Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

The root of dancing is one with the root of all the arts, namely—ecstasy. Scorned as it has been by the sister arts of Music, Painting and Sculpture, it can boast a longer lineage than theirs, for the dance is more spontaneous than they. All the arts must needs be founded in emotion, but the moment of passion is usually long past before the labour of creation begins. The emotion is “recollected in tranquillity.” But the raw material, if one may call it so, of the dance is the human body, and all human emotion expresses itself most spontaneously in bodily gesture. With children and simple peoples who have never learnt that it is incorrect to display their emotions, feeling is immediately translated into action. For a child words are never enough to express the heart’s delight—as may be seen at any street corner when music is in the wind. The whole body becomes a lively instrument for joy to play upon. Joy for joy’s sake only, however, is not yet art. “A child dancing for its own delight,” says Ruskin, “a lamb leaping or a fawn at play, are happy and holy creatures; but they are not artists. An artist is a person who has submitted to a law which it was painful to obey, that he may bestow a delight which it is gracious to bestow.” It is only when the emotion becomes self-conscious and seeks to communicate itself, that it evokes the help of formal rhythm—and where there is rhythm there is the alpha, if not the omega, of art.

This deep ecstasy out of which the dance springs, as a fountain from a well, is not necessarily joy. Often it is the ecstasy of love—for the dance, as Lucian said, is as old as love, the oldest of the gods. It may be the ecstasy of worship or the ecstasy of grief. From the nature of the emotion out of which it springs the dance takes its character—voluptuous, solemn, bacchic, mournful, as the case may be. Whenever the passions of primitive peoples were deeply moved, they evolved a dance to express them. In the mystic ritual dance they found some expression for that divine unrest, when the winds in the great forests or the serenity of the multitudinous stars strangely stirred the heart to a sense of the nearness of the spiritual order; when the triumphing warriors returned after driving back the onslaught of a hostile tribe, the sudden sense of relief from the fear of extermination could not but find vent in the dance of victory; around the bier of the chief, in sorrow, fear, and uncertainty, they dance the dances of death; in joy when they stored up for another year the kindly fruits of the earth they danced the harvest and vintage dances; and always and everywhere was danced the eternal pantomime of love.

In a passage which is none the less illuminating if its truth is perhaps imaginative rather than historical, Mr Max Beerbohm aptly illustrates the spontaneity of the dance and its development out of the ecstasy of some happy moment. “Some Thessalian vintner, say, suddenly danced for sheer joy that the earth was so bounteous; and his fellow-vintners, sharing his joy, danced with him; and ere the breath was spent they remembered who it was that had given them such cause for merry-making, and they caught leaves from the vine and twined them in their hair, and from the fig-tree and the fir-tree they snatched branches, and waved them this way and that, as they danced, in honour of him who was lord of these trees and of this wondrous vine. Thereafter this dance of joy became a custom, ever to be observed at certain periods of the year. It took on, beneath its joyousness, a formal solemnity, it was danced slowly around an altar of stone whereon wood and salt were burning—burning with little flames that were pale in the sunlight. Formal hymns were chanted around this altar. And some youth, clad in leopard’s skin and wreathed with ivy, masqueraded as the god himself, and spoke words appropriate to that august character.”

It was doubtless owing to its close connection with religion that the dance in ancient times was invested with so great dignity. It was a ceremonial before it became an amusement. Thus it is in its sacred character that we meet with the earliest instances of it. It had its place in the solemn rites of the Hebrew and the Egyptian. The Egyptian dances were full of esoteric meaning. The mystical circle of dancers round the altar interpreted the revolutions of the celestial bodies, the music of the spheres. It is significant that the name given to the dancing-women was Awalim, the wise or learned ones. Their dancing appears to have been no less elaborately technical than it was symbolic. From the painted records that have come down to us, it would appear that they were not unfamiliar with many of the movements of the modern ballet. There is little doubt that the Egyptian spectator of three or four thousand years ago delighted in the same pirouette as may be seen on the stage of St Petersburg and Milan to-day.

If Egypt was the seed-ground of the arts, it was in Greece that they flowered. As we should naturally expect, it was there that the art of rhythmic gesture achieved its most perfect expression. Thoroughly to appreciate the curious poses of the ancient dances of India and Egypt it would be necessary to understand the exact spiritual meaning of which those attitudes and gestures were but the symbol. But the dances of Greece, by their supreme beauty of movement and their power of rendering all the gamut of human emotion, are of universal appeal. There the dance escaped from its tutelage to religion and was made free of the kingdom of art. It had its part in that imperishable achievement of Greece—the revelation of the full glory and beauty of the “human form divine.” In its turn it nourished the other arts. Greek sculpture drew no little of its inspiration from the dance, and its admirable gestures, thus caught in the fugitive moment and eternalised in stone, have enriched the world’s heritage of beauty for all time.

In the Greek view, the dance was properly accompanied by music and song—song being the speech of music and dance the gesture of song. The three formed together a single imitative art, the aim of which was to present a definite emotion or idea. The story is told of Sostratus refusing to dance the dance of “Liberty” before the conqueror of his native town. “It would not be fitting for me,” he said, “to dance the ‘liberty’ which my native town has lost.” The Greeks never regarded dancing as a mere frivolous entertainment. From its power of affecting the emotions, and with them the character, they attributed to it a grave importance. In constructing his ideal republic, Plato went so far as to advocate its regulation by the State. The action of the State, let it be observed, was not to be a mere prohibition of degrading performances; it was actively to foster and prescribe the best dances with a view to elevating and perfecting the character of the citizens. Nothing could be stranger to a modern mind than this attitude of the ancient world to the dance; yet if it be true—and none I think will care to deny it—that dancing determines the emotions and that the emotions of a people determine its character, what could be more reasonable?

It is difficult to realise now to what an extent the whole life of the ancient world was coloured by the dance. It occupied as great a part as music, literature and the drama occupy in the life of to-day—perhaps a greater, for whereas in Western Europe there are many who care for none of these things, in Egypt, in Greece and in Rome, the dance touched the life of all classes and at every point. No ceremony of importance was conducted without dancing. It had its place in the rites of religion, at weddings and funerals, at private feasts and at public triumphs, in military exercises and in the theatre. It gave the theme to sculpture and painting. It went hand in hand with music. Indeed when we think of the ancient world we almost perforce think of it dancing. In the dance is summed up all the grace and gaiety of that old pagan life which was once lived on the sunlit shores of the Mediterranean, and which we are now wistfully and painfully beginning to attempt to recapture.

It is not a little strange that the dance should have fallen from its high estate as the handmaid of religion and hierarch of beauty to be the doubtful amusement of the café and the music-hall. In some measure undoubtedly its decline was due to the growing licentiousness in which it became involved. Homer dignified it with the epithet “irreproachable,” but in Cicero’s time it had already become so degenerate that he could say, “No sane man dances unless he is mad.” Sallust was even more emphatic when he told a lady of his acquaintance that she danced with too much skill to be virtuous. The Catholic Church at first not only tolerated but actually incorporated the dance in Christian worship, and survivals of the ancient ritual dance exist in the churches of Spain to this day. But as the character of the dances became more equivocal they were condemned. Little by little the dance fell into disrepute.

But the moralist mistakes when he supposes that the dance stands in a different category from the other arts by reason of a special taint. Like all the other arts it reflects the morals of the time. Among peoples of simple faith and primitive virtue, the dance has always been marked by a certain strict and hieratic quality. It was so among the austere Romans of the early republic, and among the Christians of the first centuries. When manners decay, the dance becomes decadent also. It is not the dissoluteness of the dance that poisons the morals of the age; it is the corruption of the age that poisons the dance. The sensual character of so many eastern dances is the effect and not the cause of the sensuality of the race. If the dance suffers from any general relaxation of morality more swiftly and more disastrously than any of the other arts, it is because it expresses the emotions with such fidelity and emphasis. It is the most subtle and the most accurate index of the character of a people.

The dancing that is seen on the stage of to-day, however, is never reprehensible, and seldom even vulgar, and the fact that in former ages of looser living the dance became contaminated does not adequately explain the disesteem with which it appears, until recently, to have been regarded. The true reason seems to lie in the popular belief, not that dancing is less incorruptible, but that it is less serious than the other arts.