Pyrrhic dance

“ They must leap and skip and overflow with gamesomeness and sheer joy, and they must utter all sorts of cries. But whereas animals have no perception of order or disorder in their motions, the gods who have been appointed to men as our fellow-dancers have given to us a sense of pleasure in rhythm and harmony. And so they move us and lead our bands, knitting us together with songs and in dances, and these we call choruses.” Nor was it only Apollo and Dionysos who led the dance. Athena herself danced the Pyrrhic dance. ”

“ The ancient Greeks also held that their sacred dances were performed in imitation of gods and goddesses. The Pyrrhic dance was said to have been the invention of the Dioscuri by some; others attributed it to Athena. Again, Artemis, Dionysos, and Zeus himself, were all believed to have set men the example of dancing. Ḥatḥor among the Egyptians and Baal-Marqôd among the Phoenicians are other examples. ”

“ You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet, Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone? Of two such lessons, why forget The nobler and the manlier one? You have the letters Cadmus gave— Think ye he meant them for a slave? ”

“ A very learned writer, speaking of the Pyrrhica saltatio, informs us, that "The common people in many parts of England still practise what they call a Morisco dance, in a wild manner, and as it were in armour, at proper intervals striking upon each others staves, &c." [162] This might be found on inquiry to differ from the common morris, and to be a mixture of the old Pyrrhic and Moorish dances. Such a one may be alluded to in The second part of King Henry the Sixth, Act III. Scene 1,
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“ The theory that a dancer can ignore with impunity the restrictions of technique, that she is bound to please if only she is natural and happy, and allows herself to follow the momentary inspiration of the music, and dances with the same gleeful spontaneity as a child dancing to a barrel-organ, is a doctrine as seductive as it is fatal. Already we have seen upon the stage performers who, in the name of Greek art, race and romp rather than dance. ”

“ His dancing is distinguished by its reserve. It always leaves something to the imagination. His gestures in the “Arrow Dance” derive no little of their effectiveness from what they suggest, but leave unsaid. It is the warrior not at war but at play, and like the gambolling of young tigers affects us by the passion that it only hints at. His dancing has a constant tendency to forsake motion for repose. In his entrechats and pirouettes I seemed to note a certain reluctance, as though they were a concession demanded by popular taste, or a lingering tradition of the ballet technique. ”

“ And yet she is feminine in her dancing, but feminine in the simple, calm, womanly grandeur of the three fates of the Parthenon marbles. Hers is the essential and eternal type of womanhood, the type of the Madonna, of the peasant woman, breathing of the warm earth and the open air, of Ceres rather than of Circe. Her dance has perhaps the beauty of full summer rather than of spring. Its lines are flowing, but full of dignity and restraint. There is perhaps still a suggestion of the frieze in it. A new technique necessarily at first inclines towards rigidity. ”

“ From the soft bricks of the floor the red ochre rose in a thin cloud of dust, making hazy the shadowy dancers; the three musicians, in their black hats and their cloaks, sat obscurely in the corner, making a music that came quicker and quicker, making a dance that grew swifter and more intense, more subtle, the men seeming to fly and to implicate other strange inter-rhythmic dance into the women, the women drifting and palpitating as if their souls shook and resounded to a breeze that was subtly rushing upon them, through them ”

“ She has a command of vivid facial expression such as few actresses can equal. Never for an instant does she betray the least preoccupation with her steps. Her face is like a mirror, reflecting the passing lights and shadows of the music and the mood. The head dances, the eyes dance, the brow, the neck, the lips dance—the dance, in a word, penetrates her whole being, as the breeze penetrates the body of a tree to the least shuddering of the tiniest leaf.
Indeed in Pavlova’s art is realised the full meaning of the dance, which is none other than the complete possession of the body by the spirit. ”

“ But I saw--knew, rather, as if I had always known it, sweet as summer rain, and close in me as love--that the whole Earth with all her myriad expressions of life moved to this primal rhythm as of some divine dancing."
"Dancing?" I asked, puzzled.
"Rhythmical movement call it then," he replied. "To share the life of the Earth is to dance and sing in a huge abundant joy! And the nearer to her great heart, the more natural and spontaneous the impulse--the instinctive dancing of primitive races, of savages and children, still artless and untamed ”

“ There follows a passage between captive and captor, which can scarcely be described as a dance, yet is something more than the mere acting of a scene. Desperately and repeatedly the Fire Bird strives to escape from the strong arms which imprison it; again and again the Prince, though hard put to it to retain the elusive creature in his grasp, frustrates these fluttering efforts. Though dancing, in the sense of rhythmic movement, is not the precise descriptive term for these expressive postures and motions, one needs it to convey the poetic sense of beauty which Karsavina here reveals. ”

“ There was a time when she wished to initiate a reform of human life in its least details of costume, of hygiene, of morals. But gradually she came to concentrate her interest upon the dance. For her the dance is not merely the art which permits the spirit to express itself in movement; it is the base of a whole conception of life, a life flexible, harmonious, natural. In the development of the dance she found herself confronted by the dilemma which has just been alluded to. On the one hand was the limited technique of the ballet, on the other the unnatural contortions of the eccentric school. ”

“ In that case he may have divined his daughter's fate with greater insight and love than he is credited with. As she herself admitted, she is sometimes more irresistibly drawn by what is ugly than by what is pure and beautiful; and the dance follows a logical course leading on pitilessly to tragedy."
The new phase of the dance began, in which the dancer looks at the spider again, takes it to be harmless, and laughs at herself, as it were, for her fears. Ingigerd portrayed this with inimitable grace, innocence and merriness. ”

“ What a rhythm’s here! One would say the body lay asleep and the dance escaped from the hair tips, the bleached fuzz that covers back and belly, shoulders, neck and forehead. The dance is diamantine over the sleeper who seems not to breathe! One would say heat over the end of a roadway that turns down hill. Cesa!
One may write music and music but who will dance to it? The dance escapes but the music, the music—projects a dance over itself which the feet follow lazily if at all. So a dance is a thing in itself. ”

“ All superfluous clothing is discarded in a most alarming manner at various stages of this performance, and the arms are flapped vigorously against the naked body which is made to sound like a drum. The performance is not allowed to stop until the dancer is quite exhausted, when he simply collapses in the arms of one of his friends. The musical accompaniment to this dance verges on the diabolical, the rhythm of what melody there is being interspersed with abundant howls, yells and snapping of fingers from the enthusiastic crowd all round. ”

“ The astonishment of the king and his future bride was in no way diminished when the fairy dancers suddenly changed before their eyes into flowers—jasmine, jonquils, violets, roses, and carnations—which carried on the dance just as though they were possessed of legs and feet. It was as though a flower-bed had come to life, every movement of which gave pleasure alike to eye and nostril. A moment later the flowers vanished, and in their place were fountains of leaping water that fell in a cascade and formed [p. 159] a lake beneath the castle walls. ”

“ The style of dancing is a curiosity, however; a quadrille of these women and their partners is a specimen of the saltatory art worth seeing. There is no slow, measured sliding and dawdling through the figure, as in our cotillons at home; the dancers dance all over—feet, arms, muscles, head, body, and legs; each quadrille, in which there are dancers of noted skill and agility, is surrounded by a circle of admiring spectators. ”

“ These ugly and false positions in no way express that state of unconscious dionysiac delirium which is necessary to the dancer. Moreover movements, just like harmonies in music, are not invented; they are discovered.”
It is a mistake, which some exponents of the “natural” style of dancing have fallen into, to imagine that they can express the spirit that moves them by any haphazard agitation of the limbs. To dance “naturally” does not mean to dance impromptu, relying upon the inspiration of the moment. ”

“ The truth may possibly be that that freedom from convention in which she glories is in reality a bondage. In her own words, “dancing is the spontaneous expression of the spiritual state.” The dance is “not an acquired but a spontaneous art, revealing the temperament of the dancer.” She is compelled to acknowledge the necessity for technique, but she fears that if it becomes excessive the art will no longer be able to stir the soul. ”

“ How important Lada’s illustration of the theory of concordance of motion and music is at this time of dancing evolution can be more concretely grasped by the coming generations than by an average dance-lover to-day. It is perspective that gives the true visual impression of a mountain. ‘In the unison of plasticity and music, of the visible with the audible, of the spacial with the temporal, lies the guarantee of that new art which we so ardently desire and so unsuccessfully seek,’ writes a celebrated dance authority. ”

“ It may be the ecstasy of worship or the ecstasy of grief. From the nature of the emotion out of which it springs the dance takes its character—voluptuous, solemn, bacchic, mournful, as the case may be. Whenever the passions of primitive peoples were deeply moved, they evolved a dance to express them. In the mystic ritual dance they found some expression for that divine unrest, when the winds in the great forests or the serenity of the multitudinous stars strangely stirred the heart to a sense of the nearness of the spiritual order ”

“ They danced everything they could think of, from the ridiculous Caterpillar Crawl to the lovely Moon-Moth Minuet, ending up with the Grasshopper Hornpipe. In this dance, the object was to see which dancer could leap the highest and crack his heels together oftenest before he touched the floor. ”

“ It is difficult to realise now to what an extent the whole life of the ancient world was coloured by the dance. It occupied as great a part as music, literature and the drama occupy in the life of to-day—perhaps a greater, for whereas in Western Europe there are many who care for none of these things, in Egypt, in Greece and in Rome, the dance touched the life of all classes and at every point. ”

“ It gives a chance for the dancer of the naturalistic school to display pretty poses, primitive gestures and ‘sound’ steps. Like all Glière’s compositions this is exceedingly lyric, full of charming old melodies and curved movements that occasionally call to mind Schumann, Schubert and Chopin. The ballet begins with Chrisis in the majestic valley of the Nile spinning cotton on a spinning-wheel, which she stops when a soft music, coming from a far-away temple, comes to her ears. It is the music of the morning-prayer. She prays, dancing to the trees and the clouds. ”

“ And to secure this free and large, even though vicarious, expression of pent-up impulses to movement is very grateful to us whose whole movement life is impoverished, because restricted by convention and occupation to a few narrow types. But the dance would have little interest for men were it not for another element in its beauty: the expression of the amorous feelings of the spectator. These, although really located in the breast of the spectator, are nevertheless embodied in the personality of the dancer, whose charm they constitute. ”

“ We are threatened with performances in which naïve young creatures in tenuous classic drapery amuse themselves by capering on bare feet, gathering and scattering make-believe roses, splashing in imaginary rivers, undulating snaky arms, shooting arrows, playing ball, butterfly{120} catching. The dance cannot return to nature, in the sense which Isadora Duncan intended, by returning to this rather kindergarten Arcadia. The classical dance has its hidden law, which is perhaps more difficult than that of the ballet because it is more secret. ”

“ Two glass kerosene lamps burned on the high mantel-shelf, doing their best to help the fire light up the room. Music and drum-beats and lively chatter swung into time with dance steps. The confusion flowed into clean-cut swing.
Every man had his hat on. Some were tilted back, some balanced on the side, some pulled to the front; few were right and straight. Many of the dancers wore shoes, and the loose boards on the floor rose and clattered to the regular beat of their feet.
“Did you ever seen people dance before?” April murmured in Breeze’s ear. ”