The Dance: Its Place in Art and Life

by Troy Kinney; Margaret West Kinney

Castil-Blaze writes of her: “She added to distinction and fire of execution a bewitching gaiety that was all her own. Her figure was very favourable to her talent: hands, feet, limbs, stature, all were perfect. But her face, though expressive, was not remarkably beautiful. And, as in the case of the famous harlequin, Dominique, her gaiety was a gaiety of the stage only. In private life she was sadness itself.”

In a technical sense she may be regarded as the first modern. Her work comprised all that constituted the ballet up to her time; to the resources that came to her as an artistic heritage she began a process of addition that was to be carried on by successors. She is credited with the invention of the entrechat, for instance; and here many readers will find themselves confronted by the need of some explanation of ballet technique as a means of intelligent discussion of the dancing of modern times. Before that chapter, however, it is not amiss to glance over the old dances from which the ballet, up to the foundation of the Academy in 1661, derived most of its steps.

The Gavotte, the Minuet, the Pavane, the Saraband, the Tordion, the Bourrée, the Passecaille, the Passepied, the Chaconne, the Volte, the Allemande, the Gaillarde, and the Courante—these were the dances whose measures were trod by courtiers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among those who have been moved to study these old dances during the past few years to the end of reconstructing them, no one is more fortunately equipped for the task than the only resident of America who has applied himself seriously to the subject, Mr. John Murray Anderson. He is at once a dancer, an educated man, and for years a devoted student of the social aspect of western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A period of months that he recently spent in the choreographic libraries of Europe, and in joint study with others similarly engaged, has resulted in the opportunity to see in America a fine and true representation of the old court steps. With Miss Margaret Crawford, Mr. Anderson posed for the accompanying photographs of the Gavotte, the Minuet, the Bourrée, and the Tordion. The groupings were selected with view to indicating the character of each dance. Collectively they give a good idea of the school of formality in which the French ballet was conceived, and from which it received its determining influences.

From the beginnings of time, people who give entertainments have followed a practice of employing performers of dances characteristic of various peoples. With appropriate costume, the danses caracteristiques give a synopsis, or essence, of the picturesque aspect of the people the dancer represents. Sixteenth-century nobility availed itself of the entertainment value of these folk-dances, as Athens did in its golden days and as London and Newport do to-day. In such manner did French society gather its material for many of the dances that eventually became identified with the ballroom.

The Gavotte is of such origin. A few generations of languid cultivation refined the life out of it, though it was at first a comparatively active dance. After dropping nearly into disuse it was revived and popularised by Marie Antoinette, for whose rendering of it Gluck composed music. After the Revolution, with its paralysing influence, the Gavotte was once again revived—and revised—by Gardel, premier danseur of the Opera, in a composition based on music by Grétry. But this composition was not of a kind for the execution of any but trained dancers of the stage, Gardel having made it a metier for the exploitation of his own capabilities. Among new elaborations the simple little jumping steps and the easy arabesque that distinguished the Gavotte of earlier days were lost.

The Tordion is another dance of lively origin. Sometimes it was made a vehicle for the grotesque, such as black-face comedy—let no one be surprised that the “coon comedian” of to-day is an ancient institution. It was stepped briskly, even in the stately environment of court. The position of the foot with the heel on the floor and the toe up was not adopted by the ballet, but is found in folk or “character” dances in all parts of Europe.

The Allemande also was a dance of movement; so was the Volte. In the former the man turns his partner by her raised hand; in the costume of the time, the whirl is very effective. The Volte is supposed to be the immediate ancestor of the Waltz.

The Saraband came into France from Spain, where it was tremendously popular as la Zarabanda. It dates from the twelfth century, and was praised by Cervantes. Its character justifies the belief that it comes from Moorish origins. It is a solo dance making noble use of the arms, and is executed with a plastic relaxation of the body. A distinctly Oriental mannerism is its quick shift of the foot, just as it is placed on the floor, from the customary position of toeing out to a position of toeing in. The foot-work, moreover, has little more than slow glides. Its exotic qualities, nevertheless, are subordinate to its Occidental courtliness; like all the other dances of polite society, it conformed to the etiquette of its time and place, notwithstanding improprieties of which it had been guilty in earlier centuries.

Marguerite de Valois was fond of the Bourrée because, according to tradition, she had an extraordinary natural endowment in the shape of feet and ankles. And the skipping step (related to the modern polka-step)