FRANK KERMODE
This in five tableaux: Storm at Sea-Wrecked, Lost; The River
of Death; The Fire of Life; Ave Maria; The Land of Visions.
How two famous dances, the Butterfly (subject of many photo–
graphs) and Radium, a dance in honor of the Curies, came to
be conflated, I do not know. The Land of Visions, Mr. Nicol
!.urmises, was a way of using up some photographs she had taken
of the surface of the moon.
As
time went by, she depended more
and more on her company, but also upon ingenious optical ef–
fects. Before 1909 she had founded her School, and by 1912 the
best dancers were allowed to take over her Lily, Serpentine and
Fire Dances. But the new dances were more and more abstract.
Her troupe had a great success in London in 1923 with a
shadow ballet called
Ombres Gigantesques.
There are some
splendid photographs in the
Sketch
for the 13th of December of
that year, the eve of a charity performance to be attended by the
King and Queen. An enormous shadow hand plucks at the
cowering dancers; a vast foot descends to crush them. In other
performances, for example in a ballet using Debussy's
La Mer,
the dancers were not seen at all, but simply heaved under a huge
sea of silk. Rival performers came and went; but Fuller re–
mained in the front line till her death in 1928.
The career of Fuller is untelligible without some reference
to her technical repertory. She had, of course, her own aesthetic
notions, and claimed to have brought about a revolution in the
arts.
At first she saw the dance as arising naturally from music,
but expressing human emotion best when unimpeded by training.
"The moment you attempt to give dancing a trained element,
naturalness disappears; Nature is truth, and art is artificial. For
example, a child will never dance of its own accord with the toes
pointing out." Rodin expressly agreed, and Massenet was so
struck with the doctrine that he gave Fuller unrestricted per–
forming rights in his music without royalty. Debussy was also
interested, and Florent Schmitt wrote Fuller's Salome music
( 1893). But she very often used commonplace music, and it is
hard to believe that her mature doctrine was either musical or
