The Art of Ballet

by Mark Edward Perugini

A numerous crowd, around, the lovely dance

Surveyed, delighted; while an honoured Bard

Sang, as he struck the lyre, and to the strain

Two tumblers, in the midst, were whirling round.”

The “two tumblers” is an interesting detail, but it does not necessarily refer to the sort of acrobatic “tumbling” we are familiar with to-day. There have always been two phases of the Dance which can best be understood by noting the distinction marked by the use of two words in French—at least by their use among the masters and writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—namely, danser and sauter. The former means to dance, “terre-à-terre,” that is, always with the feet, or one foot at least, on or close to the ground; sauter, means invariably to leap into the air, or even to perform steps while both feet are in the air.

We usually speak of “a somersault,” a “double somersault,” and so forth. The word is a corruption from the old French soubresault, from the Latin supra, over, and saltus, leap.

Early historians of the Dance frequently speak of “saltation,” without any reference to the “somersault” as we know it, but to what we should call simply dancing.

The Homeric picture must have been repeated innumerable times since it was first limned, whenever and wherever there has been a gathering of men and maids on a village green, dancing in a circle, with a couple of high-leaping lads in the centre inciting all to quicken the rhythm of the whirling dance. Many an Elizabethan village must have realised such a scene; and for all the artifice of the stage, with its paint and footlights, does it not hold something of the antique tradition in the picture often seen, of a circle of dancing girls enclosing two wildly turning “stars”? Is it impossibly un-Hellenic to presume that the “Two tumblers, in the midst, were whirling round” in pirouettes? At least it may be considered—a presumption!

Far later in Hellenic days we have a gracious picture of the Dance in Theocritus’ eighteenth Idyll, “The Bridal of Helen,” which reads delightfully in Calverley’s translation: