“Don’t speak to me of subsidised theatres. There’s nothing more imbecile anywhere.”
He laid great stress on the words “subsidised” and “imbecile.”
M. Claretie asked me who this young man was. I had not heard exactly what he said. Nevertheless, as I knew something embarrassing had occurred, I tried to excuse him, alleging that he had been rehearsing all day, that half his musicians had deserted to take positions at the Opera and that they had left him only the understudies.
M. Claretie, whose good nature is proverbial, paid no attention to the incident. Several days later, indeed, on November 5, 1907, he wrote for the Temps a long article, which is more eulogistic than I deserve, but which I cite because it gives an impression of my work at a rehearsal.
“The other evening,” he wrote, “I had, as it were, a vision of a theatre of the future, something of the nature of a feministic theatre.
“Women are more and more taking men’s places. They are steadily supplanting the so-called stronger sex. The court-house swarms with women lawyers. The literature of imagination and observation will soon belong to women of letters. In spite of man’s declaration that there shall be no woman doctor for him the female physician continues to pass her examinations and brilliantly. Just watch and you will see woman growing in influence and power; and if, as in Gladstone’s phrase, the nineteenth century was the working-man’s century, the twentieth will be the women’s century.
“I have been at the Théâtre des Arts, Boulevard des Batignolles, at a private rehearsal, which Miss Loie Fuller invited me to attend. She is about to present there to-morrow a ‘mute drama’—we used to call it a pantomime—the Tragedie de Salome, by M. Robert d’Humières, who has rivalled Rudyard Kipling in translating it. Loie Fuller will show several new dances there: the dance of pearls, in which she entwines herself in strings of pearls taken from the coffin of Herodias; the snake dance, which she performs in the midst of a wild incantation; the dance of steel, the dance of silver, and the dance of fright, which causes her to flee, panic-stricken, from the sight of John’s decapitated head persistently following her and surveying her with martyred eyes.
THE DANCE OF FEAR FROM “SALOME”
“Loie Fuller has made studies in a special laboratory of all the effects of light that transform the stage, with the Dead Sea, seen from a height, and the terraces of Herod’s palace. She has succeeded, by means of various projections, in giving the actual appearance of the storm, a glimpse of the moonbeams cast upon the waves, of the horror of a sea of blood. Of Mount Nebo, where Moses, dying, hailed the promised land, and the hills of Moab which border the horizon, fade into each other where night envelops them. The light in a weird way changes the appearance of the picturesque country. Clouds traverse the sky. Waves break or become smooth as a surface of mother-of-pearl. The electric apparatus is so arranged that a signal effects magical changes.