The Dance

by Unknown

I

We have witnessed the various phases and changes which the art of dancing has undergone during the past centuries. The ancient Egyptians danced the movements of astral bodies, the Greeks danced the hymns of their mythology, the Romans their war songs, the Middle Ages danced the aristocratic etiquette of gilded ball-rooms, the French Ballet danced to stereotyped tunes with marionette-like manners, the Russian Ballet danced to dramatic scenarios that had musical accompaniment, the various nations danced to their simple tunes, the Duncanites to the mood-creating elements of the music, the Jacques-Dalcrozists to the rhythm of a composition only. It is inconceivable that none of the reformers, none of the new schools, danced the music itself. Those among the partisans of ‘natural’ or ‘classic’ dancing who claim to interpret the music have given us thus far supposed imitations of the Greek, Oriental or fantastic styles of some kind, based upon hazy rhythmic mood-producing forms of a composition. We have seen only fragmentary passages here and there, single numbers of the celebrated dancers, which expressed the phonetic designs of the music in true plastic lines. Pavlova has certainly succeeded in expressing all the emotional fury of Glazounoff’s L’Autômne Bacchanale, the grace of Drigo’s Papillons, and Saint-Saëns’ ‘The Swan.’ We must give all due credit to Karsavina, for her dancing of Stravinsky’s L’Oiseau de Feu, and half a dozen others of her repertoire depict truly the very soul of the music. The child pupils of Miss Duncan dance all the ethereal grace of Schubert’s Moments Musicals. In the same way we find in one or several dances of Mordkin, Nijinsky and Volinin, of Lopokova, Fokina and Kyasht that they have succeeded in dancing the music. We are pretty safe to say that each of the celebrated dancers of history has probably been able to translate into visible ‘plasticism’ only a few of the phonetic forms of one or another composition of his repertoire. And this is what we may term ‘dancing the music.’

We have attended innumerable dance performances, have seen many new and old ballets, in Russia and abroad, have seen the new and ultra-modern dancers, yet we have so far seen but a microscopic fragment of what we here call ‘dancing the music.’ Certainly the greatest part of the repertoire of all the celebrated dancers has been the dancing of something else than the music. All the Pavlova ballets that have been given in America, all the elaborate ballets of the Russian classic school, all the ballets of the Diaghileff-Fokine group, are and remain dances to preconceived plots, dances to a style or a mood, but rarely dances of the music. We should like to have any of the celebrated dancers show us where there is expression of the music in all the spectacular pirouettes of Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky and Fokina, in their dramatic acting to a musical composition, even in the most modern ballets of Stravinsky. The dancing that they perform during the whole ballet is pantomimic acting to a certain plot, arranged to music. We are not by any means biased in making the statement, but make it with deliberation.

Dancers of various schools and ages have failed to see the point. Though Prince Volkhonsky is preaching exclusively the Jacques-Dalcroze rhythmic gymnastics as the basis of a new school of dance and therefore sees nothing more in a dance than the rhythmic expression, yet he has described aptly the defects of the Russian ballets, old and new, of the Duncanites and other modern schools of dancing. ‘Their main defect is that they develop independently of the music,’ he writes; ‘they are a design by themselves—complicated, interesting, very often pleasing to the eye, yet independent of the music. And we have already seen when we spoke of the old codas that the most unpretentious figure, even when banal, becomes inspiring when it coincides with the musical movement, and, on the contrary, the most interesting picturesque figure loses meaning when it develops in discord with music. Look at some dance, definite and exact, which has crystallized itself within well-established limits; you may look at it even without music, but try to watch a pantomime without music. In the first place, it will be a design without color, quite an acceptable form; in the second, it will be a body without skeleton—something unacceptable.

‘The main fault of the leaders of the modern ballet is that they put the centre of gravity of the ballet in the plot, in the event, in the story: what in painting is called literature. Whereas the subject of the ballet is not in the plot, the subject is in the music. Any picture which is not dictated by music, any independent movement, is synonymous with abandonment of the subject, the essence; it is in the end an interruption of art, an interruption caused by a rupture between the two equivalent elements of the visuo-audible art—sound and movement. This rupture with music is all the more felt the more participants there are in the picture, and the more markedly it tends towards “realism.” Only look at them when they represent scenes of disorder; and by and by we lose the impression of “art”; we see real, not represented, disorder; and finally we are turned to the dramatic point of view, and we are called upon to admire the “acting crowd.” And if you are musical, if you live in the movement of sound, this independent visible movement cannot but appear as a sort of unasked-for interference of some intruder. The acting crowd is not admissible where a rhythmically moving crowd is required. Acting leads the artist out of music and conducts him into the plot; and the subject of ballet, I repeat, is not in the plot, it is in the music; the plot is but the pretext.

‘Only through the rhythm will the ballet come back to music and accomplish the fusion which has been destroyed by independent acting. Schopenhauer said that music is a melody to which the universe serves as a text; take away the music from the ballet—it will have nothing to say. There is quite a clear parallel here with the vocal art. The musician composes a song; he puts words to music. Imagine a singer coming out and telling us only the words; he will be far from the fulfillment of his task; he will have accomplished but the half of it, the lesser part of it. It is the same with the ballet; the musician composes the ballet, he puts the plot to music. Imagine a dancer coming out and acting the plot alone; he will be far from the fulfillment of his task; he will have accomplished but the lesser part of it. For the ballet does not relate how the Sleeping Beauty, for instance, fell asleep and awoke (this is the business of literature, declamation and drama); the ballet relates how music tells it. Music is the only real essence in that which forms the subject of the ballet. All the remaining “reality,” the real man with his real movement, is nothing but a means of expression, nothing but artistic material. It is evident how wrong, how offensive it is (for a musician) when this material of living movement embodies a new moving formula which is not implied in the music. Have you seen those “processions” of maidens, slaves, priests, etc.? Have you ever been shocked by the discord of their walk with music? Have you noticed that the pace which you see is quite different from the one you hear? Have you ever felt offended on seeing that they step between the notes and thus give you the impression of syncopes which are in no way justified by music? I am afraid you have not. Few are those who realize the importance of the accord of movement and sound, who long for its realization, and, together with Schiller, desire that “Music in its ascendant ennoblement shall become Image.”

‘The music we hear is the subject of the image we see. And in fact the singer sings music, the dancer dances music, and cannot dance anything else; he cannot “dance” jealousy or grief or fright, but he can and must dance the music which expresses the feeling of jealousy, grief or fright. And when he has rendered the music he will, by the same means, have rendered its contents, and naturally the silly question will be dropped: “How is it possible that on the stage the people should dance everything, whereas in life only dances are danced, or, at the utmost, joy?” The question is strange, to be sure, yet no less strange are those who forget that the only thing they may dance is music, and think they may dance a “rôle.” The dramatic principle based upon an arbitrary division of time is directly opposed to the choreographic principle, which is wholly founded on the musical, consequently regulated, division of time. Therefore the introduction of the element of “personal feeling,”[D] of individual choice, and even more, destroys the very essence of the choreographic art, and eats away its very texture.

[D] As the Duncanites do.—Editor.

I do not speak against the working out of such; I speak against an independent working out—that is, a separate one running a course other than that in which music is the greatest essential. I remember one of the best ballerinas contorting herself in wild movements of anguish while the notes of the violin were dying away in one long sound of a trill. She “acted,” and there is, of course, no harm in this, but she acted according to her ideas, instead of acting according to music. It is just the same sin against art as if a singer were to execute a lyric song with bravado. Would you forgive him? Why, then, do we not forgive a singer, yet forgive a mimic, even admire his “acting”? Why is it every one understands that singing must agree with music, and so few, almost nobody, feel the offensiveness of movement which disagrees with music? And yet how sensitive to the observation of the musico-plastic principle are those who are so indifferent to its non-observation. How much they enjoy, though unconsciously, every manifestation of that concordance! We may say with certitude that for the best moments, the moments of greatest satisfaction in the living art—that is, the musico-plastic art combining the visible with the audible—we are indebted to the simultaneous concurrence of the plastic movement with the musical; in other words, to the equality in division of space and time. In an old French treatise on the dance, published in the year 1589, the author says among other bits of advice: “It is wrong for the foot to say one thing and the instrument the other.” In its naïve conciseness this sentence represents the germ of all that has been said, perhaps with some prolixity, in these pages.

‘Space and time are the fundamental conditions of all material existence—and for that same reason the inevitable conditions of all material manifestation of man within the limits of his earthly being. If we agree that art is the highest manifestation of order in matter, and order in its essence nothing but division of space and time, we shall understand the fullness of artistic satisfaction which man must feel when both his organs of perfection, eye and ear, convey to him not only each separate enjoyment, but the enjoyment of fusion; when all his æsthetic functions are awakened in him not separately but collectively, in one unique impression: the visible rhythm penetrated by the audible, the audible realized in the visible, and both united in movement. This is the combination of the spacial order with the temporal. And when this combination is accomplished, and still more when it is animated with expression, then no chord of human impressionability is left untouched, no category of human existence is neglected; space and time are filled with art, the whole man is but one æsthetic perception.

‘And, once we have understood all that, how is it possible not to express the wish that the leaders of the art of the ballet should assimilate the principle of concordance of motion and music? Without this there is no art in movement, and all our old “pointés” and “fouettés,” all those records of rapidity and difficulties are nothing but words without significance, whereas the new “choreographical” pictures are but a dramatization of movement to the sound of an accompanying music.’