proved to be Mademoiselle P., the once famous dancer and daughter of another famous dancer, and these were her friends from the Corps de Ballet who came to take tea with her; they were merely talking ‘shop,’ and incidentally illustrating their ideas by showing each other various steps. Monsieur K., the ballet-master, composes ballets as he walks, and is watched by suspicious policemen swaying and waving his arms, while he goes absent-mindedly along the streets. When the Russian ballet was in Vienna, the guests in a certain hotel were roused more than once in the middle of the night by a heavy bumping and clatter from the room above. ‘It is all right,’ one of the dancers explained to a nervous stranger, ‘it is evidently K. composing a ballet.’ An idea had occurred to him in bed; and as Strauss, the waltz-maker, in those circumstances used to jump out to note a tune on his tablets, so Monsieur K. had to jump out and dance it. Undistracted by other things, a ballet-master goes about the world gathering all the scattered beautiful gestures, the nice correlations of innumerable details (and how the tilt of the chin or the pathos of a smile just crowns the perfection of an attitude of Pavlova’s or Karsavina’s!), and keeps them ready to issue, in organic order, from his mind at the inspiration of the appropriate musical phrase.”
It is to be feared that the English ballet-dancer does not take herself sufficiently seriously. It may even be that she is a little ashamed of herself. One has the uneasy feeling that she regards dancing as merely a stepping-stone to higher things—to musical comedy for instance! It is her profession, not her art. Not until English dancers begin to realise the significance of the dance as art and to create that choregraphic atmosphere which at present appears to exist only in Russia, shall we have a true renaissance of the Ballet in England.
BEATRICE COLLIER AND FRED FARREN
IN La Danse des Apaches
Photographs: Ellis & Walery