floor, advances to a place before the guest and near him, and honours him with a slave’s salutation. Then arising she proceeds to her silent greeting.
“You are implanted in your house,” says a movement [see photographs]. “Here is food, here may you sleep well. When you go forth, go you East, West, North, South [indicating quarter-circles by pointing the toe], yet you are here. May Allah’s blessings descend upon you. May the breezes blow upon you, may the rain refresh you, may abundance be showered upon you; yet may you remember that here you are in your house, and that here is your slave.”
That is the lifeless skeleton of the story, without grace, or the animation of movement, or the embellishment of expression. To try to force words into an equivalent of the semi-ritualistic splendour of the dance would be attempting to build a Moorish palace of dry grains of sand.
In Occidental entertainment, when a performer has gained the sanctuary of the platform, he is practically immune from interruption until his “number” is finished—unless exception be made of “amateur night” in vaudeville houses, where offenders are forcibly removed with a hook, or suddenly enveloped in darkness. With that probably unique exception, however, the audience confronted by an indifferent performer can only summon patience. The Orient offers no such security, to the dancer at least. At the first sign of failure to interest, a signal, perhaps no more noticeable than the raise of an eyelid, commands the dancer to cease. Not later, but instantly.
To interrupt a dance of movement without regard to its argument would be worse than interrupting a story. It would not only undo the preceding work; it would be very likely to arrest the artist in a transitional position, in itself weak. At all events, such an interruption would painfully mar an entertainment programme. But the Arabian dance is not a dance of movement; it is a dance of pictures, to which movement is wholly subordinate. Each bar of the music accompanies a picture complete in itself. Within the measure of each bar the dancer has time for the movements leading from one picture to the next, and to hold the picture for the instant necessary to give emphasis. At whatever moment she may be stopped, therefore, she is within less than a second of a pose so balanced and sculptural that it appears as a natural termination of the dance. The Oriental’s general indifference to the forces of accumulation and climax are consistent with such a capricious ending. In his dance, each phrase is complete in itself; it may be likened to one of those serial stories in our magazines, in which each instalment of the story is self-sufficient.
To the Occidental unused to Oriental art, the absence of crescendo and climax, and the substituted iteration carried on endlessly, is uninteresting. Nevertheless, a few days of life among Oriental conditions suffice to throw many a scoffer into attunement with the Oriental art idea. Which is to soothe, not to stimulate. Moorish ornament is an indefinitely repeated series of marvellously designed units, each complete in itself, yet inextricably interwoven with its neighbours. In music the beats continue unchanging through bar after bar, phrase after phrase. The rhythmic repetition of the tile-designs on the wall, the decorative repetition of the beats of music, produce a spell of dreamy visioning comparable only to the effect of some potent but harmless narcotic.