IN Sylvia
Photograph: Bassano, Ltd.
seems strangely handicapped by its speechlessness. It appears to be groping for the libretto. It does not tell a story so much as suggest that it has a story to tell, which it would, if it could, impart to the spectator. Probably because they never seek to go outside the narrow circle of conventionalised gestures, which the English ballet has received as a sacred tradition from the Italian, the performers have the air of attempting to communicate with one another in the deaf and dumb language of a mute, or rather of one who wilfully deprives himself of the use of his tongue. The feeling that they arouse in the spectator is one almost of impatience, as with the folly of a man who uses a finger alphabet when he might just as well talk rationally.
In speaking of the English ballet, Mr Max Beerbohm has gaily admitted his inability to master the meaning of formalised gesture: “When a ballerina lays the palms of her hands against her left cheek, and then snatching them away, regards them with an air of mild astonishment, and then swaying slightly backwards, touches her forehead with her finger-tips, and then suddenly extends both arms above her head, I ought of course to be privy to her inmost meaning. I ought to have a thorough grasp of her exact state of mind. Friends have often explained to me, with careful demonstrations, the significance of the various gestures that are used in the ballet—and these gestures are not very many—and I have more than once committed them to memory, hoping that though I could never be illuded, I might at least be not bemused. But, after all this trouble, the next ballet that I have seen has teased and puzzled me as unkindly as ever. Is it that gestures were given to the ballerina to conceal her thoughts? Or is it merely that the quickness of the hand deceives the eye?”
One of the criteria of the ballet is the quality of its silence. In the perfect ballet the silence is never apprehended as a negation or a deficiency, any more than it is in a painting or a statue. The interpolation of words would indeed be felt to be an impertinence. Where the rhythm is entirely satisfying, the mind is content. Not the least of the merits of the Russian ballet is this quality of completeness in its silence. There are some exceptions: at times the action of Le Pavillon d’Armide stumbles and seems to cry for speech; but in Le Spectre de la Rose would not a single spoken word break the spell? The gestures of the dancers are never drawn from that limited stock of conventions which Mr Beerbohm tried in vain to memorise, which are in fact a kind of stock-in-trade, and can be borne in mind and applied at will like the commonplaces of the newspaper leader-writers; they are fluid and variable and flow naturally out of the emotion. They are in fact gestures, and not, as they usually are in the English ballet, gesticulations.
But there is good reason to believe that the English ballet is on the eve of a renaissance. The success of the Russians must have taught the managers that a gorgeous spectacle is not really necessary for the delight of the public,—in the Russian repertory probably the simplest ballets were the most appreciated. Already in the Dance Dream the Alhambra has produced a ballet which, if the theme was insipid, at any rate had the crowning virtue of breadth and simplicity of treatment. A sense of space was created; the tumult of action was varied by passages of sobriety; an effect of beauty was produced, larger and serener than any that has been seen in the English ballet during recent years. The principals of course were Russians—Mademoiselle Balashova succeeded Mademoiselle Geltzer as première danseuse—but the performance of the English dancers showed that under proper handling they are capable of better things than the pantomime displays to which they have been used to be restricted. The English ballet still awaits the coming of the great English dancer—it is too early yet to know whether Miss Phyllis Bedells will be she—but now that public interest is at last wide awake the primary condition of the creation of a native school of ballet is satisfied.
But there is one dancer of genius, whom, if the English stage has not produced, it at any rate monopolises. It has become difficult to think of Madame Adeline Genée as belonging to any other country than England, nevertheless the conscientious annalist must record, however unwillingly, the fact that she was born at Aarhus, in Denmark. If she was not born dancing, she danced almost from her cradle. At the age of eight she began that
ALEXANDRA BALASHOVA