The Classical Ballet
Performed at Various Theatres.
Selection of Ballets.
Peformed circa 1911.
Starring: Anna Pavlova, Adeline Genee.
Editorial and Photos all as published in 'The Play Pictorial' No. 109 (1911).
THE CLASSICAL BALLET
Foreword
This number is a distinct departure from the policy which we have pursued for so many years. But there is no denying the tremendous popularity of the Variety Theatre, and as we have frequently received communications from correspondents on this subject we have taken advantage of the present boom in dancing to put before our readers a fairly comprehensive series of illustrations of the chief ballets and the principal performers.
To my mind the classical ballet is one of the most artistic entertainments that can be witnessed, and perfect dancing is one of the greatest aesthetic achievements in the whole domain of executive art. The Russian invasion has done much to revive the interest of the public in the Ballet, and it may be - we hope that it will be - that with our widereaching circulation we shall bring home to the mind of middleclass England what they miss by not giving their support to the chief centres of ballet entertainment.
A Fairyland of Fair Women
I frankly write myself down an enthusiastic admirer of the ballet. I do not mean the hybrid, unmentionable kind of entertainment which introduces us to excursionists on Brighton Pier, or cockneys on Hampstead Heath, but the ballet that has a poetic or mythological basis, that is musical in the highest sense of the term, that is adorned with everything that artistic inventiveness can provide, and that is represented by artists who, with suppleness and grace of limb, add to their tripping measures the expressive power of the cultured mime.
The Anglo-Saxon race is to a great extent deficient in the keen sense which appreciates the Beautiful that is unaccompanied by some tangible and material form which makes an instantaneous appeal to the ear and the eye. We do not, en masse, appreciate Beauty for Beauty's sake. We are ever wanting to be "cutting the cackle and coming to the 'osses."
Unfortunately, our two great Ballet Theatres have to consider the tastes of those to whom any concentration of the mind, any genuine aesthetic endeavour, is synonymous with boredom. In spite of this discouragement and apathy the Empire and the Alhambra still go on putting before the public exquisite specimens of one of the most perfect forms of entertainment that the mind of man has conceived.
I wonder how many of the readers of the Play Pictorial have any acquaintance with the ballets that have been produced at the Empire and the Alhambra during the past ten years! The mother of a Kensington household might hold up her hands in holy horror at the mere suggestion of a visit to either place, and possibly if she went it is more than likely she would lazily close her eyes when the danseuse was at her best and meditate upon some delinquency of Mary Jane. She would be probably very much surprised if you told her that in old times the bishops led the dance on Feast Days, that the fathers of the Church assembled at Trent gave a ball in which they took part, that the dance was an integral portion of the Service in the Cathedrals of Spain and Portugal, and that in our own Merrie England there was danced at London on the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Frederick a ballet called "Religion uniting Great Britain to the rest of the World."
Within the past year or two there has been a great revival in our taste for public dancing. But it has been rather a question of the individual than the excellence or perfection of the ensemble. It is the artist who has triumphed and not the maitre de ballet.
My friend, Mr. Alfred Moul, took me severely to task for saying in these columns that it was the Russian dancers who were chiefly responsible for the renewal of interest in dancing, and pointed to the splendid ballets he had produced at the Alhambra as a proof that we did not lag in the rear of our Continental neighbours. The other day I was turning over the pages of a book by my old friend, the late Sutherland Edwards, published in 1881, in which he was writing on the "Extinction of the Ballet" in England, and in which he remarked "we shall probably have to go as far as St. Petersburg to discover a premiere danseuse worthy in some measure to be compared with those of twenty and twenty-five years ago." He little knew what a true prophet he would be.
With the exception of Adeline Genee we had no dancer of conspicuous eminence in this country for many years. Lumley, the last of the great Opera Impresarii, until the coming of Sir Augustus Harris, killed the Opera Ballet with the introduction of the famous pas de quatre. Carlotta Grisiand Cerito, Rosati and Lucille Grahn, danced together and united they attracted all London, but divided they fell and so also did the ballet. Before that Madame Taglioni - diamond bracelets were flung to her on the stage by magnificent patrons of the art - the incomparable Fanny Elssler, and the ballet were the talk of London. The Opera has returned to its early traditions, and this season the Russian Imperial Ballet has been one of the most characteristic features.
If I were asked to state a rough and ready opinion as to the cause of this renewed interest in the Premiere Ballerine, I should give the credit in the first place to Maud Allan, and secondly to Anna Pavlova. I do not class Miss Allan among the great dancers - I always feel she has left her skipping rope in the dressing room - but she has wonderful grace and a power of fascination that but few dancers have equalled. She is herself and invites no comparison. Much the same may be said of Adeline Genee, who is the perfection of sweetness and charm and a human poem.
With the coming of the Russian school, however, we have been introduced to something entirely new. It has given us the dramatic dancer. In a way, the Russian dancers realize the conception of Jean George Noverre, the Father of the Ballet. "When dancers shall feel, and, Proteus-like, transform themselves into various shapes to express to the life the conflict of passions; when their features, their very looks, shall speak their inward feelings; when extending their arms beyond the narrow circle prescribed by the narrow rules of pedantry and with equal grace and judgment giving them a fuller scope, they shall by proper situations describe the gradual and successive progress of the passions; then they may expect to distinguish themselves; each motion will be a sentence; every attitude will portray a situation; each gesture convey a thought, and each glance a new sentiment; every part will please, because the whole will be a true and faithful imitation of nature."
That this art was well understood among the Greeks is undeniable, for it is stated that "at Athens the dance of the Eumenides or Furies on the theatre had so expressive a character as to strike the spectators with irresistible terror. Men grown old in the profession of arms trembled; the multitude ran out; people imagined they saw in earnest those terrible deities commissioned with the vengeance of heaven to pursue and punish crimes upon earth."
I do not suppose that either Mr. Walter Dickson or Mr. Alfred Moul, to say nothing of Mr. Alfred Butt and Mr. Neil Forsyth, desire that the "multitude shall run out," but there is no denying the fact that they have given the public something so unique, so extraordinary in its aesthetic beauty and dramatic scope, that the present trend of taste is more than likely to become a permanent habit with the English public, and that the gorgeous and artistic ballets at the Empire and Alhambra will sooner or later make a definite and irresistible appeal to those who are now in a state of outer darkness.
As a nation we have produced no dancers of exceptional originality and accomplishment. An exception might be made in the case of Kate Vaughan, who did give us something new and who did captivate us with the peculiar grace of the "skirt dance," but her present-day successors on the English lyrical stage are merely charming hoydens and the few steps they possess do not surpass in technique the elementary studies of a Board School Dancing Class - I am assuming the Board School has added dancing to its course of studies for the offspring of the indigent poor, if not, the everready ratepayer should ask, why not?
F.D.
SCENES FROM THE BALLET
| Click any image for a larger view |
Anna Pavlova/Michael Mordkin (L'AUTOMNE BACHANALE) |
Lydia Kyasht (SYLVIA) |
The Arrival of Artemis (SYLVIA) |
Pan gloats over Amyntas death (SYLVIA) |
Amyntas resurrected (SYLVIA) |
Sylvia and her Coryphees (SYLVIA) |
Sylvia pursued by Pan (SYLVIA) |
Characters from Sylvia (SYLVIA) |
Mlle. Anna Pavlova (L'AUTOMNE BACHANALE) |
Anna Pavlova (L'AUTOMNE BACHANALE) |
Anna Pavlova (A RUSSIAN DANCE) |
Scythian Pastimes/The Bronze Age (THE DANCE DREAM) |
Mlle. Geltzer/Mons. Tichomiroff (THE DANCE DREAM) |
Mlle. Catrina Geltzer (THE DANCE DREAM) |
The Feast of Spring (THE DANCE DREAM) |
Mlle. Adeline Genee (at the COLISEUM) |
A Dream of Roses and Butterflies (at the COLISEUM) |
M. Nijinski (IMPERIAL RUSSIAN BALLET) |
M. Nijinski/Mdm. Karsavina (IMPERIAL RUSSIAN BALLET) |
Michael Mordkin (L'AUTOMNE BACHANALE) |
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