Chapter XV The Future of the Dance
“Men are so unimaginative! My husband has all sorts of appliances for getting strong quick. He gets up in the morning and pulls at straps, twirls objects and kicks furiously at nothing. Such antics you never saw. Doubtless they have some underlying advantage or he wouldn’t perform them, for he is a practical man. But they are so ridiculous. I always think of Don Quixote fighting the windmill when I see him threatening the air and striking absurd attitudes so seriously.”
It is an American woman who speaks, and she speaks as the mouthpiece of a new idea—the attempt to recreate the lost rhythms of the human body by the means of dance movements. Not the least important of the results of the modern renaissance of dancing has been the rediscovery of the grace of bodily movement by the modern man and woman. The sight of the beauty of human motion on the stage has naturally suggested the idea of the introduction of this beauty into daily life. The dancing of Isadora Duncan, of Maud Allan, of Pavlova and Mordkin, has in fact awakened the ancestral voices of the blood; the spectator can no longer remain passive, but demands to be allowed to take his or her part in the cosmic measure. The speaker continues: “Now, when I get up and feel headachy or as if my body was stuffed with sawdust, I too have my exercise. But, oh, the difference! I start the ‘Marche Militaire’ on my patient phonograph, and the strains are so inspiring that I go through my paces so buoyantly that my husband stops his seesawing to enjoy my dance. Now the difference lies in this, that while I am unlimbering my muscles and starting my blood gaily through my veins, my heart and my mind are also uplifted with the rhythm of music and pose.”
She then describes how when the patient phonograph is giving forth Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” she accompanies the music with a story related in motion and gesture. “I first point to an imaginary tree, run lightly to it, stretch up and pull down a bough, take it in my arms, then gaily throw it aside. This I do three times in different corners of the room. Suddenly I am attracted by the upspringing grass and trip lightly over it lest I crush it. Then I see flowers on the grass, sit down and gather an imaginary bouquet, then toss it over my head. This I do three times, and perhaps you may think it easy to sit down with one leg thrust forward and then break your pose gracefully in getting up. My mood changes. I hear a bird singing and bend forward to listen with one hand to my ear and my eye following its flight. Then I hear a bird in another direction and follow it. Three times these movements are repeated. The pose is now entirely different, the arms outspread as if in flight. I am by this time fairly enchanted with the spring and give myself up to the abandon of the moment, until my mood is exhausted and I calm down with music into final repose.” At the conclusion of these exercises she remarks: “At this moment I feel as if every part of my body was enjoying an independent existence, but would, if I wished it, take a subordinate position for the common good. That is exercise as it should be.”
The husband, we may suppose, is now thoroughly out of humour with his get-strong-quick methods. But where is his place in this new system by which the flexibility of the body and the exhilaration of the mind are sought in the movements of the dance? The dance, in any other sense than that of a ball-room accomplishment, is generally regarded as unsuited to the masculine character. How often has not one heard the remark that it is unpleasing to see a man dancer. And a man himself would as a rule rather be caught in the act of stealing than of dancing alone or with his fellows. The prejudice is new. It is perhaps characteristic of an artificial society for whose small conventions the liberal code of nature is too broad. In all simple and virile societies men have been dancers—unless some cramping moral code imposed its arbitrary prohibition—only in more decadent ages have they been content to be passive spectators. The men who fought at Agincourt, the men who fell in the Pass of Thermopylæ, were dancers. Greek manhood would not have been what it was without the dance. The Greek youths danced as simply and unconsciously as the Greek maidens, and they danced among themselves, singly and in groups. Nietsche said a wise word to this generation when he proclaimed his ideal: “Every man fit for warfare, every woman fit for children, both fit for dancing with head and legs.”
America is seeking to discover a dance fit for men. It has found it in a translation of the movements proper to athletics, in an expression in dance form of all the masculine sports, a dance which women could not perform if they tried. A spectator who has seen an exhibition of this new method, which is clearly a revival of the old Greek method, has recorded that “the postures were those of wrestlers or swimmers, or runners or discus and javelin throwers, always preceded by the vigorous dance steps. And none of it was in the least feminine. It was dancing, but it was essentially masculine from start to finish. There was not a suggestion of airy grace; there was more than a suggestion of strength and rhythm and of iron muscles under excellent control.... Then,” he continues, “I began to see the place of dancing in the world, its place as a wholesome natural recreation and as a form of physical training, more effective perhaps than any other, since a vigorous athletic dance brings into play nearly every muscle in the body. I saw that a normal enjoyment of dancing meant a healthy mind in a healthy body. There is no more sane and natural form of exercise than the rhythmic buoyant movements of the dance, performed with the vigour which men throw into it.”
This form of dancing corresponds almost exactly with the Greek gumnāzo, which was the simpler and more exclusively physical of the two divisions of the dance, the groundwork for the orchēsis, the intellectual and emotional expression of bodily movement. The former provided the technique, which was to be mastered not for its own sake, but as a means of furnishing the body with that eloquence by which it could utter the moods of the spirit. Without this training in the dance, the Greek men and women could never have acquired that exquisite harmony, that easy grace of carriage, such as we see in ancient art. It may even be said to have made Greek art possible, for as J. A. Symonds remarked in his “Studies of the Greek Poets”: “The whole race lived out its sculpture and painting, rehearsed, as it were, the great masterpieces of Phidias and Polygnotus in physical exercise before it learnt to express itself in marble and colour.”
The modern revival of the dance will not do the same for the art of our own time until the dance becomes the common property of the people. For the ordinary man and woman dancing provides the simplest, the most natural, the most satisfying means of expression. Self-expression is a faculty the loss of which the modern age is just beginning to be aware of. An earlier age realised it in the arts of the folk—in folk-dance, in folk-song, in folk-lore and in the popular pageants of the Church. For its loss Puritanism is primarily responsible with its vulgar shamefacedness; it was further weakened by the Industrial Revolution, which broke up the old rhythms of social life; and it finally perished when our artistic pleasures became specialised and we chose to become passive, inexpressive spectators of professional artists rather than attempt any artistic expression of our own. Whereas a former age lived out its spirit in a popular music, a popular ballad literature and national dances, the present generation prefers to listen to the wheedling airs of the gramophone, to read a professional journalism and to watch a paid dancer in the music-halls. The tendency everywhere is for a passive enjoyment to usurp the place of an active participation in the arts. But the desire for self-expression is instinctive and irrepressible. In the dance it will find a means of satisfaction—complete, elemental, and one which has the saving quality of beauty.
By no means do I wish to imply that the dance of the theatre will ever be merged in that of the people, still less that it is desirable that it should. The dance of art demands the entire surrender of the artist’s life. It is more than a pastime or a recreation. And as we demand that it shall become more and more expressive, so the study of the dancer must needs become more searching and minute. What new forms the dance is going to take, what new spirit is going to inspire it, only the future can show, but without pressing too far into the region of conjecture, it is possible to suggest the probable direction of its development.
In spite of the renewed vigour which the Russians have given to the ballet, it is difficult to believe that the strict, academic school of ballet-dancing has still a long term of life before it. Indeed the Russians—I am speaking exclusively of the Diaghilew company—have renewed the ballet by revolutionising it. Not only have they utterly transformed its spirit, but they have introduced a new manner and gesture. In Cléopâtre and Scheherazade how little remains of the strict technique of the classic ballet! The ballet is turning away from Milan and looking towards Greece and the East. Anna Pavlova has pointed out the way by which the academic style can find salvation. Her dancing is transitional. From the ballet technique it derives its precision and firmness of outline, but to these are added a fluency, a multitudinous play of the nuances of light and shade, a capacity for expressing an intense personal life. The fatal defect of the academic style is that it is impersonal. It is the geometry of the dance. If the personality of the dancer succeeds in disengaging itself, it is not so much expressed in the movements of the dance as violently imposed upon them. How drearily impersonal it can be, we are realising afresh now that the success of the Russian ballet has let loose a flood of indifferent ballet-dancers upon the stage. It permits a high degree of technical accomplishment divorced from the slightest emotional significance. It is the dance par excellence for the uneducated and unintelligent dancer—and it is she who must be banished from the stage. It justifies the gentle sarcasm of Pius IX. who, when asked for his consent to the presentation of a diadem to Fanny Elssler at Rome, assented, but remarked that in his priestly simplicity he had always believed that crowns were designed for the head and not for the legs. The famous Austrian dancer scarcely merited the reproach, for she above all other dancers danced with the head and the heart; but in general it is a just indictment of the ballet technique that it has disproportionately emphasised the importance of the legs and the feet. In the period of the decline of the ballet, the dancers of Paris and Milan in particular were little more than automata agitated by a pair of muscular legs, which worked with the precision and monotony of clockwork. The modern dance demands expression in every line of the body.
It is certain that the dance of the future will tend towards the fuller expression of personality. We shall not be content to watch dances that are merely dexterous, but only those that reveal a fresh and living emotion. It will follow that the dance must become infinitely more subtle, the body more responsive to the spirit, and the spirit more attentive to the delicate rhythms of life. It follows also that the day of the empty-headed, empty-hearted dancer, the simpering miss of the pink shoes and fixed smile, will be over. We will listen for what the artist has to say to us, and if she remains inarticulate, if she is unable to utter a syllable of poetry or of passion or of wit, we will politely ask her to trouble us no more.
In the future the content of the dance will be immeasurably enlarged. We shall learn that, like the ancient Greek dance, “it deals with every subject, grave and gay, religious and profane, decorous and indecorous; nothing in nature is too high or too low to be outside its scope; it embraces the whole scale of human passions.” When it is grown to its full stature, the dance will probably combine with drama to create a new language for the imagination. Sumurûn, the production of Professor Max Reinhardt, is a type of a new art-form, neither ballet nor pantomime in the accepted sense of the words, of which the future is bound to see a further development. Its medium is gesture, but it is a gesture which, unlike the gesture of the old pantomime, is never merely a transcript of words. The twilight procession of figures to the palace of the Sheikh, moving with the rhythm of a frieze against the blank white wall, was no less than an event in the evolution of the dance-drama, pregnant with suggestive ideas. It presented movements and gestures utterly untranslatable into words, into painting or sculpture—untranslatable even, I think, into music. They were movements which had been caught up out of life itself, and fused by the imagination into pure symbols of beauty and delight, of pride and passion and wit.
The dance, I believe, is still only in its infancy. Is it rash to imagine that the evolution of dancing will be the special achievement of art in this century, as the evolution of music was in the last? There is a whole world of gesture waiting for the dance to take possession of. The rediscovery of the gesture of the ancient world is perhaps the least important part of the undertaking. There lies a broad field for exploration in the innumerable racial and national gestures, each with its separate beauty, and its separate expressiveness. And beyond this stretches the yet more inexhaustible domain of nature, its multitudinous minor rhythms, each various and distinguishable, merging into a grand rhythm of the whole, the eternal rhythm of life itself. Fragments of attitude, phrases of motion, are scattered prodigally up and down the world, awaiting the seeing eye and the understanding mind that can pluck these happy accidents, store them in the memory, and at the proper time build up out of them a new pattern of the dance. When the choregrapher of genius arrives, he will think in gestures, as the musician thinks in sound, and the painter in mass and colour. And when he has realised the lavish abundance of his material, he will pour into it like a molten flood all that there is in the brimming life of our day to fire, to madden, to delight and to rive the heart.
Then it will be the turn of the other arts to look wonderingly upon this figure of the Dance, no longer straying timidly into their company, but coming upon divine feet, with an assured mien and a mature grace, and each will borrow something from her ancient and untiring ecstasy.
Footnotes
1 The use of the word “classical” to denote that class of dancing which claims kinship with Greek art is somewhat confusing. Before the recent revival, “classical” was the term applied to the traditional style of the ballet as distinguished from skirt-dancing, step-dancing and the various eccentric styles. To avoid confusion I have in general used the word “academic” instead of “classical” when speaking of the older school of the ballet.
2 The late Sutherland Edwards proved himself a singularly accurate prophet when in 1881 he wrote: “We shall probably have to go as far as St Petersburg to discover a première danseuse worthy in some manner to be compared with those of twenty and twenty-five years ago.”