Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

She had, however, all the impertinent charm of the petite Parisienne. And, moreover, she had a passion for her métier. Small, fair, intriguing, with delicately rounded limbs, ivory shoulders and a mutinous little head crowned with light gold hair, she startled Paris by her dancing at the Elysée Montmartre. To the abandon of the Cancan she added in her rendering of it novel effects of an audacity that won her immediate fame. She was to the eighties what Mogador and Rose Ponpon were to the sixties. She became a person of note and the spoilt child of the jeunesse dorée. The story is told of how she was invited to supper at the Maison d’Or—she was an astonishingly vulgar little being in those days—by a Russian prince. A well-meaning friend, wishing to give her a genial hint to be on her best behaviour, wrote her a note, which was handed to her on a salver by the mâitre d’hôtel. She opened it, and with some difficulty spelled out the advice, to the amusement of her host: “Speak very nicely to the Grand-Duke in order to strengthen the Franco-Russian alliance!”

In her dancing there was no order, no method, but a sure sense of rhythm and an ingenuous frankness and gaiety. To grace of movement she made no pretension—the dance was a negation of it. It was a frenzy, a delirium, a contortion. Her legs were agitated like those of a marionette, they pawed the air, jerked out in the manner of a pump-handle, menaced the hats of the spectators. She sought the geste suspect with hand, foot, and body, although at the Moulin Rouge she was obliged to cut discreeter capers. Much of her popularity depended upon a purely personal attraction. She had all the fascination of brilliant and irresponsible youth: she was frankly proud of her charms and daring in displaying them.

In personal appearance Grille d’Égout was in every way her opposite. Dark, thin, with no claims to beauty—her upper jaw was prominent, her chin receding—she resembled La Goulue only in her youth, her spirit and her passion for the dance. In her ordinary movements she had a somewhat gauche and embarrassed manner; hers was the type of the unassuming bourgeoise. But at the first sound of the music everything was changed. She launched into the dance with an astonishing assurance, verve and directness of attack. She was more correct than eccentric, gay rather than voluptuous, arresting by gestures that were droll rather than exciting. Her dancing, a délire des jambes, gave a suggestion of the antics of the Parisian gamin.

But the most striking personality of all was that of Nini Patte-en-l’air. She was dark as the night, with a strange, mask-like face of deathly pallor, eyes sunk in deep hollows overarched by thick eyebrows, suggestive of Rops’ etching of “La Mort qui danse.” Her slight body quivered with intensity of life—la vie à outrance—as though charged with electric fluid. The rapidity of her movements was dazzling, and every movement was unforeseen, incalculable, and executed without a trace of effort. Five, ten, twenty times her foot flew above her head; then it remained suspended at the level of her face; it twisted, writhed, agitated, as though it possessed a life independent of the leg; it was a prisoner and struggled to escape; the dancer watched its contortions, an amused spectator of its restlessness; at last it was released; it darted to the ground, recovered its strength and resumed its command of the dance. Then, this by-play over, the dancer rested her hand on the arm of a cavalier, and began a wild, grotesque and fantastic career among the spectators. At every step her foot leapt to the ceiling, her head was thrown violently back, her body maintained a difficult equilibrium, her emaciated features shone with a delirious excitement. Twice she made this frenzied revolution of the hall, then, coming to a sudden standstill, her heel slid along the floor and she sank abruptly in a final dislocation, her legs extended horizontally on either side. It was the dance bewitched, bedevilled, a frenzy and agony of movement, without a parallel except in the maniacal contortions of the Aïssaouas or the revolutions of the howling Dervishes.

These dancers had their followers, of whom the names alone survive—Folette, Rayon d’Or, La Soubrette, La Glu, La Cigale. The dance of école montmartroise was a variation upon one perpetual theme—the dislocation of the leg. To name the variations is to indicate the bizarre gestures which formed the stock-in-trade of the school—La Friture, Le Port d’Armes, La Jambe derrière la tête, Le Croisement—the latter executed by two dancers whose feet touched in mid-air, describing a kind of ogival arch. It is unnecessary to comment upon this style of dancing. In it the search for the sensational, the incredible, the impossible, reached its limit. The aim of the dancer was to escape as far as possible from the grace of natural bodily movement, to caricature the human form, to imitate the convulsions of the epileptic. It was an instance of one of those maladies which at times afflict the arts. But it is a disease which cannot recur, for the world, having once seen what the dance can achieve when it loses its sanity, is not likely to wish for a repetition of the spectacle. Montmartre remains—chastened, perhaps, if not repentant. It is possible that the tradition still lingers and that there are dancers who, to the confusion of the unsophisticated British or transatlantic stranger, can at need give a dim suggestion of what the école montmartroise was at the height, or perhaps rather at the depth, of its fame. But the dance is dead, and not only dead but damned.

England has always kept a circumspect eye upon the heights of Montmartre, and no dance that was danced upon that hill could long be hid. Needless to say, the Cancan in all its native freedom was never performed in this country—for there are performances which depend for their success, if not for their very existence, upon a certain indefinable but quite perceptible rapport between performer and spectator, and in England there was no atmosphere for this sympathy to ripen in. But in spite of this, England enjoyed for many years a very sensational imitation of the Montmartre school. The Skirt Dance and the Serpentine Dance, after they had lost the charm of novelty, began to pall. Tired of the monotony of their limited movements, the public was ready to welcome a dance with a wild gaiety and abandon which had all the attractiveness of contrast. The appetite for sensation grows by what it feeds on, and very soon a dancer who could not kick her legs higher than the head, who had not cultivated the “splits” and the “cart-wheel” to perfection, who did not, in fact, exhibit the art of dancing as a series of grotesque contortions, could not count upon holding the attention of an audience. The Cancan was not called by its original name after it had crossed the Channel, nor was it danced as a quadrille; but to all intents and purposes the famous dance which Lottie Collins executed after singing her “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” song—a dance which sent England and America hysterical with delight—was none other than the famous Cancan, only slightly modified in accordance with Anglo-Saxon traditions of modesty and decorum.

The anglicised version of the Cancan was closely associated with that popular song, the last lamentable echoes of which have only recently died away. The origins of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” have been discussed with an interest worthier of a more classical literature. The melody has been derived from an old German Volkslied; it has been asserted that it was heard in a Potsdam tea-garden in 1872 and in a Parisian café a hundred years ago, when it was played as the accompaniment to an Algerian danse du ventre; it is stated to have been whistled and sung for generations among the rice-fields of the Southern States by negroes whose ancestors had danced to it in the barbaric orgies of Central Africa. Whatever its origin, and the latter derivation is the most probable, it was Lottie Collins who first introduced the tune to European audiences. The words, of course, were entirely rewritten, but their barbaric originals could not have been more idiotic than those which were composed to suit the music-hall sense of humour. The dance which accompanied the song was, however, the great feature of the entertainment. Lottie Collins burst upon London just as a dull theatrical season was drawing to a close, and for several years she held the audiences at the Gaiety and Palace Theatre in the hollow of her hand. The rendering of the Cancan on an English stage was a notable event, but Lottie Collins had the invaluable instinct of knowing how far to go without ever once overstepping the border-line of propriety. In spite of the storms of protest which it raised in certain quarters, her dance was never even in its wildest moments very shocking. The extraordinary jerks of her body, her sudden and startling high kicks, her frantic pirouettes, were more astonishing than indecorous; while the spirit with which they were executed and the utter disregard of the sense of rhythm was a revelation to the English public, which was held spell-bound.

In America Lottie Collins met with a repetition of her London success. She began her tour with an unfortunate experience. Having to remain in quarantine owing to a case of cholera which had occurred on the voyage, in her exasperation she telegraphed to her manager the concise aspersion,—“Hang America.” This indiscretion did not predispose the American people, always sensitive to the appreciation of foreigners, in her favour, and the moment when she made her bow to a New York audience was not unnaturally a critical one. That her subsequent success in the States was as great as it had been in London seems to prove that there was something more attractive in her dance than those who know it only by the melody could have imagined possible. The American idiom lends itself to a description of her performance. “Lottie Collins,” so ran the account in the leading daily paper of Kansas City, “has the stage all to herself and she bounces and dances and races all over it in the most reckless and irresponsible way, precisely as if she was a happy child so full of health and spirits that she couldn’t keep still if she wanted to. Sometimes she simply runs headlong all the way round the stage, finishing the lap with perhaps a swift whirl or two, or a whisk and a kick. Sometimes she simply jumps or bounces, and sometimes she doubles up like a pen-knife with the suddenness of a spring lock to emphasise the ‘Boom.’ She is invariably in motion except when she stops to chant the gibberish that passes for verses, but the wonder is that she has breath enough to sing after the first cyclonic interlude.” Mr Clement Scott, the dramatic critic, writing of her in the Daily Telegraph, confirms the impression of her antics so succinctly conveyed by the Kansas City press. “Bang goes the drum and the quiet, simple-looking, nervous figure is changed into a bacchanalian fury. But wild and wilder as the refrain grows, half-maddened as the dancer seems to become, no one can reasonably detect one trace of vulgarity or immodesty in a single movement.”

Undoubtedly popular taste has undergone a radical change within the last generation. The enthusiasm which Lottie Collins aroused is much less intelligible to us now than the homage that in earlier days used to be rendered to Taglioni. Occasionally in the obscurer theatres of the provinces an agile young woman may still be seen throwing out her legs in all directions, performing the “splits” and imitating the rotation of a cart-wheel, but the sight leaves us wondrously cold. We find it difficult to understand how a former generation could have gone delirious with delight over such a display. Autres temps, autres mœurs. ...