Modern dancing and dancers

by J. E. Crawford Flitch

In her physical qualities, Miss St Denis is well fitted to represent the type of the East. While her beauty has much of the allure of sex, it has also that childish character which seems peculiar to the women of the East. Her figure is exquisitely slender and her arms are as supple, her hands as refined, as those of a Hindu. The way was prepared for her to a certain extent by the success which Miss Isadora Duncan had already achieved, and when she gave a series of fashionable matinées in New York in 1906, previous to her descent upon Europe, her recognition was immediate.

When she appeared at the Scala Theatre in London in 1908, Miss Ruth St Denis was accompanied by half-a-dozen natives, who supplied a note of human colour to the pictures of the street, the palace and the temple, which formed the background of her dances. In most of the scenes, the mystic atmosphere was assisted by the subdued light, the odour of incense and the native melodies embodied in the striking music of Herr Walter Meyrowitz. Her performances took the form of brief acts, illustrative of native life.

The Cobra Dance was, strictly speaking, not a dance at all, for it was performed in sitting, crouching or kneeling postures. The dancer appeared in the rôle of a snake-charmer, and throwing off

Ruth St. Denis

FROM A DESIGN BY PAUL REITH IN Jugend (MUNICH)

her mantle revealed her arms clasped over either shoulder, like two coiling snakes. On the first and fourth fingers of each hand two enormous emeralds gleamed like serpents’ eyes. The arms slowly unwound and with a curiously sinuous motion began to writhe about her body. They twined, coiled, fought and darted with lightning flashes in all directions, simulating the movements of the reptile with astonishing fidelity. It was a marvellous exercise in the flexibility of the arms.

The Dance of the Spirit of Incense was set in a scene representing the women’s quarter of an Indian house. The dancer entered bearing aloft a bowl of smoking incense. With solemn, hierophantic gestures she kindled the two censers that were placed on either side of the stage, and, as the smoke curled upwards, she danced gravely and slowly, all the motions of her body subtly responding to the rhythm of the wreathing smoke and flowing so imperceptibly one into another that they seemed less a sequence of separate movements than a single continuous thrill passing from the feet to the finger-tips.

But it was in the Nautch and the Temple Dances that Miss St Denis really established her claim to rank as a dancer of the first order. Clad in a dress of vivid green spangled with gold, her wrists and ankles encased in chattering silver bands, surrounded by the swirling curves of a gauze veil, the dancer passed from the first slow languorous movements into a vertiginous whirl of passionate delirium. Alluring in every gesture, for once she threw asceticism to the winds, and yet she succeeded in maintaining throughout that difficult distinction between the voluptuous and the lascivious. The mystic Dance of the Five Senses was a more artificial performance and only in one passage kindled into the passion of the Nautch. As the goddess Radha, she is dimly seen seated cross-legged behind the fretted doors of her shrine. The priests of the temple beat gongs before the idol and lay their offerings at her feet. Then the doors open, and Radha descends from her pedestal to suffer the temptation of the five senses. The fascination of each sense, suggested by a concrete object, is shown forth in the series of dances. Jewels represent the desire of the sight, of the hearing the music of bells, of the smell the scent of flowers, of the taste wine, and the sense of touch is fired by a kiss. Her dancing was inspired by that intensity of sensuous delight which is refined to its furthest limit probably only in the women of the East. She rightly chose to illustrate the delicacy of the perceptions not by abandon but by restraint. The dance of touch, in which every bend of the arms and of the body described the yearning for the unattainable, was more freely imaginative in treatment. And in the dance of taste there was one triumphant passage, when, having drained the wine-cup to the dregs, she burst into a dionysiac nautch, which raged ever more wildly until she fell prostrate under the maddening influence of the god of wine. Then by the expression of limbs and features showing that the gratification of the senses leads to remorse and despair, and that only in renunciation can the soul realise the attainment of peace, she returns to her shrine and the doors close upon the seated image, resigned and motionless. So she affirmed in choice and explicit gesture the creed of the Buddha.