Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

“To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which expresses the soul of these forms—this is the art of the dancer. It is from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities. Rodin has said: ‘To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature.’ Rodin is right; and in my art I have by no means copied, as has been supposed, the figures of Greek vases, friezes and paintings. From them I have learned to regard nature, and when certain of my movements recall the gestures that are seen in works of art, it is only because, like them, they are drawn from the grand natural source.

“My inspiration has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds, from the sympathies that exist between passion and the storm, between gentleness and the soft breeze, and the like, and I always endeavour to put into my movements a little of that divine continuity which gives to the whole of nature its beauty and its life.”

It must not be supposed that Isadora Duncan despised technique or attempted to dispense with it. It was the technique of the current modes of dancing that she found unsatisfactory. “I have closely studied the figured documents of all ages and of all the great masters,” she says, “but I have never seen in them any representations of human beings walking on the extremity of the toes or raising the leg higher than the head. These ugly and false positions in no way express that state of unconscious dionysiac delirium which is necessary to the dancer. Moreover movements, just like harmonies in music, are not invented; they are discovered.”

It is a mistake, which some exponents of the “natural” style of dancing have fallen into, to imagine that they can express the spirit that moves them by any haphazard agitation of the limbs. To dance “naturally” does not mean to dance impromptu, relying upon the inspiration of the moment. In art the simplest effects are usually those which have cost the greatest effort, and no effort is more severe than the attempt to imitate the inimitable model of nature. The dance demands as rigorous a technique as any other art. Without a technique it is inarticulate. Miss Duncan

Isadora Duncan

has undergone a training as elaborate as any prima ballerina. From her childhood upwards she has devoted twenty years to the study of the dance. She had to invent, or rather discover, her own technique. Taking for her models the poses of Greek art, she endeavoured to reconstruct from a single attitude the whole continuous flowing movement, of which the statuesque pose is of course but an arrested moment. She had to fill in the gaps, as it were, in the interrupted cinematographic film, to pass rhythmically from one gesture to the next. She found at first that her body failed to respond. It suffered from the unpliability, the general wrongness of movement, which is the outcome of modern conditions of life and the loss of tradition. She found that she had to begin with the elements of motion, to learn to walk, to run, to leap rhythmically before she could dance rhythmically. She started therefore to learn to govern her body, to recover a lost art of balance and flexibility, to make each slightest movement a harmonious expressive gesture. For she demands none but the finest gestures for the dance. Everything common and contemptible she would exclude by a severe test.

“Every movement that can be danced by the side of the sea without being in harmony with the rhythm of the waves, every movement that can be danced in the midst of a forest without being in harmony with the swaying of the foliage, every movement that can be danced, naked, in the broad sunlight of the open field, without being in harmony with the vibration and solitude of the landscape—all these movements are false movements in that they are discords in the harmony of the great natural lines. That is why the dancer must choose above all the movements which express the strength, the health, the grace, the nobility, the languor or the gravity of living things.”

The steps of the dance, therefore, have to be studied with a care which makes even the elaboration of the technique of the ballet appear simple. But the steps are not the end; they are only a means. The end at which in Miss Duncan’s view the dance aims is “to express the noblest and most profound sentiments of the human soul, those which come from Apollo, from Pan, from Bacchus and from Aphrodite. To see in it no more than a frivolous or agreeable diversion is to offer an insult to the dance.” She is in thorough accord with the Greek view that the dance reacts upon the moral mood. “The attitudes which we take have an influence upon our soul. A simple throwing back of the head, done passionately, causes us a sudden tremor of joy, of heroism or of desire. All gestures have a moral resonance, and thus can directly express every possible moral state.”