Geoffrey Arundel Whitworth

“ For dancing is one of those arts which least repay too dry an exposition. In this it is like music, and most unlike the monumental arts of sculpture, painting, literature, which, in virtue of their very persistence, have the less claim to be recorded. For we can read the book, or see the picture for ourselves, and go to criticism for information or sound judgment rather than for a verbal réchauffée of an accessible and authentic charm. But in an art which perishes, the mere impression of an observer, however inadequate, may be of value. ”

“ Dancing with him is an expression of mood, not of mere grace or rhythm. Even in the purely graceful ballets like Les Sylphides or Le Pavilion d'Armide, he shows us a mind at work creating gracefulness rather than a mere body being graceful. It is difficult enough to analyse, but one feels that all this splendid and apparently inspired resourcefulness must be bound up, somehow, with Nijinsky's own personal attitude towards life itself.
A man, of course, may be an excellent dancer, and at the same time only very moderate in his interest in or understanding of life as a whole. ”

“ Such is the course of training which in recent years has produced more than one dancing star of the first magnitude—a training whose principles are bound up with a tradition of art unequalled for strength and self-consistency. Never, indeed, has genius been more happy in its education than Nijinsky's. Never has it come upon the scene at a moment more opportune for its fruition. Only the very briefest résumé of the history of the ballet in Russia will be enough to make this clear. ”

“ Dancing, such people say, is of the essence of freedom. To restrain is to sterilise and to reduce the living body of man to nothing better than a mechanism of springs and steel. Well, there is this amount of truth in such a criticism: that Nijinsky's method does not actually seem so nicely adapted to express certain moods of natural abandonment as, say, Mordkin expressed in that famous Bacchanale he danced with Anna Pavlova. Still, no artist is at his best in every mood, and to expect him to be so is to deny to him the gift of personality. ”

“ It is more objective in feeling than the scene of any other of the Russian ballets—less a dream than a vision, so that when it comes to an end we feel that it is ourselves that are losing touch with reality rather than that what appeared as reality is now proving itself an illusion.
The secret of this effect is twofold. Partly it lies in the exquisite purity of convention which the ballet retains throughout, partly in the conviction of aloofness which Nijinsky brings to his rendering of the part of Armide's slave. ”

“ The method of the ballet's action is simple enough. The music is left to tell the story, and, punctual to the comencement of every theme, the appropriate character comes flitting on to the stage, to dance its little pas and then flit off again to make way for the next. The stage setting is as empty and dignified as a musical stave, and the little figures hurry across it, singly or in groups, almost like musical notation come to life and colour. ”

“ LE CARNAVAL
"Music," said Noverre, "is to dancing what words are to music—a simile which means nothing except that dance music is, or ought to be, the written poem which determines the movements and the action of the dancer." And truly the artist of the ballet has always been in debt to the musician, while there have been countless efforts actually to interpret musical compositions through the medium of the dance. ”

“ Yet if only one can bring oneself to view this very uncouthness as part of a large design, not simply as its dominating feature, one will have come a long way towards appreciating the ballet in the spirit intended by its creator. For besides the uncouthness of Le Sacre du Printemps, how much there is in it of beauty and deep emotion! Religion, the thing that binds and has tortured and nerved mankind throughout the ages, is still with us to-day, and there is nothing alien from modern thought or interest in this presentment of its early manifestation. ”

“ The conscience of the tribe demands the sacrifice of its fairest flower, to the end that all the rest may live on and enjoy the blessings of security and a pious heart. A young girl, the chosen of her fellows, is to be sanctified by acting out to the bitter end this drama of propitiation. Men of the tribe, clothed in the likeness of bears, flock around to witness the sacrifice, and the chosen maiden herself stands forth and resigns herself to the frenzied movements of the dance that celebrates at once her death and her apotheosis. ”

“ The less one thinks about Chopin, in fact, the more will one enjoy Les Sylphides. For Chopin's is the music of the velvet warmth of summer nights, and there is something sweet and scented in the air that is the breath of his dim, romantic world. But the country of Les Sylphides is cold and clear and fragile, a land of frozen moonlight, which, if you tried to reach it, would shimmer out into a thousand spangles at the first touch of your fingertips. ”

“ With the simple directness of great art Le Sacre du Printemps points the imagination not away to an imaginary world of sentiment or ideal emotion, but back to the real but misty past of human life, to a time when man was still at hostile grips with nature, when the struggle between rich and poor had not begun, but when rich and poor alike were ranged together in a common strife with the cruelty of winds and waters. ”

“ There presently, in the palace of his fathers, it is the day of the young prince's betrothal. Great celebrations are being held. A splendid company is assembled, and they perform pompous and brilliant dances. The prince dances too, more brilliantly than them all. But still he is sick at heart, distracted by the thought of the Swan-queen. For a beauteous stranger has been introduced, and seeing her he experiences a second time that fond and desperate longing he had felt by the side of the Swan lake. At length he brings himself to dance with the strange lady. ”

“ This is Nijinsky, and from the moment of his entrance the drama takes on to itself a new and terrible meaning. The dark youth flickers here and there among the mazy crowd of slaves, hungry for the faithless wife of the sultan—she whose flesh also is parched and dry for the touch of his. He finds her soon, and his lecherous hands play over and over her body with a purpose too subtle, it seems, to take and hold her once and for all. ”

“ As for the theme itself, we may admit that it is a strange and novel one, and that by making use of it Nijinsky seems to be claiming that a fresh range of subject should be opened up, or rather reopened, for the dance. But this implies, not a destruction of what has been valued in the past and will go on being valuable, but a gradual evolution towards a new expressiveness and a new technique. Strange things are bound to happen. Yet if reason and courage are behind them, why should we be afraid? Prettiness is very well in its way, but life is greater, and truth greater still. ”

“ The miraculous automaton has often been used as a subject for drama, and long before the Russians came, Adeline Genée had captivated London with the doll-ballet of Coppélia. Such a theme must certainly be attractive to any dancer who has once mastered the free and graceful rhythms of natural life, inviting as it does to the control and exercise of a whole new range of attitude and movement. ”

“ The memory of a hundred wonderful nights is enough. And if Nijinsky never danced again we should know that his fame would be safe—the fame of one who, more perhaps than any man living, has made beauty for his generation. ”

“ Expressed in terms of pantomime it might easily have seemed little more than a thing of merely fascinating commonplace, like a scene out of some musical comedy played in dumb show. But here Nijinsky comes in, and raises it all to a higher power of meaning by the sincerity of his purpose and by his use of a convention which so combines a sense of character with an austere impersonality of action, that it can turn a particular piece of fact or fancy into an instance of universal truth. For Jeux is something more than a scene of charming dalliance between a young man and two young girls. ”

“ Now, the right functioning of tradition has never, perhaps, been more perfectly exemplified than in the case of the Russian Ballet which, greeted here on its first appearance as something absolutely new, soon transpired to be the culmination of a long development which linked together in one long process the most seemingly extravagant novelties with the beginnings of modern ballet in the eighteenth century. ”

“ Scheherazade, like the less important ballet of Thamar, is concerned, you see, to present a conventionally romantic picture of oriental sensuality. Now, this is a very legitimate thing to do. But whereas Thamar is content to handle the theme in a wholly simple and unmoral manner, Scheherazade includes a deliberate appeal to the human sense of shame which, however good as morality, is surely bad as art. For the sense of shame is not compatible with æsthetic satisfaction, nor do I think that its excitement, in a work of art, would be enjoyed by a society more delicate-minded than our own. ”

“ Les Sylphides Another fusion of qualities most noticeable in the art of Nijinsky, and most rare, is that fusion of utter freedom of movement with unfailing sense for decorative effect. Freedom of movement can be attained, no doubt, by practice. And a good "producer" may contrive that the main attitudes of a dance shall be correct in themselves and sufficiently beautiful. But with Nijinsky, pose, attitude, seems to be an instinct rather than a lesson learnt, and even in the wildest orgy of motion his feeling for outline never fails. ”

“ While watching him dance it may not seem strange that a being so agile should be able to lift and hold, a hair's-breadth from the ground, another being like unto himself but frailer even than he—one of those Sylphides, perhaps, that sway like river-reeds in the breeze or hover like thistledown. ”

“ Hitherto, we must remember, the ballet in Russia has been an exclusively aristocratic form of art. It has relied for its existence on State patronage, and has inevitably preserved the bias of all things royal towards the conventional and the correct. But now that private enterprise has furnished an independent outlet, the ballet has become a splendid playground for that personal and adventurous spirit which is the first result of emancipation. ”

“ To a weird music they perform what is due, to a rhythm of unwearying persistence that throbs through all the festival, so that at last the whole broad earth seems to be throbbing, throbbing to the beat of it. ”

“ Now, one of the principal marks of genius is the combination in one and the same person of talents, common enough in themselves, but rarely found together. Nijinsky's art is full of such combinations. One of them, for example, is that union of strength with lightness which is, perhaps, the most obvious feature of his style. Apart from the muscular development of hip and thigh, Nijinsky gives one the impression of being very slight in build. His body is slim as a boy's. ”

“ The Swans of the Swan lake were enchanted birds who danced, in the form of white maidens, by moonlight at the water's edge. A young prince of the realm is hunting by the lake, and half in jest, half in earnest, pursues and takes captive the queen of the Swan-maidens, He woos her, but she escapes and flies off to the lake again, leaving him to go home again disconsolate. ”

“ As a matter of fact, if a novel work of art possesses any qualities of real virtue, tradition, we may be sure, is at the bottom of it. For tradition can act very subtly, so subtly that its influence may long remain undetected, and then at last be only generally perceived through the revealing perspective of time. ”

“ For such movement as there is in this ballet is deliberate in the extreme. The attitudes of the dancers evolve with the measured inevitability of a slowly-turned kaleidoscope, and as for lightness—the whole performance is a studied demonstration of the attractive force of the earth and of the triumph of gravity. I have heard that if we were transported all at once to a planet like Jupiter, much greater in bulk than our earth, the sense of bodily weight would be so increased that we should find it difficult to walk upright. ”

“ To-night there's another kind of music—Ping, pang, twong—the music of the to-and-fro of tennis balls. Those lively young people must be playing up on the lawn by the Château—you know the game—the kind you play with red rackets and balls as big as melons. ”

“ Human creatures, I think, know what they are doing only too well, because performance never agrees with desire. But with fairies, desire to do and performance are instinctive and simultaneous. If they think, they think in action, and in this they are far more like animals than human creatures."
How well Nijinsky has realised some such conception will be plain to anyone who has seen the Prélude. ”

“ Nijinsky, of course, impersonates the prince—the slim and debonair young prince of the fairy tale. In the first scene of eager reconnaissance, and in the final tragic tableau by the water-side, we have his genius for pantomime splendidly exhibited. While, in the middle scene—the dance and courtly festival—he demonstrates the full resources of his virtuosity, performing the rarest and most difficult figures with the ease that can belong to no one but the born technician. ”