Читать книгу The Art of Ballet - Mark Edward Perugini - Страница 10

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It is a truism of history that opposition towards the amusements of a people only increases the desire for them, and that the undue pressure of a law, or of a too rigid majority, only stimulates the invention of evasions. In dramatic history there is ample proof of this.

In England during the seventeenth century the force of Puritan opinion and of law did not crush the Drama, but led to unseemly licence.

When, in the early eighteenth century, Paris was enlivened by the spectacle of the majestic Royal Opera, endeavouring by legal thunder to suppress the lively vaudeville performances of the too popular Paris Fairs, and even going to the length of obtaining decrees forbidding the Fair theatres to perform musical plays in which words were sung, were the managers of the little theatres downhearted?

No! they merely evaded the law and made a mockery of pompous interference by having the music of their songs played, while the meaning was acted in dumb-show, and—the actual words, printed very large, were displayed on a screen let down to the stage from above! Their audiences, catching the spirit of the thing, enjoyed the wit of the evasion and supported the performances all the more.

There are many people who can only relish that which they have been told is wrong.

Much the same spirit was abroad about sixteen hundred years ago, when the growing power of the Christian Church began to be a calculable factor in “practical politics,” and the embarrassment of successive Roman emperors in trying to rule an unwieldy and decaying Empire was increased by the moral warfare between the more rigid sects of the new Church and the pleasures of the people.

It should, however, be said in justice to the early Churchmen that many of the pleasures of the people had become entirely scandalous, and detrimental to the manhood of the Empire, at least as seen in the Empire’s capital. Over such let us draw a veil!

While, in these “democratic” days, it may be doubted if there are any of the English-speaking race who “dearly love a lord” (though there is really no reason why they should not!), there were certainly some thousands of the Byzantine populace in the third and fourth centuries to whom a successful circus-rider or gladiator, actor or dancer, was of far more interest than any peer of their period.

The histrionic favourites lacked, of course, the advantages of picture-postcard fame, and had to be content with immortality in verse. But as for the now hackneyed “stage romance” of the marriage of a youthful scion of a noble house with some resplendent star of the theatrical firmament, did not a Byzantine Emperor, Justinian, marry Theodora, once a popular dancer at the Hippodrome!

Yet he it was who made one of the more effective moves to suppress some of his people’s excessive opportunities for amusement, by abolishing the laws under which the expense of the performances in the Hippodrome, and some of the less important theatres had been met by the Imperial treasury. This, however, was mainly due to his beautiful wife, who had seen all the vilest side of theatrical life in a time when the older dramatic culture had given place to banal and vulgar entertainments involving a horrible servitude of those engaged in providing them.

Before this, however, the Church’s thunder had been launched at the grosser theatrical spectacles, and the Theatre had retaliated by mocking the adherents of the then new religion. Where fulmination failed, control by influence was essayed. But for all the attacks of the more advanced and severer leaders of the early Church, there must have been something of confusion for at least the first five centuries of the Christian era. Indeed, in the endeavour of the Church to transmute the popular love of theatrical spectacles into something higher, and to awaken the public interest in the service of the Church, what with the introduction of choral song, with strophe and antistrophe, and of solemn processionals, even it is said of ceremonial dances performed by the choir—such as the Easter dances still seen in Spain to-day—the Church itself must have come at times to seem perilously sympathetic towards the very things it was professing to condemn.

Did not Gregory Nazianzen implore Julian, before he became “the Apostate,” to be more discreet, saying in effect: “If you must dance, and if you must take part in these fêtes, for which you seem to have such a passion, then dance, if you must; but why revive the dissolute dances of the daughter of Herodias, and of the pagans? Dance rather as King David did before the Ark; dance to the glory of God. Such exercises of peace and of piety are worthy of an Emperor and a Christian.”

In short, wise cleric as he was, he found no fault with the healthy exercise of the dance itself, but only with such dance and other Byzantine entertainment as had tended, or might tend, to become merely an exhibition of depraved taste.

Indeed, how could he have inveighed against the dance as an expression of clean rejoicing when it had been recorded: “And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances”?[1] Had not the servants of Achish said: “Is not this David the king of the land? did not they sing one to another of him in dances, saying, Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands?”[2] Had it not, too, been written: “And David danced before the Lord with all his might.”[3]

No, the Church thunder had been directed against the licence by which the arts of dancing and miming had been corrupted, and against, not wholesome athleticism and healthy sport, but the hysterical brutalities and “professionalism” of the arena.

And if further proof were required of ecclesiastical interest in and practice of the thing it only attacked when seen in degraded form, it is to be found in the fact that in 744, the Pope Zacharias promulgated a Bull suppressing all so-called “religious dances,” or “baladoires” as he called them, which were showing signs of becoming “degenerate.”

These were dances which were performed in, or within the precincts of cathedrals and churches at certain festivals such as Easter, Midsummer and Christmas; and of which the old English bonfire dances of St. John’s Eve, were (and the modern carnival, and the Eastertide ceremonial seen in Seville to-day, are) probably survivals, though, to be sure, they should be accounted originally as survivals of earlier pagan dances in honour of the sun, and of the harvest, and not as originating with the Christian Church.

It may seem a far cry from the date of Pope Zacharias’ edict of 744, to 1462, when the first of the ballets ambulatoires is recorded, but it must not be supposed that dancing, if not miming, is entirely lacking in history during those seven hundred odd years. Any history of dancing would aid us in at least partly bridging such a gap; but it will be convenient in a chapter dealing more especially with early ecclesiastical influence on the evolution of Ballet, to deal now with a form of entertainment or of religious festival which was essentially a creation of the earlier Church.

The famous procession of the Fête Dieu which King René d’Anjou, Count of Provence, established at Aix in 1462, was, as an old historian tells us, an “ambulatory” ballet, “composed of a number of allegorical scenes, called entremets.” This word entremets, which was later replaced by “interludes,” designated a miming spectacle in which men and animals represented the action. Sometimes jugglers and mountebanks showed their tricks and danced to the sound of their instruments. These entertainments were called entremets because they were instituted to occupy the guests agreeably at a great feast, during the intervals between the courses. “The entre-actes of our first tragedies,” the writer adds, “were arranged in this manner, as one sees in the works of Baif, the interludes in the tragedy of Sophonisbie. More than five hundred mountebanks, Merry Andrews, comedians and buffoons, exhibited their tricks and prowess at the full Court which was held at Rimini to arm the knights and nobles of the house of Malatesta and others.”

As the fêtes and tournaments, given on these occasions, were accompanied by acts of devotion, the festivals of the Church often displayed also something of the gallant pomp of the tournaments.

These ballets ambulatoires, however, with all their richer pageantry, were yet to be outshone by the two secular entertainments to which we must devote our next chapter—the banquet-dance of Bergonzio di Botta, of 1489, and the still more famous “Ballet Comique de la Reine,” of 1581, the last of which, there can be little doubt, had important effect in the development if not creation of our English masque, which, in turn, had an immense influence on the evolution of modern Ballet.