The art of dancing is inseparable from the art theatrical, and especially from pantomime. Xenophon relates that on the occasion of the return of the ten thousand Greeks sent to assist Cyrus in his campaign against Artaxerxes, after they had performed their celebrated retreat, dilated upon by all historians, the Greeks instituted the public games and festivals.
“Thracians were the first to appear, full-armed, and leaping to the sound of flutes. They sprang so high and dropped again with so much force, that the spectators seem to have been frightened.
“Next came a Mysian who held a shield in either hand. He span rapidly round and performed dangerous leaps whilst retaining these shields. He ended by striking them one against the other, after the fashion of the Persians, and by executing to the sound of this novel instrument a delightful dance-step.
“After him came a company of Arcadians. They were in brilliant armour and advanced rhythmically, hand in hand, whilst a warlike march was being played by flutes. Some detached themselves from the company, others joined it, and they concluded by dancing in a ring, but with so much rapidity and unanimity that the movement of a wheel is neither swifter nor more equal.
“Finally came two women arrayed in the most elegant garments. One of these performed the Pyrrhic dance, a shield in her hand; the other went through the dance of Ariane, waving a kerchief, and she moved with so much lightness and grace that she delighted the spectators and was greeted at the conclusion of her ballet by the applause of all.”
Pindar refers to a dance executed by a troupe of Lacedemonian virgins. The greater part of the Laconian dances were common to boys and to girls. In Hormus young men and maidens formed by their interlacings the figure of a collar. The young corypheus advanced with the vigour of his sex, striking male and bellicose attitudes, whilst the girl who led the choir advanced on her side with graceful and modest steps.
“At the beginning,” says Lucian, “the same person danced and sang at the same time; but as it was perceived that the effort of the dance was troubling to the breathing, it was considered well to appoint some to sing and others to dance.”
Among the dancers of antiquity there were those who imitated the form and the movements of beasts.
“From the imitation of animals the dancers passed on to the imitation of men, selecting those whose professions or vices rendered their movements more nearly akin to those of animals. As the Emmelie was the imitation of the most graceful and healthy bodies, the Cordace, or comic dance, was the imitation of bodies ill-made or deformed as a consequence of sensuality and low passions” (Magnin, Origines du Théâtre Moderne).
Pliny speaks of the famous Lucceia, who to a talent for dancing added that of declamation, and who reappeared on the stage in her hundredth year, to recite some verses. He speaks also of an actress, Galeria Copiola, mime and dancer, who had made her début in Rome in 671, and who reappeared in the time of Augustus. She had then reached the age of a hundred and four. Phœbe Vocontia and the famous Dionysia, who received two hundred thousand sesterces (about two thousand pounds sterling per annum) were also saltatriculæ (dancing mimes).
These two types are to be found in the Renaissance. The animal, the imitative and the burlesque is to be seen as much in the classical masques of the Italian comedy as in the grotesque ones of Leonardo da Vinci; whilst we find the graceful, the noble and the beautiful in the person of the ballerina.
Pietro Maria Cecchini (Fritellino) says, in his discourses on comedy published in 1614 but written at the end of the sixteenth century: “It is more than fifty years since the custom arose of introducing women into the theatre.” He means by that, without doubt, that the women were entrusted with rôles holding an important place in the plot, and supplanting the boys to whom such parts had been entrusted until then. From the fifteenth century (1494), in Italy, we find women in the theatre, performing concurrently with young men, and very often licentious in word and deed, the rôles of goddesses, nymphs or of allegorical and mythological characters. These early actresses in the comedy of the sixteenth century, notwithstanding the great liberty of customs and of language, contrived to maintain some of the reserve proper to their sex.
In his Supplica, N. Barbieri (Beltrame) says:
“I shall never bow to the custom of having the rôles of women or of young girls performed by boys, especially after having seen the disadvantages which result from this in certain troupes. To begin with these young people do not know how to dress themselves in the garments which do not belong to their sex, and they get themselves dressed at home by their women or their brainless servants, who sometimes amuse themselves by trifling with them, so that he whose senses have not been calmed by age or by serious care may easily become vain and fatuous; being thus disguised as women, these youngsters show themselves about the town, talking and fooling one with another; they come dishevelled to the theatre, and it is then necessary that their friends or preceptors should dress their heads again, renew their paint and rearrange their garments. We are to be thankful if they but come in time, and then it is necessary to flatter them and to cajole them so to give them courage; there is more than enough in all this to weary the patience of those entrusted with such matters. It is more natural that women should fill the rôles that are proper to them; they know how to dress themselves and, as they lead decent lives, far from being a source of scandal, they set none but good examples. But, one will exclaim, I have successfully paid my court to an actress. That is possible; but all women are not so accommodating, nor all men so fortunate. Here is a man who for years has pursued an actress and fruitlessly spent treasures upon her. It must be remembered that actresses are women with the same nature as their sister women. They may not fall but all the world knows it; and, apart from the fear of God, they are compelled to live with more care and virtue than those who are in a position to cover their faults with the mantle of hypocrisy.”
“For the rest,” says M. H. A. Soleirol, in an interesting work on Molière and his troupe, “the appearance of women on the boards seems to go back to very remote ages, as may be seen in ancient drawings. According to these pictures, which give the names of actors and indicate the rôles which they filled, we see that in the fifteenth century many women performed in the mystery plays rôles either of females or of angels. Many other old portraits show us that in the sixteenth century women performed on the trestles in the public places; and lastly we know the costumes of the women who took part in the comedies of Marguerite of Navarre in 1540.”
If in the fifteenth century in France women were permitted to appear and to take part in the mystery plays, there is every reason to suppose that they were performing long before then in the theatres of Italy, a nation which always led the way in artists of all kinds.
It is very certain that throughout the Middle Ages there was no lack of Bohemiennes and joculatores on the trestles. They came to enliven the sumptuous repasts of the great lords by performing comedy-scenes like those of Le Berger et la Bergère, Courtois, Mariage and Pèlerin. The performances of these plays were intermingled with dances and songs. The earliest actresses derived a great deal from these ballerine. The rôles which they performed, however, were very short ones in scenarii that were very simple, and one woman in a troupe would often be sufficient to discharge all the female parts. We know that down to the end of the seventeenth century the broader female rôles (such as those of gossips) were invariably performed by men, by Scaramouche, Harlequin and Pierrot.
Later on it became necessary that all Italian actresses should be able to dance; that was part of their primary education. For many celebrated actresses, indeed, it was the essential factor in their admission into the theatre; and even in the eighteenth century it was necessary for the immortal tragic actress Hippolyte Clairon to be able to dance and sing so as to be accepted into the Théâtre-Italien. Coraline and Camille, the famous daughters of the actor Veronese, owed their chief success to their dancing. This applies also to Madame Favart, whose village dance in sabots took Paris by storm.
In the plays of Angelo Beolco (Ruzzante, 1530), the young woman does not take up more than two or three scenes, somewhere about the middle of the piece, leaving it to other characters to continue and work out the story. We find her still the object of the plot; but, contrary to our modern theatrical rules, she disappears sometimes in the very moment when the interest of which she is the pivot reaches its climax. The reason for the slight development of these rôles was without doubt the insufficiency and inexperience of the actresses entrusted with them, and perhaps also their obligation to go and change their dress for the final ballet. In La Mandragora, of Macchiavelli, Lucretia appears for the first time in the third act, and does not reappear thereafter until the end of the fifth.
With the Italians, the dance was in such high repute that in the sixteenth century young Frenchwomen “would go beyond the Alps to learn it.” No spectacles were given in Italy that did not include dances and music, and to this day there are interludes in Norma and Semiramide of ballets imitating village dances.
In the seventeenth century the court of Savoy set the fashion to all other courts of Europe by its ballets and fairy scenes, under the direction of the famous Comte d’Aglié, a fertile genius in the matter of theatrical invention.
The scenario of one of his ballets, given on the occasion of the birth of the Cardinal of Savoy in 1634, is extremely curious by virtue of the singular allegorical personages introduced into it. The title of this ballet is: La Verità nemica della Apparenza sollevata dal Tempo.
“At rise of curtain a choir of False-Reports and of Suspicions is discovered, preceding Appearance and Falsehood. The back of the stage is opened. Upon a great cloud borne by the Winds Appearance is seen dressed in a garment of changing colours sewn with mirrors, and equipped with the wings and tail of a peacock; she is in a sort of nest whence issue a crowd of Pernicious Falsehoods, Frauds and Cheats; Pleasant Falsehoods, Flatteries and Intrigues; Comical Falsehoods, Pleasantries and Pretty little Stories.
“These characters had their various entrances until the advent of Time. He drove out Appearance, and caused the cloud upon which she had been enthroned to be opened. Within it was then discovered a huge hour-glass from which came Truth and the Hours. These last characters, after various speeches analogous to the subject, formed the great ballet.”
It was then the custom for great personages, even sovereigns themselves, to take part in fêtes of this brilliant kind. Thus, Louis XIV., desiring in his pleasures as in other things to be the first of his century, danced in the ballets of his court, and received the applause of the comedians for his performance as actor, singer and dancer.
“The King has twice rehearsed the ballet which he intends to dance before the Queen of England” (Guy Patin, 1661). It was in this same year that the great monarch created a dancing academy, “because,” he says in his letters patent, “the art of dancing has always been recognised as one of the most virtuous and necessary to adapt the body to exercise, and consequently one of the most useful to our nobility, not only in time of war in our armies, but also in time of peace in our ballets.”
Louis XIV. loved the rôle of the Sun in these splendid ballets, for the production of one of which no less than nine hundred new costumes were prepared. Sometimes, however, he did not disdain to be seen in a comic part. In the ballet of the Seasons he represented the golden-headed Ceres surrounded by the reapers, which were played by Messeigneurs de Saint-Aignan and de Vertpré, MM. Lulli and Bruneau, the Sieurs Beauchamp, Raynal, Lecomte and Lapierre. In the Triumph of Bacchus, he performed the part of a sort of good-for-nothing cutpurse and bully, and even sang a couplet in favour of the fair sex. In Les Amants Magnifiques, a comedy-ballet by Molière (1670), he not only co-operated in the preparation of the scenery and in the production, but mimed, danced, sang and played the flute and the guitar.
Let us cite amongst the most famous dancers Gertrude Boon, called la belle Tourneuse; a surname derived from the style of dance which she performed. She appeared and obtained the greatest possible success in the theatre of Dame Baron, at the fair of Saint-Germain. Gertrude Boon was young, beautiful and extremely gracious in the performance of her bizarre evolutions. She was no less virtuous than gifted and turned a deaf ear upon the sighs of her numerous suitors. Amongst these was a Sieur Gervais who had amassed a considerable fortune at play and who, to prove to this austere maiden how sincerely he loved her, offered her his fortune and his name. Gertrude accepted him for her husband, not on account of his fortune, but believing in the genuineness of his affection. The marriage however was not a happy one, and Gertrude was driven to seek a dissolution of it. But she failed in this, the validity of the marriage being confirmed by a judgment of the 4th March 1715.
Violente, a famous rope dancer, was an Italian. She made her first appearance at the fair of Saint-Laurent in 1717, and she was there seen dancing at the Folies d’Espagne upon a balanced plank, eight inches wide, with as much grace as security.
Mademoiselle Hamoche, the wife of Hamoche, the Pierrot of the fairs, united, in 1721, the capacities of tragic actress and première danseuse in the forain theatres.
In 1724, Mademoiselle Grognet was dancing at the Opéra-Comique; she passed into the service of the Duke of Modena in 1736, and married the Marquis d’Argens, at Berlin.
Mademoiselle Cuppi de Camargo, born in Brussels in 1710, made her first appearance at the Opéra in 1726 at the age of sixteen, and did not leave it until 1751. Voltaire compares her to Mademoiselle Sallé, another dancer quite as famous:
She was received with enthusiasm, her name became so popular that fashions assumed it. There were Camargo bonnets, Camargo corsets, Camargo head-dresses, Camargo cakes, etc., etc.; never had such a vogue been known. Compelled, notwithstanding her brilliant début, to remain among the supernumeraries in consequence of the jealousy of Mademoiselle Prévot, Camargo contrived to issue in a brilliant manner from those ranks.
“A dance of Demons was being done. The principal actor misses his entrance and whilst the orchestra, nevertheless, plays the air of the solo, murmurs rise from the groundlings; they become noisy and the actor is embarrassed, when the young débutante, seized with a happy inspiration, leaps to the middle of the stage, and improvises with spirit a Spanish step which delights the dissatisfied spectators, and transports them with admiration.”
Camargo was chiefly distinguished for her extraordinary lightness and her wild gaiety.
In a letter written from Italy in 1739 by the Président de Brosses, the following passage occurs:—
“There is nothing better to do when one arrives than to go to the comedy to seek amusement; this is what we did at Verona. I cannot get accustomed to the cheapness of the prices; the first places do not cost ten sous; but the Italian nation is imbued with the taste for spectacles so that the quantity of people who attend fully compensates for this. Thanks be to God there is no trouble to find room at the comedy in Verona. It is performed right in the middle of the ancient amphitheatre of the Romans, and there are no other places provided for the spectators but those on the steps of the amphitheatre, where all sit together and where some thirty thousand persons can be accommodated. The companies of the country itself are, in my view, better than those which are transplanted to Paris and to our provinces, but the object of my ever-increasing surprise, although I have seen her every day, is a young dancer who leaps at least as high as Javilliers who can make twenty successive capers without once repeating herself, and perform every one of the steps that are so admired in our dancing masters; so that on the score of lightness Camargo, by comparison with her, is a dancer of stone. In general the dancers of this country are very much stronger and cleverer than our own.”
Favart, in a letter of the 20th June 1762, proposed to the Count of Durazzo the engagement of Baletti the elder, a son of Silvia and he spoke at the same time of Mademoiselle Dumalgé:
“Baletti is young, no more than thirty to thirty-three years of age. He has with him a young dancer, Mademoiselle Dumalgé, of sixteen to seventeen years old; she is very shapely, though perhaps a little high in the shoulders, which is but a trivial fault. After Catinon and Camille, she is the very best of our first dancers at the Théâtre-Italien. She will follow the fortunes of Baletti, who has, it is said, secretly married her.”
The dance has changed like the fashions, and yet when we look at the ancient figures, statues, painting and Etruscan, Greek and Roman bas-reliefs which preserve for us numerous types of dancers of both sexes, we are impressed by the fact that the grace of the human body is above and beyond all transient conventions, and that it has remained the same throughout the ages in which the art of dancing has been spreading through the world. One might compare the Ballerina of the Renaissance with the dancer with the timbrel of Herculaneum, and discover the same movement of body and the same simplicity of garments. In other paintings the manner of holding up a corner of the gown, of draping the body in the tarentina or of raising cymbals or a veil above the head, might have been created yesterday by the latest brilliant choregrapher from Italy—Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, La Rosati or La Ferraris.
The famous Bigottini, the greatest mime of the nineteenth century in the serious manner, who could draw tears from her audience in her pathetic scenes, was French. In her day (1809), France was infatuated with Italian artists to such an extent that several of our composers gave the first performances of their compositions as if they were the work of ultramontane artists; an instance of this is afforded by Mohul, with his comic opera L’Irato.