Modern dance

“ The ineffectual rhythms of the dance were suddenly caught up into the masterful rhythms of life itself. What is revolutionary in the new ballet is the power to rouse and trouble the imagination. The innovators have extended the range of the ballet, a range as wide as that of the drama—one is tempted to say wider, for not only does it express a minute grace as choice as the grouping of the petals of a rose, but at times its huge leaping rhythms throb with an unconstrained and elemental violence, all too shattering for the formal mould of speech. ”

“ In the world of fashion, where there is no appeal from the decree of the great designers, the modern dance has come boldly to the front and demanded, and won, sensible styles. On looking back a few seasons to the clothing worn by women and girls, you will recall long, cruel corsets and garters that trussed them like fowls for the roasting. ”

“ It all depends upon the quality of the emotion that has gone to the making of them. The dance expresses the most serious thing in life—that is, ecstasy. All dull things are trivial. Art which has only the interest of contemporary problems is ephemeral, for when the problem is solved, the interest vanishes. The dance is the expression of the moods, and the moods are eternal. It has its source in passion, and where there is passion there is life at its utmost and seriousness at its highest.
In the present revival and development of the dance there is something at once significant and hopeful. ”

“ Is it rash to imagine that the evolution of dancing will be the special achievement of art in this century, as the evolution of music was in the last? There is a whole world of gesture waiting for the dance to take possession of. The rediscovery of the gesture of the ancient world is perhaps the least important part of the undertaking. There lies a broad field for exploration in the innumerable racial and national gestures, each with its separate beauty, and its separate expressiveness. ”

“ PROPER DANCE MUSIC
Music is really more expressive of the era in which it appears than books or pictures or any of the arts. To every nation belongs its music, and every nation expresses in its music national characteristics and national dreams.
Of course, the operas and the great concertos and symphonies are like the gods—of no age, but of every age; they are harmonies of life itself, and therefore are always beloved and considered beautiful; but dance music is the expression of the moment. ”

“ The Morris cannot properly be called a dance of art; it is a dance of the people. It can never be a substitute for the dance of the theatre. But the popular revival of the old dances is important, not only in providing a new means of emotional expression, but in arousing a new interest in the art of the dance itself. Dancing is a sensitive plant which can only thrive in a congenial atmosphere. In some degree all the arts appear to live by the breath of popular favour. Their activity is stimulated, their expression perfected, by interest, criticism and understanding. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whereas a former age lived out its spirit in a popular music, a popular ballad literature and national dances, the present generation prefers to listen to the wheedling airs of the gramophone, to read a professional journalism and to watch a paid dancer in the music-halls. The tendency everywhere is for a passive enjoyment to usurp the place of an active participation in the arts. But the desire for self-expression is instinctive and irrepressible. In the dance it will find a means of satisfaction—complete, elemental, and one which has the saving quality of beauty. ”

“ Fragments of attitude, phrases of motion, are scattered prodigally up and down the world, awaiting the seeing eye and the understanding mind that can pluck these happy accidents, store them in the memory, and at the proper time build up out of them a new pattern of the dance. When the choregrapher of genius arrives, he will think in gestures, as the musician thinks in sound, and the painter in mass and colour. ”

“ It is certain that the dance of the future will tend towards the fuller expression of personality. We shall not be content to watch dances that are merely dexterous, but only those that reveal a fresh and living emotion. It will follow that the dance must become infinitely more subtle, the body more responsive to the spirit, and the spirit more attentive to the delicate rhythms of life. ”

“ The dance of art demands the entire surrender of the artist’s life. It is more than a pastime or a recrea{219}tion. And as we demand that it shall become more and more expressive, so the study of the dancer must needs become more searching and minute. What new forms the dance is going to take, what new spirit is going to inspire it, only the future can show, but without pressing too far into the region of conjecture, it is possible to suggest the probable direction of its development. ”

“ Thirty or forty years ago, those of us who still appreciated dancing as an art—and how few they were!—had to seek for it painfully and sometimes in strange surroundings. A recent historian of dancing, in a book published so lately as 1906, declared that “the ballet is now a thing of the past, and, with the modern change of ideas, a thing that is never likely to be resuscitated.” ”

“ In this dance she represents with singular beauty the proud carriage of that remote bird, its swooning death and its sudden collapse into lifelessness. It displays her skill in the difficult act of falling; she sinks to earth without any suggestion of arrangement or preparedness, ceasing to dance as swiftly and silently as a flame may cease to burn, her limbs failing her, as though her body had actually resigned its spirit. ”

“ You don't have any young choreographers now who are really the stature of the old ones. I can't give a reason why, except that it happened historically that the 1930s turned out to be the most creative period in dance — not just in the United States, but in most parts of the world. That's when the modern dance pioneers became active. People like Martha Graham are revolutionaries, and you just don't get them in every generation. ... This applies to the other arts as well. Who are the great opera composers of today? ”

“ The savages to-day dance most of their sexual dances to rhythmic recitation of certain words. Music is in every phase of evolution the only true essence of that which forms the subject of the dance.
To the transformation of more or less primitive folk-dances into those of strictly religious character is due the principal idea of the modern ballet. In the Oriental temples dancing underwent a strange transformation. While dancing was made the basis of dramatic and symbolic ideas, yet this very fact became detrimental to the musical influence upon the choreography. ”

“ This, however, in proportion as our modern dance has advanced in technical dexterity, has fallen from the rank which it once possessed, and, indeed, has so deteriorated that the very thing tends once more to drop out of the modern ballet altogether, which is alone able to lift the same into the free domain of art. ”

“ ANY account of the modern renaissance of dancing must needs begin with the ballet. In one sense it is in the ballet that the dance attains its completest mode of expression. It may be regarded as the limit of its evolution, its most complex and elaborate statement. The more orderly sequence would be to trace the simpler forms of dancing through the various stages of their evolution until they arrive at their ultimate development in the ballet. The concern of this book, however, is not with the history of the dance, but rather with the interest which it has for the present time as an art-form. ”

“ Dancing plays a more subordinate part in them than in the ballet proper. It falls into a natural relation to the ensemble, and yet the dance, in the exotic world here represented to us, is the apt, indeed the only conceivable gesture. ”

“ Music, the soul of dancing in the modern sense, was lacking, and without this soul the art of plastic form is incomplete. Though the Russian reformers elevated11 dancing from a domestic amusement to a serious and lofty stage art, they did not succeed wholly in giving to it the foundation that it deserves among the other arts. All the past and living goddesses of choreography have not had the freedom, the phonetic means and dramatic threads to thrill their audiences as they would, if man had not distorted and hidden the natural meaning of the dance that inspired his barbaric ancestors. ”

“ In our modern world professional dancing as an art has become altogether divorced from religion, and even, in any biological sense, from love; it is scarcely even possible, so far as Western civilisation is concerned, to trace back the tradition to either source. If we survey the development of dancing as an art in Europe, it seems to me that we have to recognise two streams of tradition which have sometimes merged, but yet remain in their ideals and their tendencies essentially distinct. ”

“ The dance, like all the arts, seeks the effect of spontaneity, of inevitableness, but this spontaneity is highly self-conscious. And it expresses itself most readily by technique—for technique, when it is really fluent, does not hinder but facilitates the expression of temperament. For us moderns the “spontaneous” gesture is the clumsy, inexpressive movement of everyday life; the dancer requires a conscious technique that comes more naturally to her than the unconscious technique of the street, in order to be truly spontaneous and expressive. ”

“ All this proves that the modern dances are reformers of fashion. There are still, however, a few lessons to be learned about dressing for the dance. One should not wear in the afternoon a frock so light and décolleté that it looks like an evening gown. Soft silk gowns of dark shades, with black slippers and stockings, are far smarter and in better taste than either the light frock or a tailored suit, though one does see a number of blouses and skirts at thés dansants. ”

“ INTRODUCTION It is not unlikely that when the art historian of the future comes to treat of the artistic activity of the first decade of the twentieth century, he will remark as one of its most notable accomplishments a renaissance of the art of the Dance. ”

“ The art of dancing has always risen to its highest level when it has been most esteemed; decadence has always succeeded to neglect. “Dancing is an art, let the public remember,” a lover and critic of the dance has said, “which depends on their support for its very existence. The poet, the painter, the sculptor can work for posterity ”

“ Nothing could be stranger to a modern mind than this attitude of the ancient world to the dance; yet{20} if it be true—and none I think will care to deny it—that dancing determines the emotions and that the emotions of a people determine its character, what could be more reasonable? ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the step in itself is unnatural, and naturalness is above all things essential in the dance. When the part which it plays in the ballet is no longer incidental{59}—the emphasis given to a moment’s pose or the suggestion of intriguing daintiness added to a brief passage—but becomes the basis of all the dancer’s movements, it results in producing a sense of utter weariness on the part of the spectator. ”

“ As England never produced a great school of dancing, the vicissitudes of the ballet in this country fluctuated with its fortunes abroad. The French Revolution brought about the break-up, in 1789, of the Communeauté des Maîtres à danser founded by Louis XIV. Whenever the spirit of a people has been caught up in the great winds of emotion which sweep over the world with an invariable periodicity, the dance has always been the most immediate expression of the popular excitement. ”

“ The peasantry are no more, and we have become introspective and reflective. The bumpkin and his kind have been replaced by the clerk, with a new set of needs and different nuances of desire; so that we have to consider not so much the question of reviving the dances of the past, because, as such, these can never be anything but curiosities, antiques, but how to pick up the lapsed tradition of the dance at the point in history when it expressed the emotions of the people, and to give that tradition a chance of new life in our own day ”

“ The illustrations of dances of modern times are made from artists in the very front rank of their respective lines. If the new material so contributed to choreographic literature proves, according to the belief of dancers who have read the manuscript, to be of value to producers, the authors will experience the gratification that comes of having been of service. ”

“ Of the use and propriety of these gestures, or dances, it will not be easy for us, who see no such things attempted on the modern stage, to form any very clear or exact notions. What we cannot doubt of is, 1. That the several theatrical dances of the ancients were strictly conformable to the genius of the different species of composition, to which they were applied. 2. That, therefore, the tragic dance, which more especially accompanied the chorus, must have been expressive of the highest gravity and decorum, tending to inspire ideas of what is becoming, 179 graceful, and majestic ”