Part 11

The true art of dancing is entirely free from all apparent effort. No matter how difficult may be the feat that is accomplished, it must seem easy. Every gesture must be expressive, every movement must be beautiful, every step must have ease and lightness and grace. Forty years ago and more, the 'Black Crook' brought to America three or four dancers trained in the best schools of Europe--Bonfanti and Betty Rigl, Rita Sangalli and Morlacchi. One of this quartet, Rita Sangalli, was afterward the chief dancer at the Paris Opera, where she was followed in time by Rosita Mauri, a dancer who added beauty of face and of form to a masterly accomplishment. They were all gifted pantomimists; they had all of them the perfection of technic; they were all of them capable of the most varied difficulties of the art; and they all of them vanquished these difficulties with unobtrusive ease. They had attained to that perfection of art, when the art itself is hidden, and when only the consummate result is visible. Each of them had absolute certainty of execution, and each of them could float across the stage the embodiment of grace, exquisite in its ethereal delicacy.

For those whose memories cannot recall the haunting remembrance of the days that are gone there is abundant compensation in the opportunity which has been afforded of late to behold the dancing of Mlle. Genee and of Mlle. Pavlova. They are, at least, the equal of any of their predecessors, and it may be doubted whether Taglioni or Fanny Elssler surpassed them in mastery. They are the perfection of effortless ease; altho they suggest only the lightness of the butterfly, they have the steel strength of the gymnast. Behind their marvelous and bewildering accomplishment there is a native gift, rich and full; and there is also the utmost rigor and perseverance in training. What they are able to do with seeming spontaneity and with apparent freedom is the result of indefatigable industry and of merciless labor.

But tho this schooling sustains them, it is never paraded--indeed, it is scarcely perceived. There is not the faintest suggestion of hard work about their performances; there is nothing that hints at effort; their art is able to conceal itself absolutely, and to delight us only with the perfect result of their long apprenticeship. Capable of the most obstinate feats of strength and of agility, Mlle. Genee and Mlle. Pavlova never "show off"; they are never guilty of parading a difficulty for its own sake, and their conquest of technical obstacles serves only to support and intensify the continuous suggestion of aerial elevation and of ineffable lightness. It is to be noted, also, that as they scorn the task of the mere gymnast, they do not wear the scant costume of the acrobat; they are enveloped in ample draperies, which fall into lines of beauty with every movement.

Nothing more exquisite than their dancing has ever been seen on the American stage. Theirs is the dancing which is graceful--which, indeed, is grace itself. Here is the art at its utmost possibility, purged of all its dross. When they are floating effortless thru space we cannot help recalling the possibly apocryphal anecdote which records the visit of Emerson and Margaret Fuller to the theater to see Fanny Elssler. They gazed with increasing delight, until at last Margaret Fuller could not contain her enthusiasm. She turned and said: "Ralph, this is poetry!" To which the philosopher is said to have responded: "Margaret, this is religion!"

Perfection is always rare, and there is now only one Mlle. Genee, and only one Mlle. Pavlova, as there was only one Rosita Mauri a quarter of a century ago. It is a pity that the Danish dancer has had to appear here in an ordinary musical show and not in a framework more worthy of her and of her art, and better fitted to display it. She has revealed herself only in two or three _entrees de ballet_, as the French term them--incidental dances; and she has not yet been seen here in a _ballet d'action_, a complete story told in pantomime. It was the poet, Francois Coppee, who devised the plot of the 'Korrigane' for Rosita Mauri; and he had had Theophile Gautier as a predecessor in the preparation of a ballet-libretto. All those who are interested in every manifestation of the art of the drama, must find pleasure in the _ballet d'action_, with its adroit commingling of dance and pantomime; it gives a delight possible to no other form of the drama; and at its best it is more closely akin to pure poetry. Being her own manager, Mlle. Pavlova has been seen in a series of ballets more appropriate to her extraordinary gifts than those in which Mlle. Genee has been permitted to appear.

III

There was one scene of the 'Source,' a ballet popular at the Opera in Paris during the exhibition of 1867, which must linger in the memory of all who had the good fortune to behold it--a scene so beautiful that it was borrowed for the 'White Fawn,' which was the successor of the 'Black Crook' here in the United States. It represented a silvery glade in the lone forest, with a mysterious lake, on the surface of which the spirits of the springtime came forth to disport themselves. It was a vision of airy grace and of haunting legend; and it is only one example of the poetic possibilities of the contribution of dance and pantomime in a coherent story. It may be well to recall the fact that the plots of these _ballets d'action_ are often strong enough to enable them to serve as the basis of a libretto for an opera. It was a ballet of Scribe's, for example, which was taken for the book of the 'Somnambula'; and the book of the favorite opera 'Martha' began its existence as a libretto for a ballet.

While the _ballet d'action_ affords the fullest opportunity for the perfect art of dancers like Rosita Mauri and Adeline Genee and Anna Pavlova, there are other forms not to be despised. Twenty-five years ago the Italian Marenco brought out his stupendous 'Excelsior,' which was taken from Italy to Paris, then to New York, and finally to London. 'Excelsior' was an allegorical ballet; it represented the conflict of light and darkness, of progress and superstition, of invention and reaction. It filled a whole evening with spectacle and glitter and movement. It lacked the poetic simplicity of the 'Source' and of the 'Korrigane'; but it had other qualities of its own. What set it apart from all the ballets that had gone before was the subordination of the individual terpsichorean artist to the main body. Marenco employed the best dancers to be found in Italy, no doubt, but he did not rely on them so much as on the intricate and ingenious handling of the crowds of lesser dancers, by whom they were surrounded.

The novelty of 'Excelsior' and of the two or three gigantic Italian spectacles which were patterned upon it--'Messalina' and 'Sieba'--lay in the maneuvering of the masses, in the extraordinary skill with which squadrons of figures were made to charge across the stage and combine and melt into one another most unexpectedly and most delightfully. The whole stage was a blaze of artfully contrasted colors, and it was filled with a riot of motion and of glitter. And Marenco made use of male dancers far more abundantly than any of his predecessors, utilizing them to wear the more somber colors, to suggest a sterner vigor, and to emphasize a bolder contrast. He was responsible also for another novelty, often employed by others since; he increased the height of his swerving lines of dancers, now and again, by mounting some of the figures on stands, and by putting revolving globes and iridescent banners into the hands of the men in the background.

It is the method of Marenco in 'Excelsior' which has been followed in the often pleasing ballets of the Hippodrome in New York. Really good soloists are now very scarce, even in Milan and in Vienna, long the nurseries of the ballet; and there seem to be none too many even in Petrograd, which has preserved and improved upon the traditions of Paris and Milan. And in the absence of accomplished soloists, the deviser of the ballets at the Hippodrome has been compelled to get along without them as best he could. He has been forced to rely on the maneuvering of masses of girls, possessed of only a rudimentary instruction in the elements of the terpsichorean art. In other words, he has had to make up in quantity for the absence of quality. But he has at his disposition an immense stage, across which he could set his squadrons marching and gliding and glittering. He could not count on the skill of his principals who were not expert enough to demand the attention of the spectators; but he could seek striking effects of light and color in the costumes, as he moved his masses to and fro and as he swung them together. If only there had been a little better training for the more prominent performers, the 'Four Seasons' would have been a most artistic entertainment, in spite of the absence of any single dancer of real distinction.

IV

The dearth of remarkable dancers is due to the inexorable fact that dancing is the most arduous of all the arts; its technic is the most difficult to acquire. Indeed, this technic can be acquired only in early youth, when the muscles are flexible and when they can be supplied at will. It is early in her teens that a dancer must begin her training if she aspires to eminence in the art. This training is very severe, and it must never be relaxed. Rubinstein used to say that if he omitted his practise for a single day he noticed it in his playing; if he omitted it two days his enemies found it out; and if he omitted it three days even his friends discovered it. The apprentice dancer can never omit a single day of hard and uninteresting toil. Incessant application, during all the long years of youth, is the price the ambitious beginner must pay for the mastery of her art. She can have no vacations; she can have few relaxations; she must keep herself constantly in training; she must be prepared to surrender many of the things which make life worth living. And it is no wonder that so few have the courage to persevere, and that there is only one Rosita Mauri, only one Adeline Genee, and only one Anna Pavlova in a quarter of a century. It is no wonder that the inventor of terpsichorean spectacles nowadays finds himself compelled to get along as best he can without a satisfactory soloist and to rely rather on his handling of a mass of inadequately trained dancers.

But even if the highly accomplished soloist, absolute mistress of all the possibilities of the art, is very rare, there are certain forms of dancing which do not demand this ultimate skill and which call for little more than grace and ease and charm, combined with a knowledge of the simpler steps. For example, the Spanish Carmencita, whose portraits by Mr. Sargent and by Mr. Chase now hang in the Luxembourg in Paris and in the Metropolitan Museum in New York--Carmencita was not a skilful dancer; she had undergone no inexorable schooling; she glided thru only a few elementary movements. But she made no effort; she did not pretend to what was not in her power; she was simple and unaffected. Her charm was not in her singing or in her dancing; it was in her personality, in the alluring and exotic suggestion of her individuality.

Nor could anybody venture to assert that Miss Kate Vaughan and Miss Letty Lind were dancers in the same class with Mauri, Genee, and Pavlova; but then they did not pretend to be. They knew only a few steps of obvious simplicity, and they displayed no unexpected dexterity. But the skirt-dance as they performed it was a memory of delight, with its grace and its ease, with its perfect rhythm and with the swish of its clinging draperies. It had a fascination of its own, quite different from the fascination of the more poetic and ethereal ballet-dancing of Rita Sangalli and Rosita Mauri. It was not of the stage exactly, but almost of the drawing-room. It gave the same pleasure which we felt when we were privileged to behold a court minuet led by the late Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, who had been a dancer in the days of her youth. There is one perfect beauty of the best ballet-dancing and there are other beauties of different kinds in the skirt-dancing of the two Englishwomen and in the languorous swaying of the Spanish gipsy.

Beauty of yet another order there was in an exhibition which was called a dance, perhaps because there was no other word for it, but which demanded no skill with the feet and which necessitated rather strength in the arms. This was the luminous dance of Miss Loie Fuller, when she swirled voluminous and prolonged draperies in lights that came from above and from below, and from both sides--lights that changed by exquisite gradations from one tint to another, the figure of the dancer spinning around, now slowly and now swiftly, while her arms weaved fantastic circles in the air, revealing unexpected combinations of color, controlled by perfect taste. This may not have been dancing, by any strict definition of the word, but it was decorative, artistic, imaginative, and inexpressibly beautiful. It supplied a glimpse of unsuspected delight; and probably Terpsichore would not disdain to claim it for her own, however vigorously she might repel the suggestion that she had any responsibility for the violence of the toe-dances, for the vulgarity of the pony ballet, or for the ungainly caperings which pretend to recapture the free movements of the Greeks.

(1910-1915)

XI

THE PRINCIPLES OF PANTOMIME

THE PRINCIPLES OF PANTOMIME

I

In his suggestive study of ancient and modern drama, M. Emile Faguet dwells on the fact that the drama is the only one of the arts which can employ to advantage the aid of all the other arts. The muses of tragedy and comedy can borrow narrative from the muse of epic poetry and song from the muse of lyric poetry. They can avail themselves of oratory, music, and dancing. They can profit by the assistance of the architect, the sculptor, and the painter. They can draw on the co-operation of all the other arts without ceasing to be themselves and without losing any of their essential qualities. This was seen clearly by Wagner, who insisted that his music-dramas were really the art-work of the future, in that they were the result of a combination of all the arts. Quite possibly the Greeks had the same idea, since Athenian tragedy has many points of similarity to Wagner's music-drama; it had epic passages and a lyric chorus set to music; it called for stately dancing against an architectural background.

But altho the muses of the drama may invoke the help of their seven sisters, they need not make this appeal unless they choose. They can give their performances on a bare platform, or in the open air, and thus get along without painting and architecture. They can disdain the support of song and dance and music. They can concentrate all their effort upon themselves and provide a play which is a play and nothing else. And this is what Ibsen has done in his somber social-dramas. 'Ghosts,' for example, is independent of anything extraneous to the drama. It is a play, only a play, and nothing more than a play.

Yet it is possible to reduce the drama to an even barer state than we find in Ibsen's gloomy tragedy in prose. Ibsen's characters speak; they reveal themselves in speech; and it is by words that they carry on the story. A story can be presented on the stage, however, without the use of words, without the aid of the human voice, by the employment of gesture only, by pure pantomime. No doubt, the drama makes a great sacrifice when it decides to do without that potent instrument of emotional appeal, the human voice; and yet it can find its profit, now and then, in this self-imposed deprivation. Certain stories there are, not many, and all of them necessarily simplified and made very clear, which gain by being bereft of the spoken word and by being presented only in the pantomime. And these stories, simple as they must be, if they are to be apprehended by sight alone without the aid of sound, are, nevertheless, capable of supporting an actual play with all the absolutely necessary elements of a drama.

In his interesting and illuminating volume on the 'Theory of the Theater,' Mr. Clayton Hamilton has a carefully considered definition of a play. He asserts that "a play is a story devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an audience." Perhaps it might be possible to amend this by saying "in a theater," instead of "on a stage," since we are now pretty certain that there was no stage in the Greek theater when Sophocles was writing for it. But this is but a trifling correction, and the definition as a whole is excellent. It includes every possible kind of dramatic entertainment, Greek tragedy and Roman comedy, medieval farce and modern melodrama, the music-drama of Wagner and the problem-play of Ibsen, the summer song-show and the college boy's burlesque. Obviously it includes the wordless play, the story devised to be presented on a stage and before an audience by actors who use gesture only and who do not speak.

In forgoing the aid of words the drama is only reducing itself to its absolutely necessary elements--a story, and a story which can be shown in action. It is not quite true that the skeleton of a good play is always a pantomime, since there are plays the plot of which cannot be conveyed to the audience except by actual speech. Yet some of the greatest plays have plots so transparent that the story is clear, even if we fail to hear what the actors are saying. It has been asserted that if 'Hamlet,' for example, were to be performed in a deaf-and-dumb asylum, the inmates would be able to understand it and to enjoy it. They would be deprived of the wonderful beauty of Shakspere's verse, no doubt, and they would scarcely be able even to guess at the deeper significance of the philosophy which enriches the tragedy; but the story would unroll itself clearly before their eyes so that they could follow the succession of scenes with adequate understanding.

With his customary shrewdness and his usual gift of piercing to the center of what he was engaged in analyzing, Aristotle more than four thousand years ago saw the necessity of a neatly articulated plot. "If you string together a set of speeches," he said, "expressive of character and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play, which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents." No broader statement than this could be made as to the all-importance of the story itself--and pantomime is a story and nothing else, a story capable of being translated by the actions of the performers, without the aid of speech. Nor need we suppose that a play without words is necessarily devoid of poetry. There may be poetry in the "set of speeches expressive of character and well finished in point of thought and diction"; but there may be poetry also in the theme itself, in the actual story. 'Romeo and Juliet,' for example, is fundamentally poetic in its theme, and it retains its poetic quality even when it is made to serve as the libretto of an opera, as it would also retain this if it should be stripped bare to be presented in pantomime.

In a recent work on the 'Essentials of Poetry,' Professor William A. Neilson has made this clear: "Many a drama is a genuine poetic creation, altho it may be simple to the point of baldness in diction and exhibit the fundamental qualities of poetry only in the characterization and in the significance, proportion, and verisimilitude of the plot." That is to say, the drama can use two kinds of poetry, that which is internal and contained in the plot, and that which is external and confined to the language. It can employ

jewels five-words long, That on the stretched forefinger of all Time Sparkle forever.

But it can also attain poetry without the use of superb and sonorous phrases and solely by its choice of theme. This is what the poets have often felt, and as a result French lyrists, like Theophile Gautier and Francois Coppee, have not disdained to compose librettos for pantomimic ballets, 'Giselle' and the 'Korrigane.' One of the most successful of the recent Russian ballets was simply a representation of Gautier's poetic fantasy, 'One of Cleopatra's Nights,'

II

Perhaps because the pantomime contains only the essential element of the drama--action--it has always been a popular form of play; and it appears very early in the history of the theater. Indeed, it seems to be the sole type of play achievable by primitive man--if we may judge from observations made among savages who are still in the earlier periods of social development. Gesture precedes speech, and a pantomime was possible even before a vocabulary was developed. In the Aleutian Islands, for example, the pantomime is the only form of play known. One of the little plays of the islanders has been described. It was acted by two performers only, one representing a hunter, and the other a bird. The hunter hesitates but finally kills the bird with an arrow; then he is seized with regret that he has slain so noble a bird; whereupon the bird revives and turns into a beautiful woman who falls into the hunter's arms. This is the simplest of stories, but it lends itself to effective acting; it is capable of being interpreted adequately by means of gesture alone; and it is just the kind of play which would appeal to an Aleutian audience, being wholly within their experience and their apprehension.

Pantomime flourished in Rome and in Constantinople in the sorry years of the decline and fall of the empire; and it was then low and lascivious. A great part of the fierce hostility to the theater displayed by the Fathers of the Christian Church was due to the fact that the only drama of which they had any knowledge was pantomime of a most objectionable character, offensive in theme and even more offensive in presentation. With the conversion of the empire to Christianity, pantomimes of this type, appealing only to lewd fellows of the baser sort, was very properly prohibited. But pantomime of another type sprang up in the Middle Ages in the Christian churches to exemplify and to make visible to the ignorant congregations, certain episodes of sacred history. In the Renascence dumb-shows were represented before monarchs, at their weddings and at their stately entrances into loyal cities. And dumb-shows were often employed in the Elizabethan stage, sometimes as prologs to the several acts, as in 'Gorboduc,' for example, and sometimes within the play itself, as in 'Hamlet.'

In the eighteenth century pantomime had a double revival, in France and in England. In France, Noverre elevated the _ballet d'action_, that is to say, the story told in pantomime and adorned with dances. Sometimes these _ballets d'action_ were in several acts, relying for interest on the simple yet ingenious plot, and only decorated, so to speak, with occasional dances. From Noverre and from France the tradition of the pantomime with interludes of dancing, spread at first to Italy and Austria, and later to Russia.