II
The writer has a record of the young living solo dancer of the Danish Royal Ballet, Mrs. Elna Jörgen-Jensen, whose exquisite delicate plastic art in Strindberg’s Brott och Brott, and Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Gioconda aroused stormy enthusiasm among Copenhagen’s audiences. Haagen Falkenfleth, the celebrated ballet critic of the Nationaltidende of Copenhagen, writes of her; ‘Mrs. Elna Jörgen-Jensen, the prima ballerina of the Danish Royal Ballet, entered the Copenhagen Ballet School as a child, as the result of an episode that is still little known. Her parents knew that little Elna was passionately fond of dancing, but their surprise was great when one day she disappeared from her home. It appeared that she had run after a street organ-grinder to whose screaming tune she was dancing in the middle of the street to the surprise of the occasional spectators. At the age of seven she became a pupil of the Royal Ballet School in Copenhagen, where the children are taught not only dancing and calisthenics, but also the general school subjects, in the same way as the dancers are educated in the Russian Imperial Ballet School in Petrograd. As a pupil she was favored with small dancing parts in certain ballets. She was excellent for little fairy rôles. In this way she received a gradual training for the stage and had already mastered her routine when she made her real début in Drigo’s “Harlequin’s Millions.” She had personified Sylvia’s child in d’Annunzio’s Gioconda and the page in Schiller’s Don Carlos. Her dancing was so sure, her movements so graceful and her mimicry so true to life that her reputation was instantly established; but how versatile she was became known only later.
‘No one who saw her during her début in the rôle of the gay Pierrette, with frolic-humorous eyes and graceful juvenile steps, could imagine that on the next occasion she would be so easily transformed into a tragedienne in Schnitzler’s and Dohnányi’s “Veil of Pierrette.” She practically created her rôle. Her romantic eyes, so full of sorrow and despair, added a magic gloom to her dramatic dance, in which she stands so high above her many contemporaries. She is realistically gripping. Already at the age of nineteen she was an accomplished mute actress of the modern type, and a great solo dancer. Dohnányi, who attended the performance, told me that he had not supposed she could possibly add such a tragic fire to the rôle that he wrote for untrained theatrical dancers. Mrs. Jörgen-Jensen proved in this rôle that she had broken loose from all the traditions of the Bournoville school in which she was trained. You could not see a line of the conventional ballet style.
‘Bournoville, the reformer of the Danish ballet, introduced a strong dramatic element into the national art. Yet his tendency was outspokenly romantic. In this he aimed to be classic and strictly choreographic. In many of his ballets the romantic and the realistic issues are closely interwoven. In these Mrs. Jörgen-Jensen sometimes has gone against the Bournoville principles and used her own judgment. She has figured as the principal dancer in the “Flower Festival at Genzano,” La Ventana, “Far from Danemark,” Coppélia and Swanhilde. But in “The Little Mermaid,” a ballet based on Hans Andersen’s fairy-tale, she is best of all. While dancing in the rôle of the Mermaid, she makes the impression of a magic creature of a different world, with grace and charms that we have never known, yet which cast a spell upon us. Mrs. Jörgen-Jensen’s repertoire is large, but still larger is the range of her dramatic personifications. The Copenhagen audiences are sorry to see her so little, but the stage of our National Theatre is more adapted to the opera and drama than to the ballet.’
Perhaps the best known of the living Danish dancers is Adeline Genée, whose name has figured during the past twenty years in the ballet repertoires of all the more or less known opera houses. She has been a special favorite of the London public, where she made her début in Monte Cristo in November, 1897. She has shown her best in Delibes’ Coppélia, though some critics maintain that her triumph in the Dryad is even greater. But what La Sylphide was to Taglioni, Ghiselle to Grisi and Éoline to Lucile Grahn, that is Coppélia to Genée. She is a true exponent of the Bournoville school of ballet, though she claims that she owes her brilliant technique to some other sources. Though she studied dancing with her uncle in Denmark, yet the method, style and technique originate from Bournoville. Max Beerbohm has given a pretty characteristic account of her appearance in Coppélia in London. ‘No monstrous automaton is that young lady. Perfect though she be in the haute école, she has by some miracle preserved her own self. She was born a comedian and a comedian she remains, light as foam. A mermaid were not a more surprising creature than she—she of whom one half is that of an authentic ballerina, whilst the other is that of a most intelligent, most delightful human actress. A mermaid were, indeed, less marvellous in our eyes. She would not be able to diffuse any semblance of humanity into her tail. Madame Genée’s intelligence seems to vibrate in her very toes. Her dancing, strictly classical though it is, is a part of her acting. And her acting, moreover, is of so fine a quality, that she makes the old ineloquent conventions of gesture tell meanings to me, and tell them so exquisitely that I quite forget my craving for words.—Taglioni in Les Arabesques? I suspect in my heart of hearts, she was no better than a doll. Grisi in Ghiselle? She may or may not have been passable. Genée! It is a name our grandchildren will cherish, even as we cherish now the names of those bygone dancers. And alas! our grandchildren will never believe, will never be able to imagine, what Genée was.’
The writer has attended a number of Genée’s performances in Europe and in America, and does not agree entirely with Mr. Beerbohm’s eulogy. As already explained above, Bournoville’s method was a great improvement over the French-Italian schools of dancing, in that it emphasized the dramatic issues and individual traits in the ballet, which Genée has exactly followed; but unfortunately the evolution of the Danish ballet stopped with Bournoville. The art remained in its preliminary state of development and ended with the Dresden-china steps. It is this very style that makes Genée an attractive museum figure. In this she stands unrivalled. She exhibits an art of the past, with every detail sedulously studied. You can see how mathematically exact is the position of the fingers, the attitude of the head, the lines of the arms and limbs, and so on. ‘Every step has its name, every gesture belongs to its code; there is only one way and no other of executing them rightly, and that way is Madame Genée’s,’ writes one of her admirers. But the dance is more than an exhibition of mathematical figures. The studied smile and sorrow fail to arouse the emotions of the audience. The Dresden-china step is a fossilized thing of bygone centuries. It somehow does not belong to the stage.
The significance of the Danish ballet, and its influence upon the evolution of the art of dancing is greater than it is universally admitted. The Danes introduced the element of drama into the ballet in order to make the dancing a kind of mute acting. They were the first to revolt against many time-worn rules of the old schools. They were the first to advocate the imitation of nature to a certain extent. Bournoville said ‘as nature moves in curves and gradations rather than by leaps and turns, dancing should take that into consideration.’ The Russian ballet was influenced through the Danish and Swedish. The Danish ballet was a stepping-stone between the academic French-Italian and ethno-dramatic Russian schools. It has accomplished a great task in the evolution of the art of dancing by making the ballet a dramatic expression on academic lines.
CHAPTER XIV
THE RUSSIAN BALLET
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; Pavlova and other famous ballerinas; Mordkin; Volinin, Kyasht, Lopokova.