The Modern Dance

MODERN DANCE JOHN MARTIN

A Dance Horizons Book Princeton Book Company, Publishers Princeton, NJ

FOREWORD This book is actually the text of four lectures delivered at the New School for Social Research in New York in the season of 1931-1932 to introduce a series of lecturedemonstrations on what was then a largely unfamiliar subject. Published first in 1933, it is reprinted here without alteration or re-editing of any sort, as perhaps the first attempt -certainly one of the first-to analyze the American modern dance. JOHN MARTIN April 15, 1%5

A11 rights reserved. N o # m j of this book may be repodwed or utilized in any form or by m y means, electronic w mecbmicat, including pborocopying, recording or by &y infomdicn storage md rstriwal syrtem, &bout pewnissiolr in writing from rbe Publuhw. 2 % ~is at^ ridridged rejwblicution of tbe original editws, first publuhed is 1933, by A. S. Bonres 6 Co., Inc., New Yd.

ISBN 0-87127-272-5 Library of Congress C d o g Ctwd No. 65-24217

A Dance Horizons Book Republished 1989 by Princeton Book Company, Publishers

CONTENTS ?Ma

PART I-CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MODERN DANCE . . . . . . . . . . Introduction-"Modern" vs. Classic and Romantic -Movement as Substance--Movement as Basic Experience-Expressing the Intangibl-Muscular Sympathy-Metakinesis-Exrension of RangeThe Modern Dance a Point of View-Practical Consideration of Movement-Reaction against Muscularity Delsarte "Rhythm Systems" Dynamism.

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PART 11-FORM

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What is Art ?--Beauty the Effectiveness of FormFalse Sense of Beauty-Tentative Definition of Rhythm-Necessity of Form-Dis tortion and Idealisation-Distoon Indispensable-Distorting for Design-Practical Aspect of Design-Design in Space-Space-Time Pattems-Stress and Dynamism-Form and Metakinesis.

. PART 111-TECHNIQUE Artist and Technician--Certain Fundamentals Reconsidered-Divergent Approaches to ArtExciting Extra-Intellectual Processes-Naturalism and the Unit of Perception-Rhythrn-an Electrical Analogy-Strong and Weak Rhythm Bases-Pseudo-Mystical Contemplation-Vertical and Horizontal R h y t b T h e Rhythmic Integer

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CONTENTS

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--Feeling in Terms of Form-Internal and Externd Rhythms-Theory of EscapDeviotion from the Factual-Recapitula tion.

PART IV-THE DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS The Major Arts-The "Absolute Dancew-"Theatreys-Actor and Dancer-Parallel Developments -Dance without Music-Music Antedated by Dance-Music Always Secondary-Various Approaches to Music-Conflic ting Formffimpro&Respect for the Composer-Wigman's Musical Practice-Dancing and Poetry-Architecture and S c u l p t u r ~ n c l u s i o n .

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PART I CHARACTERISTICS OF

THE

MODERN DANCE

INTRODUCTION

HE dance has only recently begun to be recognised as a major art and there is still considerable confusion about it, not only in the public mind, but in the minds of the dancers themselves as a class. There is no literature, to speak of, in English on the subject except that which deals with the older forms no longer in general use by the progressive artists, and the only source of enlightenment has been the actual performances of the dancers themselves. In the last analysis, this is the only reliable source, to be sure, for all theory which is more than hypothetical must be by deduction from the practice of the best artists. It has not been an easy matter, however, for even the most sympathetic spectator to determine what the basis of the modern dance is when he sees no two dancers' performances apparently in any way similar to each other. He has been further confused by the neglect, the ignorance and even the hostility of the majority of music critics on the newspapers who 1

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THE MODERN DANCE

undertake without any preparation and with even less sympathy to write critically of dance petf ormances. In the past-the comparatively recent past-the dance meant the ballet, and the ballet meant the ballet d'action. This consisted of a plot of sorts interspersed with choreographic numbers much as a musical comedy is interspersed with songs. This class of performance fell naturally into the category of theatrical productions and was judged by the dramatic critics. When Isadora Duncan and the romantic movement appeared, with the emphasis heavy on music instead of drama, but still with choreographic accompaniment, dancing became a subject for the music critics to deal with. Now, with the development of the modern dance in which dancing is the main issue and music and plot are secondary where they are not actually inessential, confusion reigns. To dispel as effectually as may be this confusion is the objective of these pages. In spite of the fact that there are as many methods and systems of modern dancing as there are dancers, certain common principles and purposes underlie them all. We shall here attempt to isolate these purposes and principles so that they may be examined with care. Let it be said once more that these theoretical deductions are based not on any preconceived point to be proved, but upon the practice of the leading dancers of the day, both American and European. First, let us consider the

CHARACTERISTICS

3 distinguishing characteristics of the modern dance -what it is made up of and how it differs from other types of dance; then from this subject we must inevitably be led to a consideration of dance form, and the relation which exists between the dance and other arts.

The term "modern" dance is obviously an inadequate one. It is not synonymous with contemporary dance, for it is by no means that inclusive. It is only of temporary accuracy insofar as it is accurate at all, for to-morrow when a more advanced type of dance shall have arisen it will be impossible to refer to the dancing of to-day as modern. It is, nevertheless, a blanket word which has succeeded in making itself equally offensive in a11 the arts. It covers a multitude of minor isms--cubism, futurism, dadaism, and in the dance particularly, expressionism, absolutism, creativism, and scores of others. By the modern dance we shall here intend to imply by a method of negation those types of dancing which are neither classic nor romantic. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that folk dancing and those popular theatrical forms known as "tap and acrobatic" are excluded from consideration, not because they are felt to be inferior or without value, but because they do not come under the definition

4 THE MODERN DANCE of dancing as a fine art. The classic dance was built on set forms, arbitrary and traditional. The romantic dance rebelled against the cold estheticism of this system and discarded all formalism in favor of a free, personal expression of emotional experience. Since both these schools are still largely in practice, and since it is in a sense in opposition to them that the modern dance has arisen, it is necessary to pause for a few moments to see in a very general way what they consist of. The classic dance has a set vocabulary of movement which for perfection of execution must be performed in a prescribed manner. The predominant characteristic of its movements-or rather of its attitudes-is artificiality. They are required to measure up to standards of design in space irrespective of the natural tendencies of the body and of any relation to human experience. They are, in the fullest sense of the word, abstract. From time to time the vocabulary has been enlarged by additions devised by eminent dancers, just as the literary vocabulary is enlarged from time to time by new words, but it remains essentially a limited medium -limited, indeed, from choice. That it is a medium of great beauty when it is employed by a genuine artist is not important here, if for no other reason than that there are not a half dozen artists of any rank who employ it. The romantic dance threw off this restrictive vocabulary. It was not interested in what it consid-

CHARACTERISTICS ered to be a collection of meaningless words, so to speak; it wanted to get at meaning irrespective of words. For Isadora Duncan this meaning was to be found in herself under the inspirational influence of romantic music. But obviously in order to be objectified, it must have a visible form. As a matter of fact, this form proved to be scarcely less limited than that of the classic ballet. It contained a quantity of pantomimic gesture, many actual ballet attitudes and steps, and bits of posture from Greek ceramics and Oriental art. Ruth St. Denis added enormously to its vocabulary from Oriental sources, and realising perhaps the necessity of something concrete in the matter of form, was largely responsible for the introduction of musical form into the dance. In her musical interpretations, the pattern of the dance was practically that of the music insofar as the two could be made identical. The classic dance itself was fundamentally affected by this romantic revolution through the radical innovations of Fokine in the Russian Imperial Ballet. Here there occurred a great liberalising of the rigid forms of the classic prescription, animated by the desire to give to the dance the warmth and vitality of human emotion. But the ballet forms remained as a basis for the new method. Thus in the entire romantic movement, which if we interpret it in its strict sense has been of surprisingly brief duration, there was no essential form discovered in which to express the new spirit. The

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THE MODERN DANCE

new wine, poured into the old or inadequate bottles, burst the bottles and was lost.

MOVEMENT AS SUBSTANCE

The modern dance has actually arisen in fulfilment of the ideals of the romantic movement. It has set itself positively against the artifice of the classic ballet, making its chief aim the expression of an inner compulsion; but it has also seen the necessity for vital forms for this expression, and indeed has realised the aesthetic value of form in and of itself as an adjunct to this expression. In carrying out this purpose it has thrown aside everything that has gone before and started all over again from the beginning. This beginning was the discovery of the actual substance of the dance, which it found to be movement. This is one of the four great basic points of the modern dance. With this discovery the dance became for the first time an independent art,-an absolute art, as they like to say in Germany-completely self-contained, related directly to life, subject to infinite variety. Previously movement was only incidental. In the classic dance what counted primarily was poses, attitudes and prescribed combinations of them. The movement that united them was unimportant. Every attempt was made, indeed, to hide muscular

CHARACTERISTICS 7 action, to make the body appear to be acted upon as by some external force which eliminated effort. In the romantic developments it was the emotional idea that was the centre of interest. This was conveyed largely by means of the music and in part even by a sort of intense mental concentration. Movement resulted, of course, but it was not seen as the material out of which the dance was to be made. It seems diilicult to dispute, however, that the germ of the new idea lay in this development, a d if it had not been for the overpowering domination of the music it might have made itself felt. In the classic dance a certain meaning came out of the combination of movements, as a meaning comes out of a combination of words; but the words are essentially separate entities. In music, on the other hand, the result is obtained not by putting together a succession of notes, but by creating in the medium of sound which in spite of variations in pitch and intensity remains a unified entity, a substance. Similarly, movement is seen by the modern dancer as a unified entity, a substance. It may be varied in range of space, duration of time, quality and intensity, a d s t i l l remain a constant thing.

MOVEMENT AS BASIC EXPERIENCE

The reason for the importance of this discovesy is readily seen. Movement is the most ele-

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THE MODERN DANCE

mentary physical experience of human life. Not only is it found in the vital functional movement of the pulse and throughout the body in its business of keeping alive, but it is also found in the expression of all emotional experiences; and it is here that its value lies for the dancer. The body is the mirror of thought. When we are startled, the body moves in a quick, short, intense manner; when we are embarrassed, the blood moves to the face and we blush; when we are alarmed, the blood moves away from the face and we pale; when we are sad, tears move into our eyes and what we call a "lump" comes into the throat. When we have any of these experiences, the muscles contract or relax and all the members of the body are affected. The illustrations are too common to require any further attention. Physical movement is the normal &st effect of mental or emotional experience. To some extent the actor works on this basis, if he is a good actor; for the actor's art is in reality a subdivision of the dancer's art. If we go back to the earliest times, we find that primitive men danced when they were deeply moved. Dancing has come very generally to mean to the popular mind the expression of gaiety and exuberance of spirit and nothing else. This is utterly without solid foundation. In earlier civilisations, and even to-day among primitive people, dancing is involved in practically every important experience in the lives both of individuals and of the peo-

CHARACTERISTICS

9

ple as a whole. There are dances of birth, of death, of coming of age, of courtship and marriage, of fertility, of war and pestilence, of casting out devils, of curing the sick. Whenever the primitive mind came into contact with something that happened without his having had anything to do with it, something with the element of mystery and supernaturalism, he danced. The simple, understandable actions of daily life which were comprehensible to his limited reason he did not wonder at; if he chose to talk about them he could express himself in a rational manner, by words. But the things that transcended reason he feared, sometimes he worshipped, and always he was greatly moved by. Therefore he could not rationalise about them, and if he wanted to talk about them he had no language through which to express feelings that transcended understanding. Therefore he danced. Because in his dance he expressed a feeling which was by no means peculiar to himself but was shared by all his fellows, they had no difficulty in following his intention and even joining in with him. Not one of them, however, could have sat down calmly and told you why he moved his arms this way and his legs that way, or what the meaning of the dance was. As time went on these dances in many cases became traditional, and if we were astute enough and perceptive enough (which we are not) we could find in these rituals an incomparable treasure,

THE

MODERN DANCE

for they are really the record of man's discovery of nature. Few of them survive to-day, however, and those that do have become too stereotyped to offer us sufficient clue to work upon.

EXPRESSING THE INTANGIBLE

Nevertheless, this spirit is the animating spirit of the modern dance. The modern dancer, of course, does not marvel at the same things that caused the savage to wonder. He can converse rationally on almost any topic dealing with the action of nature; it has all been reduced to a pseudo-scientific patter which is taught in the schools. Civilisation has taken the mystery out of ordinary life to a great extent and consequently has mitigated the necessity for expressing, as the primitive dancer did, the things one's understanding cannot grasp. But to-day we are reaching farther and farther ahead into uncharted regions of thought, which, though not alarming to us as nature was to the savage, are just as far from being reducible to rational terms. And it is these grasped but intangible emotional and mental experiences that the dancer of to-day finds himself forced to express through the irrational medium of bodily movement. The order of human progress has always been in this manner. First the artist senses something unknown and unknowable and expresses it irration-

CHARACTERISTICS

II

ally; then through the continued contact with this expression, he or others begin to attach a certain tangibility to the idea, and eventually the scientific mind can see it clearly enough to rationalise it. In this way, art cannot stand still; when it has made certain images common it must move on to others. It is safe to say that when any art form has got itself to the point where it can be translated into words, it is dead as an art form. (By "words," of course, one means in this place to imply the medium of intellectual factualism, and not in any sense the stuff, though it happens to have the literary designation of words, by which poetry projects its meaning.) This makes dl the more perplexing the question which is so often asked by the layman who does not know what dancing is all about. V h a t does it mean?" he will ask you; and the only answer you can give him is something like this: "My dear man, if I could tell you what it means there would be no need for So-and-so to dance it. He might much more easily write it to you."

MUSCULAR SYMPATHY

This does not make dancing singularly remote or esoteric. No art can be described, explained. Dancing has its effect on the spectator by means of very simple processes. When dancing is pantomimic in character it consists of certain purely representa-

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"IXE MODERN DANCE

tiond movements. You have no di$culty in following their meaning because you have often done than yourself, or can easily picture yourself as doing them. You do not have to stop and reason about them, deducing that if the hand does thus and so it must infer that the purpose is such and such. Instantaneously, through a sympathetic muscular memory you associate the movement with its purpose. Your muscles remember that when you do a certain series of movements the result is a specific result. Now, if the dance is not pantomimic, if the movements are not representational, what happens? Exactly the same thing. Through kinesthetic sympathy you respond to the impulse of the dancer which has expressed itself by means of a series of movements. Movement, then, is the link between the dancer's intention and your perception of it. To a certain degree it is possible to say that no movement can be made by the human body which is wholly non-representational. The body cannot conceivably be made to do anything, in other words, which the body cannot do. Even in the case of the acrobat and the contortionist we are made to feel, through muscular sympathy, the strain, the difficulty of the tricks performed, and hence to have a corresponding sense of courage, skill, superiority, or sometimes of revulsion for abnormality. Ask the man in the street who is sickened by a

CHARACTERISTICS

13

contortionist, why he is so affected. What does it mean? How can he be affected by something when he does not even know what it means? He will not be able to explain it to you, but he will perhaps consider you just a little bit cracked if you cannot explain to him why you are moved to tears by some dance which he does not "understand."

VII METAKINESIS

Movement, then, in and of itself is a medium for the transference of an zsthetic and emotional concept from the consciousness of one individual to that of another. This should not be as strange an idea as it seems to be. Back as far as Plato, and perhaps farther, it has been toyed with by the metaphysical philosophers. Kinesis is the name they gave to physical movement; and in an obscure footnote in Webster's Dictionary-so common a source of reference as that!-we find that there is correlated with kinesis a supposed psychic accompaniment called metakinesis, this correlation growing from the theory that the physical and the psychical are merely two aspects of a single underlying reality. We are not here concerned with theories of metaphysics, and it makes very little difference what we may choose t o believe about the relation in general between the physical and the psychical. It is extremely important, however, that we see in the

I4 THE MODERN DANCE dance the relation that exists between physical movement and m e n t a l v r psychical, if you willintention. Metakinesis is perhaps a formidable word, but it is the only one the dictionary yields for the expression of one of the vital points of the modern dance. A few minutes ago, it was said that the discovery of movement as the substance of the dance in the same sense that sound is the substance of music, was one of the four important discoveries of the modern dance. The second of these discoveries is that of metakinesis. Nobody invented it, it has always been true. It was true when the early man of savagery conveyed his sense of the mystery of death, and when he stirred a whole tribe into warlike frenzy by leading them into a particular kind of dance. It was true, and recognised in a degree, in the great days of the Greek theatre, where movement was an important feature of drama. Indeed, the Greek tragic chorus, which at moments of highest tragedy sought refuge in chanting songs of deep fervour and dancing to them, was used, as Gilbert Murray has said somewhere, to express the "inexpressible residue of emotion" which mere rationality-words and pantomime-could not convey. It was also true during the many years of the classic ballet. Without it audiences would have had no more delight in watching a ballerina balance herself on one toe in defiance of gravity than they would

CHARACTERISTICS have had in watching feathers float on the air. It was their own consciousness of gravity which held them to the earth that made them applaud the feat of some one else in defying it. But no conscious artistic use was made of metakinesis until the modern dance arose. You will still find many dancers who will laugh at it-while their audiences slip rapidly away into the performances of their colleagues who have not such keen senses of humour. The Germans have realised the value of it to such an extent that they have named their type of dancing in general "expressionistic," or the kind of dancing which expresses through movement the dancer's feeling. Because of this close relationship between movement and personal experience, temperament, mental and emotional equipment, it is manifestly impossible for every one to be taught to do the same type of movement. The ideal dance education, therefore, is that which trains the student to find his own type of movement. Rudolf von Laban, the German theorist, has divided a11 people into three general types, according to their style of movement, much as singers are divided into such general types as soprano, tenor, bass, etc. He has arrived at certain interesting conclusions, based on physiological and psychological research, and coloured always with a sense of metakinesis. Certain individuals, he has found, are tall and thin and move in a certain

16 THE MODERN DANCE manner, always more or less alike. These he calls "high dancers." Others are short and squat and move in another manner. These he calls "low dancers." Between them are the "middle dancers." Now the reason they move in certain fashions is not that they are of a certain stature, and their stature is not what it is because of their type of movement. Both are the result of some personal, mental, psychological characteristics. This is a complete verification, as far as it goes, of the meraphysicians' theory that kinesis and metakinesis are two aspects of a single underlying reality.

VIII EXTENSION OF RANGE

It is easy to see what this metakinetic concept did in the way of extending the range of the dance. So long as the entire emphasis was laid upon design, the colour of dancing was exceedingly limited. Design, no matter how well wrought and ingenious, can never as an abstract element be productive of anything even a t its best beyond pleasure to the eye, a certain esthetic satisfaction which results from contact with completeness of form, and to a degree a kinesthetic satisfaction in vicarious muscular experience for its own sake. These ingredients obviously wear thin very easily. By the time Noverre came upon the scene in the middle of the eighteenth century they had al-

CHARACTERISTICS

I7

ready worn so thin that he bent his every effort toward restoring their lost substance. This he felt could be done by making the dance an "imitative art" like the drama. Almost everybody who has wme after him has accepted his theory and continued the campaign of likeness to acting, until the theory was finally exploded in the experiments of the modernists, among them Diaghilee. The added range which was so greatly needed was supplied by these innovators in a measure by the introduction of pantomime in a more emphasised manner. This theoretically allowed for the expression of every human emotion and every conceivable dramatic situation which did not depend upon words. But the incongruousness of such a theory is apparent. To attempt to express dramatic ideas and personal experiences while standing with the feet in the fifth position, moving the arms in arbitrary arcs, is likely to be absurd. It is like trying to combine pure decoration and portraiture; to the extent that the result is pure decoration it is not portraiture and vice versa. Stereotyped movements can only express stereotyped concepts of emotion. As the highly individual shadings and gradations of personal emotion begin to colour these movements, they lose their classical perfection and become bad dancing. Thus the canvas has been marred two ways: to a certain extent we have limited the integrity of the emotion to conform to an arbitrary

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THE MODERN DANCE

code, and at the same time we have deviated from the arbitrary code in order to conform to emotional integrity. Diaghileff evidently realised the fallacy of this theory very clearly and up to the time of his death worked incessantly to supplant it with something sound. The glory of the Ballet Ruse in 1909 was not due to the discovery of any final form, of any permanent rule of procedure; it was only one more step in the endless progression which constitutes the history of every art. Though there are those who maintain that the dance has gone steadily downward since the days of "Scheherazade" and "Cleopatra" and "The Fire Bird," Diaghileff knew better. His later productions employed the services of choreographers, artists, musicians, who would aid him in the discovery of new forms suitable to the expression of new ideas. His experiments never achieved their goal and many of them remained tentative, and what the possibilities may be in his method of procedure we can only surmise. Certainly they would seem worth the efIort of further pursuit, if any artist can be found capable of pursuing them. In the meantime, the modern dancer has answered the riddle by discarding completely the theory of arbitrary forms and building on the principle that emotional experience can express itself through movement directly. Thus for the first time it has become possible to have a creative tragic

CHARACTERISTICS 19 dance as well as an abstract lyrical one. The theatre has its tragedies as well as its comedies, music is full of tragic compositions; but until Isadora Duncan convinced the world against its wifl, there was never a vision of a tragic dance such as the Greeks and their forebears knew. If she did not see clearly through to its creation, she at least saw its possibilities and made many glorious, unruly, lawless efforts at achieving them.

IX THE MODERN DANCE A POINT OF VIEW

From this desire to externalise personal, authentic experience, it is evident that the scheme of modern dancing is all in the direction of individualism and away from standardisation. That is why it is likely to be so confusing for the man in the street to go to dance recitals. He goes to one, and though he is bewildered, he thinks it over at home-for the purpose of illustration it is perhaps permissible to ideallise the man in the street to this extent-and decides that he sees the point. The next Sunday he goes to the recital of another dancer just to see if he is right about the theory he has worked out. But this second dancer does not do a single thing in the way the first one did. The poor fellow is hopelessly confused. If he is still courageous enough to try a third dancer on the chance of some possible reconciliation of

THE MODERN DANCE the~rg,he does so only to h d confusion worse confounded. Nevertheless, &ere is a great similarity throughout the dance field-that is, of course, the modern dance field. The mistake that is made is in looking for a standard system, a code such as charactericed the classic dance. The modern dance is not a system; it is z point of view. This point of view has been developing through the years, and it is by no means an isolated development. It has gone hand in hand with the development of points of view on other subjects. We have all, L am sure, become weary of hearing about the machine age and how it is killing all that is fine in life and how art cannot hope to survive. It is people who stopped thinking when dear Queen Victoria mounted the throne who lament thus, and it is they who find dancing gone to the dogs. It is an outlook that is posited upon either the inability or the unwillingness to undergo a change of mind. A number of such people somehow find their way into dance recitals, and if a collection of their remarks by way of criticism were to be published, it would become over night a standard textbook of misinformation. The first appearance of Mary Wigman in any community gives rise to priceless gems in this category, and Martha Graham's performances are also a prolific source. It is not only radical artists of this calibre, however, who draw out ex 20

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21

cathedra opinions from the disgruntled, but even so comparatively conservative a dancer as La Argentina. She has been accused of everything from being a man in disguise to having no rhythm!

PRACTICAL CONSIDERATION OF MOVEMENT

We have spoken about movement thus far mostly from a theoretical standpoint; now let us look at it in its practical aspects. To do so adequately requires turning back once more to a comparison of the various schools of dance thought and to trace through them the central idea of movement and its growth. When we first find dancing assuming something of a theatrical form-that is, after the antique days w e find it concerned little if at all with the movement of the body. The early ballets were inventions of floor design almost exclusively. It is not until the Renaissance that we see the first instances of an abandonment, or rather an enrichment, of this method. Then some attention was given to the configurations of the body in space, though how much or how little cannot be said. Gradually over a period of perhaps two centuries this changed attitude gained ground until finally it grew to be of the utmost importance in the ballet of the nineteenth century.

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THE MODERN DANCE

Through all these years two great innovations in movement were made, the two which distinguish the ballet to-day from all other schools. One was the turning out of the hips and the other was the rising upon the points of the toes. Much horrified criticism has been levelled at these two technical devices, by dancers who hold only with the so-called natural movement school, but both developments were entirely consistent with the theory of the dance which produced them. We must always remember that in the classic dance moving design was the main consideration. The human body in its natural position is considerably limited in its possibilities along this line, with the result that adventurous dancers must have been continually working and experimenting to increase its range. The natural movement of the legs, for example, is only backwards and forwards, with a slight swing to the side to allow for variation. When the entire leg is turned out from the hip we find that many more movements are possible. The leg can describe a half circle to the side either on the floor or at any height above the floor up to the level of the hip. Furthermore, with the feet in parallel lines, as in the fifth position, it is possible to make movements in straight lines to the sides without interference. With .the hips turned out, therefore, the dancer may move his body with apparent ease in any direction and still keep his face

CHARACTERISTICS to the audience. The advantage of this to an art that was in every way of the theatre, is readily seen. The rising upon the points of the toes is a result of the endeavour to increase the dancer's range of movement in a vertical direction. Leaps into the air are necessarily of brief duration and are the expression of a special muscular effort. They are examples of temporary elevation. But standing upon the points of the toes provides a position of more or less permanent elevation, a position of rest in the air, so to speak. The smaller the base upon which the weight is made to rest, the more eeective the illusion of suspension. The limitations of the human body in these directions, however, were long ago arrived at. In the socalled adagio dancing of to-day there is an apparent effort to reduce them further, but to all intents and purposes the range of the body can be said to have been discovered in its completeness. It is always a dangerous thing to make statements of finality like this, because nowadays it is impossible to tell when Professor Einstein or somebody else will do away with gravity or reveal a new physical dimension or something of the sort. At any rate, so far as we can see at present there is nothing left for the body to acquire in directional freedom.

THE MODERN DANCE

REACTION AGAINST MUSCULARITY

By the end of the nineteenth century the dance had become a pretty sterile business. The dancer's body was a fine machine, no doubt, after the generations of efforts that had gone into making it so, but it was a machine which could not manufacture anything. It worked only for the sake of working. In short, the movement of the dancer was nothing but gymnastics. If you will look back at the systems of physical education that prevailed at that time you will find that they were quite consistent with the ideals of the dancer's technique. Muscularity and strength were the objects of all exercise. Every boy wanted to be a Sandow, and the muscle that was somehow of primary importance was the biceps. There is still, of course, a great deal of this muscle worship in vogue to-day. We have only to glance a t the advertisements in a certain type of magazine to see that weaklings are being urged to transform themselves into such specimens of magnificence as are pictured there with lumps and cords of muscle protruding from every square inch of their exposed anatomy. Many physical culture systems are productive of nothing in the end but stagnation, for when certain spectacular muscles are developed to inordinate size they merely interfere with movement and the body becomes muscle

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2s

bound. But this is only a hang-over of old methods and not at all representative of the times. When the reaction set in it swung much too far in the opposite direction, as so often happens with reactions, particularly inspired reactions. The young radicals, led by Isadora Duncan, scoffed at gymnasticism and talked about the soul. Isadora even went so far as to locate it in the body at the solar plexus. Physical movement in this period of romanticism was largely of the variety that is called natural and, strictly speaking, was without any sort of technique. If the dancer felt deeply, was stirred by emotional music, and could more or less keep time, it did not matter very much what the body did.

XI1 DELSARTE

At its best, however, this period made substantial contributions to the dance. It was in a very evident way an outgrowth of the teachings of Delsarte. In fact, there is every reason to believe that Isadora herself was much influenced by Delsarte, either directly or indirectly. There is a rumour that the influence was decidedly direct in that she actually studied the Delsarte system. Though this is only a rumour which has never been substantiated it has value even on that basis, for it indicates that the similarity between Isadora's theories an.d Delsarte's was recognised either by the latter's followers who

"

THE MODERN DANCE wished to give him all the glory or by Isadora's enemies who chose to discredit her. In her autobiography, she tells of her youth in a household where the reading of poetry and the recitation of "pieces" was a regular practice; and there is an account of a visiting aunt who specialised in this sort of thing. Certainly nobody who indulged in this popular pastime of the period could have been untouched by Delsarte teachings. It is perhaps well to pause for a moment to consider these teachings briefly. Delsarte is a much maligned individual who will probably never receive his just due. When he died he left no concrete work behind him by which his reputation could hope to be maintained on a level of justice. Though he had made copious notes on his theories and experiments, he had never published them and consequently when he was no longer present to object, his pupils rushed into print with highly contradictory "textbooks." When his daughter came to America in the 'go's, she was reported as being horrified at the things that were being taught in her father's name. From the very small amount of information that gives internal evidence of being reliable, however, it is possible to form an estimate of the value of his work. As a vocal and later a dramatic student a t the Acadernie in Paris, he was completely disgusted by the arbitrary teaching he received. To this he attributed the loss of his singing voice. Not only was

CHARACTERISTICS everything cut and dried, but all the teachers told him different things until he was in a state of hopeless confusion. He determined, therefore, to do his own research and to find for himself the truth of dramatic method. The only source to which he could go was to life directly. So he set out on perhaps the most exhaustive research that has ever been made into the subject of gesture. To him the crime of crime was a gesture without a meaning. In order to find out how meaning externalised itself physically in gesture and carriage, he studied human beings in every possible state of physical and emotional strain, and made minute records of the positions of their hands, the droop of their mouths, the elevation of their eyebrows, etc. He went to hospitals, to morgues, to insane asyIurns. As an example of his patience, it is related of him that he went day after day to a park where nurses from the country took the children of their employers for the daily airing. He watched every detail of the relation that existed between the nurses and their charges when they were new on the job and the changes that came about in this relation as an affection grew between them. He saw a difference develop in the position of the thumb when the nurse handled a strange child and when she handled a child for whom she had acquired an attachment. It is true, of course, that to a certain extent the form in which he couched his work discounted the work itself. The working out of a code depicting

28

THE MODERN DANCE

the natural reactions of the body to mental and emotional stimuli must inevitably have militated against that very ideal of natural, significant gesture which inspired it. His students who had not shared the vitality of his research made even more impossible the establishment of a genuinely freeing method of gesture; they succeeded only in substituting an arbitrary code based on sound principles for an arbitrary code based on dead tradition. The principles themselves, however, were absolutely sound. They not only animated the romantic revolution of thirty years ago, but still animate the modern movement. "No movement without a meaning." XIII The romanticists objected to machine-made movement, so they decided to make their movement without any machine, without any mechanism. Of course it could not be done. In repudiating muscularity, they turned to a sort of mystical hokus-pokus and relied on that to produce their results. Some of the systems that grew up in this period and still exist are completely absurd. Others might be funny if they were not actually pernicious. This was the period of the rhythm systems. Rhythm became the catchword; it cured disease, restored prosperity and worked every conceivable type of

CHARACTERISTICS

39

wonder. In some cases, rhythm was used, consciously or otherwise, to produce hypnosis in much the same way that crystal gazing produces it. It was made to occupy the conscious thought of the subject while the instructor suggested his will to the subconscious. I have known people to be taught under this type of rhythm to do all sorts of fantastic things such as sculpturing with their eyes closed. Why they could not be taught to do it with their eyes open is not clear to me, except in a figurative sense. One girl reported with enthusiasm a rhythmic system that she found very inspiring because it was so far removed from the physical; they were taught to dance, it seems, from the tops of their heads up! This sounds like foolishness, but it is absolutely true. To be sure, only the elect who knew the method could get anything out of watching such dancing as this, but the elect were always enthusiastic. There were other systems which turned to what they called nature rhythms. They patterned the movement of the body upon some so-called fundamental rhythm which was to be found in the opening of flowers and the growing of trees and the flowing of water. Now, it might be unwise to go on record as declaring that there is no such fundamental rhythm in nature. There may be, especially since rhythm is an extraordinarily elastic word; but such pursuits belong, if anywhere, to philosophy or science and not to the dance.

30

THE MODERN DANCE

The type of movement superinduced by these various rhythm schools is weak and effeminate. If it has any value at all it is to the participant and not to the spectator. The movement itself does not convey the idea which is said to be its basis, for this idea is an external, intellectual concept, as remote from movement as emotion is from the fifth position of the much despised ballet. All this is by no means to infer that the romantic movement was without importance. On the contrary, it broke the tyranny of the classic decadence and, as has already been pointed out, it contained the germ of the idea upon which the modern dance has been built. Where the classic decadence was a machine that manufactured nothing, and the romantic revolution was an attempt to manufacexpress ture something without a machine-to something outside and above oneself, the modern dance has arisen to manufacture something with a highly perfected machine-to express only what is in and of one's own experience, transformed and lifted out of the commonplace and the personal by the very process of artistic creation, of zsthetic form. It is doubtless unnecessary, but nevertheless safest, to state here in unequiv&al terms that there is a vast difference between expressing what is in and of one's own experience and that horrible practice known as self-expression. The latter is usually either exhibitionism pure and simple, or an emo-

CHARACTERISTICS

3

*

tional debauch, or a combination of the two. The fine artist is never guilty of it; he knows that his self is nothing but an instrument for the expression of the truth he perceives, and the more transparent it can be kept the clearer will be the image he projects through it.

XIV DYNAMISM

So far we have considered two of the four distinctive points of the modern danct-movement as substance, and metakinesis. The third of these points is dynamism. When we see that the dance is not a series of connected postures but is rather the stuff that connects the postures, so to speak, we arrive at the conclusion that the dance consists of continuous or sustained movement. This movement contains no static elements, no attitudes however decorative which might be considered as points of rest. Now, as a matter of fact, we know that there are actually pauses in dances, and that if there were not we would have a hard time clarifying phrases. But there is never a moment when the dancer lapses into natural physical rest until the dance, or the particular section of the dance if it is a work in several parts, is finished. Perhaps it may illustrate this point to think of a ball bouncing. There may be moments when the ball is comparatively at rest, -

32

THE MODERN DANCE

as for example when it is in the hand between bounces, -but it is never actually so until the game ends. Similarly there are moments when the body of the dancer is comparatively at rest, when the muscular effort is less than at other times. Obviously it would be almost impossible and quite undesirable to keep sustained movement always at the same degree of intensity. The new German dance lays great emphasis upon this element of dynamism. Throughout the studios of Germany you will hear the phrase "Anspannung und Abspamung" over and over again-the ebb and flow of muscular impulses. It was perhaps Rudolf von Laban who was primarily responsible for this emphasis. In his early considerations of the dance it became clear that since the dance was composed of movement and movement resulted from muscular action, the whok range of the dance, as of movement, lay between the extremes of complete relaxation and complete tension. All movement inherently possesses force and intensity. The quality of the movement, therefore, is to a great extent regulated by its quantity-by the degree or amount of force or intensity it contains. This gives to the dance its only purely m w cular rhythm. It is in a sense akin to the musical variation from loud to soft, though it is much wider in its application and more vital to the actual substance of the dance. It is of value according to its degree, the speed and range of its variation, its

CHARACTERISTICS

33 distribution among the parts of the body, and its representational implications. The fourth distinctive point of the modern dance is the discarding of all traditional requirements of form and the establishment of a new principle upon which each dance makes its own form. This is a subject that demands consideration on its own account at some length.

PART 12 FORM

DISCUSSION of the subject of form involves at the outset an excursion into the realm of aesthetics no matter how much one may wish to avoid it. This is always a dangerous region, for there are as many philosophies as there are philosophers, and more dissenting opinions from all of them than there are followers of any of them. In considering the dance there is likely to be a very general departure in certain instances from accepted standards because the dance has been enormously sli~hted-deliberatelysnubbed, in fact. This seems a bit difficult to understand when we realise that of all the arts the dance is the only one which creates its forms equally and simultaneously in time and space. In order that we may understand each other it is necessary to stop at the very beginning for a definition of terms. There is no intention here of expounding an ;esthetic philosophy, and the right is reserved to repudiate any or all of the grandiose definitions about to be given, the day after to34

FORM

35

morrow. The purpose of giving them is solely to make clear what is meant in this particular place by the use of certain terms which are usually subject to wide diversity of opinion and much contention. Let me repeat that they are not offered for your acceptance, and against any attack they will go undefended. The only reason for their use here is to clarify what is to be said about the matter of dance form. When the word "art" is used it may be taken to mean the process whereby one individual conveys from his consciousness to that of another individual a concept which transcends his powers of rational statement. This concept need not be anything profound or esoteric, else we would have to exclude the decorative arts. It may be merely that contemplation of abstract perfection which never ceases to tittilate the uthetic sensitivity by exquisite design. The cover of a book, the design of wall paper, the border on a dress, may all produce an uthetic effect through form rather than through content. Form, then, is capable of operating of itself. It may, indeed, be defined as the result of unifying diverse elements whereby they achieve collectively an uthetic vitality which except by this association they would not possess. The whole thus becomes greater than the sum of all its parts. This unifying process by which form is attained is known as composition.

THE MODERN DANCE

n BEAUTY THE EFFECTIVENESS OF FORM

Beauty, in so far as art is concerned, is the qudity which the receptive mind attaches to the perception of uthetic form. It is, so to speak, the effectiveness of form. It is not a quality in the object itself, but arises "in the eye of the beholder" when his requirements of form have been satisfied. It is entirely relative, therefore. In considering the modem dance it is well to be perfectly clear on the use of this term, for the most common accusation that is hurled against the modern dance is that it has no power of beauty, which is an accusation decidedly removed from the truth. The more accurate statement of the case would be that some people have no athetic response to the modern dance. This puts the limitation on those individual minds where it belongs, instead of wiping out an entire movement. The misapprehension arises from a narrow application of certain essentials of art-form, rhythm, beauty. The man whose zsthetic sensibilities are slight, either through natural disinclination or underdevelopment, looks for one of two things when he approaches a work of art-ither an intellectual rationalism expressed in literary allusions as a rule, or sensual satisfaction. Neither of these has anything to do with the functions of art. -

-

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37

The intellect is manifestly the wrong receiving instrument for that which by its very nature excludes rational statement, for it must thereby also exclude rational reception and perception. Science is the medium for intellectual activity; art has nothing in common with it. The senses are channels by means of which contact is established with the outside world. The beauty which serves to fiU them only impedes this contact. William Blake uttered a fundamental artistic canon when he wrote : "We are led to believe a lie, When we see witb, not through, the eye." We cannot perceive beauty, art, rhythm, form, with the eye or the ear; we must use the eye and the ear simply as channels through which beauty, art, rhythm, form, are conveyed to the perception. It is this gross attitude which has led to the misunderstanding and condemnation and even at certain periods of history to the suppression of a r t - a n d reasonably enough from its own point of view.

FALSE SENSE OF BEAUTY

This false sense of beauty, this desire to believe a lie, has always been the cause of artistic decadence. In describing what he feels to be a decadence in Greek architecture, I. K. Pond in "The Meaning of Architecture" says that the Greek in his finest

38 THE MODERN DANCE period kept his architecture simple and eloquent. "When an obstacle was to be overcome, the Greek met it with just the force necessary and with no wasted effort. When he encountered that which was pregnant with the possibilities of ugliness, he opposed a resistance which seemed inevitably to express itself in a line of beauty, a line which imparted a feeling of serenity and poise and emotional restraint that was an inspiration to the beholder. He did not dissipate his effort by distributing it over the entire field, but applied it a t the point where it would be most effective in bringing functional activities into proper relationship." He then looks at the Doric column as "representing the simplest as well as the oldest and most virile expression." "The impression conveyed is strong," he says, "that the movement within the column was merely an aspiring desire until the weight of the entablature was superimposed, and then it became a living force meeting the obstacle with a characteristically beautiful line." He describes the Ionic as lacking the strength and masculinity of the Doric but having a "charming and gracious feminine appeal." In the development of the Corinthian he sees the beginning of the decadence. Here he sees "a descent from the high intellectual plane to the emotional, or rather, the sentimental. The demands of luxury and the desire for ornament for its own sake have been met in some manner other should than in perverting and displacing truly functional

...

...

...

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39

forms. The Corinthian builders, lovers of ornament for its own sake, were not content with functional expression no matter how highly idealised. They of themselves or through contact with the Doric and the lonic realised the real meaning of the capital, knew that it 'exemplified a conflict,' but did not see fit to beautify the struggle; they sought rather to conceal it; and so they bound a beautiful acanthus fillet around the 'sore' spot, and hid, as it were, the functioning forms with a fig leaf Here is a concise statement of tbe beginnings of decadence in any art. Beyond these beginnings there are to be found, especially in the dance, developments away from fundamentals in the direction of refinements which r d t in a complete negation of those fundamentals. If we tear away the fig leaf we find, alas, no functioning forms beneath them. The false sense of beauty proves itself to be sterile, a lie.

."

IV TENTATNE DEFINITION OF RHYTHM

There is one more term I should like to define before we go further. That is rhythm, always a dangerous and contentious subject. A little later we shall discuss the manner of its functioning; for the present we shall be content with formulating a tentative definition. As it concerns art, rhythm may be said to be the

40 THE MODERN DANCE aspect of recurrent movement in the point of interest between two or more bases, actual or hypo-

thetical, in either time or space or both.

As in the

case of beauty, rhythm is not a property of the

object; it depends upon the receptivity of the subject. What is rhythmic to a man of sensitive perception may utterly elude another who is not so keen* DScult though it is to comprehend, the criticism of being unrhythmic has been hurled more than once by casual concert-goers at La Argentina! Since there is nothing at all transcendental or esoteric about her rhythmic sense, it is almost inconceivable that it should be beyond the comprehension of any normal human being, subtle and contrapuntal though it appears in her compositions. On the other hand, the insistent thump, thump, thump of the miserable type of jazz which is dispensed by the neighbour's radio for a considerable number of hours a day must give him some pleasure though it seriously offends the taste of the more cultivated, and is in no sense significant from an osthetic point of view. It is built upon two rhythm bmes-silence and accent-which alternate with unfailing regularity at a tempo just in excess of the normal blood pulse. The effect is hypnotic in a marked degree, and physiological in that it tends to increase the blood pulse and to produce thereby a false stimulation. This hypnotic effect of elementary rhythms persisted in over a period of time was well known to primitive man and was used

FORM

41

deliberately by him in the production of frenzy and unconsciousness.

v

NECESSITY OF FORM

Sometimes we find free souls in the arts who do not believe in the necessity of form. Their argument is that the art impulse comes from within and should not be tampered with. It should be allowed just to flow as it will. Now this is a perfectly sound theory if the effect of the experience is designed only for the artist; if it is designed for the onlooker, the theory is thoroughly untenable. According to the definition of art which we have chosen to abide by for the time being, such expressions are not to be included at all as works of art. Let us look at the dance specifically in this connection. If we go back to primitive sources, as we must to get a clear idea of the origin and essence of dancing, we find several different kinds of dancing. There was, for one, the play dance; that is, the dance that was designed primarily for the discharge of surplus energy. If it was performed by a single dancer, it had no need of form. If it was performed by a group of dancers, however, it needed an order of procedure so that all the dancers could be working together. This is the origin of many purely social, folk dance forms and of many ballroom dances up to a generation ago. Another class of dance is erotic in origin and pur-

42

THE MODERN DANCE

pose. It is inclined to be representational rather than formal. Nearly all of the dances of Spain and many of those of the Orient, as well as practically all of contemporary Western ballroom dancing, come under this category. It is interesting to note in passing that in dances of this character the curved line is predominant in design. Sometimes this is for the sake of emphasising the natural curves of the body and sometimes it is to keep the eye of the onlooker constantly returning to the body. In any number of erotic dances both these purposes are rendered more effective by the use of a scarf which is wound and unwound for the sake of anatomical emphasis. If this seems an unsavory background for the many ethereal chiffon-waving exhibitions by our poetic sisters of the scarf -andogarland school of dancing, they have only themselves to blame. In another type of dance, repetition was, and still is, in many cases, employed for the production of auto-intoxication and hypnosis. Such dances are generally religious in intention; they are preliminary to a state of delirium which is considered to be the ecstasy of priestcraft in which super-human wisdom is acquired; or at the other extreme, they are to induce oblivion in which the gods allow plagues and disasters to be forgotten for a time. There are also large quantities of pantomimic dances in celebration of specific events and for magical purposes. In these as in the others mentioned above two general classes appear of their own

FORM accord: those in which the dancer dances for an effect upon himself alone and those in which the spectator forms an important element. In the first class, form is of no importance, except in proportion as the dancer constitutes his own audience; in the second class, form is of utmost importance. Let us take an example of the latter class which is so fundamentd that it can be said to characterise the entire class. This is the dance in which primitive man expressed through movement concepts which he felt must be expressed and for which his intellectual means of expression were inadequate. In finding a way to make his intention understandable to his fellows he evolved a dance form which is the model for the form of the modern dance, and which, indeed, has based all art form. Simply to let the movement flow as it would, gave him perhaps an outlet for his emotions but it produced no corresponding effect upon others. To make himself clear he found that he had to repeat certain movements and certain sequences several times. Still further to point his intention he found he must eliminate all but the essential details and concentrate upon them with all his force. Even something more than this appeared necessary for certain passages, so that he heightened them by stamping his feet and clapping his hands and singing. Thus in primitive dancing were uncovered the chief elements of form: accent, repetition, contrast (which can be summed up as rhythm), and distortion.

THE MODERN DANCE

DISTORTION AND IDEALISATION

Distortion is a word which apparently throws terror into the mind of the casual observer of art. The word he prefers to use is idealisation, though there is no essential difference in the actual meaning of the two terms. Idealisation, however, has grown to entail certain spurious concepts of beauty which lead us back to the fallaciousness of the Corinthian fig leaf theory. Since the use of the term distortion requires defence so frequently, let us pause for a moment to consider the facts, even though to do so involves becoming a little precious. It is unnecessary to quote any remote or inaccessible authorities; Webster's well known dictionary will sufke. In that handy compendium we find the word distort defined in part as "to twist out of natural or regular shape," and the word idealise defined in part as "to attribute ideal characteristics and excellences to." The former is seen to be the broader term in that it does not specify what sort of characteristics may under its sanction be attributed to an object, while the latter imposes a limitation of ideal characteristics and excellences. If the word ideal is taken in its broader sense to mean conceptual, the limitation is rendered less important ; but in ordinary usage ideals and idealisation have to do with "archetypes of perfection."

FORM "In literature and art," Webster says of idealism specifically, "the theory or practice which values ideal or subjective types or aspects of beauty more than formal or sensible qualities, or that which affirms the pre-eminent value of imagination as compared with faithful copying of nature ;--opposed to realism. In critical discussion idealism is generally thought of as laying stress on imagination as the shaping or selective faculty by which the confusion and multiplicity of detail in nature and human life is ordered by the artist according to a preconceived type, or moral or asthetic ideal. The product of idealistic art thus differs from that of realistic art more or less as a portrait differs from a photograph. As variously emphasised, its operation may at one extreme amount to a license in manipulating facts and a straining of likelihood in the interest of the ideal, while at the other it may differ from artistic realism only in further selection and heightening of the pertinent in fact and detail." Idealisation, then, is a departure from the norm of nature, and therefore is distortion; in that its departure from the norm is limited to a certain field a t least, since it is so limited by popular usage, for by definition the limitation is seen largely to disappear-it can be said to be one form of distortion, or, perhaps more accurately, one motive for distortion. The actual process of twisting out of natural shape remains distortion.

THE MODERN DANCE

VII DISTORTION INDISPENSABLE

Distortion is an indispensable element of all art, whether it calls itself realistic or otherwise. It need not imply hideousness, however, though it does imply a changing of the forms of nature. It may imply beautification as it did in the Greek code. The Greeks departed just as inescapably from nature when they portrayed the ideal of physical beauty in their sculpture rather than its actuality, as the modern painter who indulges in wry faces. The difference in response is obvious. As a matter of fact, the general acceptance of Greek art is by no means equivalent to a general appreciation of it. The chances are that the idealisation of the physical body arouses a sensual satisfaction far more often than it does an zsthetic response. It serves merely to clog the channels of perception. This is true in large measure of all idealisation; if it does not halt with an appeal to the senses, it usually comes to a stop in some moralistic platitude. In pursuit of an escape from its culs-de-sac the modern artist has sought the wider utilisation of distortion. Distortion is the result upon an object of accent and elimination. I t controls the rhythm that is produced within the frame of the work of art, so to speak, the internal rhythm that relates itself to design. In addition it sets up what we may call an

FORM

47

external rhythm, a rhythm that extends outside the

f tame of the work of art, and gives rise to the keenest d e t i c experience. This external rhythm has as i a bws the onlooker's memory and knowledge of actuality on the one hand, and the artist's presentation of a variation from this actuality on the other. Thus during the contact of the o d d e r with the object there is set up within him a powerful rhythm which is the very root of the aesthetic experience. One may say, then, that the principal rhythm of any composition is that which deals with a variation from the norm.

VIII DISTORTING FOR DESIGN

Art and nature are irreconcilable opposites. For this reason natural movements and natural rhythms are impossible materials for the art dance. They have their place undoubtedly in education and in play, but not in art. The classic ballet employed distortion to a great degree and altogether in the interest of design. It made the body capable of doing things that were contrary to nature and by so doing increased the scope of its aesthetic form. This distortion was prompted solely, however, by the exigencies of design in the abstract and in no degree by the inner compulsion to convey emotional experience which prompted the distortion of the primitive dancer and which prompts the distortion of the modern

THE MODERN DANCE dancer. It therefore hit upon a snag, because, try as

48

we may, we can never make the body wholly ab-

stract*Any movement, no matter how far removed from norm?l experience, still conveys an impression which is related to normal experience. There is a kinesthetic response in the body of the spectator which to some extent reproduces in him the uperience of the dancer; if the dancer performs some movement without the motivation of inner compulsion, the spectator wiIl experience no inner responsiveness. The feeling is likely to be one of emptiness except for the fatigue of physical exertion, or perhaps, if there has been contortion for the sake of virtuosity, a reaction of distaste for the abnormal. If the design itself is suficiently brilliant to intrigue the inteiIect, there may be compensation To be m e , there is always the possibility that the dancer may be able to transmute an arbitrary code of movement into an "idealisation" of natural movement, into a consistent point of view or basis for comment upon natural movement. If this can be done, we will once more have a great ballet art. At present, the abstraction is interfered with by the fact that the dancer is a human being with feeling, and the emotional element is destroyed by the fact that the movement is abstract.

FORM

PRACTICAL ASPECT OF DESIGN

The very fact of design is itself a form of distortion*Design does not involve any strange esoteric principles, though there is a strong propaganda constantly in action to the effect that it does. The minor artist, the poetaster, would h a y s like to create an aura about himself, to make himself sean to be actuated by some supernatural force, to set himself up as a being superior to and apart from his fellows by the action of destiny. As a matter of fact, there is nothing mysterious in the least about art, form, rhythm, or m y of the other shibboleths of zstheticiam. Problems of form and design enter into the daily life of every individual and he practises them without awe or preciousness. Every human being r e h to some -tent that he must order his actions and his thinking. If he does not, he will find himself pushed aside, not only by his more alert fellows, but by the orderly laws which govern the universe. It is quite natural, then, that a perception of th perfection of abstract order in pure design should awaken in him a recognition which will set in motion that rhythm between his own experience and the artist's presentation that is the basis of the mthetic experience. Balance, symmetry, emphas, continuity, climax, are all problems of daily life-of walking and eat-

THE MODERN DANCE ing, of selling and buying. Without this relationship to experience, form in the sense of pure design would have no part in art. Form in less attenuated aspects than that of pure design, is obviously of wider service. It is merely the ordering of parts. Let us take a few crude examples, dealing not at all with uthetic experience, but entirely with the practical aspects of form and design. Suppose I extend my arm so that my hand is at the centre of a hypothetical weather vane, and from this point as a centre I move my hand in the four directions in the following sequence: north, north, east, north, south, north, west, east, south, south, west, east, east, west, south, west. The watcher, unless he is exceptionally acute, will be quite unable to tell me what I have done or how many times I have moved in each direction. Now suppose I make exactly the same movements in a different sequence, as follows: north, east, south, west, north, east, south, west, north, east, south, west, north, east, south, west. The' watcher will now be able to tell me at once exactly what I have done and how many times I have moved in each direction. If by chance he is a slow thinker, he has the materials in such a form that after I have concluded my movements he can look back over than in memory and count them. Let us take another equally crude illustration. Suppose I tap upon the table with a pencil, dividing the intervals between taps into long and short dura-

FORM tions, as follows: long, short, long, long, short, short, long, long, short, long, short, long, short, short, long, long, long, short, long, long. Again, the listener k not likely to have any impression of what I have done, but he will have no &culty at all if I rearrange the taps as follows: short, short, long, long, long, short, short, long, long, long, short, short, long, long, long, short, short, long, long, long. The first example is a very elementvy pattern in space and the second a very elementary pattern in time. In each case the design is formed from the crude elements by arranging these elements in relation to ach other. They could, of course, be arranged in other relath to each other than these I h v e chosen. When the arrangement has been made, we find that we have separated the elements into phrases. Each of these phrases can be related to other phrases of Merent pattern in a relationship as close as that whkh exists between the atnits in the individual phrase, and so the pattern can grow indefinitely. Repetition, con~ast,accent, appear naturally in the process. In th making of these patterns, the original material has been greatly disturbed. In the making of any pattern, the material is inevitably disturbed, twisted out of its original condition, distorted. In the very business of thus disturbing and distorting it, however, has developed comprehensibility which was not there before. The elements themselves, bar in mind, have not been altered in any way; there

THE MODERN DANCE are as many long and short intervals in the second arrangement as in the first, as many east and west movements in the second arrangements as in the first. Whereas they were unintelligible, they have 52

become intelligible. Thus in the distortion of nature in compositions that involve more important elements than these examples, nature has not been damaged in any way. It has rathu been made intelligible; it does not matter in the least that in the process it has been necessary to place its elements in a relation to each other which they do not have in life, to givesome of them a value beyond what casual experience gives than, to omit entirely others that assume importance in d d y routine. DESIGN IN SPACE

In the dance a condition exists which is not to be found in any of the other arts, b e c a w the dance deals in more dimensions than any of them. Dance designs are built inevitably in time, space, dynamism and metakineses. It is impossibk to eliminate any one of them at any time. That is to say, the dancer cannot make a movement which does not occupy tiw, cover space, involve energy a d have a motivation. This involves more than appears on the surface. Let us take for example the matter of space. We arc accustomed to hearing of the desiga of dances

in the old school as consisting of a floor plan or horizontal design, and the configurations oi the body in the air or vertical design. This would be perfectly satisfactory if the dancer were moving on the outside of a cube, but he is not. He is a threedimensional instrument and moves in space; that is, his movements have not only length and breadth but depth and thickness as we& In the old ballets, the floor plan was the only consideration. The dancers moved in intricate figurations which if outlined with chalk upon the floor would have represented roses and other elaborate patterns. Presumably nobody was supposed to look for design elsewhere than in the path of the feet, but nevertheless the body was carrying around with it a potential sphere of space in which it was equipped to move, and in which, indeed, it was moving whether with an intention toward design or not. Furthermore, this sphere of space bore a definite relation to the total of enclosed space in which the dance was performed and also to the spheres of space occupied by the other dancers. The spatial problem of composition is therefore in itself a complicated one. No movement can be made in line; it must be made in volume. Where a single dancer is concerned, there are separate fields of action for the head, the two arms, the torso, the two lepindeed, there is actually a separate field of action wherever there is a physical joint to allow for a change of direction. These fields of action may

THE MODERN DANCE be employed with the focus of attention upon any one of them singly or upon any number of them together. Their relationship to the total of enclosed space may also be altered at will. Where more than one dancer is performing, the possibilities are increased in geometrical proportion, With the addition of dancers there also enter other possibilities such as identical movement and the expanding or contracting of the area of space which is made to contain movement. By this latter consideration is meant the choice which exists between placing the dancers in such relation to each other that their individual spheres of movement are separate from each other, and placing them in such relation to each other that their spheres of movement overlap, thus filling only a small portion of the total of enclosed space. In the handling of groups this is frequently a matter that is overlooked and dancers are allowed to interfere with each other and with the general design by careless spatial planning. In addition to all these things, there is the actual size of various movements to be considered as they effect the scale of the composition, as well as direction which constitutes a major problem in itself. 54

SPACE-TIME PATTERNS

If this were all the elements that enter into dance composition, it would still be more than enter into

FORM

the!composition of the majority of tbc other arts; but there is a great deal more. No body can move through space without occupying time. As a matter of fact, no body can even occupy space without also occupying time, but that is pressing the point beyond the limits of practical usefulness. At this juncture the relationship between dancing and music enters, but the problems of time design can be considered somewhat apart from music. Patterns in time involve speed-that is, the duntion of units and their rate of succession-periodicity of stress, and the regularity or irregularity of the intervals between stresses. The great differentiation between composition in time and composition in space lies in the fact that space compositions work with more or less fixed units while time compositions do not. The space problem may be reduced to the matter of placing the human body in relation to a specific area. Space composition unites its elements simultaneously and therefore can utilise only such elements and so many of them as the eye can grasp at one instant. This arbitrary limitation does not exist to set up a specific time area. Time composition unites its elements in succession and so long as they a n kept in relation to each other and to the of the whole they may go on indefinitely. In the dance, however, there is never an occasion when one can be employed without the other. As we found in the case of space composition that

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there could be no such thing as vertical design and hotizontd design separate from each other, so there can be no such thing in dance compocition as space design and time design separate from each other. All the patterns of the dance must be space-time patterns. Now a space-time pattern is quite a different thing from a space pattern and a P pattern operating together. A cube is not a combination of six plan& at the proper angles; its very cubicalnes rats upon the existence of a new dimension. A sphere perhaps presents a more fitting illustration, for though it possesces both width and height, it has no two-dimensional aspects; no two-dimensional surfaces, so to speak. As in the case of the cube, i c ~ cubicalness is not interfered with by the fact that it has in addition flat surfaces complete in themselves, so in the dance there may be perfectly valid space patterns and time patterns; they are merely incidental, however, as the faces of the cube are incidental. Again, flat surfaces may be put together without forming a cube, and similarly time patterns and space may be put together without forming space-time patterns. Unfortunately, this frequently happens in the dance. It is simply an indication that the dancer has neglected or ignored the dimensions in which his art exists, has not experienced the awareness of its essential "cubicalness." Some dancers ignore other dimensions; there are those, for example, who are

FORM said to be musical; who are inclined to ignore space patterns, and those who are said to be pictorial or geometrical who ignore to some extent the requirements of time design. As we have seen, the composers of the ballets of the I 5th century were quite content to ignore all but floor plan. Let it be repeated with whatever force may be brought to bear, that the dimensions of the dance are, except in theory, inseparable. We know that when in geometry we refer to a line as having no dimension except length, we are speaking theoretically; what we mean is that for the moment we are considering no other dimension. In the dance we may likewise consider one dimension at a time, we may even emphasise one deliberately at the expense of others in the interests of certain results in composition, but we cannot compose without actually utilising them all. These thin& appear commonplace and obvious when set down thus for consideration; we need only look at the dance itself, however, to see how they have escaped the notice of composers. There have been centuries of disregard for metakinesis and dynamism in the classic dance, and decades of disregard for space-time patterns in the so-called free dance. Only with the rise of the modern dance have all the dimensions of the dance begun to be apprehended and accorded their due values.

THE MODERN DANCE

STRESS AND DYNAMISM

The dynamic element finds its most widespread service in the giving of stress. Without variations in the intensity of movement, phrasing would be greatly hampered and rhythm seriously limited. To be sure, it is possible to achieve stress by repetition and contrast instead of by an increase of power, but the simplest and clearest accent is usually that which gives more force to one specific element than t o those about it. Besides this matter of stress, dynamism is an inescapable quality of dancing, because it is impossible to make any movement without some intensity. If there is no gradation in intensity, this is not to do away with the consideration of dynamism, but is simply to induce dynamic monotony. The dancer who has the greatest fluidity of movement is the one who has the best dynamic control. It is this control of the flow of movement which makes it possible to conceive of dance movement as a substance. If, then, the composition is to be built in a solid medium, so to speak, instead of being a collection of separate attitudes strung together like beads on a string, the unifying element of dynamism must be made to play a large part. That it sets up its own rhythms is also true--crossrhythms between tension and relaxation. It is dy-

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namism that controls the muscular phrase, that is, the succession of variations in movement which are performed on a sustained muscular impulse. In rest, -that is, in the perfect normal relaxation of the body with yet enough tension to support it,-we have something of a physical counterpart of the tonic chord in music.

XI11 FORM AND METAKINESIS

Thus far we have discussed purely physical aspects of dance form. With metakineses we come to the most intangible as well as the most important of its considerations. The dancer's ability or inclination to use the overtones of movements to convey his intention determines to a very large extentindeed, almost entire1y-his type of dancing. At its highest point of development we find the so-called expressionistic dancing with Mary Wigman as an outstanding practitioner. This class of dance is in effect the modern dance in its purest manifestation. The basis of each composition in this medium lies in a vision of something in human experience which touches the sublime. Its externalisation in some form which can be apprehended by others comes not by intellectual planning but by "feeling through" with a sensitive body. The first result of such creation is the appearance of certain entirely authentic movements which are as closely

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THE MODERN DANCE

allied to the emotional experience as an instinctive recoil is to an experience of fear. In this process are evolved movements which may never have been seen before in a dance but which are nevertheless the inevitable material for this particular composition. When these movements have been arranged in rhythmic relation to each other, the arrangement dictated still by the logic of the inner feeling but at the same time productive of an aesthetic reaction in an onlooker, the composition is complete. This type of dance is generally of the utmost simplicity. It cannot permit of ornamentation, for that would only defeat its purpose of expression. Frequently it establishes its rhythms with great clarity and thereafter touches only the high spots of its design, leaving it to you to fill in the space and complete the form. When this is accomplished, the highest type of aesthetic reaction has been produced. It has sometimes been said of dancing of this sort that it lacks variety, but this is a misstatement of the case. It may not reveal its variety to certain spectators who are not equipped to see it. The man who is looking for routines, for "steps" and "tricks," of course wilI not find them, and because he does not know how to look for anything else he will naturally miss the almost unlimited variety which is before him. Metakinesis is sometimes applied literally through pantomime, generally in dances with a literary program. The pantomimic or literary dance is not a

FORM pure type of dancing, but is a leaning toward that subdivision of dancing which we call acting. In dances of this description the considerations of time and space patterns are of minor importance. The process of composition develops through a series of incidents generally concerned with external agencies Its form is governed by dramatic laws, and movement serves a secondary purpose. At the farthest extreme from the purely pantomimic dance we find that type of composition which seeks its effects through abstractions and ignores as far as may be all metakinetic considerations. Between these types there are to be found any number of variations, and any of them is good w k n it produces its effect. T o be sure, no dancer when he sets out to make a dance sits down and calculates all the various types of patterns and rhythms and dimensions he must work with. The technique of composition, like other techniques, is of no use until it is learned and forgotten and some of it has stuck in the process. The part that is retained is the part that is of service to him; the rest he need not bother to carry about with him, for he has not made it his own.

PART ZZZ TECHNIQUE

'

ARTIST AND TECHNICIAN

HE term "technique" is one that requires a great deal of clarification. We sometimes

IL speak of a dancer as a good technician but

not much of an artist, which is a conceivable combination; when, however, we speak of a dancer as being a good artist but not much of a technician, we have failed to express ourselves clearly. Technique in its broadest sense means merely the way in which a thing is done. It does not imply any particular system or formally accepted method of procedure. Actually its only standard of measurement is the result it attains. If it attains a perfect result--or at least a good enough result to carry the intention of the artist to the spectator-it is a good technique. How, then, can an artist be a good artist if his technique is not sufiicient to carry his intention to the spectator? How can the spectator obtain any information as to his artistry? The good artist must inevitably be a good technician, though the good technician need not necessarily be a good artist. The good technician may convey with ex62

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63 cellent clarity a concept which has no z~theticvitality, a platitude, an untruth. He may execute perfectly his limited rhythmic apprehension of form, which is below the level of mass experience of form, and therefore does not function.

I1 CERTAIN FUNDAMENTALS RECONSIDERED

Here it is necessary to digress for a while to consider--and in large part to reconsider, for we have already treated of many of them-certain fundamentals upon which we must unite for the purpose of understanding. Let us begin with large ones. Perhaps to do so is to begin at the wrong end of the subject. It is customary to announce the Golden Text and then proceed to the sermon; here the reverse method is adopted, with the sermon preached in the beginning and the Golden Text reserved for the conclusion. The function of art is to render appreciable that which is, for the individuals concerned-namely, a sender and a receiver-inexpressible through the media of reason and intellect. Because arguments arise on this point through misunderstanding, it is perhaps well to expatiate on it for a little. There is no implication here that the concepts with which art deals are in themselves inherently beyond the capacity of reason and intellect to express. There is no intention to belittle reason; we are not in this

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connection discussing reason in the abstract, which for aught I know may be able to compass infinity in his fullest developments. The point that is to be made is this: The function of art is to render appreciable that which is, for the indiuid?cclls concerned, inexpressible through reason and intellect. Intellect, whatever its potentialities may be, has not yet reached the state in any man's specific experience where it can fathom infinity, where there is nothing more to be discovered, nothing more to seek. Art deals with the sphere which lies beyond the reaches not of intellect in its ultimate perfection, but of one's individual intellectual experience. When through the processes of art one peers into that extra-intellectual region-mind you, once more, not eternally and finally extra-intellectual, but for oneself extra-intellectual-he does not receive his impression through any of the ordinary senses, though they may all be employed in the processes of art. He does not see or hear or taste or touch or smell something he has not before seen or heard or tasted or touched or smelled; he perceives something that he has never before perceived. This is the asthetic experience; through the agencies of art, into which we will delve more specifically in a moment, he is led to function aesthetically. The word "aesthetic" is derived from a Greek word which means to perceive, a larger term than see or hear or taste or touch or smell; This is the round of human progress: The artist

TECHNIQUE perceives something as yet too intangible to be of the nature of a fact, something in his own experience which because, perhaps, of its juxtaposition to something else takes on a new color, a new meaning d significance;this he expresses through technical means until he has rendered it comprehensible to others through their athetic functioning. After a number of repetitions,-perhaps thousands, perhaps m o r e i t becomes so clearly experienced by so many people that it begins to assume the nature of a general experience. Nothing has been added from athe outside, nothing new has been made, but there has been a general revelation in extra-intellectual experience of something that belongs essentially to all men. It then becoma possible for the intellect sharpest in analysis and deduction to reduce this once intangible concept to terms of intellectual comprehension, and hence to discover and formulate a law. What was formerly merely a vague "inspiration" has now become a scientific fact. As such it is propagated through education and eventually is added to the level of common intellectual experience. From this higher level of common intellectual experience the next level of artistic penetration departs into the yet unexplored regions of extra-intellectual experience. The variation in these levels serves to provide a steadily increasing standard for art, but it does not alter the fundamental relationship that exists between art and intellect. A work of art must lie in a sphere beyond intellectual

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experience for at least two persons, the sender and the receiver, the masculine and the feminine.

111 DIVERGENT APPROACHES TO ART

A11 this would be greatly simplified if everybody were in the same state of development axhetically and intellectually. I t is all very well to talk about the level of common intellectual experience, but no such thing actually exists. It is only a theoretical concept. No two people, probably, are in the same degree of intellectual development. Similarly there is no actual level of common xcthetic functioning. The same things obviously do not function zsthetically with all people; one man's art is another man's nonsense. We are all headed for the same goal but we are all coming from different directions and are at different stages of progress, different stag& of sensitivity to perception. Let us take a few concrete class examples. The sensualist-and by this I do not mean necessarily the ignoble and debauched-absorbs what is directed to his consciousness through his senses, and devours it en route before it has even reached him. He frequently passes for a patron of the arts, a connoisseur, and so considers himself. "A lover of the beautiful." In this position he is able to do a great deal of harm. No art work can ever be directed to the senses or received by them; the senses are merely

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the channels through which the inner perceptionthe Europeans call it the tcsod"~stablishescontacts with the material symbols which constitute the external universe. T o try to "appreciate" these material symbols as entities in themselves is as vain as to try to spend a dollar mark. The colour of the paint on the canvas, the sound of the bow on the strings, the words on the page, have no power in themselves to produce an zsthetic response. In their most festive forms they are nothing more than sugar in the mouth.-To make the symbol itself the object of attention is to prevent it from being a symbol, to make it an end in itself. It can convey nothing greater than itself; it ceases to be what might be termed a carrier. It is merely another de luxe-upholstered automobile without an engine, a mother-of-pearl steam-shovel, a crepe de chine garden hose, or any of the other popular incongruities. The senses are channels; they must be kept open and free. The sensualist, debauched or otherwise, is not receptive to zsthetic stimuli. He cloaa his doors to them. The intellectualist, distrusting his zsthetic experience because it is illogical, or else analysing it objectively as an entity in itself until it loses all vitality, seizes upon only what is factual or mathematical in the works of art presented to him, and that is not very much as a rule, nor can it be very stimulating. There are better ways than art to present the factual and mathematical. The factual ele-

68 THE MODERN DANCE ment in any work of art is necessarily commonplace to a degree; it constitutes the known and tangible ground from which the artist springs into the zsthetic. The moralist, blood brother to the intellectualist, translates the factual into canons of philosophic virtue, and rejects the aesthetic experience as an indulgence inimical to the pursuance of the paths of rectitude, because it must involve the senses. He would quote copy-book maxims in pigment and sound, quote stereotyped standards of conduct in terms of pantomime, and quote and quote and quote. Obviously unless he is willing to venture into the realm of the unquotable because unknown, he cannot add to the store of human wisdom anything it does not already contain. There are, for all I know, thousands of persons who have no response whatever to zsthetic stimuli. It is possible, however, to formulate a purely hypothetical mean, a point never actually encountered but theoretically conceivable, at which the average of all persons experiences some aesthetic response. It is this hypothetical point that was mentioned a moment ago as the level of mass experience of form.

EXCITING EXTRA-INTELLECTUAL PROCESSES

Why of form? Only form produces zsthetic response. Facts or

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elements of actuality, out of which all art is concocted, are of themselves intellectually and reasonably understandable. They require no further manipulation. They cannot of themselves excite extra-intellectual processes. The artist when he is, as the saying goes, "inspired," senses some especial quality or attribute of actuality which has heretofore been unsensed-by him, at least. He proceeds then to scale his universe for a time on this new perception, substituting for the whole only this newly sensed attribute or aspect of the whole. The Eastern fakirs have a method of mental training in which the master gives mathematical exercises to his disciples on a comparable basis. If, he says to them, the number 5 were equal to 634, how much would 4291 be? He is invoking, in other words, a hypothetical system of numbers based upon one small specific deviation from actuality. The artist does not select his specific deviation by arbitrary processes like this; his specific deviation comes to him by other means-it is indeed the central spark of his fire. In this new scale, this hypothetical mathematic, he then produces some common experience, the experience of contact with a universal object or the experience of a universal action. He cannot explain to you what his newly sensed aspect of actuality is or how it differs from the actuality itself, but if he can show you something that is definitely in your experience per-

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THE MODERN DANCE

formed in this new dimension, you will perceive the newly sensed aspect by the difference between the experience in the familiar dimension and his presentation of it in the new dimension. This process is not unlike the rhetorical processes of synechdoche and metonymy. A suitable example that comes to mind is the famous line in Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus" in which the doctor expresses his impressions of Helen of Troy in a magnificent bit of magic. "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?" He certainly could be torn to pieces by the literalists who might insist with full authority that faces are not the usual instruments for launching ships. To satisfy their arguments he would probably have to rephrase his sentiment into something like this: "Is the beauty of this woman sufficient to have caused such jealousy as to have rendered war inevitable eventually between the Greeks and the Trojans?" Somehow, there is a little lack to be felt there.

NATURALISM A N D THE UNIT OF PERCEPTION

The artist must give you his artistic intention in terms of your own easily awakened memory of experience; the parts must fit together in orderly fashion so as to be recognisable to you. This fitting together of parts constitutes what may be called the internal form of the composition. It cannot, of course, be naturalistic, though it must suggest

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your experience of reality. The reason for this is,

in the first place, that the four physical dimensions-length, breadth, height and duration-will not allow a full representation of actuality within the radius of your unit of perception. That is, your power to take in four-dirnensional objects is limited; they must be smdl in all four dimensions. If they are too high, too broad, too long or too extensive in the q o u n t of time they occupy, you cannot compass them. If for the moment we forget the element of time and deal with objects as threedimensional, it is possible to see an object of tremendous size by getting far enough away from it. Ow could go to a d c i e n t height, say, in an airplane, to reduce its apparent dimensions within the scope of your unit of perception. But when the element of time enters in, the airplane will not serve so well. The artist who deals in a medium like paiating or sculpture, which theoretically does not include time, can perform the function of the airplane by reducing his three dimensions into your unit of perception-scaling down. Similarly, those who deal in mediums where time is recognised aa an element such as drama and dance, must reduce their dimensions, must scale down, for the same purpoae. They must bring the distance covered by their action into the bounds of your eyes; and this requires the elimination of many of the places which played a part in the actual experience upon which this

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action is based, and the transfer of their values to other places. It also becomes essential for them to eliminate the passage of time by a similar telescoping. Obviously we could not sit in the theatre for thirty years to see the unfoldrnent of a life drama; Eugene O'Neill is trying t o train us up to it, but the chances are slight. It is a more practical solution of the problem to expect the dramatist to develop his mastery of his craft than to expect the audience to devote itself to theatregoing as a life work. Naturalism to any appreciable extent is prohibited in art by the very limitation of the human being's unit of perception. In the second place, it is inadmissible because the details of an experience are antagonistic to the artist's purpose. This for two reasons: ( I ) they are too different from the individual's own experience; ( 2 ) they are not different enough. WhiG fundamental experiences are common to all, the manner of their development varies for each. We all go through what is sometimes referred to as "the gamut of emotions," but we employ this gamut differently because of the difference, to continue the musical figure, in the timbre of our voices. If the artist supplies the details as he knows them, he is making it more d s c u l t for you to identify the experience as your own; the more faithfully he supplies them, the more di6cult he makes it. (Presently there will be an exception noted to this, but to all intents and purposes it holds good.) If, on the

TECHNIQUE other hand, the details are exactly or even approximately as you have experienced them, you can supply them without the artist's assistance. Consequently your memory, operating more rapidly than the artist's physical performance, keeps you always a lap or two ahead of him. Thus your attention is lost.

VI RHYTHM-AN

ELECTRICAL ANALOGY

In this process of condensation and elimination to bring his material within the scope of your unit of perception, the artist must select carefully the important elements to be presented. His selection cannot be erratic, but must be guided by a sound sense of rhythm. And this brings us to that subject which everybody would like to steer clear of if he might. We shall not here pursue the definition of rhythm any farther, for it is not its analysis that interests us at the moment, but its effects. Margaret HYDoubler in her textbook-brochure eptitled "Rhythmic Form and Analysis" has avoided the necessity of a definition in a masterly fashion. In effect she says that rhythm is like electricity; many people can produce it, many people can use it, but though it is easily known by what it does, nobody knows what it is. This electrical analogy is a very helpful one, even granting that analogies are always dangerous. However, with the forewarning that it is not accurate

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THE MODERN DANCE

but only suggestive, let us indulge in a little analogy. When two electro-magnetic points are placed apart at the proper distance, a spark flies between them. If the distance is not there the spark will not appear; if the distance t too great the spark will not appear. Roughly this is what happens in the production of the rhythmic spark. There must be two elements in it: the strong element, which corresponds to the electro-magnetic points; and the weak element, which corresponds to the space be tween them. The strength of the strong elements and the weakness of the weak elements must be accurately scaled to the amount of current flowing through the system and to the intensity of the spark required.

VII STRONG AND WEAK RHYTHM BASES

To return, then, to the problem of internal form. The strong rhythm base consists of those portions, those high points, in a common experience which the artist selects to present; the weak rhythm base consists of the intervals between them which you are to supply. Again the combination of the sender and the receiver, the masculine and the feminine. His dominant rhythm base, his accents, 'are the elements of the common experience which he forces upon you; his weak rhythm base is the space into which he forces you to crowd from your personal and individual transition through this common ex-

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perience, all the details necessary to prepare you for the reception of the next essential element, the next accent. In the strong base he informs you which of the universal experiences of living he intends to deal with; in the weak base he allows you to identify it as your own. VIII PSEUDO-MYSTICAL CONTEMPLATION

Here, let it be pointed out parenthetically, is where the many cosmic flutterings of the pseudomystical poeta&rs have their origin. When you identify yourself with a universal experience by the recognition of it as your own when it is presented to you, you may, if you have weaknesses in that direction, float off into a sort of rapt contemplation of your oneness with the infinite, or something of the sort, which is especially deceptive and especially pernicious becaw it approaches so near the truth without actually being true. It is not a safe place to stop; the purpose of thus identifying oneself with a universal experience is not to glorify such an experience as being absolute and oneself as being a pretty keen and sensitive soul, but simply to make oneself capable of understanding a new aspect of the experience which some one else has achieved, of denying the infiniteness of any finite experience and of perceiving the boundlessness of perpetual progression. The great devil, Inertia, is ever persistently presenting possible places to stop, possible

76 THE MODERN DANCE systems as final, possible states as ultimate. The P-

thetic experience pushes down these figmental barriers of emotional laziness or else it dies a-borning.

VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL RHYTHMSTHE RHYTHMIC INTEGER

If the artist chooses too intense a rhythm-that is, if he selects elements which in life experience are

far removed from each other and places them too close together in his design-he crowds you beyond your capability, he snaps the cord which you are to hang upon his p06ts. He has in another way overtaxed your unit of perception. If he chooses too slack a rhythm-that is, if he selects elements too close together in life experience and places them too far apart in his design-he allows you too much space-time between them, and lets you spin so much cord between his posts that he cannot keep it taut. He loses your attention. From this it becomes evident that the rhythmic aspects of internal form are interdependent. These may be termed the vertical rhythm, or the difference in strength between the two rhythm bases, and the horizontal rhythm, or the rate at which they succeed each other, this rate being measurable in either time or space or more accurately in that dimension known as space-time. In other words, if we were to conceive of the rhythm as rising and p

TECHNIQUE falling in a wavy or a jagged line, the vertical rhythm would be that measured by the distance of the fall in each case, and the horizontal rhythm would be that measured by the distance between the peaks. The vertical rhythm is a dynamic rhythm; the horizontal rhythm is a space-time rhythm. The rhythmic integer would then be constituted of one vertical and one horizontal unit acting simultaneously; from the first accent to the instant before the second; one peak and one valley. This rhythmic integer controls not only the sharpness of the accent, but also such considerations as beginning, middle and end.

-FEELING IN TERMS OF FORM

It is possible to go on ad infinitum on this subject of rhythmic form, because it is a fascinating subject of unlimited range. However, the intention here is simply to point out that such a thing exists, that it is vital to the creation of any work of art, and that an artist must inevitably be strongly fortified in the technique of its employment. This is not to imply that he must be able to sit down with pencil and paper and plot gaphs of rises and falls, of vertical and horizontal curves. By no means. If he had that type of mind he would not create a single work of art. H e must, however, have the talent and the training to feel in terms of form. He must

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be able to create immediately, spontaneously, with only the vital elements of his design, eliminating others without having to sit down and meditate over them. In other words, his design expresses itself to him instantaneously in terms of its strong rhythm base.

XI INTERNAL A N D EXTERNAL RHYTHMS

We cannot yet leave the subject of rhythm, however, for a bit. There is another aspect besides that of internal form that is of the utmost importance. Internal rhythm is that which is set up within the frame of the composition by the juxtaposition of its elements. In addition, there is an external rhythm which does not exist within the frame of the composition, and this is the rhythm that produces the zsthetic reaction in its fullest development. Some time ago it was stated in effect that the artist receives his inspiration by glimpsing something known in terms of something unknown, or, if you prefer, by glimpsing something unknown in terms of something known. Internal form deals with his utilisation of the known, and external rhythm deals with his invocation of the unknown. For example, if he has had an inspiration concerning some exigent human problem such as death, he utilises as his stuff the known experience of death as he and you have observed it or feared it or in some way reacted to it. This is the starting point

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from which he departs into the unknown. He must make this basic material recognisable to you, and his method of doing this, of compressing much into little, we have just discussed. But this is not his major purpose. Certainly it is an inferior purpose merely to harrow you with your distaste for the negative experience of death. There is scant reason for any artist to waste his energy telling you what you already know. As a matter of fact, that is what comprises the great bulk of stuff turned out in the name of all the arts. It is prompted by the very human desire for self-exploitation, becoming in its more advanced stages psychopathic exhibitionism. The major purpose of the artist is to make known to you something that is not already known to you, to make you share his revelation of something higher and nearer the truth, to rob the material symbol of some of its appearance of substance and disclose the essence, the reality, of which it is a transient representation. The progressive philosophers of to-day and even the leading physicists are coming to accept more and more the artist's basis for his activity as a fundamental basis of all activity. They are coming to recognise more and more that the external universe is merely the effect of limited perception trained upon reality. As perception is made more acute and less defective, the external universe will inevitably change its visible forms. The airplane and the radio were never achieved by putting pieces of objective matter to-

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gether, but by extending the range of the subjective perception of reality. All the physical sciences are the results, not the causes, of human progress; and bend their efforts to carrying on the activity inherent in their being. Thus the mastering purpose of the philosopher, the scientist, the religionist, the artist, are identical-the increase of accurate vision until the ultimate is attained. As the ultimate is non-existent in an infinity, the major subject of discussion among scientists and their colleagues in the arts and religions is likely to be whether or not there is an infinity. XI1 THEORY OF ESCAPE

We often hear the theory expressed that the arts have their hold upon us only as they provide a means of escape from the pressure of our daily living. It is a difficult theory to deny. It is frequently advanced, however, as a derogation of the value of the arts, but this is due to an underestimation of the possibility of escape. The arts provide not the scornfully enunciated escape from reality, but rather the escape into reality. Many people go to the arts for amusement, that is, simply to pass the time without thinking about their troubles. Such arts as they seek under these circumstances are usually termed popular. But contact with such arts provides only temporary escape; when the contact

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ends, the escape ends. With genuine art, the escape is permanent; a real art work never leaves us where it found us. It lifts us to a permanently higher level of perception and gives us a clearer glimpse either of the ultimate or of the infinite, depending upon which theory we subscribe to. The so-called popular art has no external rhythm, while that is the chief characteristic of genuine art. Tk artist represents to you a common experience couched in uncommon terms. Like the Indian fakir, he says to you: "Two times two, as you know, makes four; but suppose four was actually seven and two-thirds; what then would two become?" He reveals to you a glimpse of a new mathematic. H i s purpose is that by its revelation you will be able to see a familiar number in a new light, to revalue an accepted quantity. He sets up for you a rhythmic action, one base of which is in your memory of experience and the other base of which is in his presentation of this experience in a dimension contrary to your factual contact with this experience. In the extent and character of his deviation from the factual, lies the intensity and scope of the external rhythm.

DEVIATION FROM THE FACTUAL

It is natural for human inertia to resist the first contact with a strong external rhythm; it is a force

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tending to alteration and hence hostile to inertia or things as they are. Modern art is intensely concerned with the establishment of external rhythms and has been intensely opposed as a logical result. It has dared to deal in violent rhythms, where the classic and romantic arts deal with more gentle ones. It is as if the modern arts plunged you at once into cold water, knowing that you would be braced by its freshness and vigour just as soon as the shock was over, while the older arts led you first into slightly cool water and thence into still slightly cooler until by slow degrees it had manoeuvred you into the necessary state of frigidity without shock. The danger in the modern arts is of plunging you into ice-water simply for the sadistic pleasure of seeing you shocked; the danger in the older forms is of being so fearful of your welfare as to lead you gently into a pool of lukewarm water and leave you there to shiver. As soon as the artist begins to deviate from the factual, he gets into the field of distortion. His deviation may be more, or less, pleasing to the senses; may be, in other words, pretty or ugly; but so far as it is a departure from the norm it is distortion. We have discussed this point at length already, and it is not necessary to go into it again. Su6ce it to say that external rhythm is produced only by distortion or its equivalent. I add its equivalent because there was an exception noted earlier when we were treating the sub-

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If in arranging his internal form, the artist employs the exact details of his own experience, it was said, he militates against his success because he thereby makes it more diflicult for you to identify the experience as your own. The exception to this rule is to be found in a hypothetical c w in which the artist's experience is sufficiently like your own in its general outline to be recognisable by you and at the same time so radically dieerent from your own in detail as to appear like something from another planet. Obviously he need not bother either to depart from the personal or to resort to distortion. Such cases as this are only barely conceivable. Occasionally we are given a novel by an unknown and even illiterate writer detailing the actual story of his life in such a manner that it appears to be art. In many instances, this effect is produced by an unconscious distortion due to lack of skill; in other instances it may possibly be the coincidence here noted. Such a notation is solely to keep the record clear, and has in it certain elements of danger. The near-artist nine times out of ten believes sincerely that if only he could record his life, his experiences, his feelings, they would be so extraordinary that the world would rise up and call him blessed. This, unfortunately, is notpalways true, as is too often proved by those who manage somehow to get their lives and feelings recorded. The exceptions are not frequent enough to warrant risking any encouragement. The details ject of naturalism.

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of human experience are surprisingly stereotyped in the telling unless they are illumined by the vision of the artist. RECAPITULATION

Let us depart now hastily from the consideration of the subject of rhythms, internal and external, vertical and horizontal, from the subject, in short, of the technique of form. Let us narrow our topic more to the dance alone. To do so is to indulge first of all in a brief recapitulation of earlier paragraphs. The dance is the expression, by means of bodily movement arranged in significant form, of concepts which transcend the individual's power to express by rational and intellectual means. The discussion of significant form we have finished with for the time being. Now for movement. Movement is the most elementary experience of human life. Physiologically this is self -evident. In biological and social development it is equally so. It is, besides many other things which do not concern us here, the first means for the conveying of ideas from one individual to another. It far antedates language; so far as to make any comparison ludicrous. It is a substantial means, the most and indeed the only fundamentally substantial means for the conveying of ideas because it is universal. All men do not speak the same language but all men move in generally the same way and for the same reasons.

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Through kinesthesis, any bodily movement arouses a sympathetic reaction in the mind of the spectator. If it is a representational movement, the spectator recognises it at once because in performing the same action he has utilised the same movement. If it is non-representational, the same process holds true. The maker of the movement has a purpose, an intention, in making the movement; the movement is transferred in effect by kinesthetic sympathy to the muscles of the spectator, and because he is used to associating movement with intention, he arrives by induction at the intention of the particular movement under consideration; it is inconceivable that any bodily movement should be made without intention, even if that intention is nothing more than to make a movement without intention. Similarly, it is inconceivable that any bodily movement can be entirely abstract and nonrepresentational. This thought-conveying quality of movement, especially of movement &at is, roughly speaking non-representational, was called by the Greeks "metakinesis," or the overtones of movement, so to speak. All movement is capable of conveying and must convey intention. All movement, however, is not suitable material for the creation of the dance. All dance is made of movement, but all movement is not dance; just as all music is sound, but a11 sound is not music; or all poetry is words, but all words are not poetry. The greatest part of the movement

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of daily life is produced simply because we are encumbered with a large and unwieldy physical organism which must be dragged about with us wherever we go, must be fed and cared for. In other words, most of our movement has no conscious thought about it. It is merely the routine of physique. It is dominated by physical ends and hence is inferior to them. Obviously this is not the stuff of which the artist spins his web to capture the stars. When we go to a piano recital we hear the footsteps of the audience arriving, the turning down of seats, the rustle of programmes, perhaps even the screeching of casters as the piano is moved or the squeak of the stool as its height is adjusted. The concert, however, does not begin until an entirely different type of sound is forthcoming, a type of sound that is known as musical. All sound, we have been told, is really musical if only our ears were capable of catching its finer nuances; but that is not what we mean when we say "musical" sound, for we are dealing with practical conditions and practical ears. The piano is so constructed that it produces only what we call musical sound, unless, of course, it is mistreated. The dancer's instrument is not so constructed. The dancer's body produces movement that is the stuff of art and movement that is the stuff of daily, routine physical living. Let us assume for the moment that it is possible for all the movement of which a dancer's body is capable to be laid out be-

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fore him. If he is an artist he must sdect from this what he is to work with. He must see at once that most of it is of no value to him. He must select the kind of movement that is not subordinate and subsidiary to physical necessity, but is the product of a mental, an emotional, a non-physical demand. The movement that he can use must not be dominated by the body but must dominate it. There is a certain dancing school which has a sign in its window reading: "If you can walk we can teach you to dance." Perhaps and again perhaps not. I do not think a vocal school would be so bold as to say: If you can talk we can teach you to sing. Certain results in the right direction can undoubtedly be produced, and certainly everybody who can walk should try to learn to dance for the sake of his personal development. This is a somewhat different matter, however, from the dance which is an art. The artist dancer must develop the type of movement which is of service to him in the creation of works of art. This is another form of techniquethe technique of the medium in which he is working. It is comparable to the violinist's technique in the use of the bow to produce musical sound and gradations of tone, the use of the fingers of the left hand to produce accurate intonation and changes of pitch, the use of both hands-and a good deal more-to produce co-ordination in the merely external performance of his music. There is another kind of technique which the vio-

THE MODERN DANCE linist and the pianist do not have to acquire, but which the dancer does have to acquire, and that is

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the technique of the instrument. The musician begs, borrows, steals or buys an instrument which he feels to be worthy of his talents. It is manufactured by some one else and delivered to him complete. The dancer is in a different situation. He must take the raw materials of a body more or less like everybody else's body, and transform it into an instrument capable of producing the medium in which he works, movement. A dancer may have a magnificent concept of significant form, may know fine movement when he sees it, and may have vita1 things to express; but if he has no muscular control, no strength, no elasticity, no breath, he is absolutely helpless. You cannot play on an instrument which you have not got. And now we come to the end of the sermon and it is fitting that it should draw to a close with a statement of the Golden Text. It perhaps requires no further statement than it has already received, but here it is: Be cautious when you use the word "technique," for unless you specify otherwise, you are including a great deal; you are including three techniques which are to be found in the practice of any art. They are the technique of the instrument, the technique of the medium, and the technique of form.

*

PART IV THE DANCE AND THE OTHER ARTS

THE MAJOR ARTS

N discussing the relation of the dance to the other arts, it is necessary at the outset to make one or two points clear. In the first place, the other arts are here intended to mean music, drama, poetry, painting, sculpture and architecture. This makes up the classification of seven which is usual when the classifier is not too orthodox. If he is too orthodox, he generally reduces the number to five, and the two thus excluded are, significantly enough, drama and dance. They are allowed to rank among the subsidiary arts along with landscape gardening and basketry. The reason for this is not far to seek. During the last several hundred years, drama and dancing have quite legitimately excluded themselves from classification as major arts because they have had their existence almost entirely within the boundaries of other arts-poetry in the first case, and music in the second. As a matter of fact, all the arts are linked together so closely that it is difticult to pry them apart. Indeed, it does not appear to be at all neces89

90 THE MODERN DANCE sary to pry them apart except for the purposes of study and adjustment. Chemical elements are not of any great practical use until they have been isolated so that they may be thoroughly understood in all their properties. Then they can be intelligently combined with other elements to secure specific desired results. For a similar reason great value attaches to the modern experiments in the development--or the isolation, if you prefer-of the "absolute" dance.

I1 Here let us digress for a moment to clear up a common misapprehension of the term "absolute dance." Those who find themselves completely out of sympathy with the modern dance as they conceive it to be, like to infer that absolute is used as a synonym for ultimate. Such is not the case; it is used rather as an antonym for relative. There are many types of relative dancing; indeed acting is relatively a type of dancing though it is not wholly and purely dancing. The absolute dance is that pure essence of dancing which contains no element of anything else. It need not be, in fact it has already proved itself not to be, the ultimate dance. It is just a little absurd even to talk about such a thing as an ultimate dance. When physicists have set out on long and painstaking experiments to isolate some particular ele-

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ment of matter, they have not been subjected to attacks by other physicists who were not so engaged on the ground that they were trying to do away with all the other elements except the one they may have been seeking to isolate. But the dancers who have given years of effort to the pursuit of the fundamental essence of the dance have been very generally harassed by their unsympathetic colleagues and accused of a high-handed abolitionism which has not been theirs at all. Be it said to the everlasting glory of the leaders of the modern movement that they have succeeded in performing the greatest service to their art in discovering its essential substance and the dimensions in which it exists. This aspect of the subject we have already dealt with. It is possible at last for the dance to be approached with the utmost intelligence, its philosophy constructed and its technique considered scientifically. Once again, this very condition of intelligibility has been the subject of attack on the ground of dry intellectualism. But this is unjust. It is possible at last-to intellectualise on the subject, but it is no more inevitable than ever before. The creative artist will not be inclined to sit down and cerebrate; he will continue to be carried away by that madness which is sometimes euphuistically called inspiration, and he will also continue to stagger about frantically for many an hour before he hits upon the exact form through which to externalise his inspiration with complete

THE MODERN DANCE clarity and fulness. If this is any consolation to

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those who fear the intellectualisation of the art, they may rest easy. The absolute dance has not found any rules of thumb for genius. The creator, however, who knows the laws that underlie his medium, is not only able to work with less against him, but is also rendered capable of extending his sphere of action far beyond the bounds of simple instinct. The difference is comparable to that between knowing the underlying laws of music and composing or playing by ear. The dancer who does not know the basis of the dance is always dancing by ear, as it were. He has to discover bit by bit through painful processes of trial and error all the fundamental principles that have already been found for him by others. These fundamental principles had not been found until the modern dancers arose and laboured to disclose the absolute dance. There are now few if any dancers who confine themselves to the absolute dance. Mary Wigman is a good example. She has learned so well what the basis of the dance is that she is able to add music, drama, to a certain extent sculpture and painting in her use of masks and costumes, and even poetry, and still keep the dance as master of the combination.

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The complete independence of

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the dance or its domination of the other arts with which it is used in combination is not a matter of overweening importance as an end in itself. Indeed, quite the reverse is more likely to be the case; the most important end to be achieved in the arts may very well be their synthesis instead of their mutual independence. This objective has been approached to a degree in a practical manner in recent years and a new term has grown up to describe it in the word "theatre." Who first used the word in this sense, I do not know, but it has come to imply something that takes place in a theatre building but which is not drama or music or dancing but a combination of them all in a welded form which utilises also the other arts of necessity. These other arts are of a certain permanence in that their forms are objectified in material mediums which retain them, while drama, dancing and music do not exist except during the moments of their performance. Such a union existed in a high form of perfection in the theatre of the ancient Greeks, and was handed down with modifications to Rome. Here in the decline of Roman civilisation the union was dissolved and the art of the theatre became the arts of the theatre. That element which contained

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music, dancing and miming throve with the popular taste which eventually vulgarised it to its destruction. The development of the poetical branch of the art found scant patronage, and things came to such a pass eventually that poetic drama had sb few followers that performances became merely declamatory readings of almost drawing-room dimensions. Unhappily, when the theatre was revived after its long lapse into comparative silence during the so-called Dark Ages, it was this poetical-declamatory style that was held up as the standard. This was perhaps inevitable since the musical-mime ticEhoreographic element had deteriorated in its moral and social principles until it had won for itself the ban of the church. The poetical-declamatory ideal has come down to us this very day; if you doubt it, go to the performance of any play of Shakespeare by almost any company outside of Germany or Russia. If in the majority of current theatrical productions the poetry is reduced to mere literary epitome of plot and situation, and the declamation has withered away until it has become almost inaudible colloquialism, nevertheless it is from the poetical-declamatory division of the theatre that our present-day "dramatic art" stems. Fortunately, however, the more theatrical branch of the theatre was not exterminated, either by its own divagations or by the wrath of the early Christians. As the church carried the literary theatre

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through the period of decline, so the ribald mimetic theatre was preserved by minstrels and jongleurs and bands of strolling players. The Commedia dell' Arte brought it once more into the light, and what is more important, established it as an active force. The effort to reunite the elements of the theatre has appeared in many other instances-the ballet d'action, the masque, the early attempt in Italy at a restoration of the principle of Greek drama which resulted in the creation of the opera. In more recent times we find Richard Wagner very definitely undertaking the development of a pure theatrical form; we see the rise of the Diaghileff ballet and the theatres of Reinhardt, Vachtangoff ,Meyerhold and Nemirovitch-Dantchenko.

ACTOR A N D DANCER

The thing that has produced the change in all these modern cases has been the introduction of the dance in something of its proper proportion. I do not believe that the theatre will ever recover from the downhill course which as an institution it has been pursuing for many, many years (except for the artificial prosperity it enjoyed during wartime), until the dance swallows it up, so to speak. Let us see just how the dance is related to the theatre and particularly to that element of the theatre which we call drama. The drama entails,

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besides acting, poetry or some form of it, and d k o r which involves architecture, painting and to a certain extent sculpture. But it can do without any of them except acting. The author and the designer are helpful but only the actor is an inescapable quantity. Now the actor and the dancer are Tweedledurn and Tweedledee. The business of both of them is to express internal feeling through the medium of the body. The actor generally speaks, though not always; the dancer generally substitutes music as an auxiliary instead of speech. Speaking, however, is not the main function of the actor's art by any means, though that is the painful tradition under which the theatre has been laboring for many a sad year. The word "drama" comes originally from a Greek word which means to do-it does not imply speech at all. The actor's business is to do. His action is related directly to human experience, which he re-creates through memory and externalises through his physical instrument. This is exactly what the dancer does. The difference lies chiefly in the fact that the actor's externalisation is on a more naturalistic plane than the dancer's; he is more explicit and more representational. The dancer strips his material to the bone; he presents the essence of his experience and not the full memory of it. His action has design of itself, where the actor's design is incidental to a larger purpose. The actor is a member of a dance group which is engaged in a long and naturalistic dance composition.

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The dancer creates the drama through the metakinetic quality of his movements, where the actor interprets the drama that already exists. Here, as elsewhere, the fact is evident that since movement is the most elementary and fundamental means for the expression of emotion, no art can take precedence over the dance, and the actor, especially, appears as a modified form of dancer.

PARALLEL DEVELOPMENTS

It is not without interest to compare the developments in the actor's and the dancer's arts during the past years. At the beginning of the century, Isadora Duncan wrought her great transformation in the dance. Only five or six years earlier Stanislavsky in the Moscow Art Theatre wrought a very similar transformation in the art of acting. Both of them were faced with a concept of art that, roughly speaking, built on imagination, using that word in the sense of fabricating something that does not exist. Though there have been many revolutions in both arts since, we still find most dancers and most actors leaving everything to imagination. Stanislavsky realised that the actor could not imagine human experience and expect an audience to believe him when they themselves knew human experience at first hand. So he insisted upon memory as the foundation of his art, and required his actors

THE MODERN DANCE to re-experience, as well as memory would allow, the actual emotional situations required of them. If their lives did not furnish exact parallels of experience, they were taught to piece together fragments, and to enlarge and reduce whatever elements needed alteration in their personal experience, until a synthetic past had been created to be remembered in full vigour at performances. The result was staggering, as those who have seen the performances of the Moscow Art Theatre know. Isadora was a much less systematic thinker. She knew only that the stereotyped idealisations of the dance as it was being done came in no wise from the heart and could expect in no wise to touch the heart. She, too, insisted upon actual emotional en perience. Where Stanislavsky produced it consciously through memory in deliberate theatrical processes, Isadora employed music to awaken feeling in her. Again the result was staggering. But.StanislavskyYsmethod soon became the subject of attack. His leading antagonist and the most brilliantly successful of all of them was Meyerhold. To him Stanislavsky's method was mentally dangerous; it produced insanity in one of the most gifted actors of the company and was capable of producing it in all of them. It was hypnotic and introverted. The actor paid a greater price than his product was worth. He wasted much of his energy in convincing himself. In the Meyerhold system all this was changed. A new system of acting was built 98

DANCE AND OTHER ARTS up and named bio-mechanics. It lays its great emphasis upon the externalisation of the actor's intention instead of his personal experience of it. It is of particular interest to the dancer in that it works from the standpoint of movement and its metakinetic overtones. I t is, indeed, the nearest to pure dancing that the art of acting has ever approached, and as a consequence the theatre of Meyerhold is perhaps the most stimulating theatre of the day. The revolt against the introversion of Isadora's method is too well known to bear detailed discussiod again. It is suf6cient to note once more that, although the modern dance has not gone as far to the left as bio-mechanics-at least, not yet-it has laid great emphasis on the externalisation of the dancer's intention and the reliance not upon the personal feeling of the moment but upon the metakinetic power in the movement itself to carry over to tk spectator.

DANCE WITHOUT MUSIC

In every respect except one the dance is more nearly related to the drama than to music, although the contrary is generally believed to be true. This one exception is that of time-rhythm. The dance and the drama are internally related; they are of the same essential stuff, the one working in the

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medium of movement and the other in the medium of action, which are practically inseparable. The dance and music are only externally related to the extent that both make formal patterns in the one common dimension of time. Even here it is possible to argue that there is no irrefragable tie between them, for it may be held that music exists only in sound and any time pattern which exists in silence is therefore not a musical time pattern. It is, of course, quite possible to devise completely silent dance patterns in time. Doris Humphrey's "Water Study" comes at once to mind, as well as her "Drama of Motion," and Martha Graham's "Project for a Divine Comedy." Mary Wigman's "Gesicht der Nacht" and "Traumgestalt" both furnish other apt illustrations in their earlier moments. In all of these cases there are present the elements of accent, tempo, phrasing, but they are not of a musical character even if considered apart from their silence. After the audible accompaniment starts in these dances of Frau Wigman's, especially "Gesicht der Nacht," there is no musical form in them. The sounds are related more closely to the movements than they are to each other and consequently take their form from the dance instead of giving its form to it. It would be quite inconceivable to take the score of either of these dances and play it as a piece in a musical program. It simply has no entity apart from the dance. This is true to a large extent, though perhaps not

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entirely, of the accompaniments to her other dances, though in some cases there are undeveloped themes, agreeable phrases and a simple sort of melodic line. The form of music, however, is not there. VII MUSIC ANTEDATED BY DANCE

It is a matter of opinion, therefore, whether the relation of music to the dance is a close one or a distant one. From the historical viewpoint the association at least is a very close one, whether there is a fundamental unity between them or not. For some reason, there has long been a belief that music came first, though it is difFicult to see what the basis of such a theory is. Many encyclopedias and works on zsthetics which should know better go so far as to put the dance down as a secondary art deriving its being entirely from music. What is even more extraordinary is that many dancers will tell you much the same thing. One of them went into anatomical detail to prove to me (and I confess myself entirely willing, in lieu of any knowledge of anatomy, to accept her proof) that the nerve cells or the brain cells or whatever they may be which are associated with movement and those which are associated with sound are so close together that it is diflicult to tell them apart. They may, for a11 I care, be so close together that they are impossible to tell apart; it is quite unneces-

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sary to go to such physiological lengths to settle the point. All I ask of anybody who believes that music came before dancing is to make a sound of any sort that is not preceded and produced by movement. So far as I can discover there has never been a sound made in the universe that was not made by movement. Musical sound, especially, is traceable to movement, and even more than that, to muscular movement, to bodily movement. It makes no difference whether it is the sound produced by forcing wind through the vocal cords and resonance chambers of the body or of especially made pipes, or whether it is sound produced by the scraping or plucking of strings, or by striking resounding surfaces of one sort or another. The muscular impulse translates itself into sound, and the quality of the sound is controlled to a great extent-almost entirely as far as emotional colour is concerned-by the feeling, the state of mind, the extra-intellectual intention, which prompts the muscular impulse. It is no doubt quite possible to argue that music was developed as a fine art before the dance was SO developed. The point is open to debate. It is true that music was recorded before the dance was recorded, for indeed the dance is not recorded even to-day. But all this is quibbling. Movement is the most elementary means for the expression of emotional energy; as such it is employed by man and animals, birds, fish, insects, and, lacking evidence to

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the contrary, by trees, flowers, fruits and vegetables! This is not meant to imply any remote hostility to music or any aversion to its use in conjunction with dancing. On the contrary, it is readily admitted that the dance which is assisted by music is much more satisfactory than that which is not, just as a play with suitable scenery is preferable to one with no scenery at all. But it seems to be of some importance to break down the patronising attitude of music and its practitioners, and to state the truth. If there is any patronising to be done, it might well be the other way around.

VIII MUSIC ALWAYS SECONDARY

The theory of musical "interpretation" by the dance began with a misconception of Isadora Duncan's purposes. Until the beginning of the present century, roughly speaking, such an idea was entirely unknown. It has no foundation in history. In all the primitive dancing of which we have any record, music was used as an accompaniment. In the beginning it seems likely that it consisted of sounds made by the dancer himself, either by stamping or clapping, or by wearing ornaments about his neck and on his wrists and ankles that made a noise when he moved. These sounds can hardly be called music, though they are a primi-

THE MODERN DANCE tive beginning of music in its rhythmic aspect. Since the time element can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye, it is natural that it should have found some sort of parallel expression in the medium of sound. Even when voice was employed, it was probably to reinforce movement which failed to externalise the full degree of intensity within. This sound, then, was in the beginning merely a measuring and dividing of time to the ear and had no separate existence apart from the measuring and dividing of time to the eye which grew out of the dancer's impulse to move. In other words, it was not music but dance accompaniment. It served to mark accents, and therefore to make phrasing and pattern more definite, to increase the effectiveness of movement in regard to both quantity and quality. When the intention of the dancer was clear to the onlooker and his figuration was marked, it was easy for other dancers to join him in varying degrees of participation. They could stamp and clap at the proper moments, sing vocal phrases made familiar by repetition, and by these means keep themselves in unison. They could also join in the actual dance figures set by the leader. Thus onlookers could take part in the dancing, a matter of great importance to the women in societies where they were not allowed to dance with the men because of their social inferiority as a sex. They could achieve a vicarious pleasure by rattling gourds and beating drums, clapping their hands,

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and even singing and playing on flutes. This was useful to the dancers, as well as satisfying to those who were not dancing. The importance of this type of activity cannot be overestimated in the development of that group solidarity upon which the early society relied for its very existence. Indeed, by the gradual abandonment of communal dancing, civilisation has forfeited one of its most potent instrumentalities for the establishment of social unity, a fact that has been recognised by astute socially minded thinkers from Plato down to our own day. The dance inevitably set the rhythmic beat of the music, and when there was an addition made by the voice or other melodic instrument, it was made to conform to this beat. Sometimes melodic accompaniments were improvised by a single singer and repeated by the others in imitation. Frequently these improvisations were made part of the dance by their continued use, but no doubt many times they were lost and superseded by new improvisations at each performance of the dance. The general practice seems to have been to have a sort of head man to set the rhythmic beat of the dances; when there were labours to be done requiring joint action, it was he who established the basis for unison of movement. This custom has come down with all its ancient vitality to our own time, as any one may discover by watching Negroes at work together. The levees of the Mississippi furnish a rich field for such observation, but it may be made wherever

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Negroes are at work, building roads or repairing streets, or at any task which provides them an opportunity to swing their hammers or to haul or push to the rhythmic improvisations of a singing leader. The practice of self-accompaniment is also still largely alive. Castanets, finger cymbals, tambourines, ankle bells, the "bones" of the Southern Negro, are all important musical appurtenances of the dance. One of our American concert dancers, Tamiris, is interested in the possibility of applying the same principle to the contemporary creative dance, and has made a number of experiments in this direction. For a long time the Laban and Wigman schools, the Giinther school, Dr. Bode, Berthe Triimpy-indeed, almost all the German methodshave had percussion and in some cases more elaborate musical education as part of their training. In folk dancing we find the same general relationship existing between music and dancing. Whether the accompaniment was played by a fiddle or a pipe and tabour or some other instrument, the music it supplied was not of a very high degree of development as music, but was of vital importance in keeping the dancers moving at the same time and changing figures at the right moment without having to count. Melodically it was of scant importance and harmonically of none at all, but as a basis for the external structure of the dance it was invaluable.

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When the ballet arose this was still the case. The dancer was king. He had certain figures that he excelled in and around them he built his dances. The ballet master composed always with the special abilities of his company in mind. The form of the ballet as we have known it, grew out of the old court ballets and masques with their elaborate "entrances," and finally got to be a stereotyped alternation of pantomime and dance specialties, until Noverre introduced the "ballet d'action." Even this, incidentally, did not alter the situation much except in theory. At any rate, the musical composer's part in the proceedings was of small moment. He was told how many bars of music in 2/4 time were needed for this dance and how many bars in 3/4 for that, and like a good hack he turned them out. It is interesting to recall that even Mozart passed entirely unnoticed as the hack composer of a very successful ballet called "Les Petits Riens." The reason for this relationship is not hard to find. The dance had no form of its own. It was merely a succession of steps and combinations which did not grow with any logic from one to the other but were strung together quite arbitrarily. Unless the more explicit pattern of music had made its impress on the ear, there would have been no phrasing, no beginning and no end to the dance. It is not surprising that music developed and dancing stood still for hundreds of years. Literally nothing happened in the dance from Noverre whose reform

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dated from about 1760 to Fokine and Duncan who arose a century and a half later. Music was not so sterile.

IX VARIOUS APPROACHES TO MUSIC

From this revolutionary movement at the beginning of the present century we date our modern struggle to reconcile dancing, which had died the death, with music, which had grown to a richer and fuller life. There have arisen and still exist in varying degrees of prosperity, many theories as to the consummation of this reconciliation. They may be grouped, however, into a few outstanding classes. There are, first of all, those who set out to interpret the content of the music. These are perhaps the most numerous. Then there are those who visualise merely its form, translating sound patterns into movement patterns. Others do not attempt to interpret music but utilise it as a contrapuntal background, placing movement patterns against sound patterns. Still others take largely the position of the old ballet masters that the music should merely mark the tempo and phrasing of what they want to do, and to this end they select ready-made music w h i c h the old-fashioned ballet masters did not do -and irrespective of the composer's intention fit it into their own needs, even cutting and slashing and altering it at will. Some do not dance to music at all, but have an elementary music made for them

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to point the form and content of their dances. There may be a straggling few who want to dance forever and a day without any music, but they are only a few if they still exist at all. The theory of interpretative dancing seems to me to be in every way untenable. In the first place, it makes a11 music essentially programmatic. The human body cannot be an abstract instrument; it is related inextricably with life experience and its every movement has a metakinetic significance, as we have already discussed a number of times. Music, on the other hand, can separate itself entirely from the factualism of living and give us the pure essence of emotional experience without any naturalistic implications. To "interpret" Bach, therefore, or even Beethoven and Schubert, is impossible. The content of the music interprets itself in musical ideas to musical understanding. It was considered by its composer to be complete in itself without outside assistance, except in such obviously incomplete musical forms as opera and ballet. If it is not able so to interpret itself, it is merely bad music. All the dancer can possibly do is to show us what emotional reactions the music produces in him, and in this case he is interpreting not the music but himself. There is no reason why he should not with equal justification interpret the Sistine Madonna or the landscapes of Turner, for presumably he has emotional reactions to other forms as well as to music.

I 10

THE MODERN DANCE

If the music he is interpreting is program music, his way is easier but no more justifiable. Presumably again the composer has said what he intended to say and has said it with suficient emphasis t o make it clear. For the dancer to say it again is merely to underline the obvious. It is rather like the old days of the movies when a gentleman used to stand at the side of the screen and tell us what was going on. "Now the hero sees the maiden, and behind her the villain advances. He puts his hand to his gun, he points its gleaming barrel at the offender's heart, he pulls the trigger," etc. Sometimes program music deals not with human beings at all but with sunrises and waterfalls. For those who think that a barefoot lady in gauze draperies adds anything to the poetic conception of a waterfall, this is perhaps all right. If the composer is picturing a waterfall, does it seem unreasonable to believe that the correct visualisation of his music must be a waterfall and not a lady clad in gauze? There is another respect in which the two arts clash when they are put together in this way. Musical form because of its greater abstraction takes a longer time to create its effect than dance form does. The dance is related directly t o life and in one movement may be able to give an impression that music requires a number of bars t o achieve. When the two are put together in this so-called interpretative way there is likely to be a feeling that the dancer is ahead of the game and

DANCE AND OTHER

ARTS

III

just filling in until the music catches up. Then, too, the presence of physical movement invariably makes music sound slower than the actual metronome count shows it to be. Whether this is because the speed of light is greater than the speed of sound, or because the eye is trained more fully than the ear, or because of the difference mentioned above in the relative degrees of abstraction in the two arts, or for some other reason, it is nevertheless true. Music played with dancing must be speeded up to sound as if it were being played at its normal pace.

X CONFLICTING FORMS

The fundamental conflict in form is also found in the type of dancing that tries to translate music's form into dance patterns. The di6culties are obvious. The dance has nothing that corresponds in any way to pitch; music has nothing that corresponds in any way to space. Differences might be continued indefinitely. All that can be paralleled is time-pattern and dynamic colour. It is frequently the practice to raise the arms when the melody goes up and to lower them when it goes down. But this is nonsense. Up and down have nothing to do with music. The only things that go up are the printed notes on the staff, and that only if the sheet of music is held in an upright position. It might be more accurate to try to produce the variations in vibrations

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between high and low notes, but this, so far as I know, has not been attempted-yet. A famous case in point is that of Nijinsky in his choreography of "Sacre du Printemps." He did not make any effort to reproduce the melodic line, but he had recently become quite enthusiastic about Dalcroze Eurythmics, and without digesting or grasping at all the purpose and the value of the Dalcroze system, he tried to apply literally some of its teachings to the creation of the ballet. He divided the dancers into groups which represented the different instruments of the orchestra and gave each note of music an equivalent movement on the stage. The rehearsals were endless and the performance a disaster. Even Diaghileff himself was not sympathetic to it, and when it was to be revived he is reported to have expressed anything but regret that the Nijinsky choreography could not be remembered. COMPROMISE

As another development, some dancers have tried to liberalise the utilisation of music while not separating themselves entirely from these two methods we have been discussing. They have taken into consideration the general mood and subject of the music so as not to produce an absurdity, but have eschewed all attempts to "interpret," to visualise the composer's intention. They have also taken into

DANCE AND OTHER ARTS

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consideration the external form of the music and have used it as a background though without in any way following it meticulously note for note and phrase for phrase. Against this background they have placed their compositions in movement as a visual counterpoint. This, of course, allows for far greater freedom. To a certain extent the dancer can actually create his own patterns in spite of the music (what a basis for co-operation!), and his subject matter need only be in the same mood. He is nevertheless still bound more than he should be. The mere fact that his background is more fixed than his own creative figures stultifies him. He must respect the musical phrase even though it is not at all in consonance with the dance phrase. The accompaniment, which should give him aid and support, stands instead as an unyielding dictator.

RESPECT FOR THE COMPOSER

Then there is a large class which has no respect at all for the music, but uses it to fit the situation, cutting it, speeding it up, slowing it down, changing its entire musical meaning to suit the ends of the dance. This is a perfectly happy method provided the music does not happen to be known to those who hear it; it becomes, indeed, to all intents and purposes, made-to-order music. The fairer course to pursue as far as the composer is concerned

W MODERN DANCE and the safer one for the dancer, is to have special 114

music made instead of mutilating music which has already been brought into existence for other purposes. Some day, somehow, somebody may just happen along who knows it and recognises what you have done. There is a long, sad story to be told about the use of music for dancing which was never intended to be danced to. And an even longer and sadder one about that which has been butchered to make a dancer's holiday. Mr. Montagu-Nathan once asked two pertinent questions in an article in the London Dancing Times: "Is a ballet for which the music has not been specially composed to be seriously considered as a work of art? and Does it really matter what a composer intended his music to convey? The answer to the first one I should say was no, though many of our most successful ballets would have to be eliminated by such a decision. The answer to the second one I should say was emphatically yes." Mr. Montagu-Nathan cites two examples of the London season of which he was writing. In one of them, a dancer did a dance called "Pride" and used as accompaniment Scriabin's "Carese DansCe." In the other instance, he mentions a performance on the subject of Omar IChayYam-for which the musical background was Debussyys "Reflets dans 1'Eau" played over several times. He then asks if perhaps one is to expect "the music with which Honegger depicts the excursion of a

DANCE AND OTHER ARTS I 15 powerful locomotive" to be used to a scenario dealing with "the aprb-midi of a snail." One need not go to London for such examples, though it is perhaps more tactful to do so. I recall three different dance renderings in America of Ravel's "Pavane pour une Infante Defunte." In one of them, a courtier dreams before a portrait of the dead Infanta and she comes to life to dance a ceremonial payane with him. In another, three royal nursery maids fear for their lives because the royal infant has apparently passed away off-stage in their keeping, only to hear it cry at last and reassure them. Whereupon they break into a jolly dance of rejoicing. The third was a thoroughly delightful romantic duet done in romantic costume of no period at all and with no reference whatever either to an Infanta or to death.' To accommodate the dance to the music, the title of the latter was changed to simply "Pavane." The music in all three of these cases was exactly the same. The delicious sadness which Ravel has achieved so beautifully was still there off-stage, but only one of these three versions captured anything of it in movement or subject.

XI11 We find ourselves faced then with equal dSculties when we attempt to interpret music and when we attempt not to. The solution seems to lie in not

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dancing to music at all, but in using musical material to supplement the dance. This Mary Wigman has done extremely well. I am willing to admit that the actual musical material she uses might conceivably be improved in some cases; in fact, I am willing to go farther and to say that some of it is far short of perfection, is sentimental and distracting. But from the standpoint of a solid working theory, I think she has solved the problem. I have been interested in getting the views of musicians on this point, and with few exceptions they have been deeply impressed with what she has done. One well-known critic said by way of private opinion that her musical accompaniments not only seemed to him to be absolutely right for a dancer, but in addition they had opened his ears to certain aspects of modern music to which he had been totally deaf before. On the other hand, an equally well-known musician who has had vast experience with both composing and playing for dancers, found the Wigman accompaniments in every way unsatisfactory. This latter opinion, however, seems to me to be more a matter of inertia than of settled criticism. It is rather generally known by now that the music for Wigman's dances is composed along with the composition of the dances. It is neither a finished work to begin with nor is it added after the dance is finished. I t furnishes part of a creative collaboration.

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XIV DANCING AND POETRY

Dancing to poetry presents many of the same problems that are involved in dancing to music, with certain others added for good measure. The structural framework of poetry, like that of music, presents a basis for time patterns upon which the dance can bbild. But where music is likely to be abstract in substance, poetry is inclined to be specific. Words have an even more unyielding quality than music in combination with other arts; they refuse to give an inch. Perhaps in that middle ground inhabited by Gertrude Stein some compromise can be evolved, but words used in this manner amount almost to music of a sort. In the combination of poetry and dancing we run into the obstacle again of trying to put together two things that are unequal. The dance can convey its impressions instantaneously, where poetry requires perhaps several lines to complete its simplest ideas. There is, on the other hand, a certain connotation in words which cannot be duplicated in movement. A poem may, for this reason, convey a battle or a hurricane or the decline of a civilisation in a line or two, and if it is at all descriptive in character, it puts the dance into a tight place to keep up with it without resorting to a rather meretricious type of symbolic gesture. This is unfortu-

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nately what generally happens in dances to poetry. The dancer indulges in a few gestures and lets it go at that. Pantomimic action is, of course, another thing. The pantomime performed to poetry requires a definite collaboration from the beginning between poet and choreographer. This, like most of the rest of the field of danced poetry, belongs rather to the synthetic art of the theatre than to the dance alone. Poetry is one of the essential elements of drama and dancing in its broader sense is another. When they are brought together both are likely to suffer something of a sea change.

ARCHITECTURE A N D SCULPTURE

It is here possible to give little or no attention to the many fascinating relationships that arise when the dance is considered in relation to the other arts. Music and theatre are its near kin, and therefore our emphasis may most profitably be laid on them in a perfunctory discussion such as this must be. Architecture, for example, the balance of mass against space, is an important part of the dance. The visual patterns of dancing are far more closely related to architecture than they are to painting or sculpture. Painting is valuable almost entirely as it deals in colour. Its particular use of line and composition are of less importance because the dance is

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three-dimensional. To be sure, the proscenium has the effect of flattening the design to some extent, but though this tends to remove the dance from sculptur a1 considerations, it places it rather in the field of architecture than of painting. Its perspective is always actual rather than created imaginatively. Sculpture in its pure form deals with the relation of the parts of an object to itself rather than to other objects and to space. It is designed, one might say, to stand alone in space. When it begins to adjust itself to other objects it moves more and more in the direction of architecture. The dancer may employ light, however, to a certain extent for sculptural effects-to obtain degrees of flatness or roundness, variations in relief. Light also has a distinct use in the architectural composition of the dance in that it can be made to change the size of the space in which the dancer moves. XVI CONCLUSION

And here we must leave the subject for the time being. There is a great deal more to be said; indeed, here little more has been attempted than to break the ground for the preparation of the building processes. It is the usual practice in the arts that this process starts with the finished building, and from there the steps leading up to it are taken in reverse

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order until the foundations and finally the earth itself are arrived at. This is as it should be. If this study of the dance has made it appear that anything else is the proper procedure, it has failed signally of its purpose--in fact, it has done positive damage. The artist must continae to create because he has to, and not bother with why and how. It is ideally in the same fashion that the spectator should react; but because there has been formed in the world reaction to dancing a vicious habit, based on wrong principles and encouraged by wrong motives and shallow thinking, it has apparently been necessary for the encumbrances to be stripped from the subject and a new start made from the very beginning. If this new start has here been suggested, no more could be wished.

INDEX Absolute dance, 6, 90-92 Acrobat, 12 Acting, 8, 61, 96-99 Architectute, 37-39, I 18-1x9 Argentina, La, 21, 40 A n (ddnicion), 35 Decadence in, 37-39 Decorative, 3s Functiom of, 36, 63-64 and intellect, 36-37, 63-68 and nature, 47, 70-72 and the senses, 36-37, 64-66 Arts, major, 89 Bach, 109 Bdltt, 2, 21, 22 (See ilro C l k c - dincc) Russian Imperid, 5 &action, 2, 17, 951 107 Russe, 18 Ballets "Cleopatsa," I 8 "Fire Bird, The," 18 "Petits Riens, Le," "Sacre du ~ r i n t c m d '12 ~~ "Scheherazade," 18 Beauty (ddnition) , 36-37 False sense of, u - 3 9 Beethoven, 109 Bio-mechanics, 99 Blake, William, 37 Bode, Dr., 106 "Caresse Dam&," 1x4 Classic dance Design in, 13 Distortion in, 47 Extension of, 22-23 Form in, 4, 21 Libenlisation of, 9 Metakinesis in, 14 Movement in, 4, 6-7, %I-23 Music in, 107

'*Cleopatra," I 8 Commedia, dcll'Ane, 95 Composition, 3 5, 61 Contortion, 12, 13, 48 Dllcroze Eurythmics, I 12 Dance (definition), 84 Absolute, 6, 90-92 Classic (See Cllss~cdance) Erotic, 41-42 ~x~ressionistic, I5, 59 German (See German dance) Greek, 14, 19 Literary, 60 Modern (See Modern dance) Nineteenth Century, 24 Oriental, 42 Pantomimic, 42, 60, 107, I I 8 Play, 41 Primitive (See Primitive dance) Religious, 42 Romantic (See Romantic dance) Spanish, 42 Tragic, I 8-19 and architecture, x I 8-1 19 and drama, 95-99 and music, 55, 99-1 16 and other arts, Part IV, 89I20

and painting, I I 8-1 19 and poetry, 1x7 and sculpture, I 18-1 19 and spectator, I 1-12 and theatre, 93-95 design,. f 2- 57 educat~on, I 5 form, 34 Dancers, high, low and middle, 16 "Dancing Times," 1x4 Dcbuuy, 1x4 Delsarte, 25-28 Design, 16, 49 Dance, 52-27

Design (Cont'd) and dynamism, 58 and metakinesis, 59-60 q distortion, 47, 49, 51-5t in space, 50, 52-15 in space-time, 54-57 in time, 51, 55 Diaghileff, 17, 18, 95, 112 Distortion (definition), 46 and design, 47, 49, I 1-52 and idealisation, 4 4 - 4 ~ and rhythm, 46-47, 82-83 in classic ballet, 47 in Greek art, 46 in modern dance, 47 in primitive dance, 4 7 Drama, 95-99 "Drama of Motion," IOO "Dr. Faustus," 70 Duncan, Isadora, 2, J, 19, 25, 26, 97, 98, 99, 103, 108 Dynamism, 31-32 Rhythms of, 32, 58 and stress, 58 Escape, thcoty of, 80-8 I Eurythmics, Dalcroze, I 12 "Fire Bird, The," 18 Fokine, 5, 108 Form, Part 11, 34-61 (definition), 3 J Mass experience of, 63, 68 Necessity of, 41, 43 and aesthetic response, 68 and beauty, 36 and nature, 70-71 in classic dance, 4, 21 in daily life, 49-50 in modern dance, 18, 33, 43 in primitive dance, 41, 43 in romantic dance, 4, 5 German dance, 15, 32, 106 Metakinesis in, I 5-1 6 "Gesicht der Nacht," IOO Graham, Martha, 20, 100 Greek architecture, 37-39 Greek art, distortion in, 46 Greek chorus, 14 Greek dance, 14, t 9 Greek theatre, 14, 19, 93, 95

Gunther school, 106 H'Doubler, Margaret, 73 Honegger, I I 4 Humphrey, Doris, xoo Idealisation, 44-46, 48 Khayyam, Omar, 114 Kinesis, 13, 16 Kinesthesis, 8I Kinesthetic sympathy, 12, 48, 85 Laban, Rudolf von, 15, 32, 106 Marlowe, 70 Maque, 95 "Meaning of Architecture, The," 37-39 Metakinesis (definition), I 3, 8 I and classic dance, 14 and design, 58-60 and form, 59-61 and German dance, I 5-16 and Greek theatre.- 14. and music interpretation, 109 and pantomime, 60 Meyerhold, 95, 98-99 Modern dance, 2, 3, 4, 19, 20, 30 Characteristics of, Part I, 1-33 Distortion in, 47 Form in, 18, 33, 43 Movement in, 6, 7 Montagu-Nathan, I 14 Moscow Art Theatre, 97, 98 Movement Abstract, 4, 48, 61, 85, 109 Limitations of, 23 Natural, 22, 25, 47, 48 Pantomimic, 17, 60, 61 Representational and non-teptesentational, I 1-12, 85 and emotion, 8 and metakinesis, 13 and music, 102 as substance of dance, 6-7, 3 I32, 58, 85, 87 in classic dance, 4, 6, 7, 21-23 in life, 8, 84, 86-87, 102 in modern dance, 6, 7 in romantic dance, 7, 25, 28 Mozart, 107 Murray, Gilbert, 14

AfprCPlU memorp, 12 Music and dance, 99-116 d movement, 102 in &uic bncc, so7 in folk dance. 106 m primitive dance, 103-106 iB tolluptic b e , 5 , 7 interpretation, 103, 108-xro

Painting, I x 8- I I 9 "Pavane pour une Infante Defunte,"

11s

Percepuon, 37, 64, 67, 79 Unit of, 71-13 "Petits Rienr, La," 107 Plato, 13, 10s Play dance, 41 Pond, 1-&S 17-39 Poetry, 1x7 "Project for a Divine Comedy," loo Ravel, 115 "R&tS &lM PhU," I14 Rcinhardt, 91 Rhythm (ddnition) , 39-40 Elemenu of, 74 External, 47, 78, 8 1-82 Horizontal, 76-77 Internal, 46, 78 J w s 40 Natural, 47 vertical, 76-77 and distortion, 46047~82-03 and dynamism, 58

and h1rpn-h 29s 40, 42 and unit of perception, 73 systemc, 28-30 'Rhythmic Form and a y & " Rhythmic integer, 77 Roman thutrc, 93-94 Romantic dance, 2, 4 Form in, 4, s and music, s s 7 and movauent, 7, 25, 28

73

"Sacre du Printexup,* I :a " S ~ h e h ~ r ~ dI~8 , " Schubert, rog Scriabin, 1x4 Sculpture, I I 8- x 19 Self -accompaniment, 106 Sclf-expression, 30 Sitine Madonna, 109 Stanulavsky, 97-98 St. Denis, Ruth, 5 Stein, Gertrude, I 17 St-, 551 58 Tamiris, 106 Technique, Part III, 62-08 of form, 68-84 of t& instrument, 07-88 of the medium, 84-87 -trc, 93 G-L, 14s 19s 93s 9s Rm-, 93-94 ornd dance, 93-91 in Dark Ages, 94-91 '*Traumg~talt,'* 100 Triimpy, Berthe, 106 Turner, 109

Wagner, 91 "Water Study," roo W i p a n , Mary, 20, 59, 106, 116

92,

100,