DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV
67
certainly we have been underestimating her during
all
the years
when her revolutionary innovations were forgotten. One has a
clear picture of a performer who converted dancing into some–
thing other than just dancing, whose scenes and machines were
of a new theatrical epoch, and whose gifts lay primarily in such
invention. Writing of a performance at the
Theatre Champs–
Elysees
in June, 1922, Levinson said: "Even though she has the
insipid primary
plastique,
the scholarly
faux-hellenisme
of the
Anglo-Sa,xon (which forms an apparent link between her school
and Isadora's) her personality is none the less fascinating. . . .
She is a great imaginative creator of forms. Her drapes animate
and organise space, give her a dream-like ambiance, abolish geo–
metrical space. . . . Whatever belongs to the dance is ordinary;
but
tout ce qui tient de l'optique est plein d'interet."
Levinson
had no doubt that this was a different matter entirely from
((les
enfantillages caduces de Duncanisme et ces vaines danses
d'expression."
It is a little surprising, therefore, that much of Fuller's fame
derived from her ability to represent natural objects-moths,
butterflies, lilies, etc. Dances of this kind were frequently photo–
graphed, and she kept them in her repertoire right into the 'twen–
ties. The serpentine dance is part of the history of
art nouveau;
it would be tedious to make a, list of the compliments paid her
by distinguished men on her power to reveal fugitive aspects of
nature. Certainly some of the photographs are impressively moth–
like and lily-like. With this strain of compliment there was
mingled a persistent note of praise for her Orientalism and her
Hellenism too. Such contradictions, if they are so, may be recon–
ciled in the aesthetic of a MMlarme; he wrote that the dancer
was not a woman dancing but a metaphor containing elemental
aspects of our form, sword, cup, flower, etc. And Symons, in
"The World as Ballet," finds in the dance both "the evasive,
winding tum of things" and "the intellectual as well as sensuous
a,ppealof a living symbol." She was a power like one of nature's,
and her creation had the same occult meanings.
