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THE ART OF MUSIC
The Art of Music
A Comprehensive Library of Information
for Music Lovers and Musicians
Editor-in-Chief
DANIEL GREGORY MASON
Columbia University
Associate Editors
EDWARD B. HILL LELAND HALL
Harvard University Past Professor, Univ. of Wisconsin
Managing Editor
CÉSAR SAERCHINGER
Modern Music Society of New York
In Fourteen Volumes
Profusely Illustrated
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC
[Illustration: Odalisque in ‘Scheherazade’ (Russian Ballet)
_Design by Léon Bakst_]
THE ART OF MUSIC: VOLUME TEN
The Dance
Department Editor:
IVAN NARODNY
Introduction by
ANNA PAVLOWA
Ballerina, Imperial Russian Ballet
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC
Copyright, 1916, by
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC, Inc.
[All Rights Reserved]
THE DANCE
INTRODUCTION
‘The gods themselves danced, as the stars dance in the sky,’ is a
saying of the ancient Mexicans. ‘To dance is to take part in the cosmic
control of the world,’ said the ancient Greek philosophers. ‘What do
you dance?’ asks the African Bantu of a member of another tribe after
his greeting. Livingston said that when an African wild man danced,
that was his religion. It is said that the savages do not preach their
religion but dance it. According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews
danced before their Ark of the Covenant. St. Basil describes the angels
dancing in Heaven. According to Dante, dancing is the real occupation
of the inmates of Heaven, Christ acting as the leader of a celestial
ballet. ‘Dancing,’ said Lucian, ‘is as old as love.’ Dance had a sacred
and mystic meaning to the early Christians upon whom the Bible had made
a deep impression: ‘We have piped unto you and ye have not danced.’
The service of the Greek Church--even to-day--is for the most part
only a kind of sacred dance, accompanied by chants and singing. The
priest, walking and gesturing with an incense-pan up and down before
the numerous ikons, kneeling, bowing to the saints, performing queer
cabalistic figures with his hands in the air, and following always
a certain rhythm, is essentially a dancer. It is said that dancing
of a similar kind was performed in the English cathedrals until the
fourteenth century. In France the priests danced in the choir at the
Easter Mass up to the seventh century. In Spain similar religious
dancing took deepest root and flourished longest. In the Cathedrals of
Seville, Toledo, Valencia and Xeres the dancing survives and is the
feature at a few special festivals.
‘The American Indian tribes seem to have had their own religious
dances, varied and elaborate, often with a richness of meaning which
the patient study of the modern investigators has but slowly revealed,’
writes Havelock Ellis. It is a well-known fact that dancing in ancient
Egypt and Greece was an art that was practiced in their temples. ‘A
good education,’ wrote Plato, ‘consists in knowing how to sing well
and how to dance well.’ According to Plutarch, Helen of Sparta was
practicing the Dance of Innocence in the Temple of Artemis when she was
surprised and carried away by Theseus. We are told by Greek classics
that young maidens performed dances before the altars of various
goddesses, consisting of ‘grave steps and graceful, modest attitudes
belonging to that order of choric movement called _emmeleia_.’ The
ancient Egyptian Astronomic Dance can be considered the sublimest of
all dances; here, by regulated figures, steps, and movements, the order
and harmonious motion of the celestial bodies was represented to the
music of the flute, lyre and syrinx. Plato alludes to this dance as ‘a
divine institution.’
In spite of the high status of dancing in the ancient civilizations,
it has not progressed steadily, as have the other arts. It has
remained the least systematized and least respected of arts, generally
considered as lacking in seriousness of intention, fitness to express
grave emotions, and power to touch the heights and depths of the
intellect. Being an art that expresses itself first in the human body,
the dance has aroused reprobation in certain pious, puritanical minds
of mediæval type, who have considered it a collection of ‘immodest and
dissolute movements by which the cupidity of the flesh is aroused.’
It is this particular view that has damned dance with bell, book and
candle. The main reason for this has been the hostile attitude of the
church to all folk-arts which manifested a more or less conspicuous
ethnographic individuality--that is, were stamped as of Pagan and not
Christian origin. All folk-dancing, broadly speaking, is a natural
form of æsthetic courtship. The male intends to win the female by his
beauty, grace and vigor, or vice versa. From the point of view of
sexual selection we can understand, on the one hand, the immense ardor
with which every sensuous part of the human body has been brought
into the play of the dance, and, on the other, the arguments of the
pseudo-moralists to classify it with the frivolous and least tolerated
arts.
The stamp of frivolity, put upon the dance by the Christian clergy,
has retarded its natural development for several centuries. Italy and
Germany, having been the cradles of all modern music and stage arts,
have given little inspiration to a systematic development of the art
of dancing. The seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that
have meant so much to the perfection of the opera, vocal and orchestra
technique, gave nothing of any significance to choreography. The church
that tolerated Bach, Paësiello, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, put an
open ban upon everything that had any relation to the dance. The
great musical classics of the past centuries have treated dance as an
insignificant side issue, thereby putting a label of inferiority upon
this loftiest of arts. All the dance music of the great classics sounds
naïve and lacking in choreographic images. Yet dance and music are like
light and shadow, each depending upon the other. As canvas is to a
painter, so is music to a dancer the essential element upon which he
can draw his picture. The fact that the art of dancing has not evolved
into its normal state of equality with the other arts, is wholly due
to the lack of musical leadership. Neither the reforms of Noverre
nor those of Fokine nor Marius Petipa can be of fundamental value if
they lack the phonetic designs which alone a choreographic artist can
transform into plastic events. Essentially, and æsthetically speaking,
dancing should be the elemental expression alike of symbolic religion
and love, as it used to be from the earliest human times.
Dancing and architecture are the two primary and plastic arts: the
one in Time, the other in Space; the one expressing the soul directly
through the medium of the human body, the other giving only an outline
of the soul through the medium of fossilized forms. The origin of these
two arts is earlier than man himself. Both require mathematics, the one
rhythmically, the other symmetrically. For dancing the mathematical
forms are to be found in music, for architecture, in geometry. ‘The
significance of dancing, in the wide sense, thus lies in the fact that
it is simply an intimate concrete appeal of that general rhythm which
marks all the physical and spiritual manifestations of life,’ writes
Havelock Ellis. ‘The art of dancing moreover is intimately entwined
with all human traditions of war, of labor, of pleasure, of education,
while some of the wisest philosophers and ancient civilizations have
regarded the dance as the pattern in accordance with which the moral
life of man must be woven. To realize therefore what dance means for
mankind--the poignancy and the many-sidedness of its appeal--we must
survey the whole sweep of human life, both at its highest and at its
deepest moments.’
ANNA PAVLOWA.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME TEN
PAGE
INTRODUCTION BY ANNA PAVLOWA vii
CHAPTER
I. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DANCING 1
Æsthetic basis of the dance; national character expressed
in dances; ‘survival value’ of dancing; primitive
dance and sexual selection; professionalism in dancing--Music
and the dance; religion and the dance; historic analysis
of folk-dancing and ballet.
II. DANCING IN ANCIENT EGYPT 12
Earliest Egyptian records of dancing; hieroglyphic evidence;
the Astral dance; Egyptian court and temple rituals;
festival of the Sacred Bull--Music of the Egyptian dances;
Egyptian dance technique; points of similarity between
Egyptian and modern dancing; Hawasis and Almeiis; the
Graveyard Dance; modern imitations.
III. DANCING IN INDIA 24
Lack of art sense among the Hindoos; dancing and the
Brahmin religion; the Apsarazases, Bayaderes and Devadazis;
Hindoo music and the dance; dancing in modern
India; Fakir dances; philosophic symbolism of the Indian
dance.
IV. DANCES OF THE CHINESE, THE JAPANESE AND THE AMERICAN INDIANS 30
Influence of the Chinese moral teachings; general characteristics
of Chinese dancing; court and social dances of
ancient China; Yu-Vang’s ‘historical ballet’; modern Chinese
dancing; dancing Mandarins; modern imitations; the
Lantern Festival--Japan: the legend of Amaterasu; emotional
variety of the Japanese dance; pantomime and mimicry;
general characteristics and classification of Japanese
dances--The American Indians: The Dream dance; the
Ghost dance; the Snake dance.
V. DANCES OF THE HEBREWS AND ARABS 43
Biblical allusions; sacred dances; the Salome episode
and its modern influence--The Arabs; Moorish florescence
in the Middle Ages; characteristics of the Moorish dances;
the dance in daily life; the harem, the Dance of Greeting;
pictorial quality of the Arab dances.
VI. DANCING IN ANCIENT GREECE 52
Homeric testimony; importance of the dance in Greek
life; Xenophon’s description; Greek religion and the dance;
Terpsichore--Dancing of youths, educational value; Greek
dance music; Hyporchema and Saltation; Gymnopœdia; the
Pyrrhic dance; the Dipoda and the Babasis; the Emmeleia;
The Cordax; the Hormos--Greek theatres; comparison of
periods; the Eleusinian mysteries; the Dionysian mysteries;
the Heteræ; technique.
VII. DANCING IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 72
Æsthetic subservience to Greece; Pylades and Bathyllus;
the _Bellicrepa saltatio_; the Ludiones; the Roman pantomime;
the Lupercalia and Floralia; Bacchantic orgies; the
Augustinian age; importations from Cadiz; famous dancers.
VIII. DANCING IN THE MIDDLE AGES 78
The mediæval eclipse; ecclesiastical dancing in Spain;
the strolling ballets of Spain and Italy; suppression of
dancing by the church; dances of the mediæval nobility;
Renaissance court ballets; the English masques; famous
masques of the seventeenth century.
IX. THE GRAND BALLET OF FRANCE 86
Louis XIV and the ballet; the Pavane and the Courante;
reforms under Louis XV; Noverre and the _ballet d’action_;
Auguste Vestris and others; famous ballets of the period--the
Revolution and the Consulate; the French technique,
the foundation of ‘choreographic grammar’; the ‘five positions’;
the ballet steps--Famous _danseuses_; Sallé, Camargo;
Madeleine Guimard; Allard.
X. THE FOLK-DANCES OF EUROPE 104
The rise of nationalism--The Spanish folk-dances: the
Fandango; the Jota; the Bolero; the Seguidilla; other Spanish
folk-dances; general characteristics; costumes--England:
the Morris dance; the Country dance; the Sword dance; the
Horn dance--Scotland: Scotch Reel, Hornpipe, etc.--Ireland:
the Jig; British social dances--France: Rondo, Bourrée and
Farandole--Italy: the Tarantella, etc.--Hungary: the Czardas,
Szolo and related dances; the Esthonians--Germany:
the _Fackeltanz_, etc.--Finland; Scandinavia and Holland--The
Lithuanians, Poles and Southern Slavs; the Roumanians
and Armenians--The Russians: ballad dances; the Kasatchy
and Kamarienskaya; conclusion.
XI. THE CELEBRATED SOCIAL DANCES OF THE PAST 144
The _Pavane_ and the _Courante_; the _Allemande_ and the
_Sarabande_; the _Minuet_ and the _Gavotte_; the _Rigaudon_ and
other dances--The Waltz.
XII. THE CLASSIC BALLET OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 151
Aims and tendencies of the nineteenth century--Maria
Taglioni--Fanny Elssler--Carlotta Grisi and Fanny Cerito;
decadence of the classic ballet.
XIII. THE BALLET IN SCANDINAVIA 161
The Danish ballet and Boumoville’s reform; Lucile
Grahn, Augusta Nielsen, etc.--Mrs. Elna Jörgen-Jensen; Adeline
Genée; the mission of the Danish ballet.
XIV. THE RUSSIAN BALLET 170
Nationalism of the Russian ballet; pedagogic principles
of the Russian school; French and Russian schools compared--
Begutcheff and Ostrowsky; history of the Russian
ballet--Didelot and the Imperial ballet school; Petipa and
his reforms--Tschaikowsky’s ‘Snow-Maiden’ and other ballets;
Pavlowa and other famous _ballerinas_; Mordkin;
Volinin, Kyasht, Lopokova.
XV. THE ERA OF DEGENERATION 189
Nineteenth-century decadence; sensationalism--Loie
Fuller and the Serpentine Dance--Louise Weber, Lottie Collins
and others.
XVI. THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL OF DANCING 195
The ‘return to nature’; Isadora Duncan--Duncan’s influence:
Maud Allan; Duncan’s German followers--Modern music
and the dance; the Russian naturalists; Glière’s ‘Chrisis’--
Pictorial nationalism: Ruth St. Denis--Modern Spanish
dancers; ramifications of the naturalistic idea.
XVII. THE NEW RUSSIAN BALLET 214
The old ballet arguments _pro_ and _con_--The new movement:
Diaghileff and Fokine; the advent of Diaghileff’s
company; the ballets of Diaghileff’s company; ‘Spectre of
the Rose,’ ‘Cleopatra,’ _Le Pavilion d’Armide_, ‘Scheherezade’--
Nijinsky and Karsavina--Stravinsky’s ballets: ‘Petrouchka,’
‘The Fire-Bird,’ etc.; other ballets and arrangements.
XVIII. THE EURHYTHMICS OF JACQUES-DALCROZE 234
Jacques-Dalcroze and his creed; essentials of the
‘Eurhythmic’ system--Body-rhythm; the plastic expression
of musical ideas; merits and shortcomings of the Dalcroze
system--Speculation on the value of Eurhythmics to the
dance.
XIX. PLASTOMIMIC CHOREOGRAPHY 247
The defects of the new Russian and other modern
schools; the new ideals; Prince Volkhonsky’s theories--Lada
and choreographic symbolism--The question of appropriate
music.
EPILOGUE: FUTURE ASPECTS OF THE DANCE 261
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Odalisque in ‘Scheherazade’ (Russian Ballet) Frontispiece
PAGE
Egyptian women dancing with cymbals 21
Greek and Roman Dances as Depicted on Ancient Vases 68
Danseuses en Scène (The Ballet) 102
The Ball 150
Sylphides; a Typical Classic Ballet 156
Pavlowa 174
Duncan 200
Maud Allan 211
A Plastic Pantomime (Dalcroze Eurhythmics) 245
THE DANCE
CHAPTER I
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DANCING
Æsthetic basis of the dance; national character expressed in
dances; ‘survival value’ of dancing; primitive dance and sexual
selection; professionalism in dancing--Music and the dance;
religion and the dance; historic analysis of folk-dancing and
ballet.
I
Every true art is a direct and immediate act of life. As in music and
dancing, so in life, rhythm is the skeleton of tone and movement and
also the basis of existence. We breathe rhythmically and our heart
beats rhythmically. We walk, laugh and weep rhythmically. Rhythm is the
only frame to the moving material of the visuo-audible art. What except
rhythm can unite living men in order to convert them from a chaotically
moving crowd into a work of art? It was undoubtedly the innate feeling
for rhythm that actuated the primitive man to dance. All existing races
show a strong tendency to dance, as well in their primitive as in the
more or less civilized state. The plastic forms of the human body lend
themselves more to an æsthetic expression that contains architecture,
sculpture, painting, poetry, drama and music, than anything else in
creation. The mimic expressions of the face, the agility of the steps,
the grace of gestures and poses are all natural means which a man can
employ in his dance. The symmetric lines of the body that are produced
after the melodic patterns of the music form the æsthetic basis of the
art of dancing. The ability to give a living meaning to these lines is
what makes a dance beautiful and divine. Although frequently the beauty
of a line and movement can be observed in animals and birds, yet there
it is an unconscious act, lacking in that individual and subjective
feeling that we call inspiration.
The foremost element in every dance is--the step. Step is also,
practically speaking, the first movement of life. In consequence of
pure physical laws each step requires a new impulse and thus divides
it into two periods: motion and repose. The continuance of these two
rhythmic periods produces the feeling of symmetry and joy, which in
its turn creates the various combined movements that again are divided
into various sub-motions and partial measures. The development of
steps in a dance is based on two principles: the movement of the feet,
and the combined movement of the body and hands for grace or mimicry.
Consequently dance is nothing but a chain of bodily movements that
are subjected to a certain musical rhythm and follow the emotional
expressions of the dancer. According to an innate principle dance,
like speech, was practiced by the primitive races as a medium of
the most vital expressions. By means of a dance the savages express
their joy, sorrow, anger, tenderness and love. Dance has its peculiar
psychology, which varies according to racial temperament, climate
and other conditions. This is best illustrated in the various styles
of the folk-dance. To the vigorous races of Northern Europe in their
cold and damp climate dancing became naturally a function of the
legs. The Scandinavian and Finnish folk-dances betray more heavy and
massive motion, while those of Spain, Hungary and Italy or France give
an impression of romantic grace, coquettish agility and fire. The
folk-dances of the Cossacks are usually violent and acrobatic, as is
their life. Energy or dreaminess, fire or coolness, and a multitude
of other racial qualities assert themselves automatically in a
folk-dance. The list of forces that make and preserve a nation’s dances
is incomplete without the addition of the powerful element of national
pride, weakness or other peculiarities. On the contrary, in the Far
East, in Japan, Java, China, etc., dancing is exclusively a motion of
the hands and fingers alone. In ancient Rome dancing was predominantly
the rhythmic motion of the body, with vibratory or rotatory movements
of breast or flanks. The Stomach Dance of the Arabians betrays the wild
passion of a nomadic desert race.
According to Louis Robinson, dancing is an innate instinct that has an
indirect bearing upon the existence of the human race. Robinson argues
that throughout Nature instincts, like the organs of our bodies, are
the product of the strict laws of evolution, and have been built up to
meet some need. At some critical time in the past they had a certain
survival value--i. e., they were capable of determining in the struggle
for existence which individuals or tribes should go under and which
should survive. This principle can be taken as one of the axioms which
must be our pilots in every attempt to account for the faculties which
each of us brings into the world, as distinct from those acquired in
the life of the individual.
Practically every savage people has elaborate dances and spends a good
deal of time in such exercises. Among adults dancing takes the place
of the play of children. When we come to analyze the play of all young
creatures from the historical standpoint we find it forms part of an
elaborate natural system of physical training. The perpetual motion
of the kitten while it is awake is obviously a training for those
accomplishments which in later life mean a livelihood. Such astonishing
skill and agility as are shown by the cats in securing prey cannot be
attained by any ready-made machinery like that of the dragon-fly or the
mantis: they must be built up and manufactured. Herein the nervous
mechanism of the mammalia has prevailed over the limited mechanical
perfection of lower things such as reptiles, fish, and insects. Most of
them can do some one thing or other supremely well, but the mammalia,
with their better nervous system and receptive brains, can excel in
many things. We, with our greater gifts of the same sort, are the
most versatile and teachable of all; hence we prevail over the rest
of creation. The kitten, the puppy, and the young savage, by their
continual restless and organized activity, gain great advantage in
certain movements necessary in after life, and foster the growth of
the particular muscles which later on will be absolutely requisite in
the serious business of holding their place in the world. Obviously
such instincts would become out of date and inappropriate should the
general manner of living undergo a complete change. Hence we find that
much of the play of young children in civilized lands has little or no
reference to the serious life which comes afterwards. Such instincts,
however, were developed during or before the long stretch of time
of the Stone Age, when all men played hide and seek, and chased one
another, and threw things, and ran, and jumped, and wrestled for
exactly the same reason that makes us scan commercial articles, attend
markets, and work in our studies or offices. What is observable in any
nursery or playground affords a good illustration of the persistence
of instincts long after the need which created them has passed away.
For some reason the play instinct in most creatures tends to lapse
at the time of full bodily maturity. It does not cease entirely, but
apparently it no longer suffices as an incentive for the battle of life.
Man in the savage state is naturally lazy and does not like to exert
himself when food comes easily. When no urgent need or human authority
is pushing him, he prefers to eat to repletion and then to lie in
the sun or loaf. We even find this primitive habit cropping up in
strenuous lands where the stimulus of moral education and competition
has been at work for generations.
We are all aware that, when we are lazy for any length of time, we
get slack and soft. The primitive savage who lives by hunting and is
in continual danger of raids from his neighbors, cannot afford to get
slack. He must keep himself fit every day of life. How was this to be
managed by our prehistoric forefathers when there was no fighting,
with the weather soft, and a delicious fish easily to be caught quite
near the dwelling? It is pretty safe to say that, owing to the want
of condition--if they were not dancing tribes--they did not leave
descendants which are among us in the twentieth century.
It seems strange how readily a group of negroes who are apparently
exhausted after a long day’s work will join in dance with their
fellows, and how, when not very tired, they will in their laziest
moments spring up and take vigorous exercise of this kind. Every doctor
will tell you that there are plenty of women to-day who have not the
strength nor the energy to do any work or to walk a couple of miles,
but who will dance from evening till morning without showing any
great fatigue. Among such Pagans as the Zulus and Masai, who organize
themselves for war almost as well as has ever been done by the most
civilized Christians, there is practically no distinction between
military exercises and dancing. This is proof enough to show that
dancing had a survival value throughout the long stretch of the Stone
Age. Dancing taught primitive men to move in compact bodies without
confusion, and especially without getting so bunched together that they
could not use their weapons.
To-day the true war-dance only persists among us in the form of
military marchings, but the other primitive dances have left numerous
descendants of all kinds and degrees, down to the modern tango. Among
these non-military dances the survival value, apart from the healthy
exercise which they provided and their general disciplinary effects,
worked through the agency of sexual selection.
In the case of the primitive dances the working of sexual selection was
beneficial as conducive to racial fitness. The dances in which women
took part gave opportunity for appraisement of exactly the kind needed
for a sound choice of mates under savage conditions. It afforded the
chance, so lacking in our present civilization, of advertising any
admirable qualities which might be possessed. It was a test not only of
physical grace and perfection, but of activity, taste and temper. It
contributed to honest matrimonial dealing--especially when danced in
the approved ballroom costumes of savage times.
There have been many discussions as to why clothes were first
worn--whether for ornament, warmth, or decency--but one may fairly
say without any doubt whatever that, from the first ages until now,
dance clothing has been mainly decorative. Here we find an ethical
justification of matters connected with dancing dress, which has often
provoked severe criticism among puritans. Without a doubt from the
earliest times until now the dance has been a chief purifying agent
in the marriage market--has played the part, in fact, of those market
inspectors appointed to guard against adulteration.
It is a most extraordinary thing, when we come to consider man’s place
in Nature, that he ever began to dance. Not that dancing is uncommon
in Nature; many birds, especially those of the crane tribe, execute
elaborate dances during their season of courtship, and as a mere
pastime when they have nothing else to do. Few, if any, of the mammalia
appear to indulge in organized dances, unless we give such a name to
the frisking of young lambs and the prancing evolutions of horses and
antelopes. Assuredly, in our direct line of descent nothing of the kind
could have existed as far back as our knowledge and imagination will
carry us. You cannot very well dance in the trees, which, according to
Darwin, were the real nurseries of our species; and when you come down
to solid earth your weak prehensile lower members would only make you
ridiculous and contemptible if they attempted any performance of the
kind.
Mother Nature, however, is a dame of infinite varieties, and seems
continually to be trying the most bizarre experiments apparently
without the least prompting or justification. The products of these
experiments are called ‘sports,’ and there seems no limit to their
possibilities. Chimpanzees delight in thumping hollow trees and
knocking pieces of wood together, while it is said that the gorilla
waddles to war to the sound of the drum, improvising a substitute by
beating his hands against his brawny chest.
In the Western world professionalism in dancing has happily not had the
blighting effect on the pursuit that it seems to have had on some other
forms of pastime. But if we go to the East we find that practically all
other forms of dancing have ceased to exist. We see the effect of this
tendency most fully developed in China, where the recreative dancing
of European society seems to be quite beyond the comprehension of a
well-bred Chinese, who naïvely asks the question: ‘Why do you not pay
people to dance for you?’
Stage dancing seems to be an interesting instance of the degeneration
into pure luxury or something which was at one time a helpful influence
to the race. This is a tendency observable in many phases of life
when the pressure of evolutionary forces is somewhat relaxed. Most
of the luxuries pertain to matters which at one time had a survival
value, and it cannot be said that they have retired from among the
evolutionary forces even to-day; but their effect, if still beneficial
to the race, lies in aiding Nature to eliminate the unfit.
II
From the earliest times on dancing has been dependent upon music of
some kind. The question whether music is older than dancing has not
been answered satisfactorily by academic anthropologists yet. However,
all scholars agree that the appearance of these two arts must have
been more or less simultaneous, the one influencing the other. But
undoubtedly the first dance music was not instrumental but vocal. The
savages to-day dance most of their sexual dances to rhythmic recitation
of certain words. Music is in every phase of evolution the only true
essence of that which forms the subject of the dance.
To the transformation of more or less primitive folk-dances into those
of strictly religious character is due the principal idea of the
modern ballet. In the Oriental temples dancing underwent a strange
transformation. While dancing was made the basis of dramatic and
symbolic ideas, yet this very fact became detrimental to the musical
influence upon the choreography. The Egyptians, whom we consider the
pioneers in religious dances, originated elaborate temple ballets,
which were based more upon a dramatic than a musical theme. Though the
tradition speaks of rounds, of symbolic and sidereal motions, and the
instruments chiefly employed, as the Egyptian guitar, used both by men
and women, the single and double pipe, the harp, lyre, and flute, yet
essentially this all resembled a pantomime rather than actual dance.
It is very likely that all the ancient sacred dances originated with
the subconscious idea of counteracting the sensuous or strictly
playful influence of the social dances. The whole pedigree of our
Western religions seems to show a remarkable absence of this method of
encouraging religious feeling. The reasons why such manifestations were
discouraged by Jewish and Christian moralists pertains to physiology
rather than theology. As already said, man’s nature is compounded of
many diverse elements, and the machinery of emotion at present at work
within us dates back to our animal past. Our most refined and exalted
feelings spring from the same nervous reservoirs and pass through
the very channels which were at one time solely occupied by grosser
passions. The Egyptian church that grew directly of the folk-art of
the country was a stranger to Greece and Rome, and still more so to
our Christian religion. The ethical ideals that actuated the Egyptian
priests in introducing dancing at the altar, sprang directly from the
soil and meant, in bringing the better part of human nature to the top,
to act as a kind of separator. The priests discovered that the higher
emotions, with the help of sacred dancing, can be put to excellent
service as impulses to improved conduct. The Christian missionaries,
coming from the East, found nothing elevating and ennobling in our
Western dancing, which did not appeal to them on account of the very
differences of the style and racial character. It is due to their
opposition that the religious dances have faded out under the Western
civilization. The warfare against dancing generally, on the part of the
Apostles of Christianity, dates back to the fanatic era of theological
and nationalistic differences. In all countries where the religion
descends directly from a racial folk-lore, dancing has remained in high
esteem at home and in the temples. This we find true in Egypt, Greece,
India and China. In the Jewish form of worship there seems to have been
no formally recognized dancing, although we have records of several
displays of this kind, as in the case of King David, when, ‘clothed in
a linen ephod, he danced before the Ark of the Lord with all his might.’
In Greece, cradle of the arts, the Muses manifested themselves to man
as a dancing choir, led by Terpsichore. The Romans imitated the Greeks
in all their arts and imported with the Greek slaves Greek dances. But
Rome was too barbaric to appreciate the full value of Greece’s poetic
arts. The solemn religious dance instituted by Numa and practiced by
the Salian priests soon degenerated into ceremonial march that was
abolished when Rome became Christian, through a papal decree in 744.
Darkness of night fell on the development of secular and religious
dancing, a darkness that endured for centuries. The influence of the
Nile in Egypt and Cadiz in Spain, which for centuries had been the two
great centres of the ancient dancing and supplied their dancers to the
Roman potentates, faded out slowly in the history of European nations.
The folk-dances were labelled as low and undignified amusements of
Pagan peasants. Dance in every form remained an outcast, despised and
condemned until the court circles of Italy and France distorted it
to an amusement at domestic gatherings and masquerades. It is said
that the modern ballet had its origin in the spectacular masquerades
arranged for the marriage of Galeazzo, Visconti, Duke of Milan, in
1489. The impression of this performance spread to the Court of
Florence. Catherine de Medici, the Queen of France, brought the Italian
court pantomime to Paris, where the French kings and queens grew to
admire dancing and took actual part in it. The attempts of Noverre to
elevate the art of dancing to what it had been in ancient Egypt and
Greece, were successful only externally. Music, the soul of dancing in
the modern sense, was lacking, and without this soul the art of plastic
form is incomplete. Though the Russian reformers elevated dancing from
a domestic amusement to a serious and lofty stage art, they did not
succeed wholly in giving to it the foundation that it deserves among
the other arts. All the past and living goddesses of choreography have
not had the freedom, the phonetic means and dramatic threads to thrill
their audiences as they would, if man had not distorted and hidden the
natural meaning of the dance that inspired his barbaric ancestors.
The philosophical conclusion of our historic analysis of dance leads
back to the same axioms that actuated the savage in his practice of
agility: the sexual selection and primitive sport, both necessary for
evolution and the existence of the race. However, there is neither
sexual motive nor instinct for ‘physical culture’ in the ‘Heavenly
Alchemy’ of evolution that has created the poetic movements of Taglioni
and her successors. The ancient racial propensities have developed into
more spiritual ideas. Like the tendency of evolution generally, to
universalize an individual and individualize the universe, so in dance
the racial characteristics are transformed into cosmic motives. In this
stage beauty becomes symbolic and concrete emotions take on a more and
more abstract form. The survival value of the greatest art of the dance
lies in ennobling the intellect and soul, which has necessarily an
indirect bearing upon the physical. Ultimately this means perfection of
the whole human organism. It inspires the mind and influences the body.
Civilization has brought humanity to a state where the physical needs
depend upon the psychical. We have devised a more complicated form
of sexual selection and more complicated means of existence than the
primitive dances employed in our animal past. Beauty in the long course
of evolution has grown more spiritual, accordingly dancing as an art
has become an evolutionary medium of the intellect.