccompanied, the music which her dancing has ennobled, will be
conscious of a sense of incompleteness and loss.
If only Joachim had seen her art in its maturity, he would perhaps have
been content to allow her dance his beloved Beethoven!
In any account of the classical dance it is scarcely possible to forbear
mention of Mlle Magdeleine, although it is difficult to know exactly
where to place her. For the characteristic of her dancing is that it
purports to be unconscious. Some eight or nine years ago Mlle Magdeleine
came for hypnotic treatment to Professor Magnin of the Paris School of
Magnetism. M. Magnin accidentally discovered that while in a state of
trance she was susceptible to the influence of music in a quite
extraordinary degree, and that although she had learnt nothing of the
art of dancing, she accompanied the music that was played to her in her
trance with motions of the utmost beauty and significance. She was
strictly examined by a number of eminent scientists, who certified that
to the best of their belief her dancing was performed in a genuine state
of unconscious, or rather subconscious, activity. She interpreted with
strange suggestiveness the music that the foremost musicians of the day
played to her, and the painters and sculptors who saw her, including
Rodin, were astounded at the strength and beauty of her poses.
Naturally the main interest of her performance rests upon its
genuineness, and it is easier to believe that it was given under true
hypnotic conditions than that the best scientific judgment of the day
was deceived.
Mlle Magdeleine interpreted music ranging in character as widely as
Handel’s “Largo,” a valse of Chopin’s, and “The Marseillaise.” Her
rendering of the latter was the very embodiment of human passion and
blood-lust. Her power of dramatic expression is indeed terrifying. In
her gestures there is at times something tremendous and heroic; at other
times they are distinctly faulty and fall into the conventional and the
commonplace. It is said that her trance tends to become mixed with the
recollections of her waking consciousness, and that when the two states
ultimately coincide she will lose her distinctive quality, her absolute
rightness of gesture. In any case her dancing is a unique phenomenon;
she cannot found a school or perpetuate a method. But she points the way
for the art of that great tragic dancer of whom the dance is
expectant--an art which was only partially realised in the dancing of
Miss Maud Allan. Of the three Ladies of Sorrow of whom De Quincey speaks
it was perhaps possible for the dancer of the “Vision of Salomé” to
represent our Lady of Tears, “who goes abroad upon the winds when she
hears the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs,” or even of
Our Lady of Sighs, “whose eyes are filled with perishing dreams, and
with wrecks of forgotten deliriums”; but it was reserved for the
Magdeleine to portray that third and most terrible sister, Mater
Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness, the defier of God, the mother of
lunacies and the suggestress of suicides, who “moves with incalculable
motions, bounding and with tiger’s leaps,” who “wears the fierce light
of a blazing misery that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon
of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide.” The dances of
delight and gaiety come almost instinctively to those of a happy
temperament; but the dances of grief, of fear, of madness, of despair,
these are they which put the dancer to the severest test, which strip
her of the acquired graces of the schools, and leave her dependent only
on the quality of her own soul.
[Illustration: MAUD ALLAN
IN CHOPIN’S FUNERAL MARCH
_Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd._]
Of the uninspired imitators who have followed in the steps of the great
dancers of the classical school, there is happily no need to speak at
length. Mme Knipper-Rabeneck of the Artistic Theatre of Moscow trained a
group of dancers, who performed in London last year. Their
interpretation of the music which they accompanied with their dancing
was not very subtle, but if they failed to catch the finest shades of
Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, they nevertheless gave a pleasing
exhibition of youthful liveliness. The sisters Wiesenthal have added to
the classical method a “pretty fluttering, tottering marionette manner
of their own.” And Lady Constance Stuart Richardson was the first of the
aristocratic amateurs who, when any new style of dancing becomes the
vogue, are always ready to rush in where professionals sometimes fear to
tread.
Indeed there are signs that classical dancing may be overtaken by a fate
not unlike that which befell the Skirt Dance--an event which would
indeed be a calamity, and not, as in the earlier mode, a happy release.
Whatever may be said in dispraise of the school of the ballet--and it
has its detractors not a few--it has at least the advantage of
possessing a technique, the terrors of which are sufficient to protect
it against the incursion of that mob of gentlewomen who dance with ease,
or rather who would dance with ease were it not for the necessary pains
without which that ease cannot be acquired. “Natural” dancing, by its
very name, is inviting to those who are averse to hard work. The theory
that a dancer can ignore with impunity the restrictions of technique,
that she is bound to please if only she is natural and happy, and allows
herself to follow the momentary inspiration of the music, and dances
with the same gleeful spontaneity as a child dancing to a barrel-organ,
is a doctrine as seductive as it is fatal. Already we have seen upon the
stage performers who, in the name of Greek art, race and romp rather
than dance. We are threatened with performances in which naïve young
creatures in tenuous classic drapery amuse themselves by capering on
bare feet, gathering and scattering make-believe roses, splashing in
imaginary rivers, undulating snaky arms, shooting arrows, playing ball,
butterfly catching. The dance cannot return to nature, in the sense
which Isadora Duncan intended, by returning to this rather kindergarten
Arcadia. The classical dance has its hidden law, which is perhaps more
difficult than that of the ballet because it is more secret. If the
dancer despises technique and relies only on her natural endowment, she
must at least expect that the least flaw of beauty, grace or
intelligence will be exposed in painful nakedness to the general gaze.