Vol. 50 No. 1 1983 - page 104

104
PARTISAN REVIEW
Picasso, Matisse, Derain-to create music, decor, and costumes
expressly for the Ballet Russe. His success in these collaborative ven–
tures led Camille Mauclair to announce that the early Ballet Russe
extravaganzas had out-Wagnered Wagner. Here is a representative
excerpt from his review of
Scheherazade:
This dream-like spectacle, beside which the Wagnerian synthesis
itself is but a clumsy barbarism, this spectacle where all sensa–
tions correspond and weave together by their continual interlac–
ing ... the collaboration of decor, lighting, costumes, and mime
establishes unknown relationships in the mind .
Another manifestation of this hunger for wholeness is the way
much primitivist writing subtly, but intentionally, blurs the distinc–
tion between ritualistic and theatrical dance, suggesting that the sep–
aration between spectator and spectacle (even in the most secular,
estheticized circumstances) is somehow less distinct in the art of
dance than in the other theatrical arts. Dance thereby preserves that
"participation mystique" which Levy-Bruhl attributed to the primi–
tive mind. John Martin, for example, believes that "the inherent
contagion of bodily movement . . . makes the onlooker feel sympa–
thetically in his own musculature the exertions he sees in somebody
else's musculature." Even Paul Valery, who normally places such a
high premium on "disinterestedness" and esthetic distance, argues
that" part of our pleasure as spectators (of dance) consists in feeling
ourselves possessed by the rhythms so that we ourselves are virtually
dancing." And quintessentially, in his book
The Dance of Life
Havelock Ellis suggests that:
Even if we are not ourselves dancers, but merely the spectators of
the dance, we are still, according to that Lippsian doctrine of
Einjuhlung
or "empathy" ... feeling ourselves in the dancer
who is manifesting and expressing the latent impulses of our own
being.
This argument-that the act of watching dance is invariably a
form of virtual participation-reveals the primitivist's distrust of
"objectivity" (and of the detachment that makes it possible). Accor–
ding to Mary Wigman, the chief pioneer of modern dance in
Germany:
The primary concern of the creative dancer should be that his
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