Modern dancing and dancersFlitch, J. E. Crawford (John Ernest Crawford)
History
Modern dancing and dancers
Flitch, J. E. Crawford (John Ernest Crawford)
Ballet; Dance; Dancers
What expression Pavlova can obtain even in the narrower scope of the
traditional school may be seen in one of her dances to a Chopin valse.
She appears as a young girl on the night of her first ball, in a simple
white frock, somewhat longer than the usual ballet-dancer’s skirt. She
is dancing the dreams of girlhood in the garden after the ball is ended,
when suddenly the lover, to whom she has just lost her heart, appears on
a balcony and throws her a rose. She gathers it to her breast and in her
happy dance she lives over again those revealing moments when her heart
suddenly blossomed into the life of love. Then looking up she blows a
kiss to the balcony where her lover had stood. To her shy dismay she
finds him still standing there, a witness to her confessed surrender.
She is confused with a modest shame for what in her maiden innocence she
fears must seem an unmaiden-like boldness. The surprised and delighted
lover offers his proposal. After a moment of the most delicious
embarrassment she fearfully nods her assent and skips away in a
transport of excited joy. It is a delicate suggestion of the troubled
and innocent emotions of first love, as suggestive in its rendering of
that neutral and indefinite age that lies between girlhood and womanhood
as a picture by Greuze.
But perhaps the most perfect of all Pavlova’s dances is the _Papillons_.
It has been said that she “does not so much imitate the movement of a
butterfly as the emotional quality of a butterfly-flight, the sense
raised in our minds by watching it; and then it is not an ordinary
butterfly, nor a plain lepidopteron, but a Grimm butterfly, a dream
butterfly, a butterfly multiplied many times by itself, raised as it
were to the Pavlova-th power.” With that sense of the elimination of
weight which is characteristic of her dancing, Pavlova is able to
suggest the grace of things flying, things swimming, things borne upon
the breeze. The _Papillons_ is the quintessence of the spirit of
everything that dances in the wind, and is kissed by the sun, and has
intrigues with the flowers, and lives its irresponsible life between the
sunrise and sunset of a summer day. It appears to be danced almost
wholly with the eyes and the finger-tips; the dancer is on the stage and
off again all within the incredibly short space of thirty seconds. Yet
she told me that, on account of its ceaseless vibrating motion, of all
her dances it is the most exhausting.
But Pavlova’s dancing is not limited to the expression merely of
thistledown lightness and inconsequential gaiety; it has a deeper reach,
and at times is borne upon a flood of passion. _L’Automne Bacchanale_ is
a stormy and tumultuous dance, affecting the mind like that vision which
Keats saw in the “marble brede of men and maidens” on a Grecian urn:
“What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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