The Fashions in Dancing.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 17, 26 October 1910, Page 16

The Fashions in Dancing.

By

James Douglas.

THERE are fashions In darning, as ■well as in battleships and bonnets. In my time dancing has gone through many permutations, and each of them has been a sign of a change in the public mood. Dancers interpret the prevailing temper bf the period, for there is in their art a subtle sympathy with their environment. The public are not conscious of the mysterious process which makes a pertain kind of dancing the vogue for a while, but there is no doubt that dancing is an expression of a. general frame <pf mind. The dancing of Kate Vaughan and Letty Lind and Sylvia Grey was a brotest against the garish brutality of the Gaiety burlesque. In those days the Gaiety chorus was composed of tall girls in tights, and the public grew so utterly tired of the crudity of tights that they failed with delight a school of dancing Which abolished the parade of flesh in fleshings, and substituted for it the grace of ethereal wisps moving in a cloud of cobwebs. For the bravado of abandonment we were given the dainty reticence Of innumerable veils. Then the fickle soul of the people grew weary of the discreet sylph with her billows of silk and cascades of chiffon, her flashing insteps and bewildering ankles. It sighed for a sharper stimulant and a keener sting. In due time Lottie Collins took the town by storm with her epileptic high kicking and her tempestuous iicrobatisms. We turned from the lilies and langours of the diaphanous sylph to the negroid fury- of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-deay.” The strepitous blast and blare of that famous tune got into our blood, and we gave ourselves up to the madness of the plantation melody, with its alternations of swooning sensuousness and spasmodic violence. The dancing of that Wild period was a nightmare of high heels, black stockings and stormy lingerie. When we heard the other day that Lottie Collins was dead we suddenly felt very old, for it seemed a hundred years since her song was growled out by every barrel organ and was whistled by every butcher’s boy. After the acrobatic dance, there was a reaction. The weary heart of the rnusicihalls longed for something statelier and slower and more sophisticated, for Lottie Collins, one must confess, was crude and vulgar with the dreadful nudity and Vulgarity of the Cockney temper. It was Spain that came to our aid in our hour of ennui. There was a wave of Spanish dancing, on the crest of which were ganted the insolent feet of Carmencita. er empire Is immortalised in Sargent’s portrait. There her savagery, her pride, her defiant arrogance, and her haughty beauty are triumphant for ever. Who that saw it can forget the thrill of her entrance on the stage of the Palace Theatre? She seemed to set her arched instep on the neck of the audience. She did not sue or solicit or allure. She came like a conqueror to receive the Submission of slaves. Her dancing was a declaration of feminine contempt for masculine folly and frailty. She gloried in the rhythmical insults which she launched at the astonished audience. Her beauty was not offered to us; it •was flung at us. She smote us on the face with her overweening hatred and contempt. And if she relaxed her mockery for a moment, it was only to lull us into security and throw us off our guard, and then affront us with another gesture of supreme insolence. After the hot splendour of the Spanish school, we turned with relief to the cool and fragrant childishness of Adeline

Genre. In her exquisite spontaneity was the charm and vivacity of girlish joy untainted by passion and nisitmed by experience. Her butterfly gaiety matched our mood of satiety. She was like an April day, a miracle of quick laughter and elfin grace, fresh witchery and tender sprightliness. It think it was the poetry and romance of Genee which prepared the way for Maud Allan, and which disguised the fanrt morbidity and subtle perversity of the Salome dance. The English temperament is curiously supple in its self-decep-tion and its make-believe. It was able to read into Maud Allan’s beaded undulations exactly what it pleased, so that everybody was satisfied, from Silenus to Mr. Stead. But the decadence came swiftly and the cult of beads and bare feet perished in an orgy of vulgar imitation. For a while there was an epidemic of savagery which came straight from the purlieus of Paris. The Danse des Apaches, the Valse Chalopetrse, and their like raged violently, and it seemed as if the art of dancing had sunk into sheer brutality. These hooligan frenzies were deliberately ugly; they were a fierce exposition of hideous passions. Of course, they were toned down on their way across the Channed, and while they became unintelligible. they remained sordid. I do not think they pleased the London public, apart from that strange cosmopolitan crowd which haunts ;ome of the musichalls. The culmination of the cult of ferocity was reached in Polaire, and I fear it must be admitted that we laughed at her, in spite of her fourteen-inch waist and her celebrated ankle. There is but a step from the diabolical to the ridiculous. The dance of murderous ugliness died of ridicule. It wa 3 at this stage of revulsion against tortured vulgarity and morbid horror that the Russian dancers leaped into popularity. They brought nature and life into the sickly atmosphere of the theatre. They combined the technical brilliance of Genee with the warmer and richer Slavonic temperament. And yet they were as clear and pure as Genee in their interpretation of emotion. There was nothing muddy in their vitality. To see those Russians was to see the isolated from sorrow and from sin. They were like creatures in the dawn of the world, unconsciously swift and radiant and joyous, with no fatigue or grief or sadness in their intense interpretation of being at its best. For the Russian imagination is fresh and uncorrupted and simple, and in the dance as in literature it has the strong charm of beauty that is young and untarnished, the lovely pathos of childhood, sweet as wood violets and coo] as the water in a mountain tarn. The public that delight in “ The Blue Bird” and the Russian daneers is not past praying for.