It is to be hoped that the Dalcroze system of training dancers will be employed as the elementary step in all the dancing schools, for only then we may hope to see the rise of a new art of dancing. Without learning the alphabet thoroughly or without knowing the most elementary rules of a science nothing could be obtained by a pupil in his later studies. Here is the elementary system in all its primitive simplicity and truth. All we need is to adapt it to the higher schools of choreography. What the Dalcroze schooling of to-day gives is insufficient for a stage art. But it is by far a more thorough elementary training than any ballet, naturalistic or individual school can give, as it makes a student feel the music in his body and soul before he expresses it in his plastic forms. Then again, there is a strict system, a method of gradual development of those essentials which lie at the bottom of every art dance.
In spite of the many shortcomings the Jacques-Dalcroze school can be considered as the first move towards a new stage art. It means the beginning of a new school of dancing altogether. However, it needs another reformer to begin where Dalcroze ended. Can we expect this of Fokine, Volkhonsky or some one else? Dance in its highest sense is symbolic. The symbols that it expresses should not be others than those of music. We know only that they should form images of the symmetric and rhythmic elements, but their exact nature remains either for an individual artist or a future school to determine.
CHAPTER XIX
PLASTOMIMIC CHOREOGRAPHY
The defects of the new Russian and other modern schools; the new ideals; Prince Volkhonsky’s theories—Lada and choreographic symbolism—The question of appropriate music.
I
We have witnessed the various phases and changes which the art of dancing has undergone during the past centuries. The ancient Egyptians danced the movements of astral bodies, the Greeks danced the hymns of their mythology, the Romans their war songs, the Middle Ages danced the aristocratic etiquette of gilded ball-rooms, the French Ballet danced to stereotyped tunes with marionette-like manners, the Russian Ballet danced to dramatic scenarios that had musical accompaniment, the various nations danced to their simple tunes, the Duncanites to the mood-creating elements of the music, the Jacques-Dalcrozists to the rhythm of a composition only. It is inconceivable that none of the reformers, none of the new schools, danced the music itself. Those among the partisans of ‘natural’ or ‘classic’ dancing who claim to interpret the music have given us thus far supposed imitations of the Greek, Oriental or fantastic styles of some kind, based upon hazy rhythmic mood-producing forms of a composition. We have seen only fragmentary passages here and there, single numbers of the celebrated dancers, which expressed the phonetic designs of the music in true plastic lines. Pavlova has certainly succeeded in expressing all the emotional fury of Glazounoff’s L’Autômne Bacchanale, the grace of Drigo’s Papillons, and Saint-Saëns’ ‘The Swan.’ We must give all due credit to Karsavina, for her dancing of Stravinsky’s L’Oiseau de Feu, and half a dozen others of her repertoire depict truly the very soul of the music. The child pupils of Miss Duncan dance all the ethereal grace of Schubert’s Moments Musicals. In the same way we find in one or several dances of Mordkin, Nijinsky and Volinin, of Lopokova, Fokina and Kyasht that they have succeeded in dancing the music. We are pretty safe to say that each of the celebrated dancers of history has probably been able to translate into visible ‘plasticism’ only a few of the phonetic forms of one or another composition of his repertoire. And this is what we may term ‘dancing the music.’
We have attended innumerable dance performances, have seen many new and old ballets, in Russia and abroad, have seen the new and ultra-modern dancers, yet we have so far seen but a microscopic fragment of what we here call ‘dancing the music.’ Certainly the greatest part of the repertoire of all the celebrated dancers has been the dancing of something else than the music. All the Pavlova ballets that have been given in America, all the elaborate ballets of the Russian classic school, all the ballets of the Diaghileff-Fokine group, are and remain dances to preconceived plots, dances to a style or a mood, but rarely dances of the music. We should like to have any of the celebrated dancers show us where there is expression of the music in all the spectacular pirouettes of Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky and Fokina, in their dramatic acting to a musical composition, even in the most modern ballets of Stravinsky. The dancing that they perform during the whole ballet is pantomimic acting to a certain plot, arranged to music. We are not by any means biased in making the statement, but make it with deliberation.
Dancers of various schools and ages have failed to see the point. Though Prince Volkhonsky is preaching exclusively the Jacques-Dalcroze rhythmic gymnastics as the basis of a new school of dance and therefore sees nothing more in a dance than the rhythmic expression, yet he has described aptly the defects of the Russian ballets, old and new, of the Duncanites and other modern schools of dancing. ‘Their main defect is that they develop independently of the music,’ he writes; ‘they are a design by themselves—complicated, interesting, very often pleasing to the eye, yet independent of the music. And we have already seen when we spoke of the old codas that the most unpretentious figure, even when banal, becomes inspiring when it coincides with the musical movement, and, on the contrary, the most interesting picturesque figure loses meaning when it develops in discord with music. Look at some dance, definite and exact, which has crystallized itself within well-established limits; you may look at it even without music, but try to watch a pantomime without music. In the first place, it will be a design without color, quite an acceptable form; in the second, it will be a body without skeleton—something unacceptable.
‘The main fault of the leaders of the modern ballet is that they put the centre of gravity of the ballet in the plot, in the event, in the story: what in painting is called literature. Whereas the subject of the ballet is not in the plot, the subject is in the music. Any picture which is not dictated by music, any independent movement, is synonymous with abandonment of the subject, the essence; it is in the end an interruption of art, an interruption caused by a rupture between the two equivalent elements of the visuo-audible art—sound and movement. This rupture with music is all the more felt the more participants there are in the picture, and the more markedly it tends towards “realism.” Only look at them when they represent scenes of disorder; and by and by we lose the impression of “art”; we see real, not represented, disorder; and finally we are turned to the dramatic point of view, and we are called upon to admire the “acting crowd.” And if you are musical, if you live in the movement of sound, this independent visible movement cannot but appear as a sort of unasked-for interference of some intruder. The acting crowd is not admissible where a rhythmically moving crowd is required. Acting leads the artist out of music and conducts him into the plot; and the subject of ballet, I repeat, is not in the plot, it is in the music; the plot is but the pretext.