When we finally open ourselves to any subject, we find intimations of it everywhere. I found presently that all the voices of the New Age had designated the magic of the dance. It seems almost dull to declare that I do not refer now to the dance as it is taught and used and exploited as a social accomplishment, but that in which the personality is subdued and quiescent, quite as absolutely as it is in all great moments of production. One must give oneself. Music carries the sensitive soul into its own mystic region. A rhythm within answers to the external rhythm—the two meet and mate—the fusion is bewildering beauty.
As in all creativeness, the first law is spontaneity.
The great dancers of the future will hear their own music—possibly give voice to it as they give their body to the rhythm. There shall be no exact interpretation of song or sonata—at least, not until absolute genius interprets the exact figure of each tone-set. This is impossible in a world of mutation. Accordingly, one who establishes a series of movements to accompany a certain harmony, misses the meaning of the divine improvisations which is the essential beauty of the New Age dances. One should dance as freely as one called upon to speak. And one will neither speak nor dance greatly by prearrangement or following any arbitrary form.
The very tone of the voice is different and deeper when one is caught in the spirit of spontaneity. The prime object of the new education, which includes dancing, is to set the soul free. Music is one of the master-lures to call forth the sleeping giant.
One night a stranger[11] came to Stonestudy. She said she was called by the way we were doing things, and that she hoped she had something to bring to us.... The next morning at daybreak, down on the shore, I saw stars and circles of young women and girls folding and bending together in exquisite tones of colour and song. Her gift was the new dancing. Over night she had captured the young people, bringing them a new joy in the world. For two or three months she remained with us and has since established classes east and west—life given to the message of beauty. With us her expression and magic has endured.
There is no way more swift to merge in the universal, than by the response to music through movement. Not dancing, which is a response to time in music more than to rhythm, but the actual blotting out of self, a spiritual exaltation which many religionists have sought and few attained.
The means is very simple; nothing strange or peculiar. It is the dropping of the human will so that the music may flow through. One does not move to the music then; one is moved by it. The objective mind ceases to operate and through the larger consciousness absolute Beauty streams. The response to the music may be totally different with several pupils, but where the dancer is really lost to the objective world, the movement is always true and satisfying to those who watch. This is easy for those who are close to Nature and God, but it is fraught with difficulties for those who are over-mental or who have been terribly repressed. In many ways the will is man's highest asset and it requires a supreme effort of the will itself to drop the objective consciousness.
There is a technique of the dance to be sure, but it is designed only to free the body so that it may be a purer channel for the music, and to facilitate the effacement of self. Physical strength, agility, beauty as mere beauty, are never sought, but only the revelation of eternal harmony.