Ballet master

“ You forget that supreme instant when the master-spirit of the ballet comes skipping suddenly forward, and leaping into the air with calves that exchange a shimmer of kisses, and catches the prima ballerina at the waist, and tosses her aloft, and when she comes down supports her as she bends this way and that way, and all at once stiffens for her bow to the house. ”

“ To this native spirit, however, the ballet owes little or nothing. Doubtless it has in a manner fertilised the soil, created a public interested in the dance and, if heredity counts for anything, provided a raw material ready for the ballet-master to mould to his will. But the ballet, as I have said before, is in its origin aristocratic, and nowhere more so than in Russia. The Russian ballet is entirely the product of the Court. ”

“ Their limbs exist only for grace and suppleness, and are never stiffened by any other use. All their lives are devoted to dancing; and it is the constant occupation of their minds. A ballet-master is not an accident or sport of nature, but one who is acknowledged by his comrades to excel them in the sort of imagination in which they all share. A certain Russian, living in St Petersburg, was frequently puzzled by the strange behaviour of the guests in a flat across the street. ”

“ You see although the American girl is smart and sharp, and pretty original in many other things, she is entirely imitative in dancing. She watches the other girls, and although she may not even be fairly grounded in the fundamental principles of ballet dancing, she frequently faces an audience and does well—sometimes astonishingly well in fact. Some of these girls climb up out of the ranks very fast; others who are lazy and give too much time to flirting and drinking wine, remain in the same line, usually the last,262 for years, and are really in a ballet master's way all the time. ”

“ A good ballet-master must especially have regard to both poetical and picturesque invention; his aim being to unite both those arts under one exhibition. The poetical part of the composition being necessary to furnish a well-composed piece that shall begin with a clear exposition, and proceed unfolding itself to the conclusion, in situations well chosen, and well expressed. The picturesque part is also highly essential for the formation of the steps, attitudes, gestures, looks, grouping the performers, and planning their evolutions ”

“ Pah!”
“Oh, la, la, la, la!”
“Do not mind, monsieur,” the dancing-master whispered ecstatically, as if he feared such sentiments might offend me, “it is a poet, n’est-ce pas? Art—art—that is a world of itself.” He mopped his forehead, beaded with drops of perspiration, his little black eyes rolled in his head, and he drummed on the tablecloth as if his fingertips would do the office of his toes. The man was a genuine enthusiast. To dance and to teach others to dance—that was life!
“Yvette, you have brought your ballet costume so you can dance for messieurs the Americans?” ”

“ In speaking of the English ballet, Mr Max Beerbohm has gaily admitted his inability to master the meaning of formalised gesture: “When a ballerina lays the palms of her hands against her left cheek, and then snatching them away, regards them with an air of mild astonishment, and then swaying slightly backwards, touches her forehead with her finger-tips, and then suddenly extends both arms above her head, I ought of course to be privy to her inmost meaning. ”

“ They show in their faces and forms the traces of hard work and poor living, and an expert master of the ballet has need of all his skill to train them and dispose them on the stage so that their natural disadvantages of form may be kept as much as possible from public view. Now and then, however, there is a case where the glamour of the stage has so fascinated girls in better circumstances that they are ready to begin at any round of the ladder in a profession that seems so entirely imbued with roseate tints. ”

“ The counsel of Carlo-Blasis, the eighteenth-century ballet-master is fulfilled to the letter: “Il faut encore étudier,” he wrote, “lors même qu’on sera tout-à-fait formé.... Dans la musique, dans la peinture, etc., l’on n’a pas besoin d’un travail aussi opiniâtre pour conserver ce que l’on sait. L’art du danseur, comme tous ceux d’exercice, ne jouit pas de cet avantage.” ”

“ From the premiere who sits with sealskin sack over her stage costume with her pet dog by her side down to the latest acquisition to the maitre's (the ballet master's) corps, all must be on hand to rehearse with or without music. In the latter instance the steps are slowly but carefully gone through. Not only is there a day rehearsal, but there is private individual rehearsal of the steps at night previous to going on the stage; for there is much grace in a corps de ballet, and no girl in love with her art wishes to be considered awkward or in the rear ”

“ Then, if you think those graceful and varied figures of the ballet as easy to invent, or to trace, as they seem, and are, at last, easily performed, you should witness the trouble taken to invent, and the patience taken to bring to perfection—the figures and the figurantes—on the part of the artistic ballet-master, Mr. ”

“ Entry of the BALLET.
FOUR DANCERS execute the various movements and steps which the
DANCING MASTER orders them.
ACT II. SCENE I.—MR. JOURDAIN, DANCING MASTER, MUSIC MASTER. MR. JOUR. This performance is not bad, and these fellows don't do it badly.
MUS. MAS. When the dance is accompanied by the music, you will find it still more effective, and you will see something charming in the little ballet we have prepared for you.
MR. JOUR. It is for this afternoon, mind; and the person for whom I have ordered all this is to do me the honour of coming to dine here.
DAN. MAS. Everything is ready. ”

“ All old ballads are set to dance tunes, and derive their name from ballet. Where no instruments were to be had, the dancers sang the ballad, and so gave the time to their feet. The fact of ballad tunes being dance tunes has been the occasion of their preservation; for in The Compleate Dancing Master, a collection of dance tunes, the first edition of which [188] was published in 1650, and which went through eighteen editions to 1728, a great number have been preserved as dance tunes, with the titles of the ballads sung to them. ”

“ It is true the Russian ballet is controlled by the court and therefore is forced to be aristocratic in appearance. The composers and the ballet-masters have been strictly instructed to avoid all undesirable themes; but, strange to say, the ballet is just as much a mirror of the hospitable, good natured, naïve and emotional peasant as it is of a spoiled Boyar. ”

“ There was an unconscionable confusion in the darkened opera house as the audience rattled down the aisles, chattering, greeting friends, and shattering the spell of the Prologue, disturbing those who had taken the trouble to arrive on time as much as they did the artists on the stage. My concern on this point is as much for the audience as for the dancers. A ballet, being a work of art, is conceived as an entity, from beginning to end, from the first notes of the overture, till the last one of the coda. ”

“ You cannot fancy her fatigued when, with her peculiar softness of motion, she courtesies to the applause of an enchanted audience, and walks lightly away. You are never apprehensive that she has undertaken too much. You never detect as you do in all other dancers, defects slurred over adroitly and movements that, from their anticipating the music of the ballet, are known by the critical eye to cover some flaw in the step, from giddiness or loss of balance. But oh what a new relation bears the music to the dance, when this spirit of grace replaces her companions in the ballet! ”

“ I suddenly perceived all the music, all the beauty, of this colossal, this mechanical ballet, illumined by light blue rays of sunshine. Then the thought came: why beautiful? Why is the dance beautiful? Answer: because it is an unfree movement. ”

“ Only amateurs have the courage to dance in shoes. Even that strict and stilted institution, the ballet, was forced generations ago to break through its time-honored traditions by abandoning heels as useless appendages. Had she been on the stage, she would have danced in her bare feet as she had done on the night of the fiesta when Captain Forest had seen her. ”

“ In the pantomime, and where it is allowed the first or chief place in the performance, the ballet may be more appreciated; owing to the varied combinations of colour and form, afforded by the ingenious grouping of a large corps de ballet, on an ample stage. Those ballets which consist chiefly of elaborate processions, marches, and the like, are invariably more popular than those relying on dancing alone. ”

“ If any man talks to you about the syrens of the ballet, the dangerous enchantresses and cockatrices of the ballet, the pets of the ballet, whose only thoughts are about broughams and diamond aigrettes, dinners at Richmond, and villas at St. John’s Wood—if anybody tells you that the majority, or even a large proportion, of our English danseuses are inclined this perilous way, just inform him, with my compliments, that he is a dolt and a teller of untruths. I can’t say much of ballet morality abroad; of the poor rats de l’opera in Paris, who are bred to wickedness from their very cradle upwards ”

“ The ballet became a spectacle. It was buried beneath a mass of unmeaning accessories. The stage was encumbered with gorgeous properties and with the crowd of those who did not dance but merely took their place in the pageant. The effect may have been magnificent, but it was not art. At the same time the ballet-dancers, whose business was to dance, were transformed into members of a chorus, whose chief function was to look pretty. They marched and counter-marched across the stage, performing a number of evolutions with a kind of military precision. ”

“ The essential difference is to be found, not in technique, but in idea. The ballet has been brought into relation with life. Dancing, which had its origin in the most elemental emotions, gradually strayed further and further from its source, until in the ballet it lost its last remnant of vital significance. ”

“ But though his ambition as a maître de ballet outran his perceptions as an artist, at least he initiated and firmly established a new form of art which was capable of being brought subsequently to a high degree of perfection. ”

“ The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is extremely funny. The prima ballerina has all the difficult grace and far-fetched arts of the prima ballerina of flesh and blood; and when the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is humanly delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike empressement. I have no doubt the corps de ballet have their private jealousies and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and deprived of all positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms and legs. ”

“ As a dancer, she is an excellent comedienne; yet for years she fancied herself as a classical ballerina. Her insistence on dancing in such ballets as The Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, Pas de Quatre, Petroushka, Princess Aurora, and most of all, Les Sylphides, was so regrettable that it raises the question that, if she is so unconscious of her own limitations as a dancer, what are her qualifications for the directorship of a ballet company? ”

“ The conditions which this chapter has analysed show, however, that the sufficient and adequate repetition of ballet drama is by no means certain. And this chapter’s motive is to emphasise two things: first, if American lovers of dancing wish to insure for themselves the continuous opportunity to see fine representations of that art, they must found a ballet, and an academy upon which it may depend for its artists; second, for such a step no time can be more propitious than the present. ”

“ Oh, the costumer knew his business and those dainty high-heeled French slippers seemed at least five sizes smaller than they really were as they tripped so lightly through the mazes of the ballet. But alack! the illusion was just a TRIFLE dispelled when the ballet-girls broke into a rollicking chorus, for some of those voices boomed across the auditorium with an undoubtable masculine power. ”

“ After this they danced their ballet, so fantastically invented, with so many turns and convolutions, twinings and twistings, in which no lady failed to find her own place again, that all the spectators were amazed at the accuracy and grace of the evolutions. ”

“ The main tendency of the nineteenth century ballet is to get rid of the mechanical contrivances, the monstrous etiquette and majestic solemnity and, like music, give it more coherence and better harmony with the plot. Between 1820 and 1850 it became an inseparable accompaniment to the opera to such an extent that the occupants of the gilded boxes preferred the thrill of the dancing to the music. ”

“ It is to be feared that the English ballet-dancer does not take herself sufficiently seriously. It may even be that she is a little ashamed of herself. One has the uneasy feeling that she regards dancing as merely a stepping-stone to higher things—to musical comedy for instance! It is her profession, not her art. Not until English dancers begin to realise the significance of the dance as art and to create that choregraphic atmosphere which at present appears to exist only in Russia, shall we have a true renaissance of the Ballet in England.{186} ”

“ Three Ladies of the Maryinsky—And Others UP to now I have dealt with those artists of the dance whose forms of dance expression were either modern, free, or exotic. All had been, at one time or another, under my management. The rest of this candid avowal will be devoted to that form of theatrical dance known as ballet. Since I regard ballet as the most satisfactory and satisfying form of civilized entertainment, ballet will occupy the major portion of the book. Nearly two full decades of my career as impresario have been devoted to it. ”