Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

and thoroughness perhaps few dancers have equalled. For years she has spent four hours a day in front of her huge mirror practising her steps, usually under the careful supervision of her uncle. “I have given my life and myself to my dancing,” she says, and the words are true in a very special and literal sense. She has served her art with almost the rigour of asceticism. She avoids wine. She eats sparely. She shuns a supper-party. When her work is over her day is done, and she drives from the theatre home to bed. She has fulfilled to the letter Ruskin’s affirmation that an artist must submit to a law which it was painful to obey, in order that she may bestow a delight which it is gracious to bestow.

In proficiency in the strict, classical school of ballet-dancing, it is possible that Madame Genée has never been surpassed and perhaps not even equalled. Within these limits her work is faultless. Every detail is sedulously studied, and is executed with accuracy and ease. The position of the fingers, the lines of the arabesque, the resumption of the exact attitude at the end of no matter how many and how rapid pirouettes—everything is as exact as if it had been drawn by an artist with infinite leisure for correction, instead of executed in the heat of the moment without an instant’s pause between one movement and the next. Every step has its name; every gesture belongs to its code; there is one way and no other of executing them rightly, and that way is Madame Genée’s. But the dance is too rapid and too flowing to be dissected into its constituent parts. The connoisseur recognises them and knows that the apparent spontaneity is obtained only by the mastery of a science as strict as mathematics; the spectator uneducated in the dance remarks the general effect of beauty, and is instinctively aware that the performance has something of the qualities of a masterpiece of art. But this extreme physical sureness and dexterity is not without its dangers. The dancer is tempted to exhibit mere tours de force which a less proficient performer would be saved by her very incompetence from attempting, and the temptation is the greater through the knowledge that these are the accomplishments which call forth the most tempestuous applause from a public that cares less for the beautiful than for the marvellous. In a recent divertissement, A Dream of Butterflies and Roses, no movement, not even the magnificent circles made backwards with wide flying steps, excited the audience to such a pitch of enthusiasm as one particularly trying piece of gymnastic—a slow rising from the ground on one pointed toe. But Genée’s mastery of technique is so complete that the least hint of strain is eliminated and even this somewhat acrobatic feat was almost transformed into a delightful flow of grace. The ease with which she overcomes technical difficulties creates a delight of its own, cheating one’s fears, and compelling an admission of beauty where one had dreaded to see only athletic prowess.

To this technical perfection Genée adds certain spiritual qualities which are all her own. As I have said, the Dryad revealed a dramatic ability which had been perhaps overlooked in the admiration of her pure dancing. This capacity for pantomime would probably have been earlier appreciated if the ballets at the Empire had allowed it more scope. But the peculiar note of her spirit is an abounding gaiety, as clear and elemental as that of a child, affecting the heart like vital and exhilarating laughter. There is a kind of arch-merriment in her dancing which seems to flow out of the pure exultation of movement, at times almost threatening to break through the restraints of technique and convert the dance into a romp. But the elasticity of the dance is always great enough to meet the freest ebullience of spirits; there is, as it were, no leakage of vitality; every atom of force is spent in steps and movements that never lose their precision and exactitude. Genée’s dancing refutes those detractors who assert that the academic style of the ballet is a fatal limitation to the artist’s freedom of expression. She shows that, when it is brought to the perfection to which she has developed it, it is fluent and elastic enough to express the extremes of, at any rate, the more volatile emotions. The hunting dance in High Jinks carries the dance as far in the direction of high spirits, of exhilaration unmixed with passion, of sheer delight in the physical fact of life, as it can possibly go. The spirited little horsewoman in the black riding-habit, that clings closely to the lines of her gay and lithe

ADELINE GENÉE

Photograph: Dover Street Studios, Ltd.

figure, has an air at once of fragility and vigour; she is borne through the air on her dashing leaps, she curvets, she caracoles, the slender steely limbs make nothing of the weighty burden of the skirt and boots—and yet it is all done with such a whirl and wind of enthusiasm that the motive force appears to be not muscular activity but merely a fever of the blood. All the jollity, all the glorious high spirits, all the high-heartedness, all the intoxication of delight, in all the hunting mornings that ever were, are concentrated in that swaying, swirling, leaping, laughing figure.

There is something essentially of the North in Genée’s dancing, a freshness and energy like that of the north wind, a hint of the athlete in the vigorous clean-limbed movements, an absence of passion, a purity, shall we say a coldness? Her spirit seems to belong to the heights rather than to the depths. It is bright rather than subtle. It is full of high lights but lacking in half-tones.