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Illustrator: Pamela Colman Smith

THE RUSSIAN BALLET

THE RUSSIAN BALLET

Introductory

|THE Russian ballet, at least that section of it which M. de Diaghiliev, patron and grand seigneur rather than agent, has taken all over Europe during the last few years, and more recently to America, is now more than a darling of its own nation, a naturally ballet-loving nation. It has become an international possession. In England the Russian dancers have perhaps been acclaimed with more whole-hearted fervor than elsewhere, because before their coming the land was barren. In France and Italy they had ballets of their own. They have a standard by which they can measure the visitors from St. Petersburg. But English audiences, like children presented with a new toy, first shyly wondered at the novelty of the agile strangers, and then fell into transports of enthusiasm.

Uncritical enthusiasm toward art and artists is an amiable attitude of the English once they have been gained over. And this enthusiasm has a way of persisting. "The English public may be slow," said a musician who had taken a long time to win their suffrages, "but they are damnably faithful!" If the fashion in Russian ballet should age elsewhere I feel sure it will not in England, the last country to adopt it. So these notes by an enthusiast have a good chance of being seasonable for many years. Yes, I claim to be an enthusiast, although, perhaps, the fact that I am not an English enthusiast but one who is half Irish and half Scotch makes me more canny than some of my fellow-admirers. I have never opened my mouth and swallowed the new ballet and all its works without thinking. These are, all the same, impressions rather than criticisms. And the impressions are not intended as an explanation of Miss Pamela Colman Smith's pictures any more than her pictures are intended to be an explanation of my impressions. Her pictures surely speak for themselves. And like the clerk, I need only cry "Amen" to her eloquent drawings.

Dancing In General

Religious Dancing

|IT seems strange that the Dance should have almost everywhere degenerated into something base and trivial, while its children, Music and Poetry, in spite of lapses, should have preserved their dignity and beauty. It seems even more strange when we remember that dancing had a religious origin. Among the Jews, as among other peoples, dancing was constantly associated with the ceremonies of faith.

The Russian Revival

|ALL who regard dancing seriously, and there is nothing which should be regarded more seriously than an art that is to give pleasure, must be glad that they have lived in a century which has witnessed a very fine and sincere endeavor to restore the dance to some of its primal nobility. There is much in the results of this endeavor to criticize, there are a few things to deplore, but in any refusal to recognize the magnitude of what has been accomplished, there is probably some pique that it has been the nation which Europe still views as barbarously ingenuous in matters of art which has reformed the ballet on such refined and spiritual lines.

Male Dancers

|HAD the male dancers ever been excluded from the Imperial ballet its fate would have been very different. The men are trained on the "ballon" system, not on that which is known as the "parterre," and it is "ballon" dancing which is one of the most beautiful features of the Russian ballet. After we have watched interminable exercises ingeniously performed "sur les pointes," with what relief have we seen Nijinsky, perhaps the greatest "ballon" dancer who has ever existed, bound on to the stage, rise high in the air, descend slowly and with such art that when he touches the ground he can use it again for a still higher flight.

The presence of men in the ballet has an effect beyond the pleasure afforded by the virile agility of their steps.

It does away with the necessity for those feminine travesties of men, known in our pantomimes as "principal boys," who introduce an element into ballet which at its best makes a disturbing demand on our capacity for illusion, and at its worst is a little degrading. What has made the Male Dancers word "ballet" a sort of synonym for vice if it is not the idea that it provides an opportunity for women to attract admirers--not so much on account of their dancing as for the sake of their physical charm? I think that a mixed ballet has the effect of concentrating attention on the art of the dance rather than on the seductiveness of the dancers. And the free and noble plastic of the male dancers in the Russian ballet has influenced the plastic of the women, making it far less sexual and far more beautiful.

Sur les Pointes

How Far a Native Ballet?

Personality--and Nijinsky

Nijinsky, in the years when Pavlova was still in the ballet, was allowed to have talent. Lately we have all begun to use the word "genius." Where does the difference between the things talent and genius lie if not in the huge personality of the genius?

They used to say of Henry Irving, who expressed himself in a multiplicity of parts, that he was always the same Irving. Certainly he was always faithful to himself whatever he assumed. This is a sign of the presence of genius, not of its absence. In one sense we always have the same Nijinsky, as Miss Pamela Colman Smith has very happily shown in her drawings of him. Yet in another sense we never have the same Nijinsky.

Nijinsky's Distinction

Nijinsky Always a Dancer

The Dance Poems

|IT has been said that the Russian ballet makes a vivid and brutal appeal to the senses, and certainly there is some truth in this as regards the ballets of which the artist Bakst is the guiding spirit. The old saying that you cannot see the wood for the trees may be borrowed to express a criticism. You cannot see color for the colors in some Bakst ballets. Yet even Bakst sometimes helps to aid that impression of a visitation divine which Nijinsky in his own person produces. You will see that Miss Pamela Colman Smith has given what some may think a disproportionate amount of space to her studies of "Les Sylphides," "Le Carnaval," and "Le Spectre de la Rose." I think she was, perhaps unconsciously, more strongly attracted by these three dance poems because of their greater wealth in the immaterial.

Les Sylphides

|SOME of the Russian ballets take a material story and treat it in terms of the dance. But what story is there in "Les Sylphides"? Even the programme, seldom at a loss for a synopsis, has never tried to tell us what it is all about. We hear preludes and waltzes, nocturnes and mazurkas by Chopin, and hear them orchestrated audaciously, but for the most part successfully, by distinguished Russian composers. We remember that when we heard these lovely Chopin pieces on the piano, interpreted by a Paderewski or a Pachmann, we had our mental dreams; we saw things, but not with our eyes. When the curtain rose on "Les Sylphides" we were asked to make our imagination abdicate its rights, to put away the films of that little individual cinematograph which we had made with closed eyes. The demand may have seemed impertinent to those who love the interior visions given by musical sounds better than the most beautiful spectacle that the theatre has ever presented. But "Les Sylphides" had not progressed far before we ceased to be worried by the antagonism between dreams and stage pictures. The grace of those immaterial white figures, Victorian just so far as Chopin is Victorian, became one with the grace of the music.

Perhaps the rhythm of the music has never been better perceived than through these well-ordered movements designed by Fokine. The appearance of Nijinsky as a kind of dream Alfred de Musset in a romantic fair wig, and dressed in black and white, among the impalpable Sylphides was both inexplicable and inevitable. When he danced he seemed almost to play Chopin with his feet, so perfect was his time. His steps seemed to be the symmetry of the music--in fact its rhythm, for the rhythm of music is symmetry in motion. And when he merely walked about with outstretched arm, he recalled Ruskin's allusion to man "in erect and thoughtful motion," to "the great human noblesse of walking on feet."

But it is time we cried "place aux dames!" Miss Pamela Colman Smith has well transfixed the bounding motion of Nijinska in the Mazurka; and the names of Karsavina, Schollar, Will and Kovalewska excite happy memories of this romance of style.

Le Carnaval

Until I saw "Le Carnaval," although I had realized that the art of the Russians was not narrow or local, and that they could dance in several languages, I fear I had not credited them with humor. The true comic spirit rules this delicious episode, which is a setting of Schumann's music in the way that music can be a setting of words, completing their message and intensifying their significance.

For the first time I will use the word "acting" in connection with the Russian ballet. The comedy in "Le Carnaval" is of a very high order. The story is interpreted more through genuine pantomime than through dancing, which perhaps accounts for the popularity of this particular ballet with us English, who still understand the nature of good acting better than the nature of good dancing, although we are at the present time much attracted by dancing. A real note of freakish farce is in this "Carnaval." The dancing itself is freakish. It is the simplest, silliest thing! A bit of fun--yet to give us this bit of fun what serious work was needed! The grave young Nijinsky is transformed into a mischievous child!

The Corps de Ballet

Le Spectre de la Rose

|WHAT would a dramatist make of Gauthier's little idyl of the vision of the Rose? What would an actor and actress make of it if it could be dramatized? I am afraid to answer these questions. Fortunately they need not be answered, as no dramatist now will be fool enough to rush in where dancers have trodden on such light feet. A young girl returns from a ball. She sinks into a chair and, kissing the rose in her hand, which reminds her of the evening's innocent pleasure, she falls asleep. She dreams that the rose comes to life and invites her to dance with it. She dances in her dream. She knows a joy in which there is no fatigue, a love in which there is no threat to her virginity. The phantom rose disappears. She wakes. The real rose is at her feet where the dream rose had lain for a moment. She picks it up and kisses it again, poor little faded and finite sign of a fresh infinite thing which has shown itself for a moment and passed out of earth's tiny room.

A Paradox

How this music pulsates! Its deep expectant breathing increases one's sensation that we are all dreaming--dancers and audience too. Tamar Karsavina, who in other roles shows a nervous force, a tragic power, a strange and luring grace which account even better than her dancing for her triumphant prominence, is so gentle, so modest, so suppliant in the "Spectre de la Rose," that she becomes the incarnation of snow-white youth, dreaming of a heavenly lover. And Nijinsky becomes the spirit of that dream. I feel sorry for that young girl, who perhaps will wake next day in that queer Bakst bedroom, and think of the partner who gave her the rose, not of the Rose itself, who came to her as virginal as the thought which summoned him. I don't like the idea of the remembrance of an ordinary flirtation at a ball walking in at the door of that room, out of whose window the mystical figure of the Rose flew forth into the night, which was, I am sure, day to him!

|THE Russian dancers may reasonably pride themselves on their versatility. In their seven-leagued ballet shoes they travel all over the world, and beyond. They bound easily from ancient Greece to a Caucasian camp, from the East of a thousand-and-one nights to a legendary country invented for their playground. It really requires astonishing mental activity to follow them with pleasure from "Le Spectre de la Rose" to "Scheherazade." A symphonic poem of Richard Strauss after a plain-song hymn, or Wagner after Mozart, could not be a greater shock to the system. Everything in "Scheherazade" suggests violence and horror.

Bakst's palace was built for dreadful deeds; no one, I am sure, could ever feel safe in it. Its color makes it vibrate on its foundations, if indeed it has any foundations. There are bad dreams as well as good ones, and the dream quality, on which I have insisted, so far, as the special beauty of these Russian ballets and mimed poems, is present in "Scheherazade." The strange thing is that this nightmare, in which sensuality and cruelty are the only emotions evoked, has a paradoxical vein of delicacy running through it. There is something almost childlike in the wiles by which the Sultan's wives, when their lord's back is turned, induce the Master Eunuch to liberate the slaves for their pleasure. The infantile joyousness with which the dark-skinned youths rush from their silver and gold cages on their loves and on their impending doom has an element of pity. The whirligig dance which follows expresses exactly the happiness, which is short, sharp and sudden, but over which destiny hangs, and for which there is no mercy. And all the time in this riot of color, this orgy of animation, we never lose sight of the negro who is the chosen of the Sultan's favorite, the negro who half an hour ago in another world was the phantom Rose! His arms, which but now were waving invisible garlands in the serene air, are ready to coil round their prey in a serpentine embrace.

The lips which gave the innocent kiss of na?ve youth are now twisted in the spasms of desire. Nijinsky in "Scheherazade" is not the incarnation of evil, but its spirit.... His ghastly pallor is terrible.

Really he seems to turn white under his black skin.

Tamar

|TAMAR" is another pleasant little ballet of barbarity, in which Karsavina, as one of those avid, fatal heroines, in the interpretation of whose serpentine passions she is always fine, lures lovers to her high tower, and, in the manner of the Chinese Empress, makes death the penalty of an hour of her love. The execution is summary, the unfortunate lover being hurled out of the window by muscular members of Tamar's suite. In "Tamar" Adolph Bolm, who was I think the first Russian male dancer to appear in England, makes a magnificent entrance. Miss Pamela Colman Smith's drawing gives a very vivid impression of the effect produced by the first appearance on the scene of the Lover and his companions. Here is a very good example of the amazing influence that the color and shape of mere garments can have on the imagination. Those silent, black-coated, black-hatted men, their faces muffled in concealing scarfs, seem to have come from far, from very far. I feel that their horses below are in a sweat, that they have been riding furiously at the summons of a force which their fresh and ardent youth could not resist!

Poor frenzied man! What is his secret? Why has he come here to see love through a veil of blood--blood which is his own?

Prince Igor

|AT the head of the Polovtsien warriors in the dances from Borodin's opera "Prince Igor," Bolm has to dance as well as to mime, and very splendidly and fiercely he dances with his bow. This "Prince Igor" ballet lasts only a few minutes, but in those minutes are crowded enough energy, excitement, lightning swift successions of different movements, true healthy barbarity , and splendid music to take away all words, all thoughts, but "wonderful"! But those "Prince Igor" dances ought never to have been given without their accompanying songs. It has been the custom lately to leave out the singing, one of those omissions that matter.

NOTE: An omission of mine that matters is that I have recalled "Prince Igor" without mentioning the name of Sophia F?odorova, who holds her own in astounding feats of agility, as in fiery spirit with the adolescents in whose evolutions she participates. The girl is a wonder at this man's work!

Pavillon d' Armide

Narcisse

The whole treatment of the exquisite story of the youth who fell in love with his own beauty, and was drowned seeking to come near its reflection, was heavy-handed, even a little barbarous and ugly. And all the grave movements imprisoned in stone and marble by the sculptors of ancient Greece, all the joyous silhouettes on Greek vases, seemed to remain remote, and secure from the conquest of the devouring Russian, restlessly seeking material for his ballets in all nations and all times. I had a sudden seizure of distrust; it was as though the disdain of the Greek had sapped the foundations of my belief in the justness of the praises lavished on the new dance; but then memories of gestures, colors, bounding movements, freedom of expression given by perfection of technique, came crowding pell-mell into my mind. The frown on a cold marble forehead could not extinguish my joy in the flame of life which burns so ardently in the work of the Russian ballet.

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