CHAPTER XIXPLASTOMIMIC CHOREOGRAPHYThe defects of the new Russian and other modern schools; the new ideals; Prince Volkhonsky’s theories—Lada and choreographic symbolism—The question of appropriate music.
The defects of the new Russian and other modern schools; the new ideals; Prince Volkhonsky’s theories—Lada and choreographic symbolism—The question of appropriate music.
The defects of the new Russian and other modern schools; the new ideals; Prince Volkhonsky’s theories—Lada and choreographic symbolism—The question of appropriate music.
Wehave witnessed the various phases and changes which the art of dancing has undergone during the past centuries. The ancient Egyptians danced the movements of astral bodies, the Greeks danced the hymns of their mythology, the Romans their war songs, the Middle Ages danced the aristocratic etiquette of gilded ball-rooms, the French Ballet danced to stereotyped tunes with marionette-like manners, the Russian Ballet danced to dramatic scenarios that had musical accompaniment, the various nations danced to their simple tunes, the Duncanites to the mood-creating elements of the music, the Jacques-Dalcrozists to the rhythm of a composition only. It is inconceivable that none of the reformers, none of the new schools, danced the music itself. Those among the partisans of ‘natural’ or ‘classic’ dancing who claim to interpret the music have given us thus far supposed imitations of the Greek, Oriental or fantastic styles of some kind, based upon hazy rhythmic mood-producing forms of a composition. We have seen only fragmentary passages here and there, single numbers of the celebrated dancers, which expressed the phonetic designs of the music in true plastic lines. Pavlova has certainly succeededin expressing all the emotional fury of Glazounoff’sL’Autômne Bacchanale, the grace of Drigo’sPapillons, and Saint-Saëns’ ‘The Swan.’ We must give all due credit to Karsavina, for her dancing of Stravinsky’sL’Oiseau de Feu, and half a dozen others of her repertoire depict truly the very soul of the music. The child pupils of Miss Duncan dance all the ethereal grace of Schubert’sMoments Musicals. In the same way we find in one or several dances of Mordkin, Nijinsky and Volinin, of Lopokova, Fokina and Kyasht that they have succeeded in dancing the music. We are pretty safe to say that each of the celebrated dancers of history has probably been able to translate into visible ‘plasticism’ only a few of the phonetic forms of one or another composition of his repertoire. And this is what we may term ‘dancing the music.’
We have attended innumerable dance performances, have seen many new and old ballets, in Russia and abroad, have seen the new and ultra-modern dancers, yet we have so far seen but a microscopic fragment of what we here call ‘dancing the music.’ Certainly the greatest part of the repertoire of all the celebrated dancers has been the dancing of something else than the music. All the Pavlova ballets that have been given in America, all the elaborate ballets of the Russian classic school, all the ballets of the Diaghileff-Fokine group, are and remain dances to preconceived plots, dances to a style or a mood, but rarely dances of the music. We should like to have any of the celebrated dancers show us where there is expression of the music in all the spectacular pirouettes of Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky and Fokina, in their dramatic acting to a musical composition, even in the most modern ballets of Stravinsky. The dancing that they perform during the whole ballet is pantomimic acting to a certain plot, arranged to music. We are not by any means biased in making the statement, but make it with deliberation.
Dancers of various schools and ages have failed to see the point. Though Prince Volkhonsky is preaching exclusively the Jacques-Dalcroze rhythmic gymnastics as the basis of a new school of dance and therefore sees nothing more in a dance than the rhythmic expression, yet he has described aptly the defects of the Russian ballets, old and new, of the Duncanites and other modern schools of dancing. ‘Their main defect is that they develop independently of the music,’ he writes; ‘they are a design by themselves—complicated, interesting, very often pleasing to the eye, yet independent of the music. And we have already seen when we spoke of the oldcodasthat the most unpretentious figure, even when banal, becomes inspiring when it coincides with the musical movement, and, on the contrary, the most interesting picturesque figure loses meaning when it develops in discord with music. Look at some dance, definite and exact, which has crystallized itself within well-established limits; you may look at it even without music, but try to watch a pantomime without music. In the first place, it will be a design without color, quite an acceptable form; in the second, it will be a body without skeleton—something unacceptable.
‘The main fault of the leaders of the modern ballet is that they put the centre of gravity of the ballet in the plot, in the event, in the story: what in painting is called literature. Whereas the subject of the ballet is not in the plot, the subject is in the music. Any picture which is not dictated by music, any independent movement, is synonymous with abandonment of the subject, the essence; it is in the end an interruption of art, an interruption caused by a rupture between the two equivalent elements of the visuo-audible art—sound and movement. This rupture with music is all the more felt the more participants there are in the picture, and the more markedly it tends towards “realism.”Only look at them when they represent scenes of disorder; and by and by we lose the impression of “art”; we see real, not represented, disorder; and finally we are turned to the dramatic point of view, and we are called upon to admire the “acting crowd.” And if you are musical, if you live in the movement of sound, this independent visible movement cannot but appear as a sort of unasked-for interference of some intruder. The acting crowd is not admissible where a rhythmically moving crowd is required. Acting leads the artist out of music and conducts him into the plot; and the subject of ballet, I repeat, is not in the plot, it is in the music; the plot is but the pretext.
‘Only through the rhythm will the ballet come back to music and accomplish the fusion which has been destroyed by independent acting. Schopenhauer said that music is a melody to which the universe serves as a text; take away the music from the ballet—it will have nothing to say. There is quite a clear parallel here with the vocal art. The musician composes a song; he puts words to music. Imagine a singer coming out and telling us only the words; he will be far from the fulfillment of his task; he will have accomplished but the half of it, the lesser part of it. It is the same with the ballet; the musician composes the ballet, he puts the plot to music. Imagine a dancer coming out and acting the plot alone; he will be far from the fulfillment of his task; he will have accomplished but the lesser part of it. For the ballet does not relate how the Sleeping Beauty, for instance, fell asleep and awoke (this is the business of literature, declamation and drama); the ballet relates how music tells it. Music is the only real essence in that which forms the subject of the ballet. All the remaining “reality,” the real man with his real movement, is nothing but a means of expression, nothing but artistic material. It is evident how wrong, how offensive it is(for a musician) when this material of living movement embodies a new moving formula which is not implied in the music. Have you seen those “processions” of maidens, slaves, priests, etc.? Have you ever been shocked by the discord of their walk with music? Have you noticed that the pace which you see is quite different from the one you hear? Have you ever felt offended on seeing that they step between the notes and thus give you the impression of syncopes which are in no way justified by music? I am afraid you have not. Few are those who realize the importance of the accord of movement and sound, who long for its realization, and, together with Schiller, desire that “Music in its ascendant ennoblement shall become Image.”
‘The music we hear is the subject of the image we see. And in fact the singer sings music, the dancer dances music, and cannot dance anything else; he cannot “dance” jealousy or grief or fright, but he can and must dance the music which expresses the feeling of jealousy, grief or fright. And when he has rendered the music he will, by the same means, have rendered its contents, and naturally the silly question will be dropped: “How is it possible that on the stage the people should dance everything, whereas in life only dances are danced, or, at the utmost, joy?” The question is strange, to be sure, yet no less strange are those who forget that the only thing they may dance is music, and think they may dance a “rôle.” The dramatic principle based upon an arbitrary division of time is directly opposed to the choreographic principle, which is wholly founded on the musical, consequently regulated, division of time. Therefore the introduction of the element of “personal feeling,”Dof individual choice, and even more, destroys the very essence of the choreographic art, and eats away its very texture.
DAs the Duncanites do.—Editor.
DAs the Duncanites do.—Editor.
I do not speak against the working out of such; I speak against an independent working out—that is, a separate one running a course other than that in which music is the greatest essential. I remember one of the bestballerinascontorting herself in wild movements of anguish while the notes of the violin were dying away in one long sound of a trill. She “acted,” and there is, of course, no harm in this, but she acted according to her ideas, instead of acting according to music. It is just the same sin against art as if a singer were to execute a lyric song with bravado. Would you forgive him? Why, then, do we not forgive a singer, yet forgive a mimic, even admire his “acting”? Why is it every one understands that singing must agree with music, and so few, almost nobody, feel the offensiveness of movement which disagrees with music? And yet how sensitive to the observation of the musico-plastic principle are those who are so indifferent to its non-observation. How much they enjoy, though unconsciously, every manifestation of that concordance! We may say with certitude that for the best moments, the moments of greatest satisfaction in the living art—that is, the musico-plastic art combining the visible with the audible—we are indebted to the simultaneous concurrence of the plastic movement with the musical; in other words, to the equality in division of space and time. In an old French treatise on the dance, published in the year 1589, the author says among other bits of advice: “It is wrong for the foot to say one thing and the instrument the other.” In its naïve conciseness this sentence represents the germ of all that has been said, perhaps with some prolixity, in these pages.
‘Space and time are the fundamental conditions of all material existence—and for that same reason the inevitable conditions of all material manifestation of man within the limits of his earthly being. If we agreethat art is the highest manifestation of order in matter, and order in its essence nothing but division of space and time, we shall understand the fullness of artistic satisfaction which man must feel when both his organs of perfection, eye and ear, convey to him not only each separate enjoyment, but the enjoyment of fusion; when all his æsthetic functions are awakened in him not separately but collectively, in one unique impression: the visible rhythm penetrated by the audible, the audible realized in the visible, and both united in movement. This is the combination of the spacial order with the temporal. And when this combination is accomplished, and still more when it is animated with expression, then no chord of human impressionability is left untouched, no category of human existence is neglected; space and time are filled with art, the whole man is but one æsthetic perception.
‘And, once we have understood all that, how is it possible not to express the wish that the leaders of the art of the ballet should assimilate the principle of concordance of motion and music? Without this there is no art in movement, and all our old “pointés” and “fouettés,” all those records of rapidity and difficulties are nothing but words without significance, whereas the new “choreographical” pictures are but a dramatization of movement to the sound of an accompanying music.’
One of the first among living dancers to realize the truth of the above-described lack of concordance between motion and music in all the ancient and new schools, and to devise, intuitively, a method of her own in expressing only the music, is Lada, a young American girl, who had been assiduously studying dancing in Europe and in Russia. She felt so keenly the discordin the ballet, in the art of Isadora Duncan, in the dances of so many modern celebrities, that she was led to draw her inspiration from the folk-dances of various European countries. Here was something simple and primitive, the simple and naïve harmonic relation between the audible, and the visible, the plastic, conception. It was the concordance of motion and music.
Lada’s New York début in the late spring of 1914 was, in spite of so many unfavorable circumstances, a choreographic triumph such as few dancers have achieved under similar conditions. The New York musical and dramatic critics, though unfamiliar with subtle choreographic issues, declared her an artist of the foremost rank. Yet this girl has not had yet the chance to display the best of her art. Her art may be divided into three different categories: those based on the racial, on the dramatic and on the symbolic principles. Her Brahms’ Hungarian Dance, Glinka’sKamarienskaya, and Schubert’sBiedermayerare distinct ethnographic plastic panoramas; her Sibelius’Valse Tristeis a masterpiece among her dramatic and realistic dances, while MacDowell’s ‘Shadow Dance,’ Sibelius’ ‘Swan of Tuonela,’ Glière’sLada, and Rimsky-Korsakoff’sAntarare perfect choreographic gems of unusual symbolic breadth. In theValse Tristethe sad majesty, as if absorbed in infinite grief, overcomes the spectator so irresistibly that he almost forgets the morbidly beautiful music of Sibelius. On occasions, impressively executed with unsurpassed loftiness and freedom, she places before us a visionary being, though on the verge of death, in whose presence everything low falls from us, and our feelings express the same elevation that they do in genuine tragedy.
But, however excellently Lada may interpret the sentimental issues of various ethnographic compositions and how well she may portray the tragic vigor of the dramatic music, the best of her art lies in the symbolicvisualization of phonetic beauties. In these she appears like a supernatural being raised above common humanity. Her rendering of Gretchaninoff’s ‘Bells,’ which we have seen so far only in rehearsals, makes an impression as if she were lost in sacred revery. A touch of religious feeling pervades the beautiful panorama. In other dances of similar religious character she seems floating in mid-air, unsubstantial as the moon whose pale beams pour a magic beauty over sleeping Nature—and yet so far removed. Her art is an absolute image of the music. Lada is by no means a mood creator or a believer in genial spontaneity that requires nothing but a stage and orchestra. She possesses in her simplest folk-dance-like choreographic sketches the same technical perfection, the same strenuous practice, as the most accomplished ballet dancer. This is what makes her body seem like a highly strung instrument, whose strings the slightest breath of wind can set quivering. Let us hope that she will not change her views and aspirations for the sake of managerial or timely requirements, as so many successful dancers have done. It would be a loss to the evolution of the art of dancing.
To this school of dancing belongs also Natasha Trouhanova, a fascinatingly beautiful Caucasian girl, whose appearances in Russia and Paris have attracted great attention. Being of semi-Oriental descent herself, Trouhanova’s art has verged on Oriental conceptions. Russian music is rich in excellent Oriental themes; Borodine, Rubinstein, Balakireff, Ippolitoff-Ivanoff and Spendiaroff have written a large number of instrumental works of Oriental cast, which adapt themselves magnificently to dancing. Indeed, the composers of other countries have not been able to approach the Russians in the treatment of Oriental subjects. Mlle. Trouhanova has specialized in a romantic Oriental symbolism, in which she has succeeded more than any of the otherliving dancers. There is an enchanting, exotic atmosphere in Trouhanova’s plastic expressions, something that breathes of the Thousand and One Nights, seductive and saturated with passion, yet beautiful in every detail. Her best performances have been those which she has given in Oriental surroundings, in the atmosphere to which such expressions belong. Like Lada, Trouhanova seeks the solution of choreography in the music itself. She has been inclined to a kind of symbolism that pertains to the romantic emotions, and in this particular field she stands supreme.
How important Lada’s illustration of the theory of concordance of motion and music is at this time of dancing evolution can be more concretely grasped by the coming generations than by an average dance-lover to-day. It is perspective that gives the true visual impression of a mountain. ‘In the unison of plasticity and music, of the visible with the audible, of the spacial with the temporal, lies the guarantee of that new art which we so ardently desire and so unsuccessfully seek,’ writes a celebrated dance authority. But here comes the question of music, the phonetic image that should guide the choreographic artist. Lada complains that she has a very limited choice of compositions that can be danced. The problem of proper dance music is more serious than one would think. Sibelius’Valse Tristeis perhaps the best sample of dramatic dance music that corresponds perfectly to a dancer’s requirements. MacDowell’s ‘Shadow Dance’ is another gem of this kind. There are quite a few by other composers. The sum is slight. But the dancer can hardly blame the composer alone, for the latter knows only the old ballet, the naturalistic school orfolk-dance themes. He has never heard of any other dance music than the one which has been danced, either socially or on the stage.
Dancing to music requires short phonetic episodes with sufficient poetic, symbolic or dramatic element, and images clearly depicted in strong rhythmic measure and sufficient background for the story. The more variety of figures, the greater contrasts and the more ‘chapters’ in such a composition, the better for the dancer. The modern decadent, unrhythmic, vague mood music of the radical French and German schools is of little appeal and practically impossible to render in plastic forms. It is the Russian school of music, as also the works of modern Finnish composers, that have all the rich, clear and powerfully vivid magic of the north, and appeal so strongly to a dancer’s imagination. Sibelius’En Saga, a tone-poem for full orchestra, would be the most grateful composition for this purpose had it not been written in the old symphonic form. It belongs to that baffling and unsatisfactory class of symphonic poems to which Sibelius has failed to give a clear literary basis. The music suggests the recital of some old tale in which the heroic and pathetic elements are skillfully blended. The music is vigorous and highly picturesque, but its interest would be greatly enhanced by a more definite program. Again, the same composer’s ‘Lemminkainen’s Home-Faring’ would make an excellent dance for a man dancer, had the composer rearranged it for a smaller orchestra and for dancing. It is an episode from theKalevala. Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony is a composition that could be danced, being based on a series of single episodes of extremely imaginary character. But the score is written for a large symphony orchestra, therefore unpractical for dancing in a general way. Sibelius’ incidental music to Adolf Paul’s tragedy, ‘King Christian II,’ and the other to Maeterlinck’s‘Pelléas and Mélisande’ are large ballets rather than music that could be performed without any particular difficulties by dancers of Lada’s type.
The question of appropriate music for the latest phase of the art of dancing is so serious that it requires earnest consideration. In considering the best dances of all the great dancers of all ages and schools we find that among the phonetic images the symbolic element renders itself most gratefully to plastic transformation. By its very nature dancing is the symbolic rendering of music. The more symbolic the subject of a composition the better chance it has of being transmitted into a visible language. A dancer represents in his vibrating body lines the symbolic complex of all the phonetic unities of a composition. He is, so to speak, the unset type. Music is the text that he has to print in such pictorial forms, in such symbols that our mind can grasp it. Throughout his dance, he remains a kaleidoscopic tracer of the musical designs of the composition. The plastic positions of the human body, the mimic expression of the face, the gestures and the steps, are the mediums that can suggest certain phases of emotion and feeling, certain ideas and impressions of soul and body. There is a certain tonal and pictorial ‘logic,’ a kind of unarticulated thinking, in music as well as in dancing. But this cannot be depicted in any other than symbolic form. Essentially both arts are composed of a succession of peculiar emotional symbolic images. Music is the vibration of the sound, dancing the vibration of the form. Both arts appeal directly to our emotions, music more than dancing, the latter being more mixed with our intellectual processes. Dancing may be termed the translating of the absolutely subjective language into a more objective one. According to this theory all the ballets in the old form of drama, where the characters dance their rôles, is against the principle of pure art dancing. It is impossibleto imagine that there is any music on the order of our conventional dramas, of so or so many characters. At the utmost there can be only two dancing figures, two characters that we could imagine in a tone-drama of this kind; but even so, the other could be only the acting, the pantomimic character, while only one dancer at a time can render the real transformation process of the musical theme.
To comply with the requirements of the above-described theory of musical dancing, the writer has composed a scenario, ‘The Legend of Life,’ to which Reinhold Glière is composing the music. In this ballet, or more correctlyplastomime, which is arranged in three scenes, there is only one single dancer throughout the whole performance, and she is the symbolic image, the visualized imagination of a young monk, who is sitting in the evening before the festival of ordainment in his gloomy cell and thinking of the girl he used to love outside. Here he begins to hear the worldly music that is interrupted by the chimes and the choir of the church. The girl of whom he is thinking appears before him and dances romantic episodes—dances, so to speak, his vivid reminiscences. The monk is the realistic figure, the dancing girl the symbolic image of the music. It is a whole drama, which takes place in the monk’s mind. The drama is in music, and is his love, his romantic emotion, which is often interrupted by ecclesiastic surroundings. The second scene is the dream of the monk at night in a beautiful garden. The vision of the dancing girl. The third scene depicts him watching his own ordination in the church and the people arriving solemnly through the courtyard to witness the ceremony. Among them he sees his beloved. This scene is laid in the monastery’s courtyard. The charm of the dancing girl here becomes so overwhelming to the monk that he throws off his robe and rushes to her. Here she vanishes likea phantom and the plastomime ends. This, briefly, is an attempt at the sort of literary basis upon which the author considers dance music can be constructed in concordance with the new symbolic ideals.
The above-described scenario is merely one of the innumerable dance themes that modern composers could employ in their future dance music. It is to be hoped that composers will grasp the idea and enrich musical literature with works that adapt themselves to the requirements of a new choreography.
Asin the physical so in the spiritual world there prevails a kind of circulation of energies and life; growth, maturity and decline. Individuals seem nothing but the beginnings where the universes end, andvice versa. As a man mirrors the world in his soul, so a protoplasm mirrors the man. An invisible hand pushes a worm along the same road of evolution as it does an imperious Cæsar. One and the same feeling heart seems to beat in the breast of man that beats in the action of the constellations. Yet the hand of evolution that tends to adjust the equilibrium between the individual and the cosmic will gives by every new turn a new touch of perfection to the subjective and the objective parties. This tendency manifests itself in the history of individuals and races, and also in the history of art. The greatest genius of to-day is surpassed by another to-morrow.
The art of dancing, as it stands to-day, promises much encouragement for to-morrow. It is near the beginning of a new era—the era of the cosmic ideals. The past belongs to the aristocratic ideals, in which the Russian ballet reached the climax. The French were the founders of aristocratic choreography; the Russians transformed it into an aristocratic-dramatic art; to the Americans belongs the attempt at a democratic school.
‘The chief value of reaction resides in its negative,destructive element,’ says Prince Volkhonsky. ‘If, for instance, we had never seen the old ballet, with its stereotype, I do not think that the appearance of Isadora Duncan would have called forth such enthusiasm. In Isadora we greeted the deliverance.’ The chief merit of Duncan lies in destroying the aristocratic foundation of the ballet, and in attempting to find a democratic expression. She meant to find the solution in ancient Greek ideas and tried to imitate them. But she forgot that she was an outspoken American individualist and grasped only the democratic principles of a young race. All she achieved was to prove that the democratic essentials are no more satisfactory in the future æsthetic evolution of the dance than were the aristocratic traditions of the bygone centuries. The question remains, where is to be found the true basis of the coming choreography?
It is strange to contemplate what different directions the development of the dance in various countries and in various ages has taken. In ancient Egypt and Greece the primitive folk-dances developed into spectacular religious ballets, in Japan they assumed the same impressionistic character as the rest of the national art, in aristocratic France the folk-dances grew to a gilded salon art, in Italy they became acrobatic shows, while in Russia they transformed themselves into spectacular racial pantomimes. In every age and country the art of dancing followed the strongest æsthetic motives of the time. If a nation worshipped nobility it danced the aristocratic ideals, if it worshipped divine ideas it danced them accordingly. The social-political democratic ideals of the New World have exercised a great influence in this direction upon the art of the Old. Though imitating aristocratic Europe, America has not failed to add an element of its own to the æsthetic standards of the former. But had America been only democratic there would be littlehope left that it could attribute anything to the future beauty, particularly to the future dance. There are, however, other elements that give encouragement to something serious and lasting, and this is the cosmic tendency in American life and art.
The chief characteristics of the American mind are to condense expressions and ideas into their shortest forms. This is most evident in the syncopated style of its music, in its language and in its architecture. Like the American ‘ragtime’ tune, an American skyscraper is the result of an impressionistic imagination. Both are crude in their present form, yet they speak a language of an un-ethnographic race and form the foundation of a new art. Instead of having a floating, graceful and, so to speak, a horizontal tendency like the æsthetic images of the Old World, the American beauty is dynamic, impressionistic and perpendicular. It shoots directly upwards and denies every tradition. The underlying motives of such a tendency are not democratic but cosmic. While a nationalistic art is always based on something traditional, something that belongs to the past evolution of a race, the cosmic art strives to unite the emotions of all humanity. The task of the latter is very much more difficult. It requires a universal mind to grasp and express what appeals to the whole world. It requires a Titanic genius to condense the æsthetic images so that in their shortest form they may say what the others would express in roundabout ways. This gives to beauty a dynamic vigor and makes it so much more universal than the art of any nation or age could be. But this requires the use of symbols, and tends to subjectivism. However, the symbols employed in this case are fundamentally different from those employed by the Orientals. Since the earliest ages the Orient has made use of symbols in art and religion. But the Oriental symbols have been mystic or philosophic in their nature. TheAmerican symbols will either be purely intellectual or they will be poetic.
The future of the art of dancing belongs to America, the country of the cosmic ideals. This is evident from its evolution since Isadora Duncan’s début. The Russian New Ballet (of Diaghileff’s group) is the best proof that the traditional racial plasticism is being transformed into a cosmic one. Compare the steps and gestures of Karsavina and Nijinsky with those of Pavlova and Volinin. Where the former have become realistically dramatic, the latter remain acrobatically academic. There is more symbolism in Karsavina’s and Nijinsky’s art than in that of Pavlova and the followers of the old ballet. But the plastic symbols of Lada are far more condensed than those of Karsavina. This is what we have termed the essential of a cosmic choreography.
The tendency of every art is from the simple to the complex and then again from the complex to the simple. The greatest dancer is the one who can express the most complex musical images in the simplest plastic forms. Dancing in the future will be nothing but a transformatory process of the time-emotions in the space-emotions. ‘Rhythm is in time what symmetry is in space—division into equal parts corresponding to each other,’ said Schopenhauer. Arthur Symons called dancing ‘thinking overheard.’ ‘It begins and ends before words have formed themselves, in a deeper consciousness than that of speech. * * * It can render birth and death, and it is always going over and over the eternal pantomime of love; it can be all the passions, all the languors; but it idealizes these mere acts, gracious or brutal, into more than a picture; for it is more than a beautiful reflection, it has in it life itself, as it shadows life; and it is farther from life than a picture. Humanity, youth, beauty, playing the part of itself, and consciously, in a travesty, more natural thannature, more artificial than art: but we lose ourselves in the boundless bewilderment of its contradictions.’ It follows that a neo-symbolism is the logical outcome of the future dance. Dancing will become an independent stage art and take the place of the obsolescent opera. But before it reaches that stage, composers will be compelled to realize the importance of the new choreography, and produce music that contains all the graphic designs, the plastic possibilities, the dynamic drama and, above all, that structure of sounds which gives ample possibility for symbolic plasticism and yet contains a message.
The real future dance will be expressionistic and subjective. Instead of copying life it will suggest its deepest depths and highest heights by combining the plastic symbols with the musical ones. It will not try to imitate nature but transpose it, as a painting transposes a landscape. Our mind is growing tired of the prevailing naked realism and its photographic effects. The realistic drama is gradually losing its æsthetic appeal. The aristocratic opera seems to belong to past centuries. Opera has lost its grip on the modern mind. Our æsthetic conception has reached the point where our subjective mind requires not imitation but inspiration. Instead of traditional beauties we require dynamic ones. We enjoy a suggestion of an æsthetic sensation more than an accurate description of it. This proves that the symbolic sensations will sooner or later take the upper hand, and symbolic dancing will be the watchword of the coming age.
Since, according to our theory, the future of the art of dancing belongs to America, we should take into consideration those primary elements of musical art that form the foundation of every dance. American art naturally lacks fundamentally national elements; it strives toward cosmic ideals instead. Miserable as is the syncopated form of American popular music ityet constitutes the musicalVolapükof all the nations. This same syncopated form of expression manifests itself in American architecture and in its social dancing. The broken lines, the irregular dynamics, and the restless corners here and there that we find predominant in American architecture are nothing but a transposed form of popular music. It is evident that neither one of the arts has yet found its foundation. A New York skyscraper is a silent ‘ragtime’ tune, andvice versa. But the ‘ragtime’ rhythm can be modulated to the same æsthetic expressions as the skyscrapers. Unconsciously the dance follows the patterns of architecture and music. The future choreography does not necessarily need to be based upon syncopated rhythm only, but upon the various factors of the style, the method of expression and the spiritual issues.
The physical and spiritual bases of every folk-art lie in the rural life. A folk-song or a folk-dance is and remains the product of idyllic village atmosphere. It mirrors the joys and sorrows, hopes and passions of the country people. It has been molded under the blue sky, in sunshine and storm. The songs of birds and the voices of nature form its æsthetic background. A village troubadour or poet is usually its creator, and simplicity is its fundamental trait. It exalts the rural atmosphere, poetry and characteristics. The place of the birth and growth of syncopated rhythm and broken symmetry is exclusively the city. It exalts the noise, rush and triviality, also the alertness and forces of the street. It suggests motion and intellectual fever. It leaves images of something artificial and fatal in the mind. The spirit of the country is different in every nation; but the spirit of the city is a similar one all over the world. It is in this very fact that we have to look for the logical foundation of the future choreography. It will emanate from no particular race, from no particular country, nor from any particular elementof national art. It will come from the artificial city, the mother of cosmic idealism. The symbolism of the city is destined to take the place of the symbolism of the country. The New York plasticism will be also the plasticism of Paris and Petrograd.
The ethnographic and aristocratic era in the art of dancing has reached the climax of æsthetic development. We are entering the era of cosmic art. We begin it with the same primitive steps that our ancestors made so many centuries ago; only with this difference—that now we view the problem from a universal point of view while our forefathers beheld it from a nationalistic and aristocratic point of view. We are in the cosmic current of evolution and begin our circle where it was left by those who had passed the current of a certain race or class. The future dance will grasp beauty from a broader stretch and deeper depths than the greatest virtuosi of the past and present could do. The fundamental law of all spiritual as well as physical evolution is to bring about a better equilibrium between the individual and the universal powers.