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
It was this dance which inspired Mr Holbrook Jackson’s spirited eulogy.
“She does not make you think of herself,” he writes in his “Romance and
Reality”; “she sets you dreaming of all the dancing that has ever been,
of all the dancing that is. Whilst watching her I could not help
thinking she was not merely following the rules of an art, but that she
was following the rules of life. The leaves
[Illustration: PAVLOVA AND MORDKIN
IN RUSSIAN COSTUME
_Photograph: Foulsham & Banfield, Ltd._]
dance in the breeze, the flowers dance in the sun, the worlds dance in
space, and Pavlova dancing is a part of this cosmic measure.
“Everybody in the theatre must have felt something similar--especially
when she and Michael Mordkin, her superb consort in the art, danced
together the _Bacchanale_ of Glazounov. I imagine also those dim
segments of faces in the darkened auditorium, many of them reflecting
the frigid morality of English respectability, would be touched to
strange emotions. Their staid owners would feel a new wakefulness,
recalling as in a dream all that had ever happened to them of passion or
beauty, all that might have happened to them had they followed their
real desires, their sacred whims.... The swaying form of Pavlova rhymed
and romped with life and joy, with love and beauty. O the wild flight
across the stage, the hot pursuit, the sweet dalliance, and then the
rich luxury of surrender! The very essence of life was there: life so
full of joy that it overflowed with blissful abandonment until it sank
from the only pardonable excess--excess of happiness.”
In this dance Pavlova has met the exponents of the modern “barefoot”
school on their own ground, and,--shall we say? vanquished them. Her
training in the strict traditional method has taught her that lesson,
invaluable in all the arts, the restraint of emotion. For even in the
_Bacchanale_ there is restraint, the art that conceals art, else she
could not have attained that perfect unison of rhythm which gives to the
dance the swinging quality of a wave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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