THE EURHYTHMICS OF JACQUES-DALCROZE
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.
I
What apparently proves to be the elementary step in building up a
new school of choreography--perhaps that which some of the younger
dancers have chosen either by accident or by roundabout ways--are the
Jacques-Dalcroze Rhythmic Gymnastics or ‘Eurhythmics’ on the order
of the ancient Greeks. Thus far this style of dancing is merely in
its preliminary form. Therefore it is now as difficult to draw any
definite conclusion, as it was about 1905, when the Swiss composer
Dalcroze, who had been since 1892 a professor of harmony at the Geneva
Conservatoire, first launched the movement. However, the systematic
work of instruction by Dalcroze began in 1910, when the brothers Wolf
and Harald Dohrn invited him to come to Dresden, where, in the suburb
of Hellerau, they built for him a College of Rhythmic Gymnastics. From
this time on the inventor of the new method began a systematic training
of young men and women.
Ethel Ingham writes of the life at the college at Hellerau: ‘The day
commences with the sounding of a gong at seven o’clock; the house
is immediately alive, and some are off to the College for a Swedish
gymnastic lesson before breakfast, others breakfast at half-past seven
and have their lesson later. There is always a half hour of ordinary
gymnastics to begin with. Then there will be a lesson in _Solfège_,
one in Rhythmic Gymnastics, and one in Improvisation, each lasting for
fifty minutes, with an interval of ten minutes between lessons.’
‘One of the most marked tendencies of the modern æsthetic theory is to
break down the barriers that convention has created between the various
arts,’ writes Michael T. H. Sadler of the value of Jacques-Dalcroze’s
eurhythmics to art. ‘The truth is coming to be realized that the
essential factor of poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture and music
is really of the same quality, and that one art does not differ from
another in anything but the method of its expression and the conditions
connected with that method.
‘The common basis to the arts is more easily admitted than defined,
but one important element in it--perhaps the only element that can be
given a name--is rhythm. Rhythm of bodily movement, the dance, is the
earliest form of artistic expression known. It is accompanied in nearly
every case with rude music, the object being to emphasize the beat and
rhythmic movement with sound. The quickness with which children respond
to simple repetition of beat, translating the rhythm of the music into
movement, is merely the recurrence of historical development.
‘To speak of the rhythm of painting may seem fanciful, but I think
that is only lack of familiarity. The expression is used here with
no intention of metaphor. Great pictures have a very marked and real
rhythm, of color, of line, of feeling. The best prose-writing has
equally a distinct rhythm.
‘There was never an age in the history of art when rhythm played a more
important part than it does to-day. The teaching of M. Dalcroze at
Hellerau is a brilliant expression of the modern desire for rhythm in
its most fundamental form--that of bodily movement. Let it be clearly
understood from the first that the rhythmic training at Hellerau has
an importance far deeper and more extended than is contained in its
immediate artistic beauty, its excellence as a purely musical training,
or its value to physical development. The beauty of the classes is
amazing; the actor as well as the designer of stage-effects will come
to thank M. Dalcroze for the greatest contribution to their art that
any age can show. He has recreated the human body as a decorative unit.
He has shown how men, women and children can group themselves and can
be grouped in designs as lovely as any painting design, with the added
charm of movement. He has taught the individuals their own power of
gracious motion and attitude. Musically and physically the results
are equally wonderful. But the training is more than a mere musical
education; it is also emphatically more than gymnastics.
‘To take a joy in the beauty of the body, to train his mind to move
graciously and harmoniously both in itself and in relation to those
around him, finally, to make his whole life rhythmic--such an ideal
is not only possible but almost inevitable to the pupil at Hellerau.
The keenness which possesses the whole College, the delight of every
one in his work, their comradeship, their lack of self-consciousness,
their clean sense of the beauty of natural form, promise a new and more
harmonious race, almost a realization of Rousseau’s ideals, and with it
an era of truly artistic production.’
Dalcroze’s school has emphasized that its purpose is not merely to
train dancers but to educate for life generally. His theory is that
all the people should be raised to feel and appreciate the intrinsic
value of the rhythm, which is best proven in M. Dalcroze’s own essay,
_Le Rhythme_, which was published in 1909. ‘Schools of Music,’
he says, ‘formerly frequented only by born musicians, gifted from
birth with unusual powers of perception for sound and rhythm, to-day
receive all who are fond of music, however little Nature may have
endowed them with the necessary capacity for musical expression and
realization. The number of solo players, both pianists and violinists,
is constantly increasing, instrumental technique is being developed to
an extraordinary degree, but everywhere, too, the question is being
asked whether the quality of the instrumental players is equal to their
quantity, and whether the acquirement of extraordinary technique is not
joined to musical powers, if not of the first rank, at least normal.
‘Of ten certified pianists of to-day, at the most one, if indeed one,
is capable of recognizing one key from another, of improvising four
bars with character or so as to give pleasure to the listener, of
giving expression to a composition without the help of the more or less
numerous annotations with which present-day composers have to burden
their work, of experiencing any feeling whatever when they listen to,
or perform, the composition of another. The solo players of older
days were without exception complete musicians, able to improvise and
compose, artists driven irresistibly towards art by a noble thirst for
æsthetic expression, whereas most young people who devote themselves
nowadays to solo playing have the gifts neither of hearing nor of
expression, are content to imitate the composer’s expression without
the power of feeling it, and have no other sensibility than that of the
fingers, no other motor faculty than an automatism painfully acquired.
Solo playing of the present day has specialized in a finger technique
which takes no account of the faculty of mental expression. It is no
longer a means, it has become an end.
‘There are two physical agents by means of which we appreciate music.
These two agents are the ear as regards sound, and the whole nervous
system as regards rhythm. Experience has shown me that the training of
these two agents cannot easily be carried out simultaneously. A child
finds it difficult to appreciate at the same time a succession of notes
forming a melody and the rhythm which animates them.
‘Before teaching the relation which exists between sound and movement,
it is wise to undertake the independent study of each of these two
elements. Tone is evidently secondary, since it has not its origin
and model in ourselves, whereas movement is instinctive in man and
therefore primary. Therefore I begin the study of music by careful and
experimental teaching of movement. This is based in earliest childhood
on the automatic exercise of marching, for marching is the natural
model of time measure.
‘By means of various accentuations with the foot, I teach the different
time measures. Pauses (of various length) in the marching teach the
children to distinguish duration of sound; movements to time with the
arms and the head preserve order in the succession of the time measures
and analyze the bars and pauses.
‘Unsteady time when singing or playing, confusion in playing, inability
to follow when accompanying, accentuating too roughly or with lack of
precision, all these faults have their origin in the child’s muscular
and nervous control, in lack of coördination between the mind which
conceives, the brain which orders, the nerve which transmits and the
muscle which executes. And still more, the power of phrasing and
shading music with feeling depends equally upon the training of the
nerve-centres, upon the coördination of the muscular system, upon rapid
communication between brain and limbs--in a word, upon the health of
the whole organism; and it is by trying to discover the individual
cause of each musical defect, and to find a means of correcting it,
that I have gradually built up my method of eurhythmics.
‘The object of the method is, in the first instance, to create by the
help of rhythm a rapid and regular current of communication between
brain and body; and what differentiates my physical exercises from
those of present-day methods of muscular development is that each of
them is conceived in the form which can most quickly establish in the
brain the image of the movement studied.
‘It is a question of eliminating in every muscular movement, by the
help of will, the untimely intervention of muscles unless for the
movement in question, and thus developing attention, consciousness and
will-power. Next must be created an automatic technique for all those
muscular movements which do not need the help of the consciousness, so
that the latter may be reserved for those forms of expression which are
purely intelligent. Thanks to the coördination of the nerve-centres, to
the formation and development of the greatest possible number of motor
habits, my method assures the freest possible play to subconscious
expression.
‘The first result of a thorough rhythmic training is that the pupil
sees clearly in himself what he really is, and obtains from his powers
all the advantage possible. * * * The education of the nervous system
must be of such a nature that the suggested rhythms of a work of art
induce in the individual analogous vibrations, produce a powerful
reaction in him and change naturally into rhythms of expression.
In simpler language the body must become capable of responding to
artistic rhythms and of realizing them quite naturally without fear of
exaggeration.
‘Gestures and attitudes of the body complete, animate and enliven any
rhythmic music written simply and naturally without special regard
to tone, and, just as in painting there exist side by side a school
of the nude and a school of the landscape, so in music there may be
developed, side by side, plastic music and music pure and simple.
In the school of landscape painting emotion is created entirely by
combinations of moving light and by the rhythms thus caused. In the
school of the nude, which pictures the many shades of expression of
the human body, the artist tries to show the human soul as expressed
by physical forms, enlivened by the emotions of the moment, and at the
same time the characteristics suitable to the individual and the race,
such as they appear through momentary physical modifications.
‘At the present day plastic stage music is not interpreted at all, for
dramatic singers, stage managers and conductors do not understand the
relation existing between gesture and music, and the absolute ignorance
regarding plastic expression which characterizes the lyric actors of
our day is a real profanation of scenic musical art. Not only are
singers allowed to walk and gesticulate on the stage without paying
any attention to the time, but also no shade of expression, dynamic
or motor, of the orchestra--crescendo, decrescendo, accelerando,
ralletando--finds in their gestures adequate realization. By this I
mean the kind of wholly instinctive transformation of sound movements
into bodily movements such as my method teaches.’
II
This is briefly the essential part of the Jacques-Dalcroze school
of Eurhythmics. The method falls into three main divisions: (1)
ear training; (2) rhythmic gymnastics; and (3) improvisations. The
ear method is nothing but the training of the pupil in an accurate
sense of pitch and a grasp of tonality. However, the system of
teaching rhythmic gymnastics is based upon two different methods:
_time_ and _time-values_. Time is expressed by movements of the arms;
time-values--note durations--by movements of the feet and body. A
combination of these two methods is called the plastic counterpoint,
in which the actual notes played are represented by movements of the
arms, while the counterpoint in crotchets, quavers or semi-quavers, is
given by the feet. The crotchet as the unit of note-values is expressed
by means of a step. Thus for each note in the music there is one step.
Notes of shorter duration than the crotchet are also expressed by
steps, only they are quicker in proportion to their frequency. ‘When
the movements corresponding to the notes from the crotchet to the whole
note of twelve beats have, with all their details, become a habit,
the pupil need only make them mentally, contenting himself with one
step forward. This step will have the exact length of the whole note,
which will be mentally analyzed into its various elements. Although
these elements are not individually performed by the body, their images
and the innervations suggested by these images take the place of the
movements.’
The first training of a pupil in the Dalcroze school consists of steps
only. Simple music is played to which the pupils march. After the pupil
has an elementary command of his legs the rhythmic training of his
arms and body begins. At this stage the simple movements to indicate
rhythms and notes are made a second nature of the pupil. This can be
compared to the pupil’s learning of the alphabet. Plastic reading
consists of composing more or less definite images from the elementary
rhythm-units. This is done either individually or in groups. The pupil
is taught to form clear mental images of the movements corresponding
to the rhythm in question and then give physical expression to those
images. As a child learns to compose letters and syllables to words
and words to phrases, a Dalcroze pupil is taught to understand the
elementary parts of the music and the rules of its composition and to
recompose it into a lengthy series of body movements.
The main object of Dalcroze’s method is to express by rhythmic
movements rhythms perceived by the ear. The exactness of such
expression is the main aim of the school. The body must react
momentarily to the time and sound-units of the music that the ear
perceives. As the wind creates waves in the sea, music is meant
to create motion in the human body. Percy B. Ingham writes that
characteristic exercises of this group are ‘beating the same time with
both arms but in canon, beating two different tempi with the arms while
the feet march to one or perhaps march to yet a third time, e. g.,
the arms 3/4 and 4/4, the feet 5/4. There are, also, exercises in the
analysis of a given time unit into various fractions simultaneously, e.
g., in a 6/8 bar one arm may beat three to the bar, the other arm two,
while the feet march six.’
According to Dalcroze’s plastic theory the arms should express the
theme in making as many movements as there are notes, while the feet
should mark the counterpoint in crotchets, quavers, triplets or
semi-quavers. A compound rhythm can be expressed by the arms taking one
rhythm, the feet, another. This is meant to correspond to the technical
exercises of orchestral music, by training the body to react to the
various tones of different instruments. The general purpose, however,
is and remains the development of feeling for rhythm by teaching the
physical expression of body rhythms. There is no doubt that shades
of crescendos and decrescendos, fortes and pianissimos are achieved
by this method, yet the question remains: how near does the Dalcroze
school come to visualizing the music in all its symbolic and spiritual
depths?
Music is more than rhythm; it is a subjective symbolic language of
our soul and the universe. It is a mystic factor of life, human and
cosmic. There is an unaccentuated language in every genial and great
composition, an æsthetic image and philosophic meaning that we can
grasp not by means of the intellect but mostly through the emotions,
and it is in expressing this that Dalcroze’s school has failed in
so far. Dalcroze has aimed to express the elemental factors of the
music, and in this he has succeeded. The performances given by Mr. T.
Jarecki, one of the most talented of the graduates of Hellerau, are
sufficient proof of the fact that the school has its shortcomings in
the above-mentioned directions. He performed a Prelude by Chopin, a
composition of Rachmaninoff, one by Schubert, and several numbers of
other classics in a costume that looked like a bathing suit. Powerful
as he was in all his rhythmic grace, he yet failed to translate the
musical language of the compositions by means of bodily plasticity.
Chopin’s and Rachmaninoff’s preludes possess distinct tonal expressions
and designs of something very human and emotional that lies beyond mere
rhythm. Poetry is based on the laws of rhythm, yet it is not alone the
rhythm that makes a poem beautiful, but the image that it creates. Thus
in the art of dance it is not only the rhythm but the æsthetic episode
that concerns a dancer most of all. It is the transformation of this
phonetic episode into plastic forms, the visualization of the audible
beauty, that lies at the bottom of every great dance. This requires
certain symbols and those lie beyond the achievements of the Dalcroze
graduates.
III
The great value of Dalcroze’s method lies in his insistence on perfect
rhythm as an elementary training upon which the coming art of dancing
can be based. The various folk-dances are outspokenly rhythmic, but
they contain that peculiar racial flavor which is very difficult to
keep outside its proper atmosphere and race. We have found that the
best Russian dancers could not give the simple folk-dances of another
race with the racial perfection which a native untrained folk-dancer
would have imparted to it. In the same way foreign dancers with their
best efforts fail in trying to dance what a Russian dances. The
national dances can be employed as valuable bases for the individual
art, but that is all. They lack the cosmic element, the language of
the world. An Italian understands his _Tarantella_, a Spaniard his
_Fandango_, a Russian his _Trepak_ best of all. The future art of
dancing needs a universal element of choreographic design and it is
in this that the Dalcroze school may be of immense value. It bases
everything on rhythm only, which is very significant, but its aim
should lie far beyond that. Rhythm is the syllable and the word, but
words must be combined into phrases and phrases into paragraphs before
we can read a story. It is after all the story in which the mind is
interested, not the words and phrases.
We have seen in previous chapters that the foundation of the ballet
lacks the firmness and soundness of a natural art. It is decadent and
altogether shaky. No genius could build anything lasting unless the
foundation is firm. The aim of dancing is not acrobatic nor gymnastic
effect, but plasticity. Symmetry is the chief element of architecture,
rhythm that of music. If we can combine the symmetric rules with those
of the rhythmic we have the basis upon which a new choreography can be
built. Isadora Duncan, Fokine, Lada, Trouhanova and many others are
trying to grasp the truth in their individual ways, but the elemental
truth lies in Dalcroze’s system. That Dalcroze has not aimed to train
any stage artists is evidenced by the bathing-suit-like costume
that his pupils wear, which in itself is unæsthetic and objectionable
to our eye, though it may fit well for regular class-room work. It is
at illusion that the stage aims, and this is not to be found in naked
realism but in something else.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: A Plastic Pantomime (Dalcroze Eurhythmics)]
Some writers and critics seem to think that the great importance of
Dalcroze’s system lies in his Neo-Hellenism, in that it is so close
to the ancient Greek ideas. This view is particularly widespread in
Germany, the country of classic adoration. But Greek spirit and ideals
cannot help but only mislead a modern man. We have our problems, so
many thousand years of evolution after the Greek civilization, that
differ fundamentally from those of the bygone centuries. It is not in
looking backward, but in looking forward that we have to find the great
cosmic ideal of beauty. Dalcroze is by no means an imitator of the
Greeks, but a man of to-day. He maintains emphatically that his method
of eurhythmics is meant to be a general educational subject in all the
schools--an elementary rhythmic training for life.
It is to be hoped that the Dalcroze system of training dancers will
be employed as the elementary step in all the dancing schools, for
only then we may hope to see the rise of a new art of dancing.
Without learning the alphabet thoroughly or without knowing the most
elementary rules of a science nothing could be obtained by a pupil in
his later studies. Here is the elementary system in all its primitive
simplicity and truth. All we need is to adapt it to the higher
schools of choreography. What the Dalcroze schooling of to-day gives
is insufficient for a stage art. But it is by far a more thorough
elementary training than any ballet, naturalistic or individual school
can give, as it makes a student feel the music in his body and soul
before he expresses it in his plastic forms. Then again, there is a
strict system, a method of gradual development of those essentials
which lie at the bottom of every art dance.
In spite of the many shortcomings the Jacques-Dalcroze school can be
considered as the first move towards a new stage art. It means the
beginning of a new school of dancing altogether. However, it needs
another reformer to begin where Dalcroze ended. Can we expect this of
Fokine, Volkhonsky or some one else? Dance in its highest sense is
symbolic. The symbols that it expresses should not be others than those
of music. We know only that they should form images of the symmetric
and rhythmic elements, but their exact nature remains either for an
individual artist or a future school to determine.