The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief

AN AMERICAN ACCENT

Jose Limon AN AMERICAN ACCENT i THE ballet as an art is an old and established tradition, not the least of the many splendors of European civilization. One cannot fully savor the essence of European culture without recognizing the importance of the ballet, for nations make themselves known through their dances. We gain a more profound insight into the soul of Spain, of India, of Cambodia, Bali, China, Korea, and Japan from their dances than from any of their other arts. Italy, the mother of the ballet; France, its nursemaid; and Imperial Russia, which saw it to its glittering maturity, reveal themselves to the world in every movement, gesture, and configuration of their prodigious creature. The great Medici were not only statesmen , rulers, and patrons of the arts; they were connoisseurs and lovers of the ballo. One of their daughters, the illustrious Catherine, transplanted it to the court of France, where — amidst the turmoil of a savage century — it grew and flourished, elegant and serene. Subsequently the Roi Soleil gave it the prestige of his august participation. The Italian immigrant was now as royal as the dynasty of the House of Bourbon, as French as Versailles, and henceforth its code of movement, its vocabulary, was to be expressed in the French tongue. The Imperial Romanovs, in transforming Russia from an Asiatic despotism into a state with the outward trappings of a Western nation , took care that the ballet, that most Western of the arts, should certify and confirm the new status. So superbly did the ballet flourish in the climate of the Muscovite empire — favored by Imperial patronage and the astonishing aptitude of the Russian temperament Jose Limon (photo: Jack Mitchell) 17 and physique — that before long it surpassed the product of the regions of its origins. The formidable Imperial Russian Ballet came to be to the nation what armies, scientific achievements, and ancient ruins were to other nations. The Russian Ballet became the envy and wonder of the Western world. It became not only an art but a lingua franca of urbanity and civilization. Yet it is a curious property of human accomplishment that — when seemingly at its zenith — it contains the seeds of the dissolution that could destroy it. It was at this high noon of the popularity of the ballet that an American girl rose in the cultural firmament and incredibly seemed to eclipse its radiance. Isadora Duncan, a rebel, an iconoclast was — like all revolutionaries — bold and uncompromising in her attack. She declared that the ballet was decadent, effete, ugly, artificial; that its training and technique, its turned-out positions , its rigidities, its obsessive use of the pointes, were odious, distorted, and against all nature. It made the human entity into a mechanical puppet, moving jerkily from one affected pose to another to the accompaniment of execrable music. With peerless audacity , she flung out her accusations and defiance, not only in the capitals of the West but in that holy of holies of the ballet itself — St. Petersburg. It is dangerous for an art, however "classical," to become so rigid, so fossilized, as to lose the freshness, resiliency, and vigor of its original impulse.The art of the ballet during this era, in Western Europe and especially in Russia, seems to have fallen into such a state as to justify the ardent accusations of Isadora Duncan. Where the Parisians , with their cynical predilection for joie de vivre, made of their ballet a toy — a petit rien, a bagatelle — the Russians, with a heavy, despotic hand, transformedit into an instrument of the Imperial order —• as were the church, the apparatus of government, and the armed forces. And they made it, like these, impervious to new ideas and to change. Duncan — a scandal, a danger, and a delight — split the artistic world in half. There were those who saw her as a crude amateur, a shameless exhibitionist with no technique; there were those who 18 Jose Limon: rehearsing Sally Stackhouse, Louis Falco sensed in her a challenge, a revelation, and a portent for the future of the dance. It was fortunate for this future that artists of the caliber of Michel Fokine accepted the disturbing challenge to stagnation. So came into being, away from Czarist authority, in the freer ambient of the West, the glories of the Ballets Russes. It has been said that the modern dance is a temporary phase — that it has not sent...