A little later Miss Ruth St Denis presented in public some strange, quite beautiful, performances consisting of dancing, miming and posturing supposed to suggest ideas of Indian life, and her finely restrained, truly artistic work deeply impressed both the critics and audiences.
Afterwards came Miss Maud Allan, alleged—no matter with what degree of truth—to be an imitator of Isadora Duncan, and she made a great "hit," her most popular performance being a "Salome" dance, which was considered by some people to be indecent. Certainly of her costume the French phrase "qui commence trop tard et finit trop tôt" might justly be used, for she carried nudity on the stage to a startling degree. In a good many other dances her work was rather pretty and quite unobjectionable, but vastly inferior to the art of Isadora Duncan or Ruth St Denis.
[Isadora Duncan ]
The theatrical season of 1908 ended in a blaze of—dancing. At what is generally deemed about the dullest moment in the year Isadora Duncan appeared at the Duke of York's Theatre, and kept it open and well attended for almost a month. The affair is unique in the history of our theatre. One can imagine a playhouse running on the basis of a big ballet, with a story, popular music, magnificent scenery, gorgeous costumes, huge corps de ballet, half-a-dozen principals and immense advertisement. In this case we have had more or less isolated dances to music generally severe; for scenery only a background of subtle yellow, taking strange tones under the influence of different lights; for costumes only some beautiful, tranquil, simple Greek drapery; for corps de ballet a few children; for principals one woman, with an intelligent face, but certainly no great beauty; and in the way of advertisement very little, except some honestly enthusiastic press notices, and fortunately nothing in the form of photographs of nudities or half-nudities.
There has been a triumph of pure art under austere conditions, such as can hardly be recollected on our stage, unless in the case of Everyman—pure art akin to the theatrical, indeed parent of the drama. The word histrionic is derived through the Latin from an Etruscan word which means "to leap" and was originally applied to dancers.
Historically, the matter is interesting. Drama began in dance and developed from it, dance and drama going hand-in-hand for a long while; then a separation came, and dance has tended more and more to become meaningless and conventional, and, in the chief school of dancing, purely technical. The Spanish school is still alive, reinforced by the North African, and in the main showing some tendency, often perfectly restrained, towards the indecent. Our own step-dancing remains popular, and for a while the hybrid skirt-dancing triumphed, chiefly because of the genius of Kate Vaughan and talent of her successors, one of whom, Katie Seymour, worked out a clever individual compound of styles.
The "Classic" school, classic in quite a secondary sense, which has been represented by what one can conveniently call the ballet, year after year has worked towards its extinction by the over-cultivation of mere technique, of execution rather than imagination.
The greatest artist of this school in our times is Genée; natural grace, a piquant individuality, and a fine power of miming, have lent charm to work the foundation of which is really acrobatic, and consists of remarkable feats made too manifest by an abominably ugly costume.
Isadora Duncan goes back in style to the early Greek; dancing, however, necessarily to more modern music, for the reason that we do not know how to reproduce much of the old, and possibly would not like it if we could. To her work one may apply the phrase of Simonides, that "dancing is silent poetry." Preferable is the term that has been used concerning architecture: Schelling, in his "Philosophie der Kunst," calls it "frozen music," a term ridiculed by Madame de Staël. Peter Legh wrote a book on the topic, published in 1831, with the title "The Music of the Eye." The book is poor, pretentious stuff, but the title seems nicely applicable to the dancing of Isadora Duncan. To a deaf man her work would be entirely musical—to a Beethoven or Robert Franz, deaf after, for a while, full enjoyment of sound, her dances would, I believe, represent complete, delightful, musical impressions.
It may be that sometimes in her work she attempts impossible subtleties, endeavouring to express ideas beyond the range of melody—for it is difficult to imagine that any dancing can be more than expressive of melody, though no doubt to make this true "melody" must be understood in a large sense. How far away this is from dancing which consists in the main of executing more or less complicated steps "in time" with the music, or such appalling vulgarities as a cake-walk. It must be admitted that one of the Tanagra figurines is sadly suggestive of a characteristic pose in the cake-walk—though it may well be that it is a mere pose which led to none of the abominations with which our stage has been deluged!