At various times and at various places we have seen in London during
the past ten years or so every form of dance and ballet it would
seem could possibly exist. “Sand” dances; “Buck” dances; “Hypnotic”
dances; “Salome” dances; “Vampire” dances; “Apache,” “Classic,”
“Viennese,” Turkish, Egyptian, Russian, “Inspirational” dancers, and
even English ballet-dancers in an all-British ballet once at the
handsome Palladium; and also at the Court and Savoy, where Stedman
staged some delightful ballets performed, under the direction of Miss
Lilian Leoffeler and Mr. Marshall Moore, by English dancers. Not only
at the regular vaudeville houses and theatres, however, is to be
found genuine appreciation of the British dance and dancer. Elsewhere
an English school of dance has been founded, and that in a form for
which the English nation was famous in Shakespeare’s time.
Henley made his plea for “Gigues, Gavottes and Minuets,” but there
are many other lovely, or lovelier, examples of old-world dance to
old-world music, which scholarship has revived and good taste has
been eagerly accepting wherever they were seen--_Pavane_, _Chaconne_,
_Coranto_, _Galliard_, _Bourrée_, _Rigaudon_, _Passepied_, and
_Sarabande_. These, and other ancient dances, were, as we know, the
delight of the Courts of Queen Elizabeth, of Charles II, of Anne,
of Louis-Quatorze--_le Grand Monarque_, of Louis-Seize and Marie
Antoinette. Many have been revived and performed to the music of
the harpsichord, violin, viola, viole-d’amour, and ’cello; and the
curious thing--or, rather, interesting thing, for it really is not
strange--is that both to scholars and to those unlearned in their
history, to cultured townsman or woman, and to country lad and lass,
to bored frequenters of the West End drawing-room, and to those who
find only in their dreams relief from the sordidness of an East End
environment, this old-world dance and music make an instant appeal.
I saw this put to the test once when, at a hall in the somewhat dingy
neighbourhood of Bethnal Green, a performance of the “Ancient Music
and Dances,” arranged by Miss Nellie Chaplin, was received by an
audience of East End work-people with such whole-hearted enthusiasm
that practically every item in a programme often performed in West
End drawing-rooms and at Queen’s and Albert Halls, as well as at
Liverpool and Manchester, Guildford, Oxford and elsewhere, was
encored, and several were doubly and trebly so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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