One could hardly close a reference to the popular Palace—a reference necessarily brief, as must be any concerning the various “vaudeville” houses in a review covering so wide a field—without a passing word of grateful praise to that bevy of bright young dancers, the “Palace Girls.” As people of catholic enough taste to enjoy all dancing that is good in itself—from the vigorous cellar-flap of the street urchin to the aerial pas of a Pavlova—we may agree that, in a sense, the Palace has been all the more attractive for the “Palace Girls.” Somehow the modern comedic spirit appears to express itself best in short skirts, shapely legs and a jolly smile; and in their insouciante charm, their neatness, agility, precision and enfantine gaiety, the “Palace Girls” always seemed to focalise the requirements of “vaudeville,” and symbolise the attractions of music-hall modernity.
Then, at the London Hippodrome, in many a Christmas entertainment, ingeniously arranged and gorgeously staged, half pantomime, half ballet, we have seen regular feasts of dancing and always with enjoyment. But apart from the spectacular productions for which the Hippodrome early became famous, many a delightful solo dancer and dance-scena have been viewed there. To have seen those exquisitely dainty artists, the Wiesenthal Sisters, is to have ineffaceable memories of a stage-art that seems strangely enough to link up the classic simplicity of ancient Greece with the Watteauesque artifice of the eighteenth century, and yet again the clear-seeing artistry, the supreme and joyous colour-sense of latter day decorative art. The tone and hue of their chosen background, the simple yet daring colour-scheme of their dress, the thoughtful, almost dreamy, grace of their every pose and movement, the purely picture-like effect of their whole performance, summed up the modern spirit in art that is striving—perhaps as yet half-consciously—for a revolt from old methods and stereotyped traditions and for something simpler, clearer, more direct and, be it said, more beautiful and vital than we have yet had; the art, in fact, of the men to come rather than the men who have been, albeit it has drawn inspiration from the eternal past. The Wiesenthal Sisters were not mere “performers”; they were poems.
Elsewhere, at various houses, what other dancers have we seen of individual distinction? Long remembered must be the sensation caused by Miss Loie Fuller on her first appearance in London some years ago, as the introducer of a curious form of dance in which the stage effects she achieved were the paramount attraction. And what effects they were—kaleidoscopic, magic, wonderful! Just a woman, with a brain and shapely form, a mass of filmy draperies floated here and there, on which were shed the splendour of changing coloured lights, so that she seemed now some wondrous butterfly, now like a mass of cloud suffused with the gold of dawn, now like a fountain of living flame! Yes, Loie Fuller should have been an artist! Should have? Is an artist, who has not painted pictures but has lived them.
Then there was Miss Ruth St. Denis at the Scala—a vision of all the poetry and the mystery of the East. Ruth St. Denis in an Indian market-place representing a snake-dance, making cobras of her flexible arms and hands! Ruth St. Denis as a Buddhist acolyte in the jungle! Ruth St. Denis in a “Dance of the Senses,” so significantly poetic and full of strange allure. Always the glamour of the East, but without its menace and without its vice; the East exalted and austere. Moreau himself might have envied her those dreams of form and colour she made manifest, and all who saw her surely must have realised that Ruth St. Denis danced her lovely pictures as an artist born.
Yet another artist of marked individuality and intellectual distinction, Miss Isadora Duncan, was really the first to appear in London who showed any marked ability to break away from the traditional schools of ballet and step-dancing, and, casting back to the days of ancient Greece, began deliberately to use posture and movement as a means of expressing poetic ideas. I first saw her at her London début, when she appeared in a performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one of a series of Shakespearian revivals which Mr. F. R. Benson was giving—on February 22nd, 1900—at the old Lyceum.
She had but lately arrived from America, and was fired with an enthusiasm for the graceful dance of classic days, an enthusiasm which found ample expression in her dance as a wood-nymph in a Shakespearian production which I still remember as one of the most beautiful I have seen. Shortly after Miss Duncan gave a special matinée at the old St. George’s Hall entitled, “The Happier Age of Gold,” at which idylls of Theocritus, poems by Swinburne and other poets of classic inspiration, were recited to music and were either accompanied or followed by an appropriate dance designed and performed by Miss Duncan, who also set herself the task of interpreting well-known musical morceaux by means of a dance.
One of the items on her programme was Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song,” which received a thoroughly graceful and sympathetic interpretation. Miss Duncan has, of course, appeared in London frequently since then, and all dance-lovers will remember the extraordinary charm of the series of matinées which she gave at the Duke of York’s Theatre at which she introduced a number of child pupils. There has never been anything meretricious or pretentious about the work of Miss Isadora Duncan. It has always been marked by a sense of deep-rooted culture, classic dignity and poetic charm, and to her, certainly, so far as London is concerned, belongs the credit of having first introduced a form of dancing which has only too often since been parodied under the term of “classic dancing”; and even as she was the first, so, in my humble judgment, she is the best and truest exponent of a school which is justified by the beauty of its results, and which is having, and is likely yet to have, far-reaching influence.
Dover St. Studios
Miss Isadora Duncan