III
How important Lada’s illustration of the theory of concordance of motion and music is at this time of dancing evolution can be more concretely grasped by the coming generations than by an average dance-lover to-day. It is perspective that gives the true visual impression of a mountain. ‘In the unison of plasticity and music, of the visible with the audible, of the spacial with the temporal, lies the guarantee of that new art which we so ardently desire and so unsuccessfully seek,’ writes a celebrated dance authority. But here comes the question of music, the phonetic image that should guide the choreographic artist. Lada complains that she has a very limited choice of compositions that can be danced. The problem of proper dance music is more serious than one would think. Sibelius’ Valse Triste is perhaps the best sample of dramatic dance music that corresponds perfectly to a dancer’s requirements. MacDowell’s ‘Shadow Dance’ is another gem of this kind. There are quite a few by other composers. The sum is slight. But the dancer can hardly blame the composer alone, for the latter knows only the old ballet, the naturalistic school or folk-dance themes. He has never heard of any other dance music than the one which has been danced, either socially or on the stage.
Dancing to music requires short phonetic episodes with sufficient poetic, symbolic or dramatic element, and images clearly depicted in strong rhythmic measure and sufficient background for the story. The more variety of figures, the greater contrasts and the more ‘chapters’ in such a composition, the better for the dancer. The modern decadent, unrhythmic, vague mood music of the radical French and German schools is of little appeal and practically impossible to render in plastic forms. It is the Russian school of music, as also the works of modern Finnish composers, that have all the rich, clear and powerfully vivid magic of the north, and appeal so strongly to a dancer’s imagination. Sibelius’ En Saga, a tone-poem for full orchestra, would be the most grateful composition for this purpose had it not been written in the old symphonic form. It belongs to that baffling and unsatisfactory class of symphonic poems to which Sibelius has failed to give a clear literary basis. The music suggests the recital of some old tale in which the heroic and pathetic elements are skillfully blended. The music is vigorous and highly picturesque, but its interest would be greatly enhanced by a more definite program. Again, the same composer’s ‘Lemminkainen’s Home-Faring’ would make an excellent dance for a man dancer, had the composer rearranged it for a smaller orchestra and for dancing. It is an episode from the Kalevala. Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony is a composition that could be danced, being based on a series of single episodes of extremely imaginary character. But the score is written for a large symphony orchestra, therefore unpractical for dancing in a general way. Sibelius’ incidental music to Adolf Paul’s tragedy, ‘King Christian II,’ and the other to Maeterlinck’s ‘Pelléas and Mélisande’ are large ballets rather than music that could be performed without any particular difficulties by dancers of Lada’s type.
The question of appropriate music for the latest phase of the art of dancing is so serious that it requires earnest consideration. In considering the best dances of all the great dancers of all ages and schools we find that among the phonetic images the symbolic element renders itself most gratefully to plastic transformation. By its very nature dancing is the symbolic rendering of music. The more symbolic the subject of a composition the better chance it has of being transmitted into a visible language. A dancer represents in his vibrating body lines the symbolic complex of all the phonetic unities of a composition. He is, so to speak, the unset type. Music is the text that he has to print in such pictorial forms, in such symbols that our mind can grasp it. Throughout his dance, he remains a kaleidoscopic tracer of the musical designs of the composition. The plastic positions of the human body, the mimic expression of the face, the gestures and the steps, are the mediums that can suggest certain phases of emotion and feeling, certain ideas and impressions of soul and body. There is a certain tonal and pictorial ‘logic,’ a kind of unarticulated thinking, in music as well as in dancing. But this cannot be depicted in any other than symbolic form. Essentially both arts are composed of a succession of peculiar emotional symbolic images. Music is the vibration of the sound, dancing the vibration of the form. Both arts appeal directly to our emotions, music more than dancing, the latter being more mixed with our intellectual processes. Dancing may be termed the translating of the absolutely subjective language into a more objective one. According to this theory all the ballets in the old form of drama, where the characters dance their rôles, is against the principle of pure art dancing. It is impossible to imagine that there is any music on the order of our conventional dramas, of so or so many characters. At the utmost there can be only two dancing figures, two characters that we could imagine in a tone-drama of this kind; but even so, the other could be only the acting, the pantomimic character, while only one dancer at a time can render the real transformation process of the musical theme.
To comply with the requirements of the above-described theory of musical dancing, the writer has composed a scenario, ‘The Legend of Life,’ to which Reinhold Glière is composing the music. In this ballet, or more correctly plastomime, which is arranged in three scenes, there is only one single dancer throughout the whole performance, and she is the symbolic image, the visualized imagination of a young monk, who is sitting in the evening before the festival of ordainment in his gloomy cell and thinking of the girl he used to love outside. Here he begins to hear the worldly music that is interrupted by the chimes and the choir of the church. The girl of whom he is thinking appears before him and dances romantic episodes—dances, so to speak, his vivid reminiscences. The monk is the realistic figure, the dancing girl the symbolic image of the music. It is a whole drama, which takes place in the monk’s mind. The drama is in music, and is his love, his romantic emotion, which is often interrupted by ecclesiastic surroundings. The second scene is the dream of the monk at night in a beautiful garden. The vision of the dancing girl. The third scene depicts him watching his own ordination in the church and the people arriving solemnly through the courtyard to witness the ceremony. Among them he sees his beloved. This scene is laid in the monastery’s courtyard. The charm of the dancing girl here becomes so overwhelming to the monk that he throws off his robe and rushes to her. Here she vanishes like a phantom and the plastomime ends. This, briefly, is an attempt at the sort of literary basis upon which the author considers dance music can be constructed in concordance with the new symbolic ideals.
The above-described scenario is merely one of the innumerable dance themes that modern composers could employ in their future dance music. It is to be hoped that composers will grasp the idea and enrich musical literature with works that adapt themselves to the requirements of a new choreography.
EPILOGUE
FUTURE ASPECTS OF THE ART OF DANCE
As in the physical so in the spiritual world there prevails a kind of circulation of energies and life; growth, maturity and decline. Individuals seem nothing but the beginnings where the universes end, and vice versa. As a man mirrors the world in his soul, so a protoplasm mirrors the man. An invisible hand pushes a worm along the same road of evolution as it does an imperious Cæsar. One and the same feeling heart seems to beat in the breast of man that beats in the action of the constellations. Yet the hand of evolution that tends to adjust the equilibrium between the individual and the cosmic will gives by every new turn a new touch of perfection to the subjective and the objective parties. This tendency manifests itself in the history of individuals and races, and also in the history of art. The greatest genius of to-day is surpassed by another to-morrow.
The art of dancing, as it stands to-day, promises much encouragement for to-morrow. It is near the beginning of a new era—the era of the cosmic ideals. The past belongs to the aristocratic ideals, in which the Russian ballet reached the climax. The French were the founders of aristocratic choreography; the Russians transformed it into an aristocratic-dramatic art; to the Americans belongs the attempt at a democratic school.
‘The chief value of reaction resides in its negative, destructive element,’ says Prince Volkhonsky. ‘If, for instance, we had never seen the old ballet, with its stereotype, I do not think that the appearance of Isadora Duncan would have called forth such enthusiasm. In Isadora we greeted the deliverance.’ The chief merit of Duncan lies in destroying the aristocratic foundation of the ballet, and in attempting to find a democratic expression. She meant to find the solution in ancient Greek ideas and tried to imitate them. But she forgot that she was an outspoken American individualist and grasped only the democratic principles of a young race. All she achieved was to prove that the democratic essentials are no more satisfactory in the future æsthetic evolution of the dance than were the aristocratic traditions of the bygone centuries. The question remains, where is to be found the true basis of the coming choreography?
It is strange to contemplate what different directions the development of the dance in various countries and in various ages has taken. In ancient Egypt and Greece the primitive folk-dances developed into spectacular religious ballets, in Japan they assumed the same impressionistic character as the rest of the national art, in aristocratic France the folk-dances grew to a gilded salon art, in Italy they became acrobatic shows, while in Russia they transformed themselves into spectacular racial pantomimes. In every age and country the art of dancing followed the strongest æsthetic motives of the time. If a nation worshipped nobility it danced the aristocratic ideals, if it worshipped divine ideas it danced them accordingly. The social-political democratic ideals of the New World have exercised a great influence in this direction upon the art of the Old. Though imitating aristocratic Europe, America has not failed to add an element of its own to the æsthetic standards of the former. But had America been only democratic there would be little hope left that it could attribute anything to the future beauty, particularly to the future dance. There are, however, other elements that give encouragement to something serious and lasting, and this is the cosmic tendency in American life and art.
The chief characteristics of the American mind are to condense expressions and ideas into their shortest forms. This is most evident in the syncopated style of its music, in its language and in its architecture. Like the American ‘ragtime’ tune, an American skyscraper is the result of an impressionistic imagination. Both are crude in their present form, yet they speak a language of an un-ethnographic race and form the foundation of a new art. Instead of having a floating, graceful and, so to speak, a horizontal tendency like the æsthetic images of the Old World, the American beauty is dynamic, impressionistic and perpendicular. It shoots directly upwards and denies every tradition. The underlying motives of such a tendency are not democratic but cosmic. While a nationalistic art is always based on something traditional, something that belongs to the past evolution of a race, the cosmic art strives to unite the emotions of all humanity. The task of the latter is very much more difficult. It requires a universal mind to grasp and express what appeals to the whole world. It requires a Titanic genius to condense the æsthetic images so that in their shortest form they may say what the others would express in roundabout ways. This gives to beauty a dynamic vigor and makes it so much more universal than the art of any nation or age could be. But this requires the use of symbols, and tends to subjectivism. However, the symbols employed in this case are fundamentally different from those employed by the Orientals. Since the earliest ages the Orient has made use of symbols in art and religion. But the Oriental symbols have been mystic or philosophic in their nature. The American symbols will either be purely intellectual or they will be poetic.
The future of the art of dancing belongs to America, the country of the cosmic ideals. This is evident from its evolution since Isadora Duncan’s début. The Russian New Ballet (of Diaghileff’s group) is the best proof that the traditional racial plasticism is being transformed into a cosmic one. Compare the steps and gestures of Karsavina and Nijinsky with those of Pavlova and Volinin. Where the former have become realistically dramatic, the latter remain acrobatically academic. There is more symbolism in Karsavina’s and Nijinsky’s art than in that of Pavlova and the followers of the old ballet. But the plastic symbols of Lada are far more condensed than those of Karsavina. This is what we have termed the essential of a cosmic choreography.
The tendency of every art is from the simple to the complex and then again from the complex to the simple. The greatest dancer is the one who can express the most complex musical images in the simplest plastic forms. Dancing in the future will be nothing but a transformatory process of the time-emotions in the space-emotions. ‘Rhythm is in time what symmetry is in space—division into equal parts corresponding to each other,’ said Schopenhauer. Arthur Symons called dancing ‘thinking overheard.’ ‘It begins and ends before words have formed themselves, in a deeper consciousness than that of speech. * * * It can render birth and death, and it is always going over and over the eternal pantomime of love; it can be all the passions, all the languors; but it idealizes these mere acts, gracious or brutal, into more than a picture; for it is more than a beautiful reflection, it has in it life itself, as it shadows life; and it is farther from life than a picture. Humanity, youth, beauty, playing the part of itself, and consciously, in a travesty, more natural than nature, more artificial than art: but we lose ourselves in the boundless bewilderment of its contradictions.’ It follows that a neo-symbolism is the logical outcome of the future dance. Dancing will become an independent stage art and take the place of the obsolescent opera. But before it reaches that stage, composers will be compelled to realize the importance of the new choreography, and produce music that contains all the graphic designs, the plastic possibilities, the dynamic drama and, above all, that structure of sounds which gives ample possibility for symbolic plasticism and yet contains a message.
The real future dance will be expressionistic and subjective. Instead of copying life it will suggest its deepest depths and highest heights by combining the plastic symbols with the musical ones. It will not try to imitate nature but transpose it, as a painting transposes a landscape. Our mind is growing tired of the prevailing naked realism and its photographic effects. The realistic drama is gradually losing its æsthetic appeal. The aristocratic opera seems to belong to past centuries. Opera has lost its grip on the modern mind. Our æsthetic conception has reached the point where our subjective mind requires not imitation but inspiration. Instead of traditional beauties we require dynamic ones. We enjoy a suggestion of an æsthetic sensation more than an accurate description of it. This proves that the symbolic sensations will sooner or later take the upper hand, and symbolic dancing will be the watchword of the coming age.
Since, according to our theory, the future of the art of dancing belongs to America, we should take into consideration those primary elements of musical art that form the foundation of every dance. American art naturally lacks fundamentally national elements; it strives toward cosmic ideals instead. Miserable as is the syncopated form of American popular music it yet constitutes the musical Volapük of all the nations. This same syncopated form of expression manifests itself in American architecture and in its social dancing. The broken lines, the irregular dynamics, and the restless corners here and there that we find predominant in American architecture are nothing but a transposed form of popular music. It is evident that neither one of the arts has yet found its foundation. A New York skyscraper is a silent ‘ragtime’ tune, and vice versa. But the ‘ragtime’ rhythm can be modulated to the same æsthetic expressions as the skyscrapers. Unconsciously the dance follows the patterns of architecture and music. The future choreography does not necessarily need to be based upon syncopated rhythm only, but upon the various factors of the style, the method of expression and the spiritual issues.
The physical and spiritual bases of every folk-art lie in the rural life. A folk-song or a folk-dance is and remains the product of idyllic village atmosphere. It mirrors the joys and sorrows, hopes and passions of the country people. It has been molded under the blue sky, in sunshine and storm. The songs of birds and the voices of nature form its æsthetic background. A village troubadour or poet is usually its creator, and simplicity is its fundamental trait. It exalts the rural atmosphere, poetry and characteristics. The place of the birth and growth of syncopated rhythm and broken symmetry is exclusively the city. It exalts the noise, rush and triviality, also the alertness and forces of the street. It suggests motion and intellectual fever. It leaves images of something artificial and fatal in the mind. The spirit of the country is different in every nation; but the spirit of the city is a similar one all over the world. It is in this very fact that we have to look for the logical foundation of the future choreography. It will emanate from no particular race, from no particular country, nor from any particular element of national art. It will come from the artificial city, the mother of cosmic idealism. The symbolism of the city is destined to take the place of the symbolism of the country. The New York plasticism will be also the plasticism of Paris and Petrograd.
The ethnographic and aristocratic era in the art of dancing has reached the climax of æsthetic development. We are entering the era of cosmic art. We begin it with the same primitive steps that our ancestors made so many centuries ago; only with this difference—that now we view the problem from a universal point of view while our forefathers beheld it from a nationalistic and aristocratic point of view. We are in the cosmic current of evolution and begin our circle where it was left by those who had passed the current of a certain race or class. The future dance will grasp beauty from a broader stretch and deeper depths than the greatest virtuosi of the past and present could do. The fundamental law of all spiritual as well as physical evolution is to bring about a better equilibrium between the individual and the universal powers.