Books Do Furnish A Room

Every Savage Can Dance

 ... as Darcy remarks in Pride and Prejudice.  As I explained in And A Star To Steer Her By, I have just spent nearly two weeks sailing in a brigantine around Vanuatu.  One of the constant themes of the voyage was the dancing, which greeted us on every island.  The social, spiritual and political framework of these societies is called kastom, and the dancing is always referred to as kastom dancing.  In fact, some of the dancing, and more especially the singing, we saw was clearly the product of marketing men and tourist authorities.  On several islands, the song “Welcome, welcome, warmly welcome” was tirelessly and repetitively dinned into us, and in one place a different welcome song was set to the tune of God Save The Queen (in spite of its name, Soren Larsen is a British ship)!

But some of the dancing was both excellent and original, although my photographs will only bear the shadow of a witness to it.  A unique feature of these islands is the water dancing, performed only by women; indeed the men profess not to know how it is done.   A group of women stand in the sea above their knees, and clap in a highly coordinated way.  They clap beneath the water and above it, they clap in the spume and the splash, and they beat the surface with their hands.  The whole is intensely coordinated percussion which is briefly very impressive, although I suspect it lacks the range and variety for a long performance; the ladies make all the water sounds you can imagine, but also a deep resonant sound which none of us could explain (or replicate, when we tried ourselves!).  Can a physicist help, please: could it possibly be a cavitation effect, whatever that is?

 

On the tiny island of Ra, we witnessed a sacred snake dance; this always makes me a little uncomfortable, because it was not a sacred occasion, and I imagine we would resent a suggestion that we conduct Easter Mass or the Coronation for the convenience of this week’s busload of tourists from the other side of the world?  But these people seem genuinely to want to perform, and they are the local villagers themselves – there is no-one else – so there is no question of a special troop of actors enacting a gutted or spiced up tourist version.  And there is also the economic question: these people are extremely remote, and have few opportunities to earn money, which they need for schooling and other services and supplies (though they seemed mainly to rely on local produce for building materials, food etc, and live in what a colleague called affluent subsistence).  In some of the Banks Islands, the visit of the Soren was the first by a ship of any size – the odd private yacht makes it up here – for over six months, and we carried supplies for them from  Port Vila and Luganville.

But the snake dance, to return to my moutons, is very impressive.  A small troupe of musicians stand in the centre, and sing and play small drums held for them by boys, and beat a sunken wooden drum in the sand.  The snake dancers emerge from three directions, and chase back and forth round in tight circles, running, stamping, and tuning.  It’s hard to give a real impression of the dynamism of the dance, but one can imagine it being very powerful indeed by night and a fire, compared with the calm of our tourist performance on a sunny beach.

Finally - and this is hardly a dance at all, since most of the women kneel or squat in two rows facing each other, clapping rhythmically and in doing so, make patterns with their partners’ hands and arms, reminiscent of a very sophisticated version of the schoolyard game.

La Guillem

On Friday last week, to see some wonderful modern ballet at the Coliseum.  The treat was Sylvie Guillem dancing a number of short pieces and her famous pas de deux, Push, with Russell Maliphant (picture below).  The short pieces included Solo and Two (most of which you can see using the link, though it's naturally a rather different view to that the audience has in a theatre).  Do look at it, you are in for a remarkable five minutes!

Sylvie Guillem is a dancer extraordinaire - she had a great classical career, dancing slightly more dangerously than utter classicism would encourage, but was absolutely wonderful in classical, romantic and modern roles.  I remember her best in erotically charged masterpieces like Bejart's Rite of Spring and Bolero, many of which can be glimpsed on YouTube.

Now she has taken up modern dance, and is still wonderful at - for a dancer - quite an advanced age; she is still wonderfully precise, flexible, sinous, and strong.  And in this ballets, she has achieved something quite magical, some of the classiest modern dance you will ever see, anywhere.

Pavlova

This, I think, is the picture Glo is referring to, John Lavery's romantic conception of Anna Pavlova (1910), from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow.  Having lived in Australia, "pavlova" means a particularly sickly cake without much substance to it .. quite appropriate really!

Into cleanness leaping

A wonderful evening last week at the ballet  - but not just any ballet, the New York City Ballet doing Balanchine, whose flame they tend with devotion and brilliance.  This is a rare privilege for Londoners, as they last visited 25 years ago, and I was keen to make the most of it – the first of four ballet evenings over coming weeks.

We saw three ballets, all choreographed by Balanchine – Serenade (Tchaikovsky), Agon (Stravinsky), Symphony in C (Bizet) – all in archetypal style, with plain costumes, and no props and no scenery.  This is almost pure dance, at least in Serenade, with almost no emotion or drama.  It’s something I find very sympathetic – technique without any sentimental gloop – but it may have left some of the audience a little cold or at least cautious, though their applause was warm enough.  Agon, of course, is the great masterpiece, and was bold, exciting and impressive – though as in the first ballet, the supporting dancers were not always flawless (but that is to say that one leaf on the tree is curled, no more).  But in Symphony in C, which I find a little too ornate and repetitive, the dancing was absolutely unbelievable, precise, clean, fast and perfect, just showing what peaks of technique this company can rise to.

Really good writing about ballet is rare in my experience – though I’d be delighted to be proved wrong – and even pictures all too often fail to capture the passion, the drama, and the sheer hard work and sweat of the ballet.  Degas and a modern painter like Donald Hamilton Fraser are both tremendous in their different ways, but they don’t really capture all sides of the dance for me.  The title of this post comes the octet from Peace by Rupert Brooke, and is not even about ballet, these words just seemed appropriate:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping...

Dance

One of the less bookish themes that might crop up here occasionally is dance.  Not only do I love ballet, but dance has always seemed a marvellous analogy for life itself.  Think of T S Eliot in Burnt Norton:

At the still point of the turning world.  Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Or Anthony Powell, whose Dance to the Music of Time is a series of novels I return to again and again - and I even go and look at the Poussin in the National Gallery, though he is not one of my most admired Old Masters.  But the reason dance is on my mind at the moment is that I watched Darcey Bussell's farewell from the Royal Ballet a few days ago - the performance she chose was MacMillan's Song of the Earth to Mahler's song cycle of the same name.  These German translations of Chinese poems cannot be called cheerful, but both in the Mahler and in MacMillan's ballet realisation, there is such beauty.  I had the pleasure of seeing the ballet a week or so earlier as well, when I took my god-daughter to Covent Garden, a very pleasant afternoon indeed, quite without the tears which attended Darcey Bussell's farewell.

The Zantedeschia which have been trumpeting their purity all around my pond for weeks now, seem to capture the same mood of elegiac beauty, so here is a particularly fine example from my garden, after rain.

And here are a handful of other books in that tray I showed yesterday (complete with skull - no Webster references intended):

And its just occurred to me that The Fisher King, which I re-read last week, centres on a great ballerina, whose dancing is a sacrifice for the man she loves; but when she dances again, he knows he has lost her.