IT does not require a very minute observation to discover that peoples are distinguished not only by their speech, but by their habitual movements and attitudes. Every country has its special unspoken idiom of gesture, which sometimes differs in different parts of the same country as perceptibly as the spoken dialect. This characteristic gesture is the foundation of every national dance, which does but elaborate and adorn it.
The composers of the Russian ballets have achieved novel and interesting effects by using this racial attitude as the basis for the scheme of some of their dances. In Cléopâtre they have adopted the attitude of the ancient Egyptians, or rather those attitudes which are depicted on the pottery and frescoes of the old Egyptian civilisation. Whether these attitudes were ever really typical of the attitudes of the people is at least questionable. It is quite as likely that they were an artistic convention of the time, due to the naïve conceptions of the draughtsman. But there can be no doubt that ancient Egypt had a characteristic alphabet of gesture, as individual as that of ancient Greece, although probably it has been exaggerated in the designs on the figured monuments by the faultiness of the perspective. This circumstance, however, does not render it any the less serviceable as an element of design in the dance. In Scheherazade, again, Nijinsky’s dance is based upon the abrupt, angular, almost apish movements of the negro.
With Italians gesticulation so inevitably accompanies speech that it is not surprising that the ballet should have been originated and perfected, at all events so far as its pantomime is concerned, in Italy. Of course, as a people becomes more intellectual, and learns to express all the nuances of thought by means of language alone, it relies less upon the elucidation of gesture. Anglo-Saxons are naturally schooled in reserve and seek to avoid any betrayal of the emotions by physical expression. The national gesture nevertheless exists and finds its embodiment in the national dance, the Morris. America can scarcely be said to have any national dance, unless it be the cake walk, which is plainly stamped with all the ungainliness of negro movement. But American vaudeville artists—I am thinking of some who have danced this year in London—seem almost unconsciously to have seized upon the American gesture and realised it in their dances. Naturally they have distorted it; they have given it the immoderate energy of American life, the exaggeration of American wit, and the sensationalism of American advertisement. Who knows but that they will end by giving America its national dance!
The lines of bodily movement in the West are radically different from those of the East. The quality of action in the West is energy and abruptness; it tends to express itself in angles rather than in curves. The gesture of the East moves with the lethargy, the subtlety, interrupted by sudden bursts of violence, that are characteristic of the Eastern temper. Nothing could be less suitable to the tranquillity and torpor of the East than the swift and intricate dances of more bracing climes. It may be affirmed as a rough generalisation that Western dancing gives the greater importance to the feet, Eastern dancing to the body. In many of the most characteristic Oriental dances, the body revolves around its own axis, as it were, while the legs remain stationary. Equally with the motions of the body, the Eastern dance has made extraordinary use of the motions of the hands and arms. It has found an invaluable auxiliary in the extreme refinement of the Eastern woman’s hands, which always seem so infinitely more expressive than the passive oval mask of her face. For me the eternal, the essential gesture of the East is symbolised in the movement of a woman’s hand that I saw through the iron grating of a koubba on the edge of the Sahara—for where the Arab is, there is the East. The woman herself I did not see, for she was
RUTH ST DENIS
crouching upon the floor against the tomb. But her whole body could not have expressed her character more revealingly than her hand, with its fingers stained at the tips with henna to a bright orange colour and as astonishingly slender as those of a Madonna in a primitive Italian painting. I think I should scarcely be believed if I tried to tell how much there was of resignation, how much of a refined voluptuousness, in its delicate gesture.
Eastern dances, performed by really skilled Eastern dancers, have not yet been seen upon the European stage. Of course the Ouled-Nails and the hired almées of the Algerian cafés introduced the danse du ventre to Paris at the time of the first Exhibition. It would be easy to dismiss this dance with contempt if one had not seen it danced with a certain barbaric sincerity, far away from the atmosphere of cigarettes and liqueurs of the cafés of Biskra and Tunis. After all, a dance is very much like the Spanish inn of the olden days—you find in it principally what you bring to it. And so acute an observer as Lady Duff Gordon found in the danse du ventre an intensity that gave it a kind of dignity. “I could not call it voluptuous,” she says, “any more than Racine’s Phèdre; it is Venus ‘tout entière à sa proie attachée,’ and to me it seemed tragic. It is far more realistic than the fandango and far less coquettish, because the thing represented is au grand sérieux, not travestied, gazé, or played with.”
But the dancing of the East, or rather of India in particular, has found a very skilled translator in a dancer of American origin, Miss Ruth St Denis. I believe it is true that Miss St Denis has never actually been in India, but she has mixed freely with Indians; she has studied their art, their religions, their character, she has penetrated into the spirit of the people as far as it is possible for a Westerner to do so. She has, in fact, caught the gesture of the East. Her dancing has for the most part a religious and symbolic character—for it should be remembered that, besides the dances founded upon the passions, the East has evolved a whole range of dances illustrative of philosophical ideas. Buddhism has carried the symbolism of the body to an extraordinary degree of refinement. The locking and unfolding of the feet, the uplifting of the arms and the hands, even the very curves of the fingers, have all their esoteric meaning. The system of symbolism has so penetrated the actions of the dance that not infrequently the sequence and shades of the dancer’s movements are unintelligible to an uninstructed eye. Thus the slow dance movements which Hindus contemplate with delight for hours, though they may appear drearily monotonous to the European, are full of instruction to the initiated. The ritual of the dance is almost as intimately connected with Buddhism as the simpler ritual of the altar with Catholicism. The wealthier temples possess trained bands of dancers, a sort of vestal virgins, known as Devadassis, the slaves of the god. They have the happy and pious custom of dancing twice daily before the images of the gods, once in propitiation of their own sins, once in intercession for the sins of the world. It is the posturing of the Devadassi, rather than the dancing of the more voluptuous Bayadère, that Miss Ruth Denis has sought to reproduce.