Anna Pavlova

Jacques-Dalcroze and his creed; essentials of the ‘Eurhythmic’ system—Body-rhythm; the plastic expression of musical ideas; merits and shortcomings of the Dalcroze system—Speculation on the value of Eurhythmics to the dance.

I

What apparently proves to be the elementary step in building up a new school of choreography—perhaps that which some of the younger dancers have chosen either by accident or by roundabout ways—are the Jacques-Dalcroze Rhythmic Gymnastics or ‘Eurhythmics’ on the order of the ancient Greeks. Thus far this style of dancing is merely in its preliminary form. Therefore it is now as difficult to draw any definite conclusion, as it was about 1905, when the Swiss composer Dalcroze, who had been since 1892 a professor of harmony at the Geneva Conservatoire, first launched the movement. However, the systematic work of instruction by Dalcroze began in 1910, when the brothers Wolf and Harald Dohrn invited him to come to Dresden, where, in the suburb of Hellerau, they built for him a College of Rhythmic Gymnastics. From this time on the inventor of the new method began a systematic training of young men and women.

Ethel Ingham writes of the life at the college at Hellerau: ‘The day commences with the sounding of a gong at seven o’clock; the house is immediately alive, and some are off to the College for a Swedish gymnastic lesson before breakfast, others breakfast at half-past seven and have their lesson later. There is always a half hour of ordinary gymnastics to begin with. Then there will be a lesson in SolfÈge, one in Rhythmic Gymnastics, and one in Improvisation, each lasting for fifty minutes, with an interval of ten minutes between lessons.’

‘One of the most marked tendencies of the modern Æsthetic theory is to break down the barriers that convention has created between the various arts,’ writes Michael T.H. Sadler of the value of Jacques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics to art. ‘The truth is coming to be realized that the essential factor of poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture and music is really of the same quality, and that one art does not differ from another in anything but the method of its expression and the conditions connected with that method.

‘The common basis to the arts is more easily admitted than defined, but one important element in it—perhaps the only element that can be given a name—is rhythm. Rhythm of bodily movement, the dance, is the earliest form of artistic expression known. It is accompanied in nearly every case with rude music, the object being to emphasize the beat and rhythmic movement with sound. The quickness with which children respond to simple repetition of beat, translating the rhythm of the music into movement, is merely the recurrence of historical development.

‘To speak of the rhythm of painting may seem fanciful, but I think that is only lack of familiarity. The expression is used here with no intention of metaphor. Great pictures have a very marked and real rhythm, of color, of line, of feeling. The best prose-writing has equally a distinct rhythm.

‘There was never an age in the history of art when rhythm played a more important part than it does to-day. The teaching of M. Dalcroze at Hellerau is a brilliant expression of the modern desire for rhythm in its most fundamental form—that of bodily movement. Let it be clearly understood from the first that the rhythmic training at Hellerau has an importance far deeper and more extended than is contained in its immediate artistic beauty, its excellence as a purely musical training, or its value to physical development. The beauty of the classes is amazing; the actor as well as the designer of stage-effects will come to thank M. Dalcroze for the greatest contribution to their art that any age can show. He has recreated the human body as a decorative unit. He has shown how men, women and children can group themselves and can be grouped in designs as lovely as any painting design, with the added charm of movement. He has taught the individuals their own power of gracious motion and attitude. Musically and physically the results are equally wonderful. But the training is more than a mere musical education; it is also emphatically more than gymnastics.

‘To take a joy in the beauty of the body, to train his mind to move graciously and harmoniously both in itself and in relation to those around him, finally, to make his whole life rhythmic—such an ideal is not only possible but almost inevitable to the pupil at Hellerau. The keenness which possesses the whole College, the delight of every one in his work, their comradeship, their lack of self-consciousness, their clean sense of the beauty of natural form, promise a new and more harmonious race, almost a realization of Rousseau’s ideals, and with it an era of truly artistic production.’

Dalcroze’s school has emphasized that its purpose is not merely to train dancers but to educate for life generally. His theory is that all the people should be raised to feel and appreciate the intrinsic value of the rhythm, which is best proven in M. Dalcroze’s own essay, Le Rhythme, which was published in 1909. ‘Schools of Music,’ he says, ‘formerly frequented only by born musicians, gifted from birth with unusual powers of perception for sound and rhythm, to-day receive all who are fond of music, however little Nature may have endowed them with the necessary capacity for musical expression and realization. The number of solo players, both pianists and violinists, is constantly increasing, instrumental technique is being developed to an extraordinary degree, but everywhere, too, the question is being asked whether the quality of the instrumental players is equal to their quantity, and whether the acquirement of extraordinary technique is not joined to musical powers, if not of the first rank, at least normal.

‘Of ten certified pianists of to-day, at the most one, if indeed one, is capable of recognizing one key from another, of improvising four bars with character or so as to give pleasure to the listener, of giving expression to a composition without the help of the more or less numerous annotations with which present-day composers have to burden their work, of experiencing any feeling whatever when they listen to, or perform, the composition of another. The solo players of older days were without exception complete musicians, able to improvise and compose, artists driven irresistibly towards art by a noble thirst for Æsthetic expression, whereas most young people who devote themselves nowadays to solo playing have the gifts neither of hearing nor of expression, are content to imitate the composer’s expression without the power of feeling it, and have no other sensibility than that of the fingers, no other motor faculty than an automatism painfully acquired. Solo playing of the present day has specialized in a finger technique which takes no account of the faculty of mental expression. It is no longer a means, it has become an end.

‘There are two physical agents by means of which we appreciate music. These two agents are the ear as regards sound, and the whole nervous system as regards rhythm. Experience has shown me that the training of these two agents cannot easily be carried out simultaneously. A child finds it difficult to appreciate at the same time a succession of notes forming a melody and the rhythm which animates them.

‘Before teaching the relation which exists between sound and movement, it is wise to undertake the independent study of each of these two elements. Tone is evidently secondary, since it has not its origin and model in ourselves, whereas movement is instinctive in man and therefore primary. Therefore I begin the study of music by careful and experimental teaching of movement. This is based in earliest childhood on the automatic exercise of marching, for marching is the natural model of time measure.

‘By means of various accentuations with the foot, I teach the different time measures. Pauses (of various length) in the marching teach the children to distinguish duration of sound; movements to time with the arms and the head preserve order in the succession of the time measures and analyze the bars and pauses.

‘Unsteady time when singing or playing, confusion in playing, inability to follow when accompanying, accentuating too roughly or with lack of precision, all these faults have their origin in the child’s muscular and nervous control, in lack of coÖrdination between the mind which conceives, the brain which orders, the nerve which transmits and the muscle which executes. And still more, the power of phrasing and shading music with feeling depends equally upon the training of the nerve-centres, upon the coÖrdination of the muscular system, upon rapid communication between brain and limbs—in a word, upon the health of the whole organism; and it is by trying to discover the individual cause of each musical defect, and to find a means of correcting it, that I have gradually built up my method of eurhythmics.

‘The object of the method is, in the first instance, to create by the help of rhythm a rapid and regular current of communication between brain and body; and what differentiates my physical exercises from those of present-day methods of muscular development is that each of them is conceived in the form which can most quickly establish in the brain the image of the movement studied.

‘It is a question of eliminating in every muscular movement, by the help of will, the untimely intervention of muscles unless for the movement in question, and thus developing attention, consciousness and will-power. Next must be created an automatic technique for all those muscular movements which do not need the help of the consciousness, so that the latter may be reserved for those forms of expression which are purely intelligent. Thanks to the coÖrdination of the nerve-centres, to the formation and development of the greatest possible number of motor habits, my method assures the freest possible play to subconscious expression.

‘The first result of a thorough rhythmic training is that the pupil sees clearly in himself what he really is, and obtains from his powers all the advantage possible. * * * The education of the nervous system must be of such a nature that the suggested rhythms of a work of art induce in the individual analogous vibrations, produce a powerful reaction in him and change naturally into rhythms of expression. In simpler language the body must become capable of responding to artistic rhythms and of realizing them quite naturally without fear of exaggeration.

‘Gestures and attitudes of the body complete, animate and enliven any rhythmic music written simply and naturally without special regard to tone, and, just as in painting there exist side by side a school of the nude and a school of the landscape, so in music there may be developed, side by side, plastic music and music pure and simple. In the school of landscape painting emotion is created entirely by combinations of moving light and by the rhythms thus caused. In the school of the nude, which pictures the many shades of expression of the human body, the artist tries to show the human soul as expressed by physical forms, enlivened by the emotions of the moment, and at the same time the characteristics suitable to the individual and the race, such as they appear through momentary physical modifications.

‘At the present day plastic stage music is not interpreted at all, for dramatic singers, stage managers and conductors do not understand the relation existing between gesture and music, and the absolute ignorance regarding plastic expression which characterizes the lyric actors of our day is a real profanation of scenic musical art. Not only are singers allowed to walk and gesticulate on the stage without paying any attention to the time, but also no shade of expression, dynamic or motor, of the orchestra—crescendo, decrescendo, accelerando, ralletando—finds in their gestures adequate realization. By this I mean the kind of wholly instinctive transformation of sound movements into bodily movements such as my method teaches.’

II

This is briefly the essential part of the Jacques-Dalcroze school of Eurhythmics. The method falls into three main divisions: (1) ear training; (2) rhythmic gymnastics; and (3) improvisations. The ear method is nothing but the training of the pupil in an accurate sense of pitch and a grasp of tonality. However, the system of teaching rhythmic gymnastics is based upon two different methods: time and time-values. Time is expressed by movements of the arms; time-values—note durations—by movements of the feet and body. A combination of these two methods is called the plastic counterpoint, in which the actual notes played are represented by movements of the arms, while the counterpoint in crotchets, quavers or semi-quavers, is given by the feet. The crotchet as the unit of note-values is expressed by means of a step. Thus for each note in the music there is one step. Notes of shorter duration than the crotchet are also expressed by steps, only they are quicker in proportion to their frequency. ‘When the movements corresponding to the notes from the crotchet to the whole note of twelve beats have, with all their details, become a habit, the pupil need only make them mentally, contenting himself with one step forward. This step will have the exact length of the whole note, which will be mentally analyzed into its various elements. Although these elements are not individually performed by the body, their images and the innervations suggested by these images take the place of the movements.’

The first training of a pupil in the Dalcroze school consists of steps only. Simple music is played to which the pupils march. After the pupil has an elementary command of his legs the rhythmic training of his arms and body begins. At this stage the simple movements to indicate rhythms and notes are made a second nature of the pupil. This can be compared to the pupil’s learning of the alphabet. Plastic reading consists of composing more or less definite images from the elementary rhythm-units. This is done either individually or in groups. The pupil is taught to form clear mental images of the movements corresponding to the rhythm in question and then give physical expression to those images. As a child learns to compose letters and syllables to words and words to phrases, a Dalcroze pupil is taught to understand the elementary parts of the music and the rules of its composition and to recompose it into a lengthy series of body movements.

The main object of Dalcroze’s method is to express by rhythmic movements rhythms perceived by the ear. The exactness of such expression is the main aim of the school. The body must react momentarily to the time and sound-units of the music that the ear perceives. As the wind creates waves in the sea, music is meant to create motion in the human body. Percy B. Ingham writes that characteristic exercises of this group are ‘beating the same time with both arms but in canon, beating two different tempi with the arms while the feet march to one or perhaps march to yet a third time, e. g., the arms 3/4 and 4/4, the feet 5/4. There are, also, exercises in the analysis of a given time unit into various fractions simultaneously, e. g., in a 6/8 bar one arm may beat three to the bar, the other arm two, while the feet march six.’

According to Dalcroze’s plastic theory the arms should express the theme in making as many movements as there are notes, while the feet should mark the counterpoint in crotchets, quavers, triplets or semi-quavers. A compound rhythm can be expressed by the arms taking one rhythm, the feet, another. This is meant to correspond to the technical exercises of orchestral music, by training the body to react to the various tones of different instruments. The general purpose, however, is and remains the development of feeling for rhythm by teaching the physical expression of body rhythms. There is no doubt that shades of crescendos and decrescendos, fortes and pianissimos are achieved by this method, yet the question remains: how near does the Dalcroze school come to visualizing the music in all its symbolic and spiritual depths?

Music is more than rhythm; it is a subjective symbolic language of our soul and the universe. It is a mystic factor of life, human and cosmic. There is an unaccentuated language in every genial and great composition, an Æsthetic image and philosophic meaning that we can grasp not by means of the intellect but mostly through the emotions, and it is in expressing this that Dalcroze’s school has failed in so far. Dalcroze has aimed to express the elemental factors of the music, and in this he has succeeded. The performances given by Mr. T. Jarecki, one of the most talented of the graduates of Hellerau, are sufficient proof of the fact that the school has its shortcomings in the above-mentioned directions. He performed a Prelude by Chopin, a composition of Rachmaninoff, one by Schubert, and several numbers of other classics in a costume that looked like a bathing suit. Powerful as he was in all his rhythmic grace, he yet failed to translate the musical language of the compositions by means of bodily plasticity. Chopin’s and Rachmaninoff’s preludes possess distinct tonal expressions and designs of something very human and emotional that lies beyond mere rhythm. Poetry is based on the laws of rhythm, yet it is not alone the rhythm that makes a poem beautiful, but the image that it creates. Thus in the art of dance it is not only the rhythm but the Æsthetic episode that concerns a dancer most of all. It is the transformation of this phonetic episode into plastic forms, the visualization of the audible beauty, that lies at the bottom of every great dance. This requires certain symbols and those lie beyond the achievements of the Dalcroze graduates.

III

The great value of Dalcroze’s method lies in his insistence on perfect rhythm as an elementary training upon which the coming art of dancing can be based. The various folk-dances are outspokenly rhythmic, but they contain that peculiar racial flavor which is very difficult to keep outside its proper atmosphere and race. We have found that the best Russian dancers could not give the simple folk-dances of another race with the racial perfection which a native untrained folk-dancer would have imparted to it. In the same way foreign dancers with their best efforts fail in trying to dance what a Russian dances. The national dances can be employed as valuable bases for the individual art, but that is all. They lack the cosmic element, the language of the world. An Italian understands his Tarantella, a Spaniard his Fandango, a Russian his Trepak best of all. The future art of dancing needs a universal element of choreographic design and it is in this that the Dalcroze school may be of immense value. It bases everything on rhythm only, which is very significant, but its aim should lie far beyond that. Rhythm is the syllable and the word, but words must be combined into phrases and phrases into paragraphs before we can read a story. It is after all the story in which the mind is interested, not the words and phrases.

We have seen in previous chapters that the foundation of the ballet lacks the firmness and soundness of a natural art. It is decadent and altogether shaky. No genius could build anything lasting unless the foundation is firm. The aim of dancing is not acrobatic nor gymnastic effect, but plasticity. Symmetry is the chief element of architecture, rhythm that of music. If we can combine the symmetric rules with those of the rhythmic we have the basis upon which a new choreography can be built. Isadora Duncan, Fokine, Lada, Trouhanova and many others are trying to grasp the truth in their individual ways, but the elemental truth lies in Dalcroze’s system. That Dalcroze has not aimed to train any stage artists is evidenced by the bathing-suit-like costume that his pupils wear, which in itself is unÆsthetic and objectionable to our eye, though it may fit well for regular class-room work. It is at illusion that the stage aims, and this is not to be found in naked realism but in something else.