The Dance: Its Place in Art and Life

by Troy Kinney; Margaret West Kinney

Of the notable personalities that the early rays of the eighteenth century illuminated, the aforementioned Auguste Vestris was the interesting son of a more interesting father. The latter was a genius of the very first water, with a conceit so incredibly exaggerated that it is almost lovable. “This century,” he was accustomed to observe, “has produced but three great men—myself, Voltaire, and Frederick the Great.” He sometimes signed himself “le Diou de la Danse”; himself a Florentine, the relation of French spelling to pronunciation was contrary to his ideas. The phrase as he put it had a special merit, and as “le Diou de la Danse” he was known through his long life. A lady, having stepped on his foot, expressed a hope that she had not hurt him. “Le Diou” depreciated the hurt to himself, but informed the lady that she had put Paris into a two-weeks’ mourning. Of his son’s leaps he said that if Auguste did not remain in the air forever, it was because he did not wish to humiliate his comrades.

The foundation of the Opera was another of the impulses to act favourably, if indirectly, upon the interests of dancing. Its modest beginning had been made a few years after that of the ballet academy. The two arts at once combined to produce a new variety of musical spectacle, namely, opera. Great music came to the fore in response to the added encouragement—but digressions must be repressed.

Contemporary with Camargo and Sallé was a dreamer of dreams too great to be realized in his own time, but whose ideas take place among the lasting good influences in art. Garrick called him “the Shakespeare of the Dance”: his name was Noverre.

To the post of ballet-master at the Opera he brought the experience of years in similar service in Stuttgart, Vienna and St. Petersburg. His work he regarded with the broad vision of cultivated understanding of painting, music, story, acting and dancing, and the functions of each. His genius was, above all else, constructive; his ideal was to bring the arts into a harmonious union, to which each should contribute its utmost, while all should be informed with and dominated by a single æsthetic purpose.

The obstacle always blocking his path was not incompetence of aides and artists, not lack of money, nor any of the bêtes noires to which more recent idealists are accustomed. His enemy was the inert, impalpable and almost invincible force of custom, paradoxically persistent despite the public’s demand for new things. It was custom that the composer of a ballet should always arrange for the introduction of the specialties of the several principals, irrespective of motives. Custom obliged him to arrange entrances in the inverse order of the artists’ relative ranks—he of least rank “going on” first, the star being the last to appear. Noverre broke up this usage, and characters thereafter entered at times consistent with plot-development. Plots had been crippled by accepted beliefs that certain dance sequences were unalterable; a Gavotte, for instance, had to be followed by a Tambourin and a Musette; the sequence had not been questioned. Noverre saw the possibilities of dancing as an instrument of expression; he insisted that steps and enchainements should be composed to intensify the motive of the passage. Scenery, he held, should contribute in the same way to the mood of the act it decorates. Pretty it had been, and executed by capable painters; but Noverre found its composition lacking in consideration of proper relationship to the other elements of the production. With himself he associated Boucher and one or two other decorators of lesser name; under his comprehension of the scene’s dramatic intent, settings were designed that reasserted in line, form and colour the argument of the scene’s plot, music and dance. In this department he was less successful than in others. Boucher made beautiful sketches, some of which are extant. But one has only to consider opera in his own day to realise that any influence Noverre exercised toward the unification of scenery with music and plot, was not strong enough to last. Stories taken from legend, set among surroundings as realistic as skill can paint them; tragic scenes among architecture and foliage coloured in the key of care-free frivolity—to enumerate the familiar discrepancies is unnecessary. Tradition specifies a bright first-act “set” for Carmen, and grey for the prison interior in Faust. But the profound correlation of colour and line with the explicit mood of the piece has remained for the Russian, Léon Bakst. In the recent volcanic renaissance of dancing effected by his fellow-countrymen, M. Bakst and his ideas have been a force second only to the marvellous work of the dancers themselves. His scenery strikes the note of the drama, attunes the spectator with its mood, at the rise of the curtain. His knowledge of pictorial composition he has extended to the designing of costumes; his broad artist’s intelligence he has applied to the composition and direction of ballets! It is his happy rôle to realise Noverre’s dream.

In music Noverre worked with Gluck, in certain productions at least; and happily. “Instead of writing the steps on prescribed airs,” in a free translation of his own words, “as is done with couplets of familiar tunes, I composed—if I may so express myself—the dialogue of my ballet and had the music made for each phrase and each idea. It was just so that I dictated to Gluck the characteristic air of the ballet of the savages in Iphigenia in Tauris; the steps, the gestures, the expressions of the different personages that I designed for him gave to the celebrated composer the character of the composition of that beautiful bit of music.”

The abolition of the mask was among Noverre’s desires; its fortuitous accomplishment at a later time already has been described. In his ideals for costume reform in general he was only partly successful. What he strove for seems to have been costuming in something of the sense of its present-day interpretation by the Russians; garments wholly in character with the beings represented, in regard to race and period, yet conceding enough in line and colour to enable them to be used as part of the material of abstract interpretation. At the beginning of his administration of the Opera he found each performer dressed, for the most part, according to individual choice: either the drawing-room costume of the period, or the same with shortened skirt, à la Camargo. To this was added the mask, an enormous wig (unrelated to the character) and some such symbol as a leopard skin, a wreath of flowers, or more likely a property such as a bow and quiver of arrows, or a pair of bellows. In the order mentioned, such articles represented a bacchante, Flora, Cupid, and Zephyrus. Excepting the superadded marks of identification, artists provided their own wardrobe. The lack of consistent supervision and its natural consequence is exemplified in an anecdote of a member of the corps de ballet in Le Carnaval et la Folie: in the performance she exhibited a series of gowns of Adrienne Lecouvreur, which she had thriftily picked up at a sale of the recently deceased tragedienne’s effects.

In the ballet of The Horatii, of Noverre’s own composition, “Camilla wore a huge hooped petticoat, her hair piled up three feet high with flowers and ribbons. Her brothers wore long-skirt coats, set out from their hips by padding.” And so forth.

It is to be noted that Roman and Greek mythology lived and flourished, but no longer excluded other lore from the composer’s use. A list of Noverre’s ballets d’action includes The Death of Ajax, The Judgment of Paris, Orpheus’ Descent into Hell, Rinaldo and Armida, The Caprices of Galatea, The Toilette of Venus and the Roses of Love, The Jealousies of the Seraglio, The Death of Agamemnon, The Clemency of Titus, Cupid the Pirate and The Embarkation for Cythera. His work of permanent value, still read by composers and ballet-masters, is his book Letters on the Imitative Arts. For his light composition, Les Petits Riens, the music was by Mozart.

Notwithstanding his failure to accomplish all he hoped in the several departments of his organisation, and in spite of his rather pessimistic opinions of early eighteenth-century conditions affecting the ballet, the dance was entering its golden age. Pantomime—largely owing to the enrichment he had given it out of the fruits of his study of Garrick’s methods—had exponents who could touch the heart. Writings began to show intelligent and explicit criticism, and that of a nature to prove that choreographic execution had reached a high point. The added scope afforded by new acquisitions of material in the steps allowed artists to go far in development of individuality. Camargo charmed by perfection of technique; “she danced to dance, not to stir emotion.” Her special steps are enumerated: besides the entrechat, she shone in jetés battus and a frictionless entrechat coupé. About her work there was a healthy public controversy, a vigourous minority protesting against idolisation of one who they asserted had virtuosity only. And the protests show analytical understanding of the dance.