Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

CHAPTER VIII
THE REVIVAL OF CLASSICAL DANCING[1]

WHEN an art grows infirm, there always comes a time when the practitioners hold council over the failing body and prescribe the remedy. And the remedy is always the same—they recommend a return to Nature. Art must go back to its nursing mother, nourish itself again upon the elemental milk from which it drew its earliest life, and be made whole.

Towards the close of the last century, the dance was sick with a fever, sick unto death. The mild and genial palliatives of Mr John Tiller were unavailing. In vain he taught his pupils to smile, to shun the movements of delirium, to simulate a childish glee, to be cheerful even though the heavens should fall. The result too often showed that a dancer might smile and smile and be a failure. Her naturalness was not really Nature. Her passion for honeysuckle and the mountains was as little sincere as the morning blush upon her cheek. The dance could not be tricked back to health by such artless deceptions. It demanded the more radical cure of a genuine return to nature.

The goal was clear, but the way was not plain to be seen. For where was nature to be found? All dancing is merely a refinement upon unconscious bodily gesture. It is the poetic rendering of the prose of ordinary human movement. But the modern world has lost the old graceful motions natural to man in a less artificial state. The characteristic of natural movement is undulation. Waters, winds, trees, all living forms, obey a sovereign law of rhythm. Nature moves in curves and gradations rather than by leaps and bounds. And man in his happiest circumstances—when he lives close to nature, when his occupations are genial and not arduous, when the processes of his labour are even and uncomplicated, when his body is freely exercised and is not forced to conform itself to a special and restricted task—moves with the regular rhythm, the freedom, the equipoise, of nature itself. In that pleasant tract of life, midway between the savage and the civilised state, the occupations of man seem to have developed equally his vigour and his grace. The ancient world had the instinct to know how far labour might be saved without the labourer being sacrificed to the machine. The pause and ictus of the scythe, the even swing of the oar, the circular sweep of the sling, the balance of the seat upon the unbitted and barebacked horse—such were the movements that formed a breed of men capable of all the heights and depths of human grace. Civilisation—in the canting sense of the word—means specialisation of employment, and such specialisation in its turn too often means the deformation of the body. In the modern civilised world the body is usually exercised either too little or too continuously in a single occupation. The dependence upon easy means of locomotion, the resort to labour-saving appliances, the endless dull circulation through the rigid streets, the long periods of inaction interrupted by sudden spells of haste, have quenched the old buoyant and even rhythms. Human motion nowadays tends to be not flowing but angular, jerky, abrupt, disjointed, full of gestures not flowing imperceptibly one into another, but broken off midway. A return to nature means a turning away from the precedents of art to the incidents of contemporary life. The difficulty of applying this precept to the dance lay in the fact that there was no nature to return to, or rather that nature itself had become corrupt and sophisticated.

In this predicament what was to be done? Happily when nature fails us we can still have recourse to a counsellor of almost equal authority and wisdom—the art of the antique world. And whereas for some of the modern arts—for painting and music, for example—classical art is but a taciturn guide, for the dance it is full of instruction. Their interests are one and the same—the body and bodily movement. Greek sculpture has caught innumerable moments of freely flowing action, at a time when action was probably most pure, removed equally far from the rudeness of the savage and the inexpressiveness of the modern. All its salient gestures of sport and war and of the emotional states are as clear to us as if we had been the contemporaries of Pericles and Pheidias. The Greek frieze has been described as a kind of incomplete cinematographic film of the Greek dance. And the so-called Tanagra figures represent a whole alphabet of the silent plastic speech of everyday life.

To recall the dance to nature by the way of Greek art was the work of an American woman, perhaps the greatest personality who has ever devoted herself to developing the art of the dance, Isadora Duncan. Her interests ranged over a wide field of activities. There was a time when she wished to initiate a reform of human life in its least details of costume, of hygiene, of morals. But gradually she came to concentrate her interest upon the dance. For her the dance is not merely the art which permits the spirit to express itself in movement; it is the base of a whole conception of life, a life flexible, harmonious, natural. In the development of the dance she found herself confronted by the dilemma which has just been alluded to. On the one hand was the limited technique of the ballet, on the other the unnatural contortions of the eccentric school. To return to the unconscious gesture of the people—that is to say, the crude, stereotyped gestures of the street—offered no way of escape. She found the solution in a return to the natural gesture of human life as represented in Greek art.

In order to get at her point of view it is best to let her speak in her own words—although, as she would say, one speaks better about the dance in dancing than in commentaries and explanations.