Part 2
|THE Russian dancers may reasonably pride themselves on their versatility. In their seven-leagued ballet shoes they travel all over the world, and beyond. They bound easily from ancient Greece to a Caucasian camp, from the East of a thousand-and-one nights to a legendary country invented for their playground. It really requires astonishing mental activity to follow them with pleasure from "Le Spectre de la Rose" to "Scheherazade." A symphonic poem of Richard Strauss after a plain-song hymn, or Wagner after Mozart, could not be a greater shock to the system. Everything in "Scheherazade" suggests violence and horror.
Bakst's palace was built for dreadful deeds; no one, I am sure, could ever feel safe in it. Its color makes it vibrate on its foundations, if indeed it has any foundations. There are bad dreams as well as good ones, and the dream quality, on which I have insisted, so far, as the special beauty of these Russian ballets and mimed poems, is present in "Scheherazade." The strange thing is that this nightmare, in which sensuality and cruelty are the only emotions evoked, has a paradoxical vein of delicacy running through it. There is something almost childlike in the wiles by which the Sultan's wives, when their lord's back is turned, induce the Master Eunuch to liberate the slaves for their pleasure. The infantile joyousness with which the dark-skinned youths rush from their silver and gold cages on their loves and on their impending doom has an element of pity. The whirligig dance which follows expresses exactly the happiness, which is short, sharp and sudden, but over which destiny hangs, and for which there is no mercy. And all the time in this riot of color, this orgy of animation, we never lose sight of the negro who is the chosen of the Sultan's favorite, the negro who half an hour ago in another world was the phantom Rose! His arms, which but now were waving invisible garlands in the serene air, are ready to coil round their prey in a serpentine embrace.
The lips which gave the innocent kiss of naïve youth are now twisted in the spasms of desire. Nijinsky in "Scheherazade" is not the incarnation of evil, but its spirit.... His ghastly pallor is terrible.
Really he seems to turn white under his black skin.
Tamar
|TAMAR" is another pleasant little ballet of barbarity, in which Karsavina, as one of those avid, fatal heroines, in the interpretation of whose serpentine passions she is always fine, lures lovers to her high tower, and, in the manner of the Chinese Empress, makes death the penalty of an hour of her love. The execution is summary, the unfortunate lover being hurled out of the window by muscular members of Tamar's suite. In "Tamar" Adolph Bolm, who was I think the first Russian male dancer to appear in England, makes a magnificent entrance. Miss Pamela Colman Smith's drawing gives a very vivid impression of the effect produced by the first appearance on the scene of the Lover and his companions. Here is a very good example of the amazing influence that the color and shape of mere garments can have on the imagination. Those silent, black-coated, black-hatted men, their faces muffled in concealing scarfs, seem to have come from far, from very far. I feel that their horses below are in a sweat, that they have been riding furiously at the summons of a force which their fresh and ardent youth could not resist!
Poor frenzied man! What is his secret? Why has he come here to see love through a veil of blood--blood which is his own?
Prince Igor
|AT the head of the Polovtsien warriors in the dances from Borodin's opera "Prince Igor," Bolm has to dance as well as to mime, and very splendidly and fiercely he dances with his bow. This "Prince Igor" ballet lasts only a few minutes, but in those minutes are crowded enough energy, excitement, lightning swift successions of different movements, true healthy barbarity (not the barbarity of decadence), and splendid music to take away all words, all thoughts, but "wonderful"! But those "Prince Igor" dances ought never to have been given without their accompanying songs. It has been the custom lately to leave out the singing, one of those omissions that matter.
NOTE: An omission of mine that matters is that I have recalled "Prince Igor" without mentioning the name of Sophia Féodorova, who holds her own in astounding feats of agility, as in fiery spirit with the adolescents in whose evolutions she participates. The girl is a wonder at this man's work!
Pavillon d' Armide
|IN this ballet, in the style of the French ballets of the reign of Louis XIV., there is less distinction, I think, than in the others from which Miss Pamela Colman Smith has derived her pictures. The costumes and scenery are "designed by Benois," but any one with a knowledge of the theatre and a Racinet at hand could have done the same sort of thing. And yet as I write this I know I should make the reservation of that "life" which the Russians know how to breathe into everything. What I mean is that Benois gives us no new creation. Karsavina's bird-like grace in her eighteenth-century guise is captivating (oh, that this talented little dancer had more music in her, and did not dance always a fraction off the beat!), and Nijinsky as a wholly unnecessary slave in white satin gives a wonderful exhibition of dancing in the style of the original Ballon who danced at the opera in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century, and gave his name to the kind of classical dancing which consists in elevation.
NOTE: Bolm as the lover looks very like one of Louis XIV.'s sons, and mimes perfectly. I like the "pas de trois" (the music of this ballet by Tscherepnin is fascinating), but I liked it better when it was originally given at the Coliseum as an extract, and danced by Kosloff, Karsavina and Baldina. Our spirited, bounding Nijinska has not got the eighteenth- century style. Oh, I must not forget those dear Bouffons! Their little dance alone makes "Pavilion d'Armide" worth while.
Narcisse
|THE last drawing in this book is of Nijinsky as Narcisse, and if Narcisse had been a _pas seul_ by Nijinsky I am sure that there would have been more to praise in it. For once, the mosaic was all wrong, and so the centre piece could not be all right. I have read enthusiastic accounts of "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune," which Nijinsky himself arranged, making Debussy's music the vehicle for a display of Greek poses, and from Nijinsky's personal performance in "Narcisse" I believe it to be possible that he has succeeded in doing, in "L'Après-midi de un Faune," what Bakst failed to do in "Narcisse. ' ' When, at the end of the ballet, that colossal stage narcissus was jerked up from the stage pool, and the limelight was turned on it, I regretfully saw in that light a limitation in the Russian art. They could not interpret the tranquil repose, the immanent beauty of Greek ideas.
The whole treatment of the exquisite story of the youth who fell in love with his own beauty, and was drowned seeking to come near its reflection, was heavy-handed, even a little barbarous and ugly. And all the grave movements imprisoned in stone and marble by the sculptors of ancient Greece, all the joyous silhouettes on Greek vases, seemed to remain remote, and secure from the conquest of the devouring Russian, restlessly seeking material for his ballets in all nations and all times. I had a sudden seizure of distrust; it was as though the disdain of the Greek had sapped the foundations of my belief in the justness of the praises lavished on the new dance; but then memories of gestures, colors, bounding movements, freedom of expression given by perfection of technique, came crowding pell-mell into my mind. The frown on a cold marble forehead could not extinguish my joy in the flame of life which burns so ardently in the work of the Russian ballet.