Dance History

Lincoln Kirstein at 28 is a tall, tense, bold-faced esthete, rich because his father is vice president of Filene's department store in Boston. At Harvard (class of 1930) young Lincoln Kirstein and Edward Warburg, another rich man's son, started a Society for Contemporary Art, exhibited painting, sculpture, photography. As an undergraduate Kirstein founded the magazine Hound & Horn, kept it intellectually alive until 1934 when dancing became his dominant interest. With Edward Warburg, Kirstein then founded the School of American Ballet (TIME, Dec. 17 et seq.). Although he took no credit, he collaborated with Romola Nijinsky on the tragic biography of her husband. No such swift-moving dramatic tale but a rich, fat history of the dance was this week published by Lincoln Kirstein. It proved him no idle dabbler in the subject but an enthusiastic scholar, equipped with information worthy of one twice his years.* If the pattern of Dance is sometimes involved and cluttered, it is because Author Kirstein was unwilling to neglect any phase or style of dancing which even remotely contributed to the evolution of the art as it is currently known. He begins with primitive tribes which danced instinctively to celebrate birth, adolescence, fertility, danced when they needed rain, danced for hunting, planting, warring, danced over their sick, danced over their dead. Dancing was a species of worship as it exhibited itself in ancient Egypt. With the great Greek tragedies dancing entered the theatre, developed until it followed a play's mood as surely as the choral chanting. Dancing in Greece was greatly respected for its fluent beauty, the healthful exercise it offered. But Rome preferred gaudy pageantry, chariot-racing, the bloody games of the Circus Maximus. Linked with these as the Empire's entertainment, dancing got a thoroughly bad name, incurred the enmity of the Christian Church. Yet in the early Catholic Mass Author Kirstein discerns seeds of the present dance-drama and through the early mystery plays the theatre was to begin to reassert itself.

In his medieval chapters Author Kirstein makes much of the fanatic Dance of Death which he calls a tombstone to medieval mentality. It was at the time of plagues that Death appeared as "a graveyard ghoul, a chilling spectral horror . . . frightening now only to listeners of ghost stories or children whistling past cemeteries." Its influence was tremendous. When the bubonic scourge swept Europe in 1373 wakes for the dead assumed an insane gaiety. While germs raged, one male dancer would feign death and a bevy of girls would hover around him, attempting to kiss him back to life. Such aberrations were widely spread. A band of German children danced hectically from Erfurt to Arnstadt (12 mi.), many of them dying on the way, the rest living on, completely shattered mentally. Another troupe danced on a bridge at Marburg, until the bridge collapsed and all were drowned.

Ballet supremacy teetered between France and Italy until Russia raised it to its peak. Peter the Great imported Western dances. Catherine did more, and so did her mad son Paul. Thereafter a national ballet school flourished in Russia. The Classicist, Petipa, trained all his dancers until they had superlative technique. Isadora Duncan had an influence because of her free approach to music, her dominating personality. Michael Fokine appeared on the Russian scene with his own liberated ideas, introducing the ballets with which Sergei Diaghilev paved his way throughout the Western world.

The Diaghilev epoch was a long one, done almost to death by ballet enthusiasts during the past few years. Author Kirstein never knew the great impresario but from the testimony of many of his associates he has been able to paint him as a man with surly grandeur, a magnificent snarl, a staggering, penetrating, shrewd instinct. Diaghilev assembled talent which spoke for the best in music, painting, dancing. Pavlova was with him for a time, but she soon formed her own touring company, so built around her own personality that she succeeded in spite of ragged musical accompaniment, shoddy, second-rate scenery. The Diaghilev company was peerless so long as it had Tamara Karsavina and Nijinsky who, according to Author Kirstein, established a landmark more with his stark choreography (L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune, Le Sacre du Printemps) than with his sensational leaps or his unsurpassed entrechats.

Now Nijinsky is mad, cloistered in a Swiss sanatorium. Now Diaghilev is dead, his company disbanded. For its so-called successor, the popular Monte Carlo Ballet Russe, Author Kirstein has limited respect. He freely grants talent to its maitre de ballet, Leonide Massine, to Ballerinas Alexandra Danilova, Tamara Toumanova, Tatiana Riabouchinska, Irina Baronova. But his hope is centred on the new American Ballet, engaged this season for the first time to supply dancing at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House.

*Dance--Putnam ($5).

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