Sibelius’ incidental music to Adolf Paul’s
tragedy, ‘King Christian II,’ and the other to Maeterlinck’s ‘Pelléas
and Mélisande’ are large ballets rather than music that could be
performed without any particular difficulties by dancers of Lada’s type.
The question of appropriate music for the latest phase of the art
of dancing is so serious that it requires earnest consideration. In
considering the best dances of all the great dancers of all ages and
schools we find that among the phonetic images the symbolic element
renders itself most gratefully to plastic transformation. By its
very nature dancing is the symbolic rendering of music. The more
symbolic the subject of a composition the better chance it has of
being transmitted into a visible language. A dancer represents in his
vibrating body lines the symbolic complex of all the phonetic unities
of a composition. He is, so to speak, the unset type. Music is the text
that he has to print in such pictorial forms, in such symbols that our
mind can grasp it. Throughout his dance, he remains a kaleidoscopic
tracer of the musical designs of the composition. The plastic positions
of the human body, the mimic expression of the face, the gestures and
the steps, are the mediums that can suggest certain phases of emotion
and feeling, certain ideas and impressions of soul and body. There
is a certain tonal and pictorial ‘logic,’ a kind of unarticulated
thinking, in music as well as in dancing. But this cannot be depicted
in any other than symbolic form. Essentially both arts are composed
of a succession of peculiar emotional symbolic images. Music is the
vibration of the sound, dancing the vibration of the form. Both arts
appeal directly to our emotions, music more than dancing, the latter
being more mixed with our intellectual processes. Dancing may be termed
the translating of the absolutely subjective language into a more
objective one. According to this theory all the ballets in the old
form of drama, where the characters dance their rôles, is against the
principle of pure art dancing. It is impossible to imagine that there
is any music on the order of our conventional dramas, of so or so many
characters. At the utmost there can be only two dancing figures, two
characters that we could imagine in a tone-drama of this kind; but even
so, the other could be only the acting, the pantomimic character, while
only one dancer at a time can render the real transformation process of
the musical theme.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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