Chapter I: Introduction

‘The gods themselves danced, as the stars dance in the sky,’ is a saying of the ancient Mexicans. ‘To dance is to take part in the cosmic control of the world,’ said the ancient Greek philosophers. ‘What do you dance?’ asks the African Bantu of a member of another tribe after his greeting. Livingston said that when an African wild man danced, that was his religion. It is said that the savages do not preach their religion but dance it. According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews danced before their Ark of the Covenant. St. Basil describes the angels dancing in Heaven. According to Dante, dancing is the real occupation of the inmates of Heaven, Christ acting as the leader of a celestial ballet. ‘Dancing,’ said Lucian, ‘is as old as love.’ Dance had a sacred and mystic meaning to the early Christians upon whom the Bible had made a deep impression: ‘We have piped unto you and ye have not danced.’

The service of the Greek Church--even to-day--is for the most part only a kind of sacred dance, accompanied by chants and singing. The priest, walking and gesturing with an incense-pan up and down before the numerous ikons, kneeling, bowing to the saints, performing queer cabalistic figures with his hands in the air, and following always a certain rhythm, is essentially a dancer. It is said that dancing of a similar kind was performed in the English cathedrals until the fourteenth century. In France the priests danced in the choir at the Easter Mass up to the seventh century. In Spain similar religious dancing took deepest root and flourished longest. In the Cathedrals of Seville, Toledo, Valencia and Xeres the dancing survives and is the feature at a few special festivals.

‘The American Indian tribes seem to have had their own religious dances, varied and elaborate, often with a richness of meaning which the patient study of the modern investigators has but slowly revealed,’ writes Havelock Ellis. It is a well-known fact that dancing in ancient Egypt and Greece was an art that was practiced in their temples. ‘A good education,’ wrote Plato, ‘consists in knowing how to sing well and how to dance well.’ According to Plutarch, Helen of Sparta was practicing the Dance of Innocence in the Temple of Artemis when she was surprised and carried away by Theseus. We are told by Greek classics that young maidens performed dances before the altars of various goddesses, consisting of ‘grave steps and graceful, modest attitudes belonging to that order of choric movement called _emmeleia_.’ The ancient Egyptian Astronomic Dance can be considered the sublimest of all dances; here, by regulated figures, steps, and movements, the order and harmonious motion of the celestial bodies was represented to the music of the flute, lyre and syrinx. Plato alludes to this dance as ‘a divine institution.’

In spite of the high status of dancing in the ancient civilizations, it has not progressed steadily, as have the other arts. It has remained the least systematized and least respected of arts, generally considered as lacking in seriousness of intention, fitness to express grave emotions, and power to touch the heights and depths of the intellect. Being an art that expresses itself first in the human body, the dance has aroused reprobation in certain pious, puritanical minds of mediæval type, who have considered it a collection of ‘immodest and dissolute movements by which the cupidity of the flesh is aroused.’ It is this particular view that has damned dance with bell, book and candle. The main reason for this has been the hostile attitude of the church to all folk-arts which manifested a more or less conspicuous ethnographic individuality--that is, were stamped as of Pagan and not Christian origin. All folk-dancing, broadly speaking, is a natural form of æsthetic courtship. The male intends to win the female by his beauty, grace and vigor, or vice versa. From the point of view of sexual selection we can understand, on the one hand, the immense ardor with which every sensuous part of the human body has been brought into the play of the dance, and, on the other, the arguments of the pseudo-moralists to classify it with the frivolous and least tolerated arts.

The stamp of frivolity, put upon the dance by the Christian clergy, has retarded its natural development for several centuries. Italy and Germany, having been the cradles of all modern music and stage arts, have given little inspiration to a systematic development of the art of dancing. The seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that have meant so much to the perfection of the opera, vocal and orchestra technique, gave nothing of any significance to choreography. The church that tolerated Bach, Paësiello, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, put an open ban upon everything that had any relation to the dance. The great musical classics of the past centuries have treated dance as an insignificant side issue, thereby putting a label of inferiority upon this loftiest of arts. All the dance music of the great classics sounds naïve and lacking in choreographic images. Yet dance and music are like light and shadow, each depending upon the other. As canvas is to a painter, so is music to a dancer the essential element upon which he can draw his picture. The fact that the art of dancing has not evolved into its normal state of equality with the other arts, is wholly due to the lack of musical leadership. Neither the reforms of Noverre nor those of Fokine nor Marius Petipa can be of fundamental value if they lack the phonetic designs which alone a choreographic artist can transform into plastic events. Essentially, and æsthetically speaking, dancing should be the elemental expression alike of symbolic religion and love, as it used to be from the earliest human times.

Dancing and architecture are the two primary and plastic arts: the one in Time, the other in Space; the one expressing the soul directly through the medium of the human body, the other giving only an outline of the soul through the medium of fossilized forms. The origin of these two arts is earlier than man himself. Both require mathematics, the one rhythmically, the other symmetrically. For dancing the mathematical forms are to be found in music, for architecture, in geometry. ‘The significance of dancing, in the wide sense, thus lies in the fact that it is simply an intimate concrete appeal of that general rhythm which marks all the physical and spiritual manifestations of life,’ writes Havelock Ellis. ‘The art of dancing moreover is intimately entwined with all human traditions of war, of labor, of pleasure, of education, while some of the wisest philosophers and ancient civilizations have regarded the dance as the pattern in accordance with which the moral life of man must be woven. To realize therefore what dance means for mankind--the poignancy and the many-sidedness of its appeal--we must survey the whole sweep of human life, both at its highest and at its deepest moments.’

ANNA PAVLOWA.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME TEN

PAGE
INTRODUCTION BY ANNA PAVLOWA vii

CHAPTER
I. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DANCING 1

Æsthetic basis of the dance; national character expressed
in dances; ‘survival value’ of dancing; primitive
dance and sexual selection; professionalism in dancing--Music
and the dance; religion and the dance; historic analysis
of folk-dancing and ballet.

II. DANCING IN ANCIENT EGYPT 12

Earliest Egyptian records of dancing; hieroglyphic evidence;
the Astral dance; Egyptian court and temple rituals;
festival of the Sacred Bull--Music of the Egyptian dances;
Egyptian dance technique; points of similarity between
Egyptian and modern dancing; Hawasis and Almeiis; the
Graveyard Dance; modern imitations.

III. DANCING IN INDIA 24

Lack of art sense among the Hindoos; dancing and the
Brahmin religion; the Apsarazases, Bayaderes and Devadazis;
Hindoo music and the dance; dancing in modern
India; Fakir dances; philosophic symbolism of the Indian
dance.

IV. DANCES OF THE CHINESE, THE JAPANESE AND THE AMERICAN INDIANS 30

Influence of the Chinese moral teachings; general characteristics
of Chinese dancing; court and social dances of
ancient China; Yu-Vang’s ‘historical ballet’; modern Chinese
dancing; dancing Mandarins; modern imitations; the
Lantern Festival--Japan: the legend of Amaterasu; emotional
variety of the Japanese dance; pantomime and mimicry;
general characteristics and classification of Japanese
dances--The American Indians: The Dream dance; the
Ghost dance; the Snake dance.

V. DANCES OF THE HEBREWS AND ARABS 43

Biblical allusions; sacred dances; the Salome episode
and its modern influence--The Arabs; Moorish florescence
in the Middle Ages; characteristics of the Moorish dances;
the dance in daily life; the harem, the Dance of Greeting;
pictorial quality of the Arab dances.

VI. DANCING IN ANCIENT GREECE 52

Homeric testimony; importance of the dance in Greek
life; Xenophon’s description; Greek religion and the dance;
Terpsichore--Dancing of youths, educational value; Greek
dance music; Hyporchema and Saltation; Gymnopœdia; the
Pyrrhic dance; the Dipoda and the Babasis; the Emmeleia;
The Cordax; the Hormos--Greek theatres; comparison of
periods; the Eleusinian mysteries; the Dionysian mysteries;
the Heteræ; technique.

VII. DANCING IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE 72

Æsthetic subservience to Greece; Pylades and Bathyllus;
the _Bellicrepa saltatio_; the Ludiones; the Roman pantomime;
the Lupercalia and Floralia; Bacchantic orgies; the
Augustinian age; importations from Cadiz; famous dancers.

VIII. DANCING IN THE MIDDLE AGES 78

The mediæval eclipse; ecclesiastical dancing in Spain;
the strolling ballets of Spain and Italy; suppression of
dancing by the church; dances of the mediæval nobility;
Renaissance court ballets; the English masques; famous
masques of the seventeenth century.

IX. THE GRAND BALLET OF FRANCE 86

Louis XIV and the ballet; the Pavane and the Courante;
reforms under Louis XV; Noverre and the _ballet d’action_;
Auguste Vestris and others; famous ballets of the period--the
Revolution and the Consulate; the French technique,
the foundation of ‘choreographic grammar’; the ‘five positions’;
the ballet steps--Famous _danseuses_; Sallé, Camargo;
Madeleine Guimard; Allard.

X. THE FOLK-DANCES OF EUROPE 104

The rise of nationalism--The Spanish folk-dances: the
Fandango; the Jota; the Bolero; the Seguidilla; other Spanish
folk-dances; general characteristics; costumes--England:
the Morris dance; the Country dance; the Sword dance; the
Horn dance--Scotland: Scotch Reel, Hornpipe, etc.--Ireland:
the Jig; British social dances--France: Rondo, Bourrée and
Farandole--Italy: the Tarantella, etc.--Hungary: the Czardas,
Szolo and related dances; the Esthonians--Germany:
the _Fackeltanz_, etc.--Finland; Scandinavia and Holland--The
Lithuanians, Poles and Southern Slavs; the Roumanians
and Armenians--The Russians: ballad dances; the Kasatchy
and Kamarienskaya; conclusion.

XI. THE CELEBRATED SOCIAL DANCES OF THE PAST 144

The _Pavane_ and the _Courante_; the _Allemande_ and the
_Sarabande_; the _Minuet_ and the _Gavotte_; the _Rigaudon_ and
other dances--The Waltz.

XII. THE CLASSIC BALLET OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 151

Aims and tendencies of the nineteenth century--Maria
Taglioni--Fanny Elssler--Carlotta Grisi and Fanny Cerito;
decadence of the classic ballet.

XIII. THE BALLET IN SCANDINAVIA 161

The Danish ballet and Boumoville’s reform; Lucile
Grahn, Augusta Nielsen, etc.--Mrs. Elna Jörgen-Jensen; Adeline
Genée; the mission of the Danish ballet.

XIV. THE RUSSIAN BALLET 170

Nationalism of the Russian ballet; pedagogic principles
of the Russian school; French and Russian schools compared--
Begutcheff and Ostrowsky; history of the Russian
ballet--Didelot and the Imperial ballet school; Petipa and
his reforms--Tschaikowsky’s ‘Snow-Maiden’ and other ballets;
Pavlowa and other famous _ballerinas_; Mordkin;
Volinin, Kyasht, Lopokova.

XV. THE ERA OF DEGENERATION 189

Nineteenth-century decadence; sensationalism--Loie
Fuller and the Serpentine Dance--Louise Weber, Lottie Collins
and others.

XVI. THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL OF DANCING 195

The ‘return to nature’; Isadora Duncan--Duncan’s influence:
Maud Allan; Duncan’s German followers--Modern music
and the dance; the Russian naturalists; Glière’s ‘Chrisis’--
Pictorial nationalism: Ruth St. Denis--Modern Spanish
dancers; ramifications of the naturalistic idea.

XVII. THE NEW RUSSIAN BALLET 214

The old ballet arguments _pro_ and _con_--The new movement:
Diaghileff and Fokine; the advent of Diaghileff’s
company; the ballets of Diaghileff’s company; ‘Spectre of
the Rose,’ ‘Cleopatra,’ _Le Pavilion d’Armide_, ‘Scheherezade’--
Nijinsky and Karsavina--Stravinsky’s ballets: ‘Petrouchka,’
‘The Fire-Bird,’ etc.; other ballets and arrangements.

XVIII. THE EURHYTHMICS OF JACQUES-DALCROZE 234

Jacques-Dalcroze and his creed; essentials of the
‘Eurhythmic’ system--Body-rhythm; the plastic expression
of musical ideas; merits and shortcomings of the Dalcroze
system--Speculation on the value of Eurhythmics to the
dance.

XIX. PLASTOMIMIC CHOREOGRAPHY 247

The defects of the new Russian and other modern
schools; the new ideals; Prince Volkhonsky’s theories--Lada
and choreographic symbolism--The question of appropriate
music.

EPILOGUE: FUTURE ASPECTS OF THE DANCE 261

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Odalisque in ‘Scheherazade’ (Russian Ballet) Frontispiece

PAGE
Egyptian women dancing with cymbals 21

Greek and Roman Dances as Depicted on Ancient Vases 68

Danseuses en Scène (The Ballet) 102

The Ball 150

Sylphides; a Typical Classic Ballet 156

Pavlowa 174

Duncan 200

Maud Allan 211

A Plastic Pantomime (Dalcroze Eurhythmics) 245

THE DANCE