THE DANCE

Back of the dance in its highly specialized artistic form are the natural rhythms, the broad utilities, and pleasures of life. From this cosmic and cultural background emerges an art, which by the use of rhythm, pose, gesture, and set- i ting creates a world of mobile patterns and imaginative values a realm of its own, but reminiscent none the less of the life from which it sprang. The old cultural dances of India and Egypt reappear in the work of a Ruth St. Denis or a Sent Ma'hesa, but with a new life and meaning put into their stiff, hieratic forms; the free rhythms and aggressive movements of the Russian folk-dance are subjected to a new discipline and bent to a new purpose in a ballet like Ingomar or in the art of a Nijinski or a Mordkin. There is a wide difference between dancing-as work or pastimeand the dance, but there is an indebtedness as well; and both difference and indebtedness must be constantly borne in mind.

RHYTHMS AND RHYTHMIC ORGANIZATION

NATURAL RHYTHMS

One need not return to a naive nature philosophy and think of the universe as a huge breathing animal to discover rhythmic processes. They are everywhere:-in the cycle of the seasons; in the choreography of the heavens; in the advance and recession of tides; in the lapping of water against pilings or the swaying of tree-tops in a storm; in pulse-beat and breathing; in the ebb and flow of vital forces. Then there are the rhythms of psychical reactions: the

curious fluctuations of the attention, charted by the experimental psychologist, and the equally curious rhythmic expression of intense feeling-the clenching and unclenching of fists, moans, the stamping of feet, the sing-song of lamentations, the throb and drum of shouts.

Natural rhythms differ in quality, complexity, tempo, and pleasingness. The flicker's tap-tap has a quality of its own; so has the less simple whine and whirr of a saw in a planing-mill. The rhythms of a crowded city street move faster than those of a village. The jingle of sleigh-bells is more pleasing than the sliding of a trolley along its rails. Ordinarily we attend to and appreciate only a few of these rhythms; the quality of the more complex and less pleasing escapes us. We do not look for rhythms in crowds, nor for rhythmic patterns in noises. The 1:2 and the 1:2:3 patterns, differently accentuated, of poetry and dancing are but a narrow selection from the many rhythms of speech and bodily movement. At this point an unstable attention and a variously stressing emotional response step in and change the chop-chop of a mechanical iambic line to a finely tempered series of stresses and pauses, and the monotonous tick-tock of a clock into a swinging variety of sounds. These subjective rhythms cannot be set off sharply from the others-it is impossible to cut in two the world man takes and the thing he makes of it.

RHYTHMIC ORGANIZATION

In selecting and reshaping natural rhythms and in throwing the common stuff of experience into varied forms, man shows himself an organizer on a grand scale. The smooth play of interlocking or threading machinery; the confused mass of vehicles swung into a system of traffic regulation; the orderly variety in building and dredging enterprises; landscape gardening; aquatic spectacles and fire

works; gymnastic and military drills-such are a few samples of this work, which means the rearrangement in time and space patterns of man's body and its physical setting. It is easy to understand why such organization is undertaken. Rhythm (1) makes apprehension easier-witness memory verses and the grouping of items—(2) makes achievement easier-witness the rhythmic dipping of oars or the swing of the scythe (3) gives a pleasurable tone to experiences-witness our delight in patterned rugs, in flower-beds, in watching troops deploying. Neither the individual nor the group need be conscious of such benefits; they may be sought after and gained in response to activities that are as spontaneous and as incidental as they are helpful. A man may dance for the love of it, improvising gestures and movements that are flung out and then bent back into a scheme of measured self-expression; a group may in a holiday mood stage a spectacle in which mass rhythms of sound and color blend in a constantly changing orderliness. No matter how stereotyped a society may be in its forms or how mechanical in its manners and pastimes, this freedom is never wholly absent. The Renaissance and the Grand Siècle had their elaborate codes of courtly behavior—the bow, the sweep of the hat, the use of the fan, the exchange of compliments; they had their hieratic processionals and their stately dances, delicately and minutely phrased. Nothing could be more elaborate and more sacrosanct than the dancing manuals of these periods. But the minuet and the quadrille, dances that are too formal for our taste, were made to yield individual variations of rhythm. Freedom is prized as well as uniformity; and no codification can put an end to it. That is why social amusements can never be standardized; and that is why a hackneyed verse-form may be made to yield new music. In the dance these impulses work themselves out harmoniously: an individual life stirs in an ordered, flowing pattern.

THE DANCE AND SOCIAL WORK

Dancing marks the life of even the most primitive group, and it is consciously or unconsciously practised and encouraged in order to make that life more effective. Muscular efforts are to be correlated; common feelings are to be aroused; a common will is to be fostered; social demands are to be made impressive. Work must be done, and this work-hunting, scouting, tilling, rowing, and fighting— is largely of a direct physical type, which sets a premium on strength and speed. The lack of machinery forces the constant use of capricious human material; this in turn must be made to function smoothly. Nor is the rhythmic bending of muscles to common tasks all that is needed: the absence of an advanced system of intellectual and moral values forces a direct appeal to mass impulses and mass feeling. Social consecration, again, moves along the levels, not of ideas, but of picture-thought and the childlike, sensuous appeal of processional and festival.

Gymnastic dances supply the necessary physical training and with their leaping, bounding, and whirling develop what primitive life insistently calls for an agile strength. War dances prepare men for fighting and set them to the martial key. The sending of arrows, the brandishing of heavy war-clubs, the hurling of spears, the clinching and retreating, the taking cover must all be done smoothly and must be rightly timed if they are to be effective. Excitement is whipped up by shouting and dancing and the noise of tom-toms and war-rattles or by the crude naturalism and the equally crude symbolism of erotic dances. Religious dances with their mixture of ceremonial, incantation, and magic make social needs impressive. Dancing for rain after a drought or for the removal of a spell supposed to have been cast on the chief of the tribe impresses the individual with the seriousness of social dangers and stresses the

world of malevolent or beneficent spirits on which ordinary life is imagined to rest. Mass dances of the more playful sort serve the purpose of spreading contentment and promoting good fellowship.

It is to be noted that the occasion for these dances (war, the gathering of fruits, an invocation, an initiation, a religious festival, a market-fair) and the staging (a hall, an open space, a tribal circle) are given by the tribe; and that these dances are for the most part group dances, characterized by a bewildering variety of shared movements and massed effects. Even when there is solo dancing, when from the crowd there leaps dancer after dancer to do his bit of gymnastic or mimetic dancing, the social motif is still present, in the spirit of rivalry and in the palpitating life of the encircling multitude of potential participants.

One thing, however, must not be forgotten. Even in advanced societies there is more loose play than is needed for smooth running; and this is more marked in primitive groups. It has been said of a certain tribe of Eskimo that with them four days out of seven are holidays. All this feasting, dancing, and buffoonery are to be explained in part in terms of high spirits, of an inveterate playfulness, and a childlike unconcern with the future; in part in terms of a life organized loosely enough to allow such things some play. To ignore this spontaneous, individual element in early dancing is to falsify the facts in the interest of a theory of utility values which cannot be upheld; to exaggerate it is to overlook the need of a process of aesthetic indirection, which changes this socially charged early dancing to the free, highly individualized art of the dance.

THE PROCESS OF AESTHETIC INDIRECTION

As society advances the response to life becomes more indirect and more subtle. Impulses are less headlong and less aggressive in their satisfactions. The sex-impulse, for