PAVLOVA AND MORDKIN
Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd.
than in those passages which demand a more stormy energy. In this dance she represents with singular beauty the proud carriage of that remote bird, its swooning death and its sudden collapse into lifelessness. It displays her skill in the difficult act of falling; she sinks to earth without any suggestion of arrangement or preparedness, ceasing to dance as swiftly and silently as a flame may cease to burn, her limbs failing her, as though her body had actually resigned its spirit.
Her interpretation of Strauss’s Blue Danube is a perfect personification of the river-spirit. From beginning to end it sounds a clear note of joy and untrammelled life. Pavlova dances it in her freest style; the pirouette and the entrechat have no part in this simulation of the triumphing flood. All the phases of the river’s moods live in her dancing—its strong, pulsating race in mid-torrent, its bursts of sky-flung spray, its quiet dalliance in secret, wood-browned pools, its gentle play with the entangling weeds, its smooth descents over the breasting rocks ending in a laughing and ecstatic tumult.
What expression Pavlova can obtain even in the narrower scope of the traditional school may be seen in one of her dances to a Chopin valse. She appears as a young girl on the night of her first ball, in a simple white frock, somewhat longer than the usual ballet-dancer’s skirt. She is dancing the dreams of girlhood in the garden after the ball is ended, when suddenly the lover, to whom she has just lost her heart, appears on a balcony and throws her a rose. She gathers it to her breast and in her happy dance she lives over again those revealing moments when her heart suddenly blossomed into the life of love. Then looking up she blows a kiss to the balcony where her lover had stood. To her shy dismay she finds him still standing there, a witness to her confessed surrender. She is confused with a modest shame for what in her maiden innocence she fears must seem an unmaiden-like boldness. The surprised and delighted lover offers his proposal. After a moment of the most delicious embarrassment she fearfully nods her assent and skips away in a transport of excited joy. It is a delicate suggestion of the troubled and innocent emotions of first love, as suggestive in its rendering of that neutral and indefinite age that lies between girlhood and womanhood as a picture by Greuze.
But perhaps the most perfect of all Pavlova’s dances is the Papillons. It has been said that she “does not so much imitate the movement of a butterfly as the emotional quality of a butterfly-flight, the sense raised in our minds by watching it; and then it is not an ordinary butterfly, nor a plain lepidopteron, but a Grimm butterfly, a dream butterfly, a butterfly multiplied many times by itself, raised as it were to the Pavlova-th power.” With that sense of the elimination of weight which is characteristic of her dancing, Pavlova is able to suggest the grace of things flying, things swimming, things borne upon the breeze. The Papillons is the quintessence of the spirit of everything that dances in the wind, and is kissed by the sun, and has intrigues with the flowers, and lives its irresponsible life between the sunrise and sunset of a summer day. It appears to be danced almost wholly with the eyes and the finger-tips; the dancer is on the stage and off again all within the incredibly short space of thirty seconds. Yet she told me that, on account of its ceaseless vibrating motion, of all her dances it is the most exhausting.
But Pavlova’s dancing is not limited to the expression merely of thistledown lightness and inconsequential gaiety; it has a deeper reach, and at times is borne upon a flood of passion. L’Automne Bacchanale is a stormy and tumultuous dance, affecting the mind like that vision which Keats saw in the “marble brede of men and maidens” on a Grecian urn:
“What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”