Anna Pavlova (1881-1931)
Anna Pavlova (1881-1931)
(The Daily Mail [London, UK] - 19th April, 1910)
WORLD'S GREATEST DANCER
PAVLOVA IN LONDON - DEBUT AT THE PALACE THEATRE
London - that is to say art and pleasure loving London - has a new sensation which will be discussed as widely and as eagerly as "Elektra" and the Sicilians, with the one difference that the new topic does not lend itself to argument. Anna Pavlova and Michael Mordkin, Russia's acknowledged greatest dancers and the famous leaders of the Imperial Russian Ballet, who made their debut at the Palace Theatre last night, are the last word in the art of dancing. The perfection of their art cannot be disputed. It is such as to re-establish the supremacy of the traditional ballet-style over the so called "classic" dance and its offshoots, of which we have had a very surfeit during the last year or two.
It is impossible to do justice to Anna Pavlova by mere description. Such grace as hers, such litheness of body, and such perfect balance in motion so quick that eyes can scarcely follow it must be seen to be believed. It is not alone the top-like whirling round on tip-toe, ending in a difficult poise that would defy the efforts of an ordinary dancer, even if it were attempted from an attitude of repose; it is none of the conventional tricks of the ballets-dancer that causes wonderment in the dancing of Anna Pavlova and her no less amazing partner, but their extraordinary effects of movement arrested, as it were, in mid-air - a pause, a hesitation that seems to defy the laws of gravity and makes you look instinctively for the wires on which these graceful marionettes must surely be suspended.
WHO SURPRISES AND DELIGHTS
Here, indeed, is the very apotheosis of ballet dancing. Even in the interpretation of music of a different order these amazing performers maintain the tradifions of the ballet, which disdains realism and insists upon what might be called academic execution. Even in the frantic whirl, the staggering, the wild intoxication of the Bacchanalian dance by Glasounov they retain this academic sense of balance and order and of absolute beauty. Pavlova's indescribably graceful, coy, and coquettish movements in Rubinstein's "Valse Caprice" were so irresistible that they caused some of the audience to shout out aloud in their rapture. And each dance of the long programme brought new surprises, new delights, new storms of applause.
Nor was the success of the evening confined to the two leaders of the troupe. Indeed, one of the most remarkable items of the programme was Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, danced by Mlle. Eduardova and M. Monahoff, supported by eight members of the company.
The Russian Dancers at the Palace Theatre will conquer London, as they have conquered Paris. They will be the event of the season, and they will convince London of the supremacy of the Russian ballet, which London began to doubt last year, when Mme. Preobajenska disappointed her Covent Garden audience.
(DANCING AND DANCERS OF TODAY, The Modern Revival of Dancing as an Art
By Carline and Charles H. Caffin - Dodd, Mead and Company, New York 1912)
CHAPTER XI - ANNA PAVLOWA
If some airy spirit of nature, captured by a kind-hearted poet, who had trained its ear to mortal music and its heart by recitation of stories of pathos and romance, should be allowed freely to interpret its own conception of human life it might evolve such an art as Pavlowa's. The earth has no claim upon her. She does not even need it as a resting place for her feet. She can just as readily float in the air or swim through the waters. So in interpreting the things of the earth she is quite detached in her point of view, a lyric embodiment of the soul of facts far more than an impersonator of the facts themselves. Her dancing bears towards drama the same relation that the song of a bird bears towards the song of the human voice. The bird's song may be the rapturous carol of the lark or the throbbing pathos of the nightingale, either of which will thrill the hearers to the very core, though it has not the personal capacity to experience these emotions with which the human voice thrills us. And thus it is with Pavlowa. She has the bewitching capacity of expressing, to an exquisite degree, a whole range of human emotion without suggesting that she herself has any personal share in them.
For one thing, her technical achievement is a thing so wonderful as to place her beyond the physical laws that govern the movements of ordinary mortals. And in everything she does is an exquisiteness of dainty grace which gives it poetic distinction. Yet with it is an air of wildness, of wilfulness and mischievous joy. Never do we feel any of the lassitude of the overtrained or the sophistication of the over-perfected. It is the spontaneous ebullition of the airy spirit with no consciousness that there is such a thing as technique. Those wonderful poses which she maintains, when raised in the arms of her companion dancer, are the absolute expression of blended art and nature. And in all she seems to be filled to the finger tips with the sheer joy of the moment; not an inch of her but is fully and consciously alive.
Moreover the training in the Imperial Ballet School has included a thorough knowledge of music. This, with the Russians, is considered a most necessary part of the dancer's equipment, since it is ever from the music that she must seek inspiration. Even in the dance-drama it is not the story only that must be interpreted, but every subtle mood and shade of the music must be duly revealed. So the long twelve years' study which the Imperial School demands trains not body only but mind and taste. The pupils study the geography, history and civilisation of various countries; their literature and art and everything that will help to develop the sympathetic understanding of different phases of human life. Accordingly the dancers who have come to us from this school have been no empty-headed attitudinisers, but earnest, studious artists devoting their lives to what they claim to be the most beautiful of the arts.
In allowing to these artists liberty to break the continuity of their twenty-year contract, the Imperial Ballet School has indeed made a great contribution to the world of art. And in sending Pavlowa they sent of their best. For even with this wonderful training it is only the rare genius that has the creative ability and fire which mark her achievement. In Russia her name holds high rank among the great artists of the Dance. It is well nigh impossible in words to give any picture of the spirituelle beauty that pervades her art. The varying moods flash and melt into each other in endless procession. Now shrinking in timid dread, now mischievously teasing, dark eyes full of tantalising elfishness; now haughtily disdainful, head held high, the tips of the toe hardly deigning to touch the ground; now archly bashful, arms upraised, eyelids lowered, yet one quick glance beneath them darting a challenge. For she dances with eyes and smiles, flash of the teeth, curve of the neck; every part of her in accord and doing its share in the expression of the sentiment, while her beautiful mobile features change with the changing moods like the surface of water under the play of the sunshine and wind.
How slumbrously dusky are her eyes as she sits sullenly and aloof before her captors in the drama of "Arabian Nights," every limb tense with outraged pride and hatred. The royal maiden has been captured by warrior hordes who have brought her, rolled in a rug of rare weave, as a surprise to their lord. How full of dignity and appeal is her movement toward the Schah-Rahman, with chained hands outstretched, and beseeching eyes. How consciously beguiling is each pose as she lures him to a fancied security, all the while watching him with stealthy malice and long slow glances that wait the fulfilment of her purpose. How the seeming radiance will die away from her face and limbs and body as she turns to ply him with wine with which she counts on overwhelming his vigilance. See her as she sits before him, every limb infused with inviting witchery, a smile too consciously sweet illuminating her face, while the eyes are those of a startled fawn, watching, ever watching. And when her end is accomplished and the ravished Schah-Rahman hangs helpless over the arm of his throne, how her whole form shrinks in fearful horror, as, clinging to her faithful slave, with dilated eyes fixed on her victim, she gropes for the door which leads to liberty.
(Nebraska State Journal [USA] - 4th September, 1910)
IF PAVLOVA HAD NEVER DANCED
(From the London Times)
If Siddons had never played - said F. E. Smith in his remarkable speech in the woman suffrage debate the other day - the sum total of human happiness, knowledge and achievement would have been almost unaffected. The statement sufficed for the speakers point; but it might of course, be enlarged, writes Mr. Walkley in the London Times.
The contribution of any individual player, of either sex, to the sum total of human happiness and achievement is no doubt a negligible quantity. But that particular kind of human happiness which results from the spectacle of tragic emotion at its highest pitch - what our forefathers were fond of calling "the sublime" - was sensibly augmented for one generation of London playgoers by the acting of Sarah Siddons. Human happiness in the playhouse, as elsewhere, likes a change of stimulant. It used to be "the sublime," and Sarah Siddons; just now it is the voluptuous and Anna Pavlova.
For it is not to be gainsaid that the art of these Russian dancers, headed by Mme. Pavlova, appeals to the dilettante-voluptuary. That is a wide though not a universal appeal. It is not given to everyone to be a voluptuary and a dilettante into the bargain. "Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut," as Villon sang. You have to possess the enjoying temperament, but that is not enough. You must not only revel in sensation of every kind for its own sake, but you must also be curious about your sensations, keen to distinguish and to note their quality and degree, even to the most trivial particular.
Montaigne is a good example of this temperament. Pepys perhaps a still better. The famous Diary might be called the voluptuary's vademecum. A true voluptuary, he couples "wine and plays," and he is constantly making ineffectual vows to abstain from both. "But Lord! to consider how my natural desire is to pleasure, which God be praised that he has given me power by any late oaths to curb so well as I have done, and will do again, after" - he characteristically adds - "two or three plays more." Not serious plays, if he could help it. "Methinks it is too sad and melancholy." he says of "The Maid's Tragedy." He would not have approved Mr. Galsworthy's "Justice" or Mr. Barker's "Waste." The Gaiety and Daly's, the Palace and the Empire would have been his theaters of predilection.
There is a touch of Pepys in most of us, but not in all. It is obvious, for instance, that there is nothing akin to the Pepysian mood in our "new" dramatists and the straitest sect of their admirers. Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Barker and Mr. Shaw are all austere, icebergish men. Nor are our "old" dramatists much better. And that, we suggest, is one reason why the theaters of strict drama are at the present time competing so unsuccessfully with the theaters of "musical comedy" and "variety."
These latter theaters recognize "the natural desire to please" of the vast majority of playgoers, and lay themselves out to satisfy it. Nor is the provision of "mirth and youthful jollity" necessarily a less artistic achievement than the task of edification to which our more serious dramatists address themselves. Mr. Barker claims to be doing pioneer work in drama; to be experimenting in new forms of dramatic expression. Well, so were the musical, comedy people before him with this difference, that their experiment succeeded.
There were other qualities in art than the merely literary, and the intellectual; appeal is not always the most artistic appeal. There is nothing strenuously "intellectual" that we know of about young George Grossmith at the Gaiety; but be is a genuine objet d'art, as dainty and delicately wrought as a Japanese curio. The very cut and fit of his clothes, the curve of his immaculate "topper," the nice conduct of his cane, are a pleasure to the eye; and pleasure for pleasure, we would far rather enjoy this one than listen to the usual actor spouting "To be or not to be" in the usual wearisome way.
There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the intellectual drama. Stage conversations about the woman question, politics, marriage, divorce, and other "intellectual" topics, may be far less artistically important and stimulating than stage performances which make no direct intellectual appeal. The most artistically important and most stimulating thing in the past theatrical season has not been an "intellectual" play, or any play at all, but the dancing of Pavola and the Russian dancers.
If Pavlova had never danced - though F. E. Smith's "sum of human happiness" might have been unaffected - the public stock of harmless pleasure during the past theatrical season would certainly have been deminished. Nothing like it has been seen in the London of our time. There was, to be sure, the delightful Genee with her gaiety and brilliance, and there was the seductive posturing of Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan. But Pavlova and the Russian dancers of the present moment (including not only those of Pavlova's own troupe, but the beautiful Lydia Kyasht of the empire - a rival who runs, or rather dances, her very close - and others at the Coliseum and the Hippodrome) have given us Londoners something really new; an extraordinary technical accomplishment, an unfailing sense of rythm, an unerring feeling for the elegant in fantasy, and what Haslitt would havo called a "gusto," a passionate enjoyment. The dancing of Anna Pavlova is a thing of perfect beauty. This is no case of Mr. Pepy's and his "best legs that ever I saw." In the presence of art of this stamp one's pleasure is purely esthetic. Indeed, the sex element (though of course necessarily somewhere in the, subconsciousness) counts for very little; for a man the dancing of M. Mordkin is almost as pleasure-giving as that of Mlle. Pavlova.
And all this with that wonderful aloofness which presents so much more of the spirit of the fact than the fact itself! If you are looking for simple pantomime acting, you may not appreciate Pavlowa. But when acting has been removed to this abstract plane and you learn this new art language there opens before you a whole world of beauty and expression. For it is a mistake to think that, because Pavlowa is a creature of exquisite beauty, the sight of that beauty is the whole of what there is to be enjoyed in her performance. There is, indeed, so much of sheer physical beauty that it is not to be wondered at if it suffices with some of her audience. But in truth she has so much to give, if one only looks a little deeper, that it will repay even that unwonted exertion which an ordinary theatre audience seems usually to grudge the exercise of its mentality. Her art is an expression of exquisitely intellectualised sensations. For this language of abstract emotion, which is occupying so much of the attention of our art world today, is set forth in Pavlowa's art in a manner so attractive that even the most devoted lover of the naturalistic school is forced to admire it. The sheer beauty of Pavlowa's appeal cannot but fascinate and ultimately persuade him that there are things in art which are real and true, even if they do not represent cross-sections of daily happenings. And this all the more, because the last thing one could ever suspect in her would be a didactic purpose or a mission, even a mission to enforce the love of beauty. As one watches the exquisite harmony of her movements, the varying expressions of her body, now so full of fire, now so languid or caressing, it is impossible not to be convinced that this is life. Here are the emotions which make life worth while and are above the mechanical routine that is the least part of living, though it occupies so much of our time and energy. Here in this exquisite creature is compact the pure flame of all these emotions. She has not experienced them but the spirit of them has inspired her. It is our own experience that is reflected by her purged of all actualities and made abstract and impersonal.
Her own words express her ideal: "It is the soul, the face that should lead the dance. The body is subservient. You must forget what you have learned to do with the body. Ah! but you must first learn it !" It is an old story that the face is the mirror of the soul. But in the case of too many artists, choregraphic and dramatic, the mirror reveals a vacuous monotony; betrays, in fact, the lifelessness of the soul. It is here that Pavlowa takes rank with the very few great modern artists of expression. Her soul has been quickened by study and reflection, until it is capable of a wide range of imagined experiences, among which it flits with the spontaneous freedom of a butterfly in a garden, radiant with variety of flowers. Meanwhile every mood of emotion takes instant reflection in the sensitive expressions of her face, while every nerve throughout her body spontaneously directs the muscles to an obligate of interpretative movement. Every passage of the latter is instinct with a virtuosity which the habit of practice has made second nature, so that, while there is not a gesture, however slight, without its charm of technique, they pass one into the other with the fluency of life. Their marvellous perfection of detail does but contribute to the finer expressiveness of the whole creation. And, what a variety of modes !
Anna Pavlova
Watch her, for example, as Columbine, beset with the amourous rivalry of Harlequin and Gilles. The dance is a "Pas de Trois," arranged by M. Legatt, to the music of Drigo; a piece as dainty in allurement and baffling in its lace-like complexities as a web of gossamer jewelled with dew. The music exhales the very soul of virginal coquetry and Pavlowa renders it momentarily incarnate to the eye; not as a bird caught and imprisoned, but as a living energy, modulated with infinite variations of shifting light and shade. She is the very spirit of young femininity, awakened to a consciousness of her own attractiveness, dawning to the sense of her own power, glorying in both and toying with her new sensations. She palpitates to the wooing of each of her lovers, as the strings of an Eolian harp to the breathings of the wind. To the agile blandishments of Harlequin, she vibrates with movements, now supple as waving reeds, now swift as a swallow's flight. She darts toward his outstretched arms, poises a moment and dips her yielding form to his embrace; then a moment later has flashed from his grasp, leaving only the trail of a smile behind her.
Now the slow antics of the love-lorn Gilles attract her. She plays around him with the lingering evanescence of sheet-lightning in a summer sky. His uncouthness awakes a strain of tenderness amid her volatile sensations. She would be kind, she pats his chin, she pities him and lays her cheek for an instant to his lips. Harlequin is aflame, he threatens his friend. Columbine averts their quarrel. She distracts them from themselves in renewed devotion to herself. She plays to each in turn, dispensing favours - a touch of fingers, a smile, a roguish glance, the rare rapture of a winged kiss. Gradually she is aware of the mystery of her own power and is swayed with the fascination of exerting it. She leads her would-be captors captive; lifts each in turn to expectant bliss and drops him to depths of disappointment. She plays one against the other; with a glance can raise a storm of rivalry and with a smile allay it. Finally through her own veins the magic of her own witchery runs like wine; she is raptured with her own allurement, elate with triumph. Swifter and swifter grows the pace; more and more bewildering the rhythm of her movements, while, as her hands float upon the air, they seem to hold invisible strings that guide the antics of her lovers. They are puppets beneath the sway of her resistless charm. She is youth and mirth and mischief; more, she is Desiree, the incarnation of youth's dream of love and loveliness; aye and more, she is the mystery, rendered visible, of Life's eternal Elusiveness.
She has vanished in a laugh; to reappear, as the spirit of the Waltz. The music is Chopin's and the lowered light makes the scene rather felt than visible. She floats into view, in company with Mordkin or, it may be, with Novikoff. The forms of the two dancers seem to be incorporeal; the spiritual embodiment of the music's abstractions; the palpable essence of the abstract passion and poignancy of rhythm. All that has ever captured one's rarefied imagination of the soul of poetry as expressed in the melodious movement of the dance, purged of any physical distraction, seems to be realised and made more consumedly perfect in this inspired interpretation. All that one has ever dreamed in youth of the stainless loveliness of life, the tenderness, the fragrance and delicious elation of the purity of spiritual love, blossoms anew in the memory.
Now, the music changes! The subtle spell of Chopin passes into a Valse Caprice by Rubinstein. In the sparkle of light the atmosphere quivers with a delicately fluid devilry. It is pungent with scarcely perceptible suggestions of the revel of the senses. The dancers become transmitters of exquisite sensations. Their bodies still preserve their incorporeality; they are still personifications, touching the physical apprehension with infinite surprises, but ever with a purely abstract stimulus. Under the sway of the music, interpreted by this marvellous language of choregraphic art, the imagination, purified of all alloy, leaps into vivid life; glides upon floorless spaces, turns and poises in mid-air, and languishes weightless in the arms of ether. It is the ecstasy of the senses, rarefied and heightened by the magic of the artist.
But the music changes to Glazounow's "Automne Bacchanale." We are transported into the old, young world of primitive instincts and desires. The solitude of a forest dell is interrupted by the appearance of a nymph and faun. Gaily holding hands and trailing a veil above their laughing faces, they are wafted in fleet-footed as a breeze, and eddy round and round. Their forms are buoyant with the untroubled joy of life; their limbs free in nature's artless wantonness. It is enough for them to be alive and every movement tells their gladness. Then, suddenly, an instinct stirs. The young female thing breaks away from her play-fellow. He pursues her; they dodge and twist in flight, he has caught her and again she has escaped his grasp. For a while it is but children's play; then gradually the mystery of life envelops them. She becomes more coy and timid; he, more persistent and eager. Nature prompts her to innocent wiles and him to hotter pursuit; until little by little he turns to hunter and she becomes the hunted. She flies in terror of herself and him. When he catches her, she pants, round-eyed, like a rabbit in the grasp of a young hound. For as yet he has only the instinct of the chase and lets his prey elude him. She escapes with a shriek, the sound of which stirs him with delicious frenzy. And now the dance becomes a whirl of sheer mad beauty set to the ever-quickening pulse-beats of the two young hearts; till nature's victory is won and the nymph, drained of all power to resist the call of instinct, swoons at the feet of her love.
Bravo, Pavlowa! Once again, as in all your dances, you have proved yourself the artist who creates; who snatches us from the world of every day into a world of your own imagining, permeated with the beauty that transcends time and place; the beauty of the universal.