THE NEW DANCING.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume IV, Issue 965, 15 March 1917, Page 4

THE NEW DANCING.

In the "Delienator" for February E. R. Lipsett writes the following prosepoem in appreciation of the new a.Tt: We are at, the beginning of Freedom, for we are at the beginning of the Dance, the real Dance, the Dance that means things and tells them, the Dance that creates and sets new and strange worlds before us, where we never were and never will be, as Jean Paul said of music. And if that is true of music, it is still truer of the dance, for the dance is greater than music. The dance comes first, music springs from the dance; it is the rythmic movement of air waves. The finer the music the clearer we see in it the dance. So did Richard Wagner say of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that it was the dance in its highest aspect. Then came Tsadore Duncan, the. greatest exponent of the Expressive Dance, and she danced the second, third and fourth movements in that Symphony. So also the wife of Mozart used to say in his name that it was the dance rather than the music he meant in his creation. And so, too, it may be said of the modern waltz king, Strauss, that he writes his music with his feet. He dances while he composes—or perhaps he composes when he dances. But all this by the way. Our more immediate concern is the Dance for what it is and for what it portends to us. It is the Dance of Freedom. No longer shall intellect and emotion be held prisoners and permitted only to filter through the bare organs of speech, with their conventionalised medium of words. Now we have all that we are, body and limbs, to express ourselves with. And each man and woman shall give vent to thought, feeling, vision, aspirations, and longing; each in his and her own instinctive and individual way, with all the might, of muscles and all the peace and rhythm and beauty of the human figure. For the Dance is the speech of gods and angels and beatified souls. When his father looked into the prison cell of St. Vitus, through a crack in the door, he saw him there in company with seven angels, and they were all dancing. The old man's mind could not conceive of an angel otherwise than dancing. So also was the conception of St. Basil. The angels all danced. St Bonaventura could think of only on" occupation for the inmates of heaven, and that was dancing, with Christ lead-

ing. And so did Dante give much space in his Paradise for dancing. What, then, is the idea of all this? It is that there is a state of being that can express itself only in dance; that there is emotion too tense and too lofty to be afforded outlet by the mechanism of speech; that only the dance can liberate it. The Dance is as old as creation. Creation is a dance, a molecular dance in ether. The whole universe is a dance. It is a dance without beginning, without: ending. Your astronomers have alalways been telling you that. You know a little of it yourself. You know something of the stellar movements. You look at the sea and you know the sea. is an eternal dance. You look at tip' wheat-fields, at the trees, and you see the Dance. They all dance. It would not be life if they did not dance. You never saw the sea absolutely at rest, without a wave or a ripple, for that could not be. But if it could, and you saw it so, it. would be your most wretched moment in life. It would give you the feel of death. You know what you felt when on a hot, still, sultry day you looked out, from your window at the tree, ami for minutes on a stretch you could not see a branch swaying nor a leaf stirring. This happens now and then during the summer, and you remember well each time it happens. You could not forget. You never experienced anything so depressing. For the Dance is the life. Whatever lives, dances. Wise people, writing people especially, speak of the Dance as an art, and they tell you that it is one of the oldest arts, classing its antiquity with architecture. .Now, dancing is more than an art, ami it is older than all the arts. It is even more than an instinct. It is n' force, a necessity, as natural as breathing. Dancing is the essence of being. There can be no being without expression, ami the Dance is the true form of expression. Speech is but the currency of the Dance. For case and dispatch, words have been invented to rcpresentmovement, as printed slips of paper an 1 minted discs of metal are made to represent value. Man danced before he spoke, and so does man to-day supplement his speech with gesticulation of head and arms, where speech seems to him inadequate. Children dance before they learn to speak. Tf you-have never seen an infant dance on its mother's or nurse's arm, you should be sorry for yourself. Baby has its own little world, and it finds its own way of expression, the only way, the natural way —the Dance The Dance is an art, of course, in the sense that the body and limbs have to be trained before you can dance to others; that is, before you can make the meaning of your dance as clear to others as it is to yourself, even as the finest, voice in the world must needs be cultivated before it can sing grand opera to others. But, unlike sculpture or painting, which belong only to the minute few, while the great rest do not all feel the need of it, the Dance is the birthright of all with a mind and feeling, and with a body and limbs to express them. Only, it may still be added that the Dance belongs more to woman than to man, or rather, woman belongs to the Dance. The Dance is essentially feminine. The call for it is deeper with the greater depth of feminine feelings am! instinct, and in turn the Dance calls for its execution the finer graces of the female figure and its more subtle charms. There are masculine dances, tierce am! fiery, as the war dance of the savage and the religious dance of the dervish, but the Dance Beautiful belongs to the beautiful. But where has the, Dance been all these ages till just now? What limbo has been holding it since the dying out of the Greeks? The answer to this comes in the shape of another query: Where has woman been till just now? Nowhere. She has not been in existence as an entity, but, merely as an auxiliary to man, to minister to his comforts and to perpetuate his kind. All men everywhere hail combined to suppress and obliterate her. All schools and all creeds had written her out of the land of being. Roblinism ami Islaniism denied her a soul and an intellect, and then came Puritanism to deny her also a body. She was a creature unfit to be spoken of in terms of anatomy. She had neither body nor limbs. From the narrow Puritanic circle this idea spread everywhere into a principle of aesthetics, "Her highness has no legs" came once the snub from Spanish border officials, turning back a gift of silk stockings from abroad to a Royal Princess. Obviously, then, it was impossible for woman to dance, when she had no legs! Of course, no woman could afford to carry with her a thing that was unthinkable in polite society! Women, bless their silly heads, have ever been eager to take their cue from royalty, and what was not good for royalty was good for no woman. Woman had become so inured to the land of shadows that she readily put her own seal to each fresh ban put upon her by men, and deserved it, afterward with a vengeance. But this is not writing a history of woman, and so it is not necessary to go into data on the score of her progress since. What we know is that there has been a turning of the road somewhere, and now woman is fast coining into her own, in all things. Step by step, she has been regaining he ground, last since the days when sin' was seer and prophet, equal with men. Bit by bit, she has been wresting back what, men had wrested from her. What she had yielded up first she was first to regain. She has regained her soul ami her intellect, and here she is to-day, firmly installed in professions and callings hitherto looked upon as the exclusive domain of the male. And here she is now, the free woman, free, body and soul; ready to dance, too, in the Dance of Freedom. It. is the liberation of the dancer and the liberation of new worlds of beauty to her beholders.