ROGER COPELAND
103
one of the great choreographic traditions of this century, the
modern dance.
The Quest for Wholeness
The key concept in all primitivist thinking and writing about
dance is wholeness, the idea that dance can somehow help restore a
sense of unity or connection otherwise alien to the modern world.
Geoffrey Gorer speaks for many of his fellow anthropologists when
he writes (with obvious admiration and envy) about the function of
dance in West African tribal communities:
The dance is undoubtedly the chief African art; all the other
arts-music, singing, sculpture, textiles, and lesser handicrafts
have been diverted to serve and enhance the dance . ...The
dance is the chief medium which gives meaning to their lives and
unites them with the forces which people their universe.
Elsewhere in the same article, he observes that "the first and most
fundamental point to be made about African dancing is that it
always involves the whole body."
Wagner, invoking the unity of primitive ritual as the basis of his
Gesamtkunstwerk,
ascribes a comparably central role to dance (at least
in theory):
The arts of Dance , of Tone, and Poetry thus call themselves the
three primeval sisters . .. . By their nature they are inseparable
.. . for in the dance, which is the very cadence of Art itself, they
are so wonderous closely interlaced with one another.
The poets and intellectuals that Frank Kermode discusses, the
ones who genuflected at the feet of Loie Fuller and the early Ballet
Russe, were all smitten with this Wagnerian dream of synthesis.
Loie Fuller, enveloped in billowing silks and bathed in brightly col–
ored light, appeared to become "one" with her materials. "She
blends with rapidly changing colours which vary their limelit phan–
tasmagoria... ." wrote Mallarme. Yeats was also a great fan of
hers; and it may well have been the memory of Fuller that inspired
him to ask (in "Among School Children"), "How can we know the
dancer from the dance? " And Diaghilev, of course, was renowned
primarily for his entrepreneurial savvy, his ability to persuade the
leading composers and painters of the day-Stravinsky, Satie,
