Los Angeles herald., 1910-05-01

nearly abstract beauty that it had no
magnetism, that she let the time of
the music obliterate the timing of the
bodily organs, according to their own
perduium and leverage laws. The aud
fence was soothed. delighted, calmed.
The applause was a great-Voiced COM
pliment to the artist. The audience
was never magnetized, never reused to
a wild enthusiasm.
Americans are so Greek! Americans
love white marble statues 1t was even
proposed the other day to place some
in the park instead of cleaning up the
slums and washing the boulevards.
Americans so love beauty, and the
Americans who saw that statue in mo-
tion on that great green background
sat bathed in joy and glanced with
smile or q sigh at one another before
clappng in compliment.
But there are other forms of beauty.
There are other moods of Joy. There
are a thousand other dancers to come,
each singing q new motion song. Beau
tiful rags and scenery have long held
the stage. The theater is differentiat-
ing as all art must do in a growing
people. The spectacular drama is be-
ing dragged out of doors, where it be-
longs, and is now called pageantry.
The human being is left in the public
~ e anu DeSllS the new InuN NelleilI Will
one little moving figure in the midst
of a great green expanse. Duncan on
the full-sized green carpeted and hung
stage of the Metropolitan opera house
In New York or Allan alone on the
green floor of the Auditorium.
Others will come. A new movement
is sweeping the world, and as much as
our wireless. telephone, aeroplane
world is d better place than ancient
TOW noly
dancing will be the modern product of
dramatic dancing. The soul of man
will play upon the human organism in
ever differentiating and ever grander
eloquence, just as the composers of
ages have produced a richer music
than the Gregorian plain song.
We have, we Americans, and particu-
larly we of the southland, the same
1.-THE limbs the Greeks had, the same
number of muscles and bones and
nerves, and we have richer heart eX-
perience to express in the arts. We
have more people who think, we have
greater development of the dramatic
passions for the arts to mirror, and
best of all, we have for the good of the
arts the science of expression as basis
of study in developing an art, just as
we have the modern sciences with
which to deal with the material world.
The first ripping wave of the great
tide of the new expressive dancing
blessed our eyes as it passed over the
Auditorium stage and we call it Maud
Allan and our own art, THE New
Dancing"
Maud Allan we have all seen; she
has greatest invention of all the promi-
nent dancers, albeit invention over a
very narrow scale of notes. She pre-
sents perhaps the truest impression of
the meaning of the musical accompa-
niments. Duncan, however, rose to a
physical, vital, not sensual, eXaltation
in her Bacchante dance, and carried the
audience with her to an enthusiasiasm
that Miss Allan does not reach. For a
few minutes Duncan gave the apotheo-
sis of rhythm.
st. Denis, moreover, gives some
rhythm of the whole body, melodious
motion from head to foot, or from foot |
to head, that as beauty of body work |
and magnetic truth of bodily rhythm |
from the musical beat of |
the accompaniment and technical diff |
Guilty, and beauty far beyond any one |
by either of the other two
dancers in question. Thus one sees
that no one of these three has the |
whole gamut of idealized bodily action. |
Miss Allan this week in Los Angeles
used perhaps 10 per cent of the funda-
mental motion themes the body pre-
sents for the dancers use, but not l per
cent of what can be and therefore will
be done in conventionalized, idealized
expression in what is perhaps best
called the new dramatic dancing.
In lectures and teaching for a past
decade or two or three an esthetic ex-
ereise has been proclaimed and used.
The exercises referred to are so close
to nature that their repetition breeds
impulse and leads to an instructive i'm
provisation. This improvisation. draw
ing on inherited tendencies, produces
to acting, dancing, personal
expression and personal culture in
many directions. These newly discov-
cred laws of expression in the body it.
self were first found useful to the ac-
tor, but it might have been more help
full to the race had they gone first
into that education which prepares the
body for skilled labor instead Of wait
ing to appeal through the mind and
sense of beauty to the motiopal atttV.-
ity, to the deeds and ordinary acts Of
work.
The new dancnig is but part of
great coming of intelligence in all the
arts. When laws shall have fully sup
planted rules, freedom will be every
where productive of impulse.