Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

MAUD ALLAN

IN The Vision of Salomé

Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd.

craving the spiritual guidance of the man whose wraith is before her; but it remains silent! No word of comfort, not even a sign! Crazed by the rigid stillness, Salome, seeking an understanding, and knowing not how to obtain it, presses her warm, vibrating lips to the cold lifeless ones of the Baptist! In this instant the curtain of darkness that had enveloped her soul falls, the strange grandeur of a power higher than Salome has ever dreamed of beholding becomes visible to her, and her anguish becomes vibrant.

“She begs and prays for mercy of the stern head—alas, without response! Salome flees in despair, and though her pride, her princely rank, confront her, and she halts, it is but for a moment. The Revelation of Something far greater still breaks upon her, and stretching out her trembling arms turns her soul rejoicing towards Salvation. It is gone! Where, oh, where! A sudden wild grief overmasters her, and the fair young Princess, bereft of all her pride, her childish gaiety, and her womanly desire, falls, her hands grasping high above her for her lost redemption, a quivering huddled mass.”

It was a dance of a strange and haunting fascination, deriving no little of its disquieting effect from the weird Oriental strains of Strauss’s music. There were many who found themselves unaccountably drawn to it and were compelled to return to the tragic vision night after night. Yet as a presentment of tragic emotion, finer even than the “Vision of Salomé,” or the rendering of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” was the dance of “Ase’s Death” in Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite. It was a study of mournful poses, inspired by that grief which lies too deep and still to explode in tumultuous and exciting gesture. There is, however, in her ecstasies both of joy and grief just that lack of fire which makes intelligible, if it does not quite justify, the somewhat harsh words of Mr W. R. Titterton when he says of Miss Maud Allan that “she is the English Miss in art. She is an ineffectual angel beating in the limelight her luminous wings in vain. She has many pretty movements; she is light and dainty, she has an elfin prance, with bent knee and waving hands, but she has no temperament, and no presence; she is spectral; you think you can see through her. And above all, she is monotonous. She repeats and repeats and repeats. How she sickens me in the end, for example, with that, at first, so beautiful ripple of the hands.”

The truth may possibly be that that freedom from convention in which she glories is in reality a bondage. In her own words, “dancing is the spontaneous expression of the spiritual state.” The dance is “not an acquired but a spontaneous art, revealing the temperament of the dancer.” She is compelled to acknowledge the necessity for technique, but she fears that if it becomes excessive the art will no longer be able to stir the soul. In this theory lurks a certain element of danger. The dance, like all the arts, seeks the effect of spontaneity, of inevitableness, but this spontaneity is highly self-conscious. And it expresses itself most readily by technique—for technique, when it is really fluent, does not hinder but facilitates the expression of temperament. For us moderns the “spontaneous” gesture is the clumsy, inexpressive movement of everyday life; the dancer requires a conscious technique that comes more naturally to her than the unconscious technique of the street, in order to be truly spontaneous and expressive. It is perhaps her detestation of the stereotyped steps of the ballet that causes her to incline to the opposite extreme. But she herself would be the first to admit that her art has cost her pains no less than that of the ballet-dancer. It is one of her complaints that many suppose that she has learned to dance with no more than the exertion of a fluttering butterfly. It is not for Miss Allan herself, but for her imitators, that the theory that technique is relatively unimportant is so dangerous a pitfall. The conventions of classical or “natural” dancing are not yet so fixed as those of the ballet. Where the path is less clearly marked out there is more danger of going astray. Would-be dancers of the “natural” school, imagining that nothing is so easy as to dance “naturally,” forget that they have to unlearn the movements they are accustomed to before they can produce anything worthy of the name of art.

If Isadora Duncan is a poet, Maud Allan is before all things a musician. In the musical qualities of her art she has no rival. Apart from her instinct for music, she has profited by a musical training such as probably no other dancer has been equipped with. Her steps are to the eye the exact equivalent of the notes which reach the ear. One of the most felicitous of her accomplishments is her ability to pass with the music from the major to the minor key, or vice versa. When a phrase occurs first in one key and then in the other, it is repeated in her dancing with just that modification of aspect and accent which expresses the change of mood. Some of the movements in Grieg’s first Peer Gynt suite gave her admirable scope for this beautiful art of transposition. The faithfulness with which her movements follow the moods of the composer is probably only fully realised by those who are musicians as well as connoisseurs of the dance. Her translation of music has not seldom that rare quality of translations of being finer than the original, and there are not a few who, when they hear again, unaccompanied, the music which her dancing has ennobled, will be conscious of a sense of incompleteness and loss.