MUSIC AND MOTION

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 147, 17 March 1933, Page 12

MUSIC AND MOTION

Dancers’ Outstanding Interpretations ANCIENT GRECIAN ART Enthralling a large audience at the Town Hall last evening, Michael and Hester Martin-Harvey in an exhibition of bare-foot dancing to the accompaniment of the Wellington Symphony Orchestra achieved a great and thoroughly justified success. Their ideals are, as far as,their distinct personalities will allow it, those of the late Isadora Duncan, who first revived the ancient Grecian art of moving plastic. To music they make by body movement a direct interpretation of human emotions and aesthetic feeling. And those effortless movements, as Mr. and Mrs. Martin-Har-vey made them last evening, were controlled by a wealth of imagination and thought grave or fanciful as the music dictated.

They' wore no padded shoes or usual ballet costume, and in fact their dancing owes nothing to the great tradilast was done to the music of “La Margained no support from ballet techuic. Mr. Martin-Harvey could not capture his audience w r ith the wonder of his entrechats nor his wife with dainty pointe-work, and it is a tribute to their artistry that although they, were presenting what was strange fare to most people they did so quickly have the crowd with them heart and soul. In all they performed, either together or as solo efforts, twenty dances and it would be difficult to particularise among them. Yet there were some which had a special appeal—perhaps because the audience by its breathless watching gave to them an added intensity. Outstanding among these were Mr. Martin-Harvey’s interpretation of Chopin’s March Funebre —a dramatic picture of a. soul rising in awed wonder from its dead self—and his Danse Arabe impregnated with the cruelty and mystery .of the East, and his wonderful presentation of a slave, bowed with the weight of oppression, bursting his shackles and rising to the heights of freedom. This last was done to the musi of La Marseillaise.” ' Mrs. Martin-Harvey showed great suppleness, and an alertly sensitive mind in all her dances. Her bubble dance and her patterning of the music in three Brahms waltzes had an especial appeal. Together she and her husband were excellent in all they did. One might mention in particular, perhaps, the dances ot the well-known Bach aria, full of a humble supplication, and to Tschaikowsky’s “Valse des Fleurs.” This latter, with its many-col-oured flowing veils, miraculously escaped the touch of vulgarity in the music. At the end of the programme were three dances for which the artitsts abandoned their Greek dress and appeared in more modern garb. To Sousa’s stirring march, “Stars and Stripes,” Mrs. Martin-Harvey, with the added difficulty of a long skirt, gave a striking skipping dance, and Mr. Mar-tin-Harvey greatly caught the fancy of his audience with a most amusing hiking dance, full of the self-importance of the walker for walking’s sake. Their last item was an improvised waltz to the music of Johann Strauss’s “Tales from the Vienna Woods.” Lastly, mention must be made of the splendid work of the orchestra under Mr. Leon de Mauny, which by Its fine playing so stimulated the dancers. In the second of the three parts of the programme Mrs. de Mauny accompanied on the piano alone, and she also played as a solo Brahms’s Scherzo, Opus 4. In addition to accompanying Mr. and Mrs. Martin-Harvey, the orchestra gave delightful interpretations of Nicolai’s bright overture to “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and “Praeludium” by Jarnefelt,