The Dance: Its Place in Art and Life

by Troy Kinney; Margaret West Kinney

These “spectacles” were the vehicle that carried the mimetic ballet through the Dark Ages from Rome’s licentious theatre and banquet hall to the stately salon of the Medici. Under the name of “moralities” they survive to this day in convents, though clipped as to their choreographic wings. Everyman, played a few years ago by Ben Greet and his company, was a re-creation of some of the elements of the early morality, plus speech and minus dancing. Love, aspiration, reverence, envy, fear, remorse and various other elemental abstractions that inhabit the human soul were the source of most of the morality’s characters; the dramatic action consisted—usually if not always—in a simple treatment of the influences wrought by the varied forces on the destiny of a man. The man, no more and no less than the abstract qualities, was represented by an actor. Occurrences of man’s life, both earthly and subsequent, were equally available as dramatic material. Apostles, angels and even God were of frequent representation.

A start was made in a direction destined to lead to the development of scenery. Whereas the Greek drama established the setting by means of spoken words (and the Roman apparently made no exception to the same practice), the early morality specified the setting by means of words or crude symbols marked on objects, the back wall, and other available surfaces: “forest,” “front of house,” “Heaven,” “street,” or whatever was necessary. Elaboration by degrees brought these primitive suggestions up to the point of real scenery, with practical mechanical devices for sensational entrances.

One must infer that the semiconstant opposition of the Church to these representations was necessitated by occasional forgetfulness of their sacred character. The pagan gods persistently lingered among the dramatis personæ, undismayed by the fact that they were dead, and unshamed by the treatment their followers had accorded Christianity. Performers no less than authors were sometimes guilty of ribaldry ranging from the frivolous to the impious. “A canon playing entirely nude the rôle of Christ, and a clerk representing Saint Francis in a scene of seduction, undressed in the same manner, were not at all spectacles of which the originators of the genre had dreamed.”

Yet the good clearly outweighed the bad. And although repeatedly prohibited, no mention is found of dancing being severely penalised. Now at the altar and again at the feast it serves, in whatever capacity is required of it, until at length it comes into prominent connection with the strolling ballet.

For the morality play—or mystery, as it is otherwise known—becomes an elaborate affair, with casts and mechanical and scenic effects, on such a scale that it must collect more coppers than one town affords, in order to recover the initial expense of the production. On a scale sufficient to make an impression on its times was the spectacle designed to celebrate the canonisation of Carlo Borroméo, at Lisbon in 1610. In the words of Vuillier: “A ship, bearing a statue of St. Carlo, advanced toward Lisbon, as though to take possession of the soil of Portugal, and all the ships in the harbour went out to meet it. St. Anthony of Padua and St. Vincent, patrons of the town, received the newcomer, amid salvoes of artillery from forts and vessels. On his disembarkation, St. Carlo Borroméo was received by the clergy and carried in a procession in which figured four enormous chariots. The first represented Fame, the second the city of Milan, the third Portugal, and the fourth the Church. Each religious body and each brotherhood in the procession carried its patron saint upon a richly decorated litter.

“The statue of St. Carlo Borroméo was enriched with jewels of enormous value, and each saint was decorated with rich ornaments. It is estimated that the value of the jewelry that bedecked these images was not less than four millions of francs (£160,000).

“Between each chariot, bands of dancers enacted various scenes. In Portugal, at that period, processions and religious ceremonies would have been incomplete if they had not been accompanied by dancing in token of joy.

“In order to add brilliancy to these celebrations, tall gilded masts, decorated with crowns and many-coloured banners, were erected at the doors of the churches and along the route of the choreographic procession. These masts also served to show the points at which the procession should halt, for the dancers to perform the principal scenes of their ballet.”