THE DANCE OF THE PEOPLE: by Mary Fanton Roberts

The craftsman 1912

"Except ye become as little children."    "A little child shall lead them."

I went the other evening to see a child dance. It was a joyous evening because it was a revelation of that spontaneous beauty every child should have the power to portray; it was also an infinitely sad evening because I realized that this one little girl was the only child I knew of in the world who was doing this spontaneously beautiful thing. She was only five years old, yet she danced with equal wonder whether her mother played a simple little tune, or whether she floated past a pale-green curtain, upborne by the music of her lovely soul. I have never seen any dancing at all like it, except Isadora Duncan's, and I realized when I saw this child that she was doing eagerly, unconsciously, joyously, what Miss Duncan has striven for twelve years to make us understand the miracle of, namely, that the perfect dance is the natural outpouring of the spirit of beauty through motion.

Mr. Percy MacKaye, who sat by me, said: "The wonder is not that the child is doing this thing, but that every child in the world is not doing it." And then Mr. Coburn, head of the Coburn Players added, what was equally true, "If only this child could live her life close to the spring of beauty, Nature, informed day by day through the winds and the sunlight, through the perfumes and color–Nature's great sources of rhythm–what tremendous things she could do to freshen the gray world." And I realized as I watched the little child dancing, without draperies, without dramatic surroundings, without consciousness of her genius, a "Dance of the Wind," a "Dance of the Flowers," a "Dance of Sadness," a "Dance of a Little Child Going out of the House to Play," all her own improvisation (if one may call by so elaborate a name anything so simple and inevitable), that it is the real things of the world, the very simple things which hold the great qualities of perfect beauty and moving joy.

How much of her readiness to interpret beauty this child owes to her parents it would be hard to estimate. Her father, Jerome Myers, is a painter of modern life, of out of doors, sunlight, children playing and dancing-the joyous aspect of everyday existence, a painter of profound insight, with technique that enables him to present his philosophy adequately through his art. But granting this artistic inheritance, this little child is of herself inherently close to the source of beauty, as only little children and the more primitive people of the world can be, and all children are, if left to their own conception of happiness, instinctively primitive. Each child of its own accord would begin the world anew daily. Thus it is that we seek for stirrings of emotional art in the early days of the race or the individual. And so from an appreciation of what this child could accomplish through her exquisitely naive methods of expressing her own natural joy in living, I began to understand why it is that we unconsciously turn to the more elemental folk of the world for our hope of the development of the more emotional arts, such as music and dancing.

Mary Fanton Roberts (1864-1956) was a writer, editor, and critic from New York City. Wrote for Herald Tribune, Journal, the Sun, editor for the Craftsman, 1906-1916, the Touchstone, 1917-1921, Arts & Decoration, ca. 1922-1934. She was also a close friend of Isadora Duncan and helped arrange and support her New York performances as well as writing a number of fine articles about her life and career.

IN MEMORIUM by Hutchins Hapgood

LIFE AND DEATH: Little Virginia Myers, six-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Myers, has stirred in me again that disturbing sense of beauty which is the essence of life.

She is an exquisite dancer, untaught and consciously artistic. She dances spontaneously to classical music, or to any idea, however expressed, which suggests rhythm to her imagination. Her dances are her own, the expression of her own nature, which is both that of a child, and that of an adult. When I saw her dance the other day, in her father's studio, I had the feeling that she had no age or sex, but a singularly mature artistic sense, one that had formed itself freely but perfectly, recognized its own joy and its own law.

And I thought of an article I wrote last week called "The Dance," in which I suggested how the spontaneous instinct in children for drawing and for dancing is often crushed out by conventional and mechanical instruction. So I was delighted when I found that this charming little artist is not being taught at all.

Her father, who is an artist himself, and her mother treat little Virginia with wise respect and a kind of touching humility. All they try to do is to encourage the little girl to be her own lovely self; to put her in the right environment for her nature to flower. They are sedulously avoiding any attempt to have her follow their ideas or those of anybody else. In a sense, their attitude toward her is religious. They regard her as too divine a thing for them to trifle with even in that serious spirit which most parents call "duty."

When I saw Virginia dance, the spiral of life again ascended rapidly for me and I felt that exhilarating but at the same time sad enhancement which is the essence of life and therefore of art. The sadness as well as the beauty is that of life intensely realized.

Shortly after I saw that little girl dance I read an interview with Kenyon Cox in the Times on the recent much-talked-of art exhibition at the Armory. This article gave me that cold compression, that depletion of life, which is the essence of death. And I thought of his spirit and that of little Virginia as direct opposites–death and life.

Hutchins Hapgood (1869 to 1944) was an American journalist and author. Among the seven books he wrote, “The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York” was the most important. Later he became Drama critic for the Chicago Evening Post and then returned to New York to spend much of his career as editorial writer for the New York Evening Post, the Press, and the Globe.

                       “THE DANCE” by Lloyd Morris

              (This is a longer essay by Morris that includes the earlier
                                  piece he wrote about Virginia Myers)

          Of all the arts, the dance is, in the quality both of its appeal and of its idiom, the most universal of human expressions. Essentially we mean, in speaking of the dance, three different forms of expression. The dance is an amusement, standardized in the technique of its diction; it is the medium of an imitation of life; and, finally, it may be a lyric and immediate expression of emotion.

          In our growing contemporary preoccupation with the arts there has been manifest something of a renascence of interest in the dance. In its primary form this has been evident in the revival of the dance as a social amusement; with the dance as an essentially dramatic art we have become familiar through the visits of the Russian Ballet and of Isadora Duncan; but the dance as an immediate and lyric expression of emotion is an art know to but a few.

          The fact that with music, lyric dancing is the purest of the arts, may in a measure account for the desuetude into which it has fallen. For the purest art tells no story, urges no contention upon us, but asks of us only our emotions and our imagination that it may woo them. It clothes in a perfect form an immediate and lyrical reaction to life in terms of emotion. The idiom of the dance is, in a certain sense, the idiom of nature, for the dance employs as its medium of expression rhythm, pattern, and movement, three characteristic attributes of the methods of nature.

          Of all those who have been laboring at the reconstruction and the reconstitution of this most ancient of the arts, Virginia Myers is, one of the most remarkable. She is really an artist and the fact that she is young renders her art the more beautiful. For great artists in their reaction to life, possess one quality in common with youth; the gift of immediate and untrammeled expression of emotion, uncorrupted by the sophistication of a maturity that has been taught by convention the things which it shall and shall not see. Great poetry, great painting and great music possess in common this childlike vision of life.

          The arts are pleading, today in America, for the power of the freer and fuller self-expression. In the lyric dancing of Virginia Myers there is evident the utmost freedom of expression, and the complete and immediate reaction to life in terms of emotion that we seek in the arts. It is an art founded upon personal and self-developed technique; untaught, unhampered, conditioned only by the emotional stimulus to which it is a reaction. And Virginia Myers has achieved in her own field of artistic creation, the ideal toward which the arts today are striving; the ideal of immediate and lyric expression of emotion, vestured in beauty, and leading us to a vision of life.