Felix Cherniavsky - News Clippings 1900s 2

Added 18th Mar 2022 by Beth Dobson (Archives and Programming Assistant, DCD) / Last update 18th Mar 2022

Maud Allan 400b 51 2008-1-29.jpg
Maud Allan 400b 51 2008-1-29.jpg
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Felix Cherniavsky - News Clippings 1900s 2

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Maud Allan Research Collection
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51.2008-1-29
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1906 THE DANCE IN ANCIENT GREECE 407 6 dancer - ihe quickness , the control , and the grace . To poetry the dance gave a richness and abundance of rhythm difficult to estimate ; to music it gave the same , indirectly , through poetry . From the dance -- the pantomimic ritual -- of both the Eleusinian worship of Demeter and of the sombre and joyful cult of Dionysos arose tragedy and comedy . And sculpture and painting owe more to the influence of the dance than to any other thing . Athenæus says that ' the most eminent sculptors thought their time not ill employed in studying and drawing the attitudes of their public dancers , ' and to this every Greek work of art bears witness . As Symonds says in his Studies of the Greek Poets , the whole race lived out its sculpture and painting , rehearsed , as it were , the great masterpieces of Phidias and Polygnotus in physical exercise , before it learnt to express itself in marble and colour . ' The exquisite harmony , that easy grace of carriage so characteristic of Greek men and women , as we see them in ancient art , tell their own tale ; they are the result of that gumnāzo , ' the exercising , the training . And the expressiveness of their attitudes , the way in which body , head , arm , and hand convey their meaning , the eloquence of every limb , comes from the thorough comprehension of the intellectual and emotional part of ' orchēsis ' --the mimetic . In no other art de we find that perfect balance of the physical and mental - mens sana in corpore sano ' -o clearly exemplified . The little terra cotta figures from Tanagra and Myrina show how much even in small things the Greek artist used the dancer as his model . Enough has been said to show what an abyss lies between Greek ' orchésis ' and our modern conception of dancing . No art has fallen from so high , and no art has fallen so low . The dance , once so full of ' solemn and passionate meaning , ' once the most powerful and eloquent mode of worshipping the gods , once a true sister of the Muses , has now become a mere acrobatic exercise , an excuse for kicking and flirtation , as in the modern ballroom ! In a complex civilisation , where not only ' man's love is from man's life a thing apart , ' but where religion and art are from man's life quite apart ; wbere a man is satisfied with being religious only on Sunday , an artist only in picture - galleries and at concerts - it is not surprising that the most living and realistic of the arts , the one most closely bound up with daily life , should have become so degenerate and should even tend to disappear altogether . And we have but to turn to what Greek civilisation , with its cult of the dance , has be queathed to humanity , to feel whether or no we should lament the death of Terpsichore . MARCELLE AZRA HINCKS . 6 3

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