DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV
73
larmC's "prodigious" writings on the subject "a peculiar condition
of my work." So I believe that when he came to write the pas–
sage comparing the dancer with a salamander-living "com–
pletely at ease, in an element comparable to fire," he was re–
membering Fuller. The passage culminates in a long, rhapsodical
speech from Socrates: "what is a flame ... if not
the moment
itself?
...
Flame is the act of that moment which is between
earth and heaven ... the flame sings wildly between matter and
ether ... we can no longer speak of movement ... nor distin–
guish any longer its acts from its limbs." Phaedrus replies that
"she flings her gestures like scintillations ... she filches impos–
sible attitudes, even under the very eye of Time!" Eryximachus
sums it up: "Instant engenders form, and form makes the instant
visible." And when the dancer speaks, she says she
is
neither dead
nor alive, and ends: "Refuge, refuge, 0 my refuge, 0 Whirl–
wind! I was in thee, 0 movement--outside all things. . . ." A
Bergsonian dancer almost,
"reuelatrice du reel"
as Levinson says.
The propriety of yoking together Avril and Fuller as I have
done here is now, perhaps, self-evident. Avril is a smaller figure
altogether, but she demonstrates the strength of the link between
dancing and poetry, as well as the important pathological ele–
ment in the dancer's appeal. Fuller deserves, one would have
thought, some of the attention that has gone to Isadora. Levin–
son, who repeatedly declares his faith in classical dancing as the
one discipline
"jeconde, complete, creatrice,"
respected Fuller,
but despised Duncan as having no technique, no beauty, no sup–
pleness, her feet flattened and enlarged by years of barefoot
prancing, her music primitive. The fact is that Duncan was much
more the Tanagra figurine, the dancer from the Pompeian
fresco, than Fuller, who earned these descriptions in her early
days. And Duncan certainly did not submerge her personality
in strange disguises and unnatural lights. The Modern Dance
has developed theories sufficiently impersonal to make
it
in–
tensely interesting to Mrs. Langer, creating a symbolic reality in-
