while the public remain content with a pretty face, a pleasing figure, a dainty dress, and an air for which barrel-organs cry aloud, English girls may regard it as a labour lost to give them anything better. And yet the successes in years past of dancers like Katti Lanner and Malvina Cavallazzi, and the triumph that has fallen to Adeline Genée to-day, must prove that there is an English audience for better things. Perhaps, if we had more dancers who could and would take their work seriously, the tone of what so many people are generously pleased to call their taste might cease to be contemptible.”
CHAPTER V
THE SKIRT DANCE
THE discovery of a new medium has not infrequently infused a new vitality into a declining art. Certainly the nature of the medium has been almost as important a factor in determining style as the nature of the artist. One of the media through which the dance expresses itself is costume. It has been pointed out how the evolution of the caleçon revolutionised the technique of the ballet. The rediscovery of the flowing skirt brought about a revolution in modern dancing.
The flowing skirt appears to us to be a natural appurtenance of the dance. But it must be remembered that the infinitesimal skirt of the ballet-dancer had become a cherished convention, and such is the tyranny of convention that it makes whatever is contrary to it appear to be unnatural. The development of the ballet had been largely due to the abandonment of the fulsome skirt of the early eighteenth century; it was felt that to adopt it once again would be to involve the dance in the swaddling-clothes of its infancy.
The introduction of the long skirt, however, provided an outlet from the impasse into which dancing had been driven. On the one hand was the classical school of the ballet, now in an unfortunate condition of decadence. It lacked all those elements which make of the ballet a living art. The public was sick and tired of it. On the other hand a more or less vulgar type of dancing, which had no relation to art, enjoyed a certain popularity on the music-hall stage. It consisted chiefly of the Clog Dance, believed originally to have come from the cotton mills of Lancashire, and various kinds of acrobatic dancing. In the race for popularity the ugly but energetic Step Dance was first, the classical ballet nowhere. Between the two there was no happy medium.
The Skirt Dance was essentially a compromise between the academical method of the ballet and the grotesque step-dancing which appealed to the popular taste of the time. It stood nearer perhaps to the more serious form of dancing, for in its elements, at least, it was modelled upon the method of the ballet. The exchange, the pirouette, the balance, all the first steps necessary to the ballet-dancer, are the same in both. But while retaining the academical steps as a foundation, it permitted the performer greater license in the use of them. Remembering the passionate dancing of Fanny Elssler, it would perhaps not be correct to say that it introduced more spirit into the dance; but its tendency was towards greater vividness and the play of temperament. The domination of the ballet had in some measure confined dancing to one particular method and, especially in the period of its decline, had exalted technical proficiency at the expense of the display of personality. The Skirt Dance broadened the scope of dancing. In itself never a performance of very great artistic merit, it had all the value of a revolt. It broke down the dominion of a tradition which had become too narrow. It opened up new vistas. It contained the seeds of future movements. In particular it recalled the forgotten dances of antiquity. Though essentially modern, and notably so in its lapses into vulgarity, it nevertheless suggested new possibilities in the grace of flowing drapery, the value of line, the simplicity and naturalness that were characteristic of Greek dance.
But the Skirt Dance was chiefly justified by its success, which can only be described as sensational. The utter absence of enthusiasm for the academic dance made it manifest that the time was ripe for the discovery of a new form of dancing. The wit to invent the novel mode that was to revolutionise theatrical dancing in England came from Mr John D’Auban, for many years ballet-master and director of the dances at Drury Lane. It was of him that “Punch” wrote the doggerel eulogy:
