Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

Anna Pavlova is not merely a great executive, but a creative artist. She is more than a dancer, she is a lyric poet. One feels that she might equally well have chosen any other of the media of art for the expression of her emotion, but she has chosen her body—or perhaps rather her body has chosen her. This beautiful instrument she has refined to the most delicate sensibility and instructed in a perfect precision. As a piece of mechanism—if indeed mechanism be not too harsh a term for what in grace is wholly flower-like—it has been rendered as supple, just and exquisitely responsive as infinite pains could make it. It is perfectly equipped with swiftness, strength, delicacy. Only in the very greatest dancers does the body become the utter slave of the spirit, serving it with a scrupulous and joyful fidelity. But in Pavlova’s dancing we are no longer aware of the conscious and painful obedience of the body to the dictates of a governing mind. It is as though the spirit itself had left its central citadel and, by some unwonted alchemy becoming dissolved in the blood and fibres of her being, had penetrated to the extremities of the limbs. Soul from body is no longer distinguishable, and which is servant to the other none can tell.

It goes without saying that her long and careful apprenticeship in the art of dancing has given Madame Pavlova perfect

Anna Pavlova

FROM A PAINTING BY J. LAVERY

proficiency in that technique of the ballet which is variously known as traditional, academic, or Italian. But although all dancing that is not grounded upon this technique is apt to become to a certain extent wavering and nerveless, it seems certain that this technique alone does not suffice for a dancer who dances with soul as well as body. After she had passed through her years of probation, Pavlova’s individuality naturally began to assert itself, and she demanded a wider scope for the full expression of her emotions. This liberty she found in those gestures and poses, more naturally human than those of the conventional ballet, which had been discovered, or rather rediscovered, by Isadora Duncan, for they are native to the world of Greek art. The characteristic of her dancing, therefore, is the combination of the older traditional method with the freedom that is demanded for the expression of emotional ideas. Other dancers have sought to find this freedom by casting aside, or rather by never troubling to learn, the traditional technique. Pavlova knows well that the freedom of art is not to be attained by a wilful lawlessness, but only by a glad and strict submission to law. Thus she has carried the dance of the ballet a stage further along the lines of its natural evolution, not despising the heritage of the past, but enlarging it to meet the deeper needs of the present.

In particular, she has shown that true dancing demands the service of every member and particle of the body. No one is now so simple as to suppose that dancing is the business only, or even principally, of the legs and feet. Carlo Blasis, a hundred years ago, said that the position, the opposition, all the movements and carriage of the arms, are perhaps the most difficult parts of the dance; and Noverre still earlier remarked, “Peu d’artistes sont distingués par un beau style de bras.” But the more subtly emotional the dance becomes, the more finely must be studied the play of light and shade over the whole surface of the body. Pavlova’s dancing is as expressive in its minutest details as in its general lines. Her dance lives in her finger-tips. The character-play of her hands is astonishing. They take their part in the interpretation of the music; they are, as it were, illuminating appendices to the story of love and joy, of rapture and fear, that her body relates. Her face dances too. She has a command of vivid facial expression such as few actresses can equal. Never for an instant does she betray the least preoccupation with her steps. Her face is like a mirror, reflecting the passing lights and shadows of the music and the mood. The head dances, the eyes dance, the brow, the neck, the lips dance—the dance, in a word, penetrates her whole being, as the breeze penetrates the body of a tree to the least shuddering of the tiniest leaf.

Indeed in Pavlova’s art is realised the full meaning of the dance, which is none other than the complete possession of the body by the spirit. I understood this best when I saw her, not in motion on the stage, but at rest in her home. Reclining in a chair, she sketched with a few inimitable gestures the Danse des Papillons. It was scarcely more than a turn of the head, a light in the eyes, a fluttering of the fingers, and yet the mood was evoked as surely as a painter in a few nervous strokes might capture an emotion and fix it on his canvas. In this almost intangible expression the dance seemed to become, if you will suffer the paradox, independent even of motion, rather a design living in the brain, an intellectual thing which could communicate itself by a hint, a breath, by an energy of the spirit rather than of the body.

The idea of the dance—the choregraphic design—is sometimes suggested to her by music, by fragments from the works of Delibes, Chopin, Tchaikovsky or Saint-Saëns; sometimes it is hinted in a chance sight or incident of everyday life; sometimes it springs into being independently of any external impulse, as spontaneously as a melody is conceived in the musician’s or an image in the poet’s mind. Le Cygne, which she dances to the music of Saint-Saëns, owed its origin to a walk with M. Fokine in a park in St Petersburg. Seeing some swans floating upon the water, M. Fokine remarked to Madame Pavlova that it would be easy for her with her supple and slender throat to take the graceful motion of the bird as the theme of one of her dances. Her figure has something of the easy dignity of the swan, and in the gliding motions, to the accompaniment of the cool music of Saint-Saëns, she is perhaps more at ease