|SOME of the Russian ballets take a material story and treat it in terms of the dance. But what story is there in "Les Sylphides"? Even the programme, seldom at a loss for a synopsis, has never tried to tell us what it is all about. We hear preludes and waltzes, nocturnes and mazurkas by Chopin, and hear them orchestrated audaciously, but for the most part successfully, by distinguished Russian composers. We remember that when we heard these lovely Chopin pieces on the piano, interpreted by a Paderewski or a Pachmann, we had our mental dreams; we saw things, but not with our eyes. When the curtain rose on "Les Sylphides" we were asked to make our imagination abdicate its rights, to put away the films of that little individual cinematograph which we had made with closed eyes. The demand may have seemed impertinent to those who love the interior visions given by musical sounds better than the most beautiful spectacle that the theatre has ever presented. But "Les Sylphides" had not progressed far before we ceased to be worried by the antagonism between dreams and stage pictures. The grace of those immaterial white figures, Victorian just so far as Chopin is Victorian, became one with the grace of the music. [Illustration: 0044] Perhaps the rhythm of the music has never been better perceived than through these well-ordered movements designed by Fokine. The appearance of Nijinsky as a kind of dream Alfred de Musset in a romantic fair wig, and dressed in black and white, among the impalpable Sylphides was both inexplicable and inevitable. When he danced he seemed almost to play Chopin with his feet, so perfect was his time. His steps seemed to be the symmetry of the music--in fact its rhythm, for the rhythm of music is symmetry in motion. And when he merely walked about with outstretched arm, he recalled Ruskin's allusion to man "in erect and thoughtful motion," to "the great human noblesse of walking on feet." [Illustration: 0046] But it is time we cried "place aux dames!" Miss Pamela Colman Smith has well transfixed the bounding motion of Nijinska (sister to the "centre piece of the mosaic") in the Mazurka; and the names of Karsavina, Schollar, Will and Kovalewska excite happy memories of this romance of style. Le Carnaval |LE CARNAVAL," the second of the dance poems which have inspired Miss Pamela Colman Smith, is equally romantic, but not in the pensive, twilight manner of "Les Sylphides," with its vague suggestion of mysterious grief. Everything in "Carnaval" is joyous and _insouciant_--except perhaps poor Bolm as Pierrot, the unhappy dupe of Nijinsky-Arlecchino's teasing pranks. Bakst's scene, with its plain blue curtains and two absurd uncomfortable Victorian sofas, prepares us for the Russian interpretation of Schumann's music, before the peg-top trousered and crinolined _corps de ballet_ have made their appearance. [Illustration: 0048]