Henley made his plea for “Gigues, Gavottes and Minuets,” but there are many other lovely, or lovelier, examples of old-world dance to old-world music, which scholarship has revived and good taste has been eagerly accepting wherever they were seen—Pavane, Chaconne, Coranto, Galliard, Bourrée, Rigaudon, Passepied, and Sarabande. These, and other ancient dances, were, as we know, the delight of the Courts of Queen Elizabeth, of Charles II, of Anne, of Louis-Quatorze—le Grand Monarque, of Louis-Seize and Marie Antoinette. Many have been revived and performed to the music of the harpsichord, violin, viola, viole-d’amour, and ’cello; and the curious thing—or, rather, interesting thing, for it really is not strange—is that both to scholars and to those unlearned in their history, to cultured townsman or woman, and to country lad and lass, to bored frequenters of the West End drawing-room, and to those who find only in their dreams relief from the sordidness of an East End environment, this old-world dance and music make an instant appeal.
I saw this put to the test once when, at a hall in the somewhat dingy neighbourhood of Bethnal Green, a performance of the “Ancient Music and Dances,” arranged by Miss Nellie Chaplin, was received by an audience of East End work-people with such whole-hearted enthusiasm that practically every item in a programme often performed in West End drawing-rooms and at Queen’s and Albert Halls, as well as at Liverpool and Manchester, Guildford, Oxford and elsewhere, was encored, and several were doubly and trebly so.
A Galliard of the seventeenth century, an Allemande by an English composer, Robert Johnson (1540-1626), Handel’s Oboe Concerto (1734), a Sarabande by Destouches (1672), “Lady Elizabeth Spencer’s Minuet” performed at Blenheim in 1788—all these and other historically interesting items were encored by the audience, not because of their historic interest, but simply because of their joyousness and charm; while a bourrée by Mouret (1742), and the fascinating Old English dance, “Once I loved a maiden fair” (one of a group including “Althea,” “Lord of Carnarvon’s Jig,” and Stanes’ Morris-dance) had to be given three times. This was all complimentary, of course, to the beautiful way in which the dances and music were performed; but it was an interesting revelation of the eternal appeal to humanity, whatsoever the degree of caste or wealth, of the really good thing in art, and certainly the centuries are bridged with ease by the charm and joyousness of these old-time dances to their appropriate music, seen and heard more recently and to such advantage amid congenial environment in “Shakespeare’s England” at Earl’s Court.
Veritably we seem to have seen every known form of dance and type of dancer in London during the past twenty years or so, and latterly we have had at the Royal Opera-House, and, since, at Drury Lane, such a festival of ballet as has not been seen in England since the ’forties of last century, for here we have seen a galaxy of dancers from the two great opera-houses of Russia, that of the Mariensky at Petrograd, and that of the great theatre in Moscow, where the traditional training for ballet has been kept up and infused with a new artistic spirit such as is hardly to be found in any other continental opera-house.
Early in last century Carlo Blasis brought the Milan school to perfection, and thence went teachers to Paris, Vienna, Dresden, Moscow, Petrograd, wherever they went carrying something of the artistic spirit and culture of their master, one of the most versatile maîtres de ballet there has ever been, for there seems to have been scarcely an art of which he did not know something, and of which he could not say something worth hearing.
But since those days probably nowhere quite as in Russia has the ballet moved with the times and been so imbued with the new artistic spirit which has been at work within the past generation.
Painter, musician, poet, dramatist, and maître de ballet, are called upon to produce the homogeneous and individual spectacle which we call the Russian ballet.
One has to recall but a few examples from the Russian répertoire to note with what serious artistic purpose the art of Ballet is studied by the representatives of the best school. Glazounov’s “Cleopatra,” a “mimodrame” in one act; “Les Sylphides,” a rêverie romantique, the music by Chopin; Schumann’s exquisitely whimsical “Le Carnaval,” made into a pantomime-ballet in one act; “Le Dieu Bleu,” by that curiously interesting and rêveur composer Reynaldo Hahn. These are among the productions which, ranging over classic, poetic and romantic subjects, would veritably have appealed to such artists of the Ballet as Rameau, Noverre, Gardel and Blasis, not to mention other maîtres of more recent times. And what dancers to interpret them! M. Nijinsky, perhaps the best male dancer of our time, so good that one’s usual objection to the male dancer melted into admiration: Mme. Karsavina, Mlles. Sophie Fedorova and Ludmilla Schollar were among the danseuses who had been seen in London previously, and were each in their degree remarkable not only as dancers but as brilliant mimes. There was not one among the extensive and interesting cast who was not of Russia’s best, the best that is that can come from the school where the traditional art of Ballet is understood not to be the result of a mere few lessons in “dancing,” but the result of a study also of all that is best in the traditions of art and music and literature, from all of which the art of Ballet draws its inspiration.
Yet again, one must pay tribute to the Russian artists on their masterly sense of stage effect, and for that supreme sense of what the ballet should be, namely, a harmony of the arts. One has but to contrast three such productions as “Les Sylphides,” “Cleopatra,” and Schumann’s “Carnaval,” to see a revelation of stage artistry which put to shame the conventionality which, save in rare instances—and in English ballet—had characterised the London stage so long.