[Illustration: BEATRICE COLLIER AND FRED FARREN IN _La Danse des Apaches_ _Photographs: Ellis & Walery_] CHAPTER XIII ORIENTAL AND SPANISH DANCING It does not require a very minute observation to discover that peoples are distinguished not only by their speech, but by their habitual movements and attitudes. Every country has its special unspoken idiom of gesture, which sometimes differs in different parts of the same country as perceptibly as the spoken dialect. This characteristic gesture is the foundation of every national dance, which does but elaborate and adorn it. The composers of the Russian ballets have achieved novel and interesting effects by using this racial attitude as the basis for the scheme of some of their dances. In _Cléopâtre_ they have adopted the attitude of the ancient Egyptians, or rather those attitudes which are depicted on the pottery and frescoes of the old Egyptian civilisation. Whether these attitudes were ever really typical of the attitudes of the people is at least questionable. It is quite as likely that they were an artistic convention of the time, due to the naïve conceptions of the draughtsman. But there can be no doubt that ancient Egypt had a characteristic alphabet of gesture, as individual as that of ancient Greece, although probably it has been exaggerated in the designs on the figured monuments by the faultiness of the perspective. This circumstance, however, does not render it any the less serviceable as an element of design in the dance. In _Scheherazade_, again, Nijinsky’s dance is based upon the abrupt, angular, almost apish movements of the negro. With Italians gesticulation so inevitably accompanies speech that it is not surprising that the ballet should have been originated and perfected, at all events so far as its pantomime is concerned, in Italy. Of course, as a people becomes more intellectual, and learns to express all the nuances of thought by means of language alone, it relies less upon the elucidation of gesture. Anglo-Saxons are naturally schooled in reserve and seek to avoid any betrayal of the emotions by physical expression. The national gesture nevertheless exists and finds its embodiment in the national dance, the Morris. America can scarcely be said to have any national dance, unless it be the cake walk, which is plainly stamped with all the ungainliness of negro movement. But American vaudeville artists--I am thinking of some who have danced this year in London--seem almost unconsciously to have seized upon the American gesture and realised it in their dances. Naturally they have distorted it; they have given it the immoderate energy of American life, the exaggeration of American wit, and the sensationalism of American advertisement. Who knows but that they will end by giving America its national dance!