Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

If only Joachim had seen her art in its maturity, he would perhaps have been content to allow her dance his beloved Beethoven!

In any account of the classical dance it is scarcely possible to forbear mention of Mlle Magdeleine, although it is difficult to know exactly where to place her. For the characteristic of her dancing is that it purports to be unconscious. Some eight or nine years ago Mlle Magdeleine came for hypnotic treatment to Professor Magnin of the Paris School of Magnetism. M. Magnin accidentally discovered that while in a state of trance she was susceptible to the influence of music in a quite extraordinary degree, and that although she had learnt nothing of the art of dancing, she accompanied the music that was played to her in her trance with motions of the utmost beauty and significance. She was strictly examined by a number of eminent scientists, who certified that to the best of their belief her dancing was performed in a genuine state of unconscious, or rather subconscious, activity. She interpreted with strange suggestiveness the music that the foremost musicians of the day played to her, and the painters and sculptors who saw her, including Rodin, were astounded at the strength and beauty of her poses. Naturally the main interest of her performance rests upon its genuineness, and it is easier to believe that it was given under true hypnotic conditions than that the best scientific judgment of the day was deceived.

Mlle Magdeleine interpreted music ranging in character as widely as Handel’s “Largo,” a valse of Chopin’s, and “The Marseillaise.” Her rendering of the latter was the very embodiment of human passion and blood-lust. Her power of dramatic expression is indeed terrifying. In her gestures there is at times something tremendous and heroic; at other times they are distinctly faulty and fall into the conventional and the commonplace. It is said that her trance tends to become mixed with the recollections of her waking consciousness, and that when the two states ultimately coincide she will lose her distinctive quality, her absolute rightness of gesture. In any case her dancing is a unique phenomenon; she cannot found a school or perpetuate a method. But she points the way for the art of that great tragic dancer of whom the dance is expectant—an art which was only partially realised in the dancing of Miss Maud Allan. Of the three Ladies of Sorrow of whom De Quincey speaks it was perhaps possible for the dancer of the “Vision of Salomé” to represent our Lady of Tears, “who goes abroad upon the winds when she hears the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs,” or even of Our Lady of Sighs, “whose eyes are filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten deliriums”; but it was reserved for the Magdeleine to portray that third and most terrible sister, Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness, the defier of God, the mother of lunacies and the suggestress of suicides, who “moves with incalculable motions, bounding and with tiger’s leaps,” who “wears the fierce light of a blazing misery that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide.” The dances of delight and gaiety come almost instinctively to those of a happy temperament; but the dances of grief, of fear, of madness, of despair, these are they which put the dancer to the severest test, which strip her of the acquired graces of the schools, and leave her dependent only on the quality of her own soul.

MAUD ALLAN

IN CHOPIN’S FUNERAL MARCH

Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd.

Of the uninspired imitators who have followed in the steps of the great dancers of the classical school, there is happily no need to speak at length. Mme Knipper-Rabeneck of the Artistic Theatre of Moscow trained a group of dancers, who performed in London last year. Their interpretation of the music which they accompanied with their dancing was not very subtle, but if they failed to catch the finest shades of Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, they nevertheless gave a pleasing exhibition of youthful liveliness. The sisters Wiesenthal have added to the classical method a “pretty fluttering, tottering marionette manner of their own.” And Lady Constance Stuart Richardson was the first of the aristocratic amateurs who, when any new style of dancing becomes the vogue, are always ready to rush in where professionals sometimes fear to tread.

Indeed there are signs that classical dancing may be overtaken by a fate not unlike that which befell the Skirt Dance—an event which would indeed be a calamity, and not, as in the earlier mode, a happy release. Whatever may be said in dispraise of the school of the ballet—and it has its detractors not a few—it has at least the advantage of possessing a technique, the terrors of which are sufficient to protect it against the incursion of that mob of gentlewomen who dance with ease, or rather who would dance with ease were it not for the necessary pains without which that ease cannot be acquired. “Natural” dancing, by its very name, is inviting to those who are averse to hard work. The theory that a dancer can ignore with impunity the restrictions of technique, that she is bound to please if only she is natural and happy, and allows herself to follow the momentary inspiration of the music, and dances with the same gleeful spontaneity as a child dancing to a barrel-organ, is a doctrine as seductive as it is fatal. Already we have seen upon the stage performers who, in the name of Greek art, race and romp rather than dance. We are threatened with performances in which naïve young creatures in tenuous classic drapery amuse themselves by capering on bare feet, gathering and scattering make-believe roses, splashing in imaginary rivers, undulating snaky arms, shooting arrows, playing ball, butterfly catching. The dance cannot return to nature, in the sense which Isadora Duncan intended, by returning to this rather kindergarten Arcadia. The classical dance has its hidden law, which is perhaps more difficult than that of the ballet because it is more secret. If the dancer despises technique and relies only on her natural endowment, she must at least expect that the least flaw of beauty, grace or intelligence will be exposed in painful nakedness to the general gaze.