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.
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.
CHAPTER XIX
PLASTOMIMIC CHOREOGRAPHY
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.