Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd.

described: “He places a number of pure, fresh colours on the stage. The colours are first placed in order of their relationship to each other, and thereafter arranged according to a complete gradation of tints. Thus he selects, say, six colours—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. From these he evolves six rows of colours, starting with each colour at full pitch, and gradating it till he reaches the lowest, subtlest, and most Whistler-like key. Then he sets all these reds and yellows and blues and greens revolving. The effect is indescribable. The whole scene begins to pulsate. The walls and the floor clothe themselves with designs of perfectly designed rhythmical lines. Masses move in all directions according to a law of ordered disorder. The air becomes dense with a quivering sheen of colour so violently contrasted, yet so harmonious.”

But the distinguishing characteristic of Cléopâtre is the subordination of the dancing to the décor. In spite of the intensity of the frenzy of madly whirling limbs, the spectator is never allowed to forget the grim stone witnesses of the human tumult. With something malevolent in the gaze of their obliquely set eyes, the erect, abiding figures glance down upon the momentary riot. The men of stone are mightier than the men of flesh. Suddenly, when passion is storming through the veins, we are reminded of the triviality and transience of everything human. Here again is that ironic note which in so many of the Russian ballets forms a menacing undertone to their music.

A hush falls upon the dancers. The night of love is over and Cleopatra is about to take toll of her lover. With an incredibly cruel gesture she passes, or rather insinuates, the cup brimmed with poisons. The youth drinks. Cleopatra, with greedy, curious eyes, watches him stagger and writhe in his death-agony. Then this newest sensation of excitement fails her, her unutterable languor repossesses her, and, leaning upon her bending slaves, she passes slowly beneath the towering portal, along the terrace by the river, and her retinue dumbly follow her.

Then the artist speaks his last unerring word. The priest covers the prostrate body with a black pall. The voided forecourt resumes its immensity of space. A warm flush clothes the broad surfaces of the columns; brightness lies on the river; and the single stain of black sets the seal of tragedy upon the empty scene.

Scheherazade is an illuminated page torn from the book of “The Thousand and One Nights.” The music, the scenery, the dances, the costumes, the appointments, all the circumstances of the ballet are designed to create a heavy perfumed atmosphere of Eastern voluptuousness. The severity and simplicity of the Egyptian temple is exchanged for the semi-barbaric sumptuousness of the harem of an Arabian palace. A massive curtained canopy of an impure green stained with purple hangs in billowy folds over the scene; massy silvern lamps depend from a ceiling splendid with arabesques and floral designs; a latticed window gives upon a garden of tainted verdure; the floor is inlaid with blood-coloured porphyry. The sensuous lines of M. Bakst’s décor are echoed in the throbbing waves of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. Here again is the complete sympathy between musician and decorator, which fuses these ballets into an organic whole. In spite of the wealth of the accessories, there is not an irrelevant line or tone; there is economy and constraint even in the splendour, so that the spectator receives an impression of singleness and unity like that of Greek drama.

At the very commencement the keynote is given in the dance of three odalisques, in which languor intertwines with the energy of desire. As the ballet proceeds the gust of passion blows more strongly, and the riot begins after the departure of the two sultans, when the Grand Eunuch unlocks first a bronze door, through which enter negroes clothed in copper-coloured costumes, and then a silver door, which gives entry to another band of negroes attired in silver. Zobeide, the favourite faithless wife of the sultan Schahriar, still remains without her consort. She crouches half fearfully against a curtain, which at last is pulled aside and her lover, a gorgeous negro in a golden dress, leaps upon her with one tremendous panther-like bound. Undoubtedly the climax of the ballet is reached in the ecstatic dances of Nijinsky as the slate-coloured negro. He has learnt a whole new grammar of grotesque, savage gestures. Part monkey, part tiger, part human, he fawns, he caresses, he grimaces, he passes from delirium to devotion, from awe to lust, his body elemental fire, motion, passion. At times his swiftness renders him momentarily almost invisible; at times he becomes a living boomerang, and after a marvellous circuit in space returns unerringly to his point of departure; one moment he is an arrow shot through the air, the next a crouching, servile beast worshipping the feet of his mistress. And in the mad final orgy he is the vortex of the swirling throng, the happy, leaping heart which shoots its ecstasy to the outermost limits of the coiling maze of lovers.

With a sound of dismay the music signals the return of the betrayed sultans. The harem becomes a slaughter-house. A flashing scimitar cuts down the golden negro. Zobeide drives the dagger into her breast and falls grasping the feet of her outraged lord.

A discerning critic has pointed out that perhaps the terrifying suggestiveness of Scheherazade lies not so much in the catastrophe of the plot as in the dreadful significance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. “Passages that may have meant no more, as pure music, than the secrecy of the East and the plaintive mysteriousness of women (like that often-repeated passage on the first violin) get a new colour of tragic passion, of yearning in the shadow of death, from their allotment in the dramatic scheme. There is the sound of fate and murder, mingled with the saddest ironical comedy, in the insistent blast of the hunting horns. The swift huddling of deceitful wives, the tripping and scurrying, the wheedling of the old eunuch, the ravenous mien of the negroes, the magnificent stride and gesture of the fruit-bearing attendants, the complicated frenzy of the dance, the drama of fear and despair in Karsavina’s proud rendering, leave a solemn impression beyond anything in those other fantastic ballets. How much depends upon the music it is hard to gauge—much more than one is disposed to admit at first; for the mind pouring stagewards through the eyes, receives the musical impressions half unconsciously, as a direct emotional influence, scarcely registered in the sensuous ear.”