Dancing Naturally

Also by Alexandra Carter

THE ROUTLEDGE DANCE STUDIES READER (ed.)

RETHINKING DANCE HISTORY: A Reader (ed.)

DANCE AND DANCERS IN THE VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN

MUSIC HALL BALLET

THE ROUTLEDGE DANCE STUDIES READER

(second edition, ed. with J. O’Shea)

Also by Rachel Fensham

DISORIENTATIONS, CULTURAL PRAXIS IN THEATRE: Asia, Pacific, Australia
(ed. with P. Eckersall)

THE DOLLS’ REVOLUTION: Australian Theatre and Cultural Imagination

(with D. Varney)

TO WATCH THEATRE: Essays on Genre and Corporeality

Dancing Naturally
Nature, Neo-Classicism and Modernity in
Early Twentieth-Century Dance

Edited by

Alexandra Carter and Rachel Fensham

Palgrave
macmillan
Selection and editorial matter © Alexandra Carter and Rachel Fensham 2011
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Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements ix

Notes on Contributors x

1 Nature, Force and Variation 1

Rachel Fensham
2 Constructing and Contesting the Natural in British
Theatre Dance 16
Alexandra Carter
3 Ideas of Nature, the Natural and the Modern in Early
Twentieth-Century Dance Discourse 31
Michael Huxley and Ramsay Burt
4 The Ancient Greeks and the ‘Natural’ 43
Fiona Macintosh
5 From the Artificial to the Natural Body: Social Dancing
in Britain, 1900–1914 58
Theresa Jill Buckland
6 Dancing Based on Natural Movement 73
Mary A. Johnstone and Madge Atkinson
Extracts edited by Alexandra Carter
7 Undressing and Dressing Up: Natural Movement’s
Life in Costume 82
Rachel Fensham
8 Nature Moving Naturally in Succession: An Exploration of
Doris Humphrey’s Water Study 98
Lesley Main
9 Tensing and Relaxing Naturally: Systematic Approaches to
Training the Body 110
Susan Leigh Foster
10 ‘Female Nature’, Body Culture and Plastique 124
Karen Vedel

v
vi Contents

11 Tethering the Flow: Dialogues between Dance, Physical

Culture and Antiquity in Interwar Australia 139
Amanda Card
12 Mining Anatomy: Moving Naturally 155
Libby Worth

Index 170
List of Illustrations

Front Cover: Photograph of a group of Natural Movement dancers in

backward bend pose rehearsing outdoors, c.1928, NRCD reference NM/
F/3/1/3/2 © Allied Newspapers Ltd

Back Cover: Anita Heyworth in Fire Dance or Fire. An image of this

dance appears in the Dancing Times as ‘The Spirit of the Bush Fire’,
1926, NRCD reference NM/F/2/15/1 © Longworth Cooper

2.1 Eunice Hardman in Bacchanale (NRCD reference

NM/F/2/2/1*) 20

2.2 Natural Movement dancer at Woody Bay, Devon, 25 August

1925 (NRCD reference NM/F/2/2/1*) 26

2.3 Dancer Nancy Sherwood, a tutor at the Ginner-Mawer

school and Ginner’s main demonstrator (Pauline Grant
photograph album of Revived Greek dancers, Bice Bellairs
collection, NRCD reference BB/F/l) 27

4.1 Frieze Lines (Pauline Grant photograph album from the

Ginner-Mawer School, Bice Bellairs collection, NRCD
reference BB/F/l*) 51

6.1 ‘(Ed. ne Alimari) N. 26970. ROMA – Musee Vaticano. Donne

che conducono un Toro al sacrifizio. (Scultura antica.)’
Illustration in mss.papers ‘Dancing based on Natural
Movement’ by Mary A. Johnstone and Madge Atkinson.
(National Resource Centre for Dance,
University of Surrey. NRCD reference NM/E/2/3/1) 74

7.1 Sigh of Autumn, All-in-alls/leaf dresses, c.1931 (NRCD

Reference NM/S/3/2*) 85

7.2 Anita Heyworth and Madge Bateman in Soaring, early 1930s,

Guttenberg (NRCD reference NM/F/2/14/1*) 89

7.3 Costume design for Laideronette character from Ravel’s

Mother Goose Suite, Lilian Reburn, c.1919/20 (NRCD
reference NM/N/2*) 91

vii
viii List of Illustrations

9.1 Illustration from Dudley Allen Sargent, Handbook of

Developing Exercises (Cambridge: n.p., 1897) 114
9.2 Exercises 10, 11 and 12, Elsie M. Wilbor, Delsarte Recitation
Book. A pantomime depicting Grief (4th edition, New York:
Edgar S. Werner, 1905) 116
10.1 H. E. Hetch: Ida Brun by the bust of her mother, 1803
(by courtesy of Christian Brun and Sophienholm) 126
11.1 Stage and Society (Vol. 12, No. 4, 1922; Mitchell Library,
State Library of NSW, Sydney Australia, call number Q0595) 145

* Every effort has been made to identify the owners of the rights in this material
where it is unknown. The NRCD apologize for any infringement that may have
occurred. If you have any information regarding copyright, then please contact
the publishers who will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the
earliest opportunity.
Acknowledgements

The editors extend their gratitude to Angela Kane and Helen Roberts, who
recognized the importance of the archives on early British modern danc-
ers held at the National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD), University
of Surrey. Their conception of a research and preservation project, based
on these collections, was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council from 2008–10. Thanks are due to the staff of the NRCD, in liai-
son with the University’s Department of Dance, Film and Theatre, who
were instrumental in sustaining this project: Emily Churchill, Project
Archivist; Laura Griffiths, Project Archivist and Research Assistant; and
Sharon Maxwell, NRCD Archivist. Sharon also provided essential assist-
ance in making possible the inclusion of many of the photographs from
the research project in this volume. A significant debt is owed to Helen
Roberts, NRCD Manager, whose continuing support and multi-skilled
co-management contributed significantly to the successful completion of
Pioneer Women: Early British Modern Dancers.
This edited text arises out of the above project. We thank all the con-
tributors, who have greatly enriched and expanded the field in terms of
both breadth of material and an international dimension by sharing their
research and responding so willingly to editorial negotiations. We are also
grateful to the members of the wider dance community who participated
in the conference, Moving Naturally, convened at Surrey University in
October 2009, and whose enthusiastic support made us realize that this
topic of the relationship between dancing, movement, and all things
natural, continues to pulse at the heart of much of what constitutes
dance today.
Last, we thank Penny Simmons for her enthusiastic and text-enhancing
proof reading and editing, and Paula Kennedy and Ben Doyle at
Palgrave, whose faith in the research field and continuing support have
made this edition possible.

ix
Notes on Contributors

Madge Atkinson (1885–1970) was a choreographer/teacher/dancer

who worked initially in the Manchester region and later London. She
evolved her own systemic method of dance training known as Natural
Movement. She and her colleague Anita Heyworth were instrumental in
founding the London College of Dance and Drama.

Theresa Jill Buckland is Professor of Performing Arts at De Montfort

University, Leicester. She has edited two international collections, Dance
in the Field: Theory, Methods and Issues in Dance Ethnography (1999) and
Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture and Identities (2006) and is
the author of Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England 1870–1920
(2011).

Ramsay Burt is Professor of Dance History at De Montfort University. His

publications include The Male Dancer (1995), Alien Bodies (1997), Judson
Dance Theater (2006), and, with Valerie Briginshaw, Writing Dancing
Together (2009). With Susan Foster, he is founder editor of Discourses in
Dance.

Amanda Card lectures at the Department of Performance Studies,

University of Sydney. Her research and teaching are primarily in the areas of
dance studies, performance histories and cross-cultural or hybrid perform-
ance practices. She is currently working on a new book – Choreographing a
Continent: Histories of Australian Dance.

Alexandra Carter is Emeritus Professor at Middlesex University, London.

She edited the Routledge Dance Studies Reader (1998, 2010) and Rethinking
Dance History (2004), and sole authored Dance and Dancers in the Victorian
and Edwardian Music Hall (2005). She was Co-Investigator of the Pioneer
Women Project at the University of Surrey.

Rachel Fensham is Professor of Dance and Theatre Studies at the

University of Surrey. She was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded
Pioneer Women project which produced this volume, and other recent
publications include To Watch Theatre (Peter Lang, 2009), and articles in
New Theatre Quarterly and Discourses on Dance.

x
 Notes on Contributors xi

Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is Distinguished

Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. She
is the author of Reading Dancing; Choreography and Narrative; Dances that
Describe Themselves and Choreographing Empathy. She is also editor of
Choreographing History; Corporealities and Worlding Dance.

Michael Huxley is a researcher and teacher at De Montfort University.

He has published in a number of books and journals including Research
in Dance Education and Discourses in Dance. He is a Board member of
the Congress on Research in Dance; Chair, Editorial Board for Dance
Research Journal and Senior Academic Adviser and Chair of the Advisory
Board for PALATINE.

Fiona Macintosh is Reader in Greek and Roman Drama, Fellow of

St Hilda’s College and Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek
and Roman Drama, University of Oxford. Her most recent publication
is The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World (Oxford, 2010).

Lesley Main teaches Humphrey Technique and Repertory at Middlesex

University. She danced in the United States with Ernestine Stodelle from
1985, is director of the Doris Humphrey Foundation UK, and stages
Humphrey’s work for Arke Compagnie D’Arte (Italy) and MOMENTA
Dance Company (Chicago). Recent publications include Directing the
Dance Legacy of Doris Humphrey: The Creative Impulse of Reconstruction
(2011).

Karen Vedel is Postdoctorate Research Fellow in ‘Dance in Nordic

Spaces’, Tampere University, Finland. Research areas are dance historiog-
raphy, space and place in contemporary performance, and the interface
of ritual and performative practices. Recent publications are Dance and
the Formation of Norden (editor, 2010) Religion, Ritual, Theatre (co-editor,
2008), En anden dans (author, 2008).

Libby Worth is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre Practice at Royal Holloway,

University of London. Her published works include Anna Halprin (2004)
co-authored with Helen Poynor and essays on Jenny Kempe, Halprin, Pina
Bausch, Writing about Practice, and Caryl Churchill. She trained in dance
with Anna Halprin and is a professional practitioner of the Feldenkrais
Method®.
1
Nature, Force and Variation
Rachel Fensham

During the first quarter of the twentieth century there was a return, in the
West, to notions of the ‘natural’ in diverse fields of cultural activity. For
many, outdoor pursuits; freer ways of learning; liberating costume; the
authenticity of emotion and sexual desire; and the natural world itself
were all privileged in action and belief. For others, the Hellenic Greek
period (5 BCE) was viewed as the epitome of a natural harmony and
balance between the State, the people and their gods. One of the central
tenets of the beliefs, inspired by this Greek world, was a return to the re-
presentation of the ‘natural’ body in many forms of artistic expression,
with aspirations to a liberation through nature, as seen in Art Nouveau
objects, barefoot dancing, modern literature and theatre symbolism.
Described as ‘expressive’, ‘interpretative’ or ‘free’, new performance
genres found alternatives to ballet and to the popular dances of music
hall and vaudeville in the idea of the ‘natural’. In dance historiography,
the scarf-waving Isadora Duncan, her figure draped against the columns
of the Acropolis, has appeared as prime mover in this rebellion. Duncan
was, however, not alone, for there were many others who embraced
notions of the ‘natural’ as an underlying philosophy for art. Regular
outdoor concerts in Hyde Park, for instance, included choric pageants
in which female dancers presented a range of Greek myths and legends,
and celebrations of the seasons.
In Britain, the United States, Australia and Europe, the ideals of this
new aesthetic took root in formal choreography, in new methods of
theatre and dance teaching, and as inspiration in those communities
around which groups of artists, composers and designers gathered.
Establishing a context for these developments in the early twentieth
century, particularly in the artistic experimentation associated with the
studio practices of a rising middle class, Dancing Naturally will introduce
1
2 Dancing Naturally

some of the leading figures of the movement towards ‘dancing natu-

rally’, and their ongoing legacy in dance institutions, educational
practices and artistic innovation. This volume intends to expand upon
this social and historical context, by examining the intellectual forces
shaping the emergence of a new aesthetic. By carefully historicizing the
scope of this activity, the editors intend to provide a framework that
might be used in relation to research, study or investigation of those
dance practices today which continue to link the ‘natural’ with the
‘body’ and its meaning-making potential.

How to understand the natural?

The notion of dancing ‘naturally’ is a slippery concept that has been

used in different contexts, by different artists and writers, for different
purposes. The dance educators, Madge Atkinson and her protégé Anita
Hayworth, spoke, like Duncan, of being ‘inspired by nature’; of wanting
their students to have exposure to the natural world; or to express the
qualities of nature in their movement. Already, at least three versions of
what ‘the natural’ might mean are being invoked in relation, perhaps
even in opposition, to culture. Precisely how nature becomes an expres-
sive quality or process within art-making, subject inevitably to the work-
ings of culture, is even more ambiguous. Is drawing upon some intrinsic
property of the body or person what makes a movement natural? Is
nature intrinsic or extrinsic to forms of subjectivity? Or, can dance be
shaped by observation of the natural world and therefore reflect it? And
when science harnesses the study of the natural, such as the anatomy and
physiology of the body, and uses it to discipline and order representation,
in what ways do scientific procedures become translated into techniques
and training systems for performance? During the early twentieth cen-
tury, many products of culture, whether in science, politics or art, were
fashioned in active response to, or variation of, what were perceived to
be the laws and forces of an ambivalent nature. A ‘nature’ whose signifi-
cance keeps changing.
Whenever in doubt about the etymology of a concept in the English
language it is always worth returning to Raymond Williams’ compen-
dium of Keywords. Under ‘nature’, he writes, not so reassuringly, that it is
‘perhaps the most complex word in the language’; however, his discus-
sion of its history and adaptation in Western society elaborates several
distinctions useful to the purpose of this book (1976: 184). In its most
common attribution, nature is referred to as an essential quality or char-
acteristic of a process or thing, as in ‘the nature of dance is to express the
 Nature, Force and Variation 3

human spirit’. This latter also becomes aligned with the intrinsic qualities
of certain persons, as in the phrase ‘she is a natural dancer’. However,
nature’s history and ideology are far more complex.
Across many cultures, nature is given personified forms in the repre-
sentation of a ‘Mother Nature’ or goddess of Nature who has mythical
attributes and, in any number of anthropomorphic representations of the
sun, moon, plants or animals, nature is imagined figuratively and alle-
gorically (Tuan, 1993). When the ‘forces of nature’, whether malevolent
or benign, interfere with human fortune the personification of nature
becomes troubled. Managing this complexity – from the innocence and
certainty of nature to its destructiveness and unpredictability – humans
have learnt how to alter nature, and as ideas of the difference between
humans and natural spirits or forces emerge, the classification of causal-
ity in the world becomes increasingly important. By the sixteenth cen-
tury, nature could be understood therefore as a set of patterns, and laws,
which ordered the cosmos including ‘man’s place in a hierarchical world’
(Williams, 1976: 187).
Once this idea of Nature as a hierarchical order became established,
dominant meanings for ‘nature’ evolved more abstract particularities.1
The first strand saw nature as a directing or inherent force, perhaps
supernatural, but nonetheless distinct from the social world. And
the other regarded ‘nature’ as a manifestation of the material world
in which given and fixed general properties of matter could shape
human knowledge and experience. It is in this latter sense that both
the Enlightenment and Romanticism approach the understanding of
nature: Science sees nature as something subject to Reason, tending to
the design and management of natural forces; whereas the Romantics
regard nature as something wilfully perverse, yet sublime because freed
of the degeneracies of human society, and thus potentially offering
escape or regeneration (Williams, 1976: 188). In both these intellectual
developments, nature remains relatively static since it represents univer-
sal, primary and recurrent forces. Likewise, in the ideologies of ‘natural
movement’ elaborated by modern dance practitioners, there is a sense
that ‘nature’ represents a constant force; regarded as transcendentally
beautiful, but occasionally overwhelming, as evident in the symbolism
inherent in a fire or water dance.
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the concept of a mate-
rial world, representing an alternative set of natural values, was firmly
entrenched in language and society. On the one hand, the ‘goodness’
and ‘innocence’ of nature had become associated with the countryside,
or with that which is ‘anti-urban, anti-industrial, anti-mechanized and
4 Dancing Naturally

anti-chaotic’ (Adams, 2003: 75). The enjoyment of ‘unspoiled’ places

of nature, which might include constructions from long ago such as
ancient stone monuments, or hedgerows, began to represent some-
thing redemptive to artists drawn to the reification of the natural in
their art, or dances. In the natural sciences, scholars wanted to try and
understand what ‘nature teaches’ through close observation, which
increasingly included recognition of the human as an animal species
in an all-encompassing ‘natural world’. During this period, the legacy
of Darwin’s (1859) The Origin of the Species and ideas of natural selec-
tion stimulated many artists, but it also gave credence to the renamed
‘survival of the fittest’ which was a more pernicious, cruel notion of the
natural environment as a constant testing ground for social progress.2
Later the alignment of anatomical study with new types of instrumental
measurement also led to cultures of exercise, which placed an emphasis
on fitness, technique and training systems which could improve the
human body. In the worst excesses of this association of the natural
with human survival, the Galtonian science of eugenics sought to inter-
fere with nature to new social purposes.
Artistic developments, such as ‘nature painting’ or ‘naturalism’ in
theatre and literature, frequently responded to and adapted these philo-
sophical and scientific views of nature. Linked with the notion of study-
ing natural causes, close observation of nature, whether landscapes or
the detailed structure of fruits, plants and animals, became a means to
explain and justify a new sense of morality that derived from nature.3
Initially used by social critics as a derogative term, theories of naturalism
also placed value on a materiality in nature that challenged the power of
religious belief.4 Styles of writing, and art that accommodated ‘natural
manners’ became associated with a rejection of artifice, theatricality and
formalism in the arts; and these ranged from the Aesthetic movement to
the love of ‘plein air’ in the Impressionists of the early twentieth century.
Effects of nature not simply available to the gaze, however, required
methods of abstraction which could produce the look of ‘naturalism’ in
art more indirectly. In this sense, an external representation of nature
might appear expressive of organic forms or organic processes, but these
had to be studied and learnt.
A systematic approach to the evocation of nature in visual art was
shared partly by tonalism in music, but differed considerably from
the naturalism revolutionizing the theatre. Stage naturalism aimed to
utilize scientific approaches to the observation of character and action
to excavate the psychological and social causes of human behaviour in
the environment, now understood as the matrix of forces producing
 Nature, Force and Variation 5

modern society (Innes, 2000). The approximation of nature, without

stylization or excess, was to lead theatre towards the frightening revela-
tions of an inner psychological self, without adornment or repression.
For its exponents, such as Ibsen and Strindberg, a new mode of acting
and writing that could admit the cruelty and violence of a wild nature
underpinning human behaviour had to be created. As a result, drama-
turgical structures in theatrical representation began to reflect the influ-
ential and determining forces shaping the modern, particularly middle
class, social world.
Exponents of natural movement who wanted to explore properties
which might constitute the natural, whether the sensual aspects of the
body or the diversity of the physical world, used both a scientific method
of observation as well as an aesthetic justification for untethering matter
and feelings from social and religious constraints in order to seek beauty
in dancing. They also realized that an impression of nature could be
approximated by the manipulation and incorporation of rhythmic and
muscular elements into structured patterns of movement. Since no child
or adult dancer of the twentieth century had lived in a ‘state of nature’
in the Rousseauian sense, with freedom to wander or dress without con-
straint, the intention of teachers aspiring to natural movement began to
be advanced through the detailed study of principles underpinning natu-
ral forms, and translated by physical modulations such as the experience
of the foot stretched out without shoes, or via imaginative exercises such
as running to replicate the sense of lightness that might be felt by leaves
drifting in an autumn wind.
For the natural movement artists making concert dances, however,
their representation of organic forms and natural elements harked
back to more Romantic ideals of nature, as sublime and autonomous
from human society or science. They desired a quasi-mystical version
of nature that could thrive in spite of the social transformation taking
place after the Victorian era and between the wars. Perhaps inevitably,
natural movement, particularly in its later development, led to a con-
vergence with other idealist tendencies in empiricism and materialism.
Thus, the design and fashioning of nature became based on greater
objectivity, and movement observation was used to construct power-
ful new aesthetic disciplines, methods and pedagogies for dance. Not
merely a free-floating signifier, the development of natural movement
often registered a considered (often female) dissent from the destructive
and elitist forces of a crushing social reality. Ideologically, however, as
the twentieth century reveals, the celebration of corporeal nature could
be harnessed to both liberating and repressive social transformation.
6 Dancing Naturally

Criticisms of a culture/nature binary

Missing from this account of the changing historical significance of the

concept of nature is consideration of how the meaning of nature can be
manipulated by culture, by attributing values differentially according to
race, class and gender distinctions. Feminist theory has been suspicious,
for instance, of those oppositions within language which link differences
between the terms Culture/Nature, to those of Reason/Passion, Father/
Mother, Man/Woman, therefore to representational systems which
reinforce divisions that are gendered (Cixous in Sellars, 1994: 37–8). The
implications of binary logic for the domestic sphere are that a woman
becomes associated with her fleshy body, and with maternity, and thus
with a passivity beholden to a male social order. Other binary differences
regard Culture as about civilization, and Nature as that which belongs
to so-called primitive society; a structural dichotomy confirmed danger-
ously in the modern science of anthropology.5 In the United Kingdom,
at the beginning of the twentieth century, nature was not close to most
people living in cities, and a sense of decadence arose from the feeling
that Western civilization might have passed its nadir. Oswald Spengler’s
(1918) The Decline of the West was a popular book which argued, following
Darwin, that cultures might be thought of as evolving in cyclical phases,
like plant-forms, flourishing then atrophying, left as mere ‘civilization’
but without any energy (Wilson, 2005: 234–5). While a universalizing
argument such as this is untenable, modern political theory often regards
class structures as evidence of profound alienation and ‘living with
nature’ as an alternative form of freedom. In his 1993 book, The Country
and the City, Williams traced the ideals of the ‘organic community’ back
to the eighteenth century, while Michael Bunce (1994) relates the early
twentieth century ‘countryside ideal’ to the modern ecology movement.
Likewise, in artistic practices, culture identified with modern society
was often regarded as corrupted while nature came to be regarded as
pure. Although such cultural distinctions and hierarchies should not
be essentialized, these ideas have had real effects. Political debates in
the early twentieth century, with new movements for female suffrage
and at the end of colonialism were often conducted around polarized
views of what was and was not ‘natural’ for men and women to do, or
what rights should belong to which classes of people.6 Under claims of
natural difference, religious and social structures have often, and still
do, attempt to restrict mobility or corporeal expression.
The irony for those artistic practices aligned with nature, or celebrat-
ing a notion of a nature unadulterated by the human, is that any degree
 Nature, Force and Variation 7

of representation and transformation of natural materials, or natural

processes is always subject to culture. New historicist or poststructuralist
arguments therefore reject the binary logics outlined above: by recog-
nizing that discourses can reinforce ideological distinctions around race,
gender and class; and by arguing that power over nature can restrict the
body to mute, organic matter waiting to be shaped by the mind, subject
to discipline, as if corporeality is only rendered legible by technique.
Asserting the ascendancy of culture over biology has been an impor-
tant strategy for feminists, historians and others to counter the ways in
which such binary distinctions around nature and culture oppress indi-
viduals and groups. Even today, distinctions made between the value of
science or the arts to research and teaching often draw upon essential
ideas of how nature can best be understood and managed.
Elizabeth Grosz, a feminist philosopher, has recently attended to
the ways in which nature might be rethought. Rather than counter
its value, she suggests we consider its affirmative potential ‘outside’
culture, yet capable of becoming a force within culture. She argues that
it may be useful to consider ‘nature’ as ‘perpetual variation’ and thus
to develop a ‘correspondingly complex understanding of the relation
between the cultural and the natural’ (2005: 48–9). Likewise, contempo-
rary ecologists argue that ‘nature itself is dynamic and highly variable,
its patterns at one particular place and time contingent on preceding
events, its trajectory through time … open-ended’ (Adams, 2003: 89).
Departing from the superiority of culture in cultural theory, a re-evalu-
ation of the role of nature in our thought, social practices and creative
practices seems timely.
In this book, it is therefore exciting to see the many purposes to which
nature was put in the encounter between science, the arts, philosophy
and social policy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nature was
represented, often through dancing, as a vital force with powerful lib-
eratory potential, particularly for women. As with other metaphors of
motion, nature became privileged as flux, as the experience of flow, and
thus as something mobilizing change. After the ‘spirit’ of Romanticism
in art and literature had been crushed by the First World War, ‘nature’
appealed as a powerful alternative to scientific progress, but it also offered
a form of knowledge about the human organism’s place in a greater,
natural world. Science also regained legitimacy within pedagogy as a
mode of instruction about cellular life and species behaviour, hence the
social and political management of bodies and other organic processes in
health and education. Dancing Naturally shows how scientific investiga-
tion aided the regulation and understanding of natural movement, but
8 Dancing Naturally

scientific intervention also meant a regression from the variability and

differentiation that nature earlier promised. As Grosz suggests, society
can be ‘naturally closed’ by culture: when culture ‘re-actively functions to
narrow down, to slow down, to filter, to cohere, and organize that which
provokes and stimulates it’ (2005: 52). Fear of nature and the unnatural
by dominant cultural ideologies can produce repression of the distorted,
the degenerate, and otherwise non-normative identities. The unnatural,
however, crerates other forms of beauty and insight, and it is often in this
terrain between nature and culture that alternative artistic theories and
practices reinvigorate dancing.

Nature and modernity

The nature debates of Dancing Naturally circulate in the context of a

‘modernity’ associated with rapid changes in society, via capitalism,
bureaucracy and technological development. But, as with ‘nature’,
modernity is a contested concept, and a problematic historical perio-
dization. As Rita Felski writes, modernity represents a constantly shift-
ing set of historical coordinates, which above all, do not demonstrate
‘a homogenous cultural consensus’ (1995: 12–15). Instead, the dis-
courses of modernity shaping modern dance reveal multiple and
conflicting responses to processes of social change. With our book’s
focus on the early twentieth century, Western conceptions of moder-
nity – shaped by alienation, war and destruction – which produce new
forms of subjectivity and society, contrast with the commodification
and consumption of idealized others, such as the exoticized subjects
of ancient Greece or Asian culture. In terms of gender, as Felski argues,
modernity was consciously, and self-consciously differentiated by male
and female writers and artists, even though class and female emancipa-
tion in education, the arts, and public life brought about progressive
social transformation. The gendering of modernity impacts upon those
female dancers identifying themselves as independent subjects via their
encounters with nature, and indeed with a relative liberation from bio-
logical imperatives, in their new roles as educators, entrepreneurs and
independent business women.
Although Dancing Naturally does not specifically address non-white
modernity, such as Paul Gilroy examines in his book Black Atlantic, sev-
eral chapters draw attention to the ways in which racial ideas, stereotypes
and anxieties became identified with the ‘natural’ during this period,
and illustrate how the circulation of goods, services and people from the
remains of Empire impacted upon the nostalgia for, and reinvention
 Nature, Force and Variation 9

of, the natural. Gilroy, for instance, suggests that ‘different sets of ideas
about the relationship of the past and present, living and dead, tradi-
tional and modern, coexist and conflict’ to make the project of examin-
ing ‘countercultures’ heuristically important (1993: 197). With its focus
on the repressed ideas and values of modernity in many dance practices,
this book documents countercultures which have negotiated historical
and discursive spaces alongside more dominant artistic developments in
concert dance. Through the coexistence of ideas shaped by the experi-
ence of bodies ‘dancing naturally’, and the dynamics of socio-historical
events, what constitutes modern dance becomes redefined.
Twentieth-century dance history has already noted the contradictory
relations between gender, modernity, race and identity in the early
twentieth century, however, when Duncan, and to a lesser extent Fuller
appear, they often uphold the centrality of the myth of ‘modern dance’,
using Duncan’s assertion of its pure nature. Duncan claimed the natural
as a force within her, providing her with inspiration to dance, and many
recent books continue to celebrate these values of an inner sublime
in modern dance as well as her role as a modern woman in Europe
and America (LaMothe, 2006; Daly, 1995). Of course, there are also
critiques of this position, offered not least by scholars such as Franko
(1995) and Burt (1998). This book further decentralizes modern dance
history by documenting other dancers and theorists advancing similar
corporeal practices, and by showing how Duncan’s philosophy relates
to intellectual genealogies active across a wide range of disciplines from
eighteenth-century ‘neo-classicism’ to the new sciences of psychol-
ogy and physiology, and the nascent discourses of political national-
ism. It is intriguing to note the influence of female photographer Elli
Souyioultzoglou-Seraïdar (known as Nelly), who built upon the legen-
dary 1921 photograph of Duncan at the Acropolis taken by Edward
Steichen in her many pictures of dancers set against temple and sky.7
The Hellenistic attitude combines the upraised gestures which release
Dionysiac revelry as well as the darker aspect of a pure nature whose
abstraction later converges with nationalist ideologies in Germany.
As the modern sciences absorbed natural movement into social pro-
grammes designed to promote alliances between a healthy body and
healthy mind, the forces of nature became fully exploited by fascist
aesthetics. In every sense, therefore, the association between moder-
nity and nature partakes of contradictory constellations of discourses,
images and modes of embodiment that can only be understood through
close analysis of specific instances, historically situated and geographi-
cally differentiated, of dancing and physical cultures.
10 Dancing Naturally

Approach and structure of the book

Dancing Naturally aims therefore to (i) reveal the international perva-

siveness of certain dance forms and cultural trends and thus appeal to
a wide geographic constituency of readers; (ii) consider links between
dance and practices in other arts and cultural activity, thus position-
ing dance as an exemplary discipline for investigating this period; (iii)
redress gaps in dance historiography which are currently found across
all modes of knowledge transfer, including library records and teaching
syllabi; and (iv) rarely, for any dance texts, to consider the breadth of
theatrical, educational and social functions that a dance movement has
led. Our approach has been to regard dance as a social practice, as well as
an interdisciplinary mode of artistic expression, since dancing naturally
is yet another way to ‘highlight history’s multiple voices’ (Hammergren,
2004: 27). Investigating the discourses of the natural became a way to
identify some ‘knots’ of history whereby key figures serve as networks
of influence, shaped by their own historical conditions and resources, as
well as to understand how a confluence of competing ideas can trigger
new patterns of movement and dance within culture.
The book is broadly divided into three sections; however, since many
themes introduced in earlier chapters return subsequently, we have not
formally divided the chapters. With a focus on the Anglo-American
context, the first four chapters expand upon the social forces and intel-
lectual debates shaping artistic practices as society adapted to rapid
modernization in the early twentieth century. These chapters record, in
particular, the ways that scientists, philosophers and artists negotiated
new social values, and modes of embodiment, that were in keeping with
the energies of modernity, in their emphasis on speed, fragmentation
and social mobility, while seeking in ‘nature’, insights into the workings
and potential liberation of the human subject.
Alexandra Carter in Chapter 2 provides an eloquent introduction to the
neo-Romantic influence upon the period, and introduces some of the key
protagonists, such as Madge Atkinson and Ruby Ginner, who were using
dance to reinvigorate the metaphoric possibilities of expression in and
through nature. Aligned with an appreciation of modern compositional
techniques in music, these women devised forms for the composition of
rhythmic properties in the body and on the stage. In Chapter 3 Michael
Huxley and Ramsay Burt position these dance practices in relation to dis-
courses that became particularly powerful in the establishment of concepts
of ‘physical culture’. They usefully locate psychophysical arguments shap-
ing twentieth-century modernity through early sociologists such as Georg
 Nature, Force and Variation 11

Simmel; through writers such as Eugen Sandow and Charles Sherrington;

and by discussing the work of body or dance practitioners such as Mabel
Todd, Margaret H’Doubler, F. M. Alexander and Margaret Morris. In doing
so they move towards an embodied theorization of modernity itself.
Fiona Macintosh in Chapter 4 vividly describes the hotbed of argu-
ments provoked during this same period by ‘reading the classics’, from
Nietzsche to the Cambridge Ritualists. Split between the Dionysiac forces
and those of Apollonian rectitude, scholars sought different interpreta-
tions of the Ancient Greek past and often these ideas seeped into the
public domain via theatre or performance, in particular dance. Following
Ruby Ginner’s career, Macintosh shows how her methodical study of the
Greeks, first in shaping the chorus for the modern stage, and then in
designing a system of dance education, produced its own idealizations. By
way of contrast, Theresa Buckland focuses in Chapter 5 on the new social
dances of modernity, which scandalized British society because of their
‘natural’ movements and rhythms on the dance floor. The sense of dis-
turbance that comes from the arrival of new ways of dancing associated
with America and Africa reveals much about the gendered and racialized
attitudes of British society towards corporeal expression at this time.
The next group of chapters provides specific and detailed examples of
artistic practice associated with the choreography of the natural. Beginning
with a selection from Madge Atkinson’s writings on natural movement,
edited by Alexandra Carter, Chapter 6 records her intention to transmit
an understanding of what constitutes the elements of a liberating dance
education. Placing, amongst other things, emphasis on the ‘bare foot’;
on the relationship between dance and music; and on scenic patterning
inspired by both chaos and stillness, it is both a philosophy and system-
atic approach. Perhaps uniquely, Atkinson’s method of teaching Natural
Movement continues to the present, and thus has influenced education,
dance training and, to a lesser extent, community choreography through-
out the twentieth century. My own Chapter 7 further examines Atkinson’s
aesthetics, and explores a different tangent towards the natural. By con-
sidering the materiality of her costumes, it provides a postcolonial read-
ing of how Indian ideas and products have shaped the qualities of the
‘natural’, as well as drawing attention to the interdependence of artists,
designers and musicians working with dancers between the wars.
As a dancer, Lesley Main’s insight in Chapter 8 into Doris Humphrey’s
Water Study accumulates from years of studying the form of this iconic
modern dance choreography. Dissatisfied with reconstruction, her
exploration of the score for Water Study suddenly comes alive when she
grasps its kinesthetics of ‘successive movement’. Through working with
12 Dancing Naturally

a wave-like dynamics, and by reflecting its inner logic in the thought

of Nietzsche, she realizes that the dance provides fractals of continuous
motion, in the eternal return of life and death.
The final group of chapters documents the widely dispersed geographi-
cal and social effects of physical culture movements in the United States,
Denmark, Australia and the United Kingdom. For many scientists, educa-
tors and dance teachers, the expressive potential of natural movement
could be harnessed towards a different set of kinesthetic ideas or corpo-
real energies. A sense of ‘flow’ or ‘flux’ in gymnastics was also developed
for women in universities and colleges, and in the wider population
through local dance schools; this rhythmic freedom forged an entirely
modern relation between bodily experience and social mobility. Susan
Leigh Foster, in Chapter 9 on American movement educators Dudley
Sargent and Genevieve Stebbins, demonstrates how they, and contempo-
raries of John Dewey, harnessed new scientific knowledge about muscle
groupings and positions of rest, to systematize bodily movement in ways
that continue to influence dance training today. In Chapter 10 Karen
Vedel documents how expressive movement forms were adopted by act-
ing schools and gymnastics teachers as Danish body culture developed,
in particular through the popularity of plastique. She reads these corporeal
practices as gendered, alternating between affirmation of female bodies in
the suffrage movement or as constraint in relation to national ideology.
Amanda Card shows in Chapter 11 how Australian women, introduced
to the innovations of Margaret Morris in Britain, readily adopted the
‘healthy body’ freedoms of Greek dancing. When popularized in wom-
en’s magazines and taught by suburban teachers, Card suggests that the
experience of ‘flowing grace’ went beyond the middle class and concert
stage, and became increasingly ‘democratized’ in a range of dance styles.
Subsequently, these ideologies of the healthy body became harnessed to
the war effort in the late 1930s, and were increasingly identified with
fascist values, as McIntosh, Vedel and Card all suggest.
Finally, in Chapter 12 Elizabeth Worth brings many of the themes
central to this book forward to the late twentieth century. For instance,
she reflects upon Mabel Todd’s influence on dancers and dance educa-
tors through her development of ideokinesis, with its detailed commit-
ment to anatomical awareness; and upon Anna Halprin, who harnessed
the natural as communal dance practice. In somatic studies, and for
many dancers of the postmodern generation, relationships between
‘authentic movement’ housed in the body, perhaps originating with
the self, are sought and studied through imaginative projects as if this
‘inner nature’ might become transmissible to others.
 Nature, Force and Variation 13

The chapters therefore cover a wide range of historical and social con-
texts providing, for the first time, commentary on distinctive archives and
primary source materials, including newspaper accounts, teaching manu-
als, photographs and dance notations. There is remarkable consistency
in the themes explored by each contributor, such as relations between
freedom, temporal flow, classicism, social hygiene and kinesthesia; which
suggests that key intellectuals and artists, whose names recur, were able
to mobilize understandings of the ‘natural’ to new purposes. We believe
that the book will be read primarily as a set of ‘stand-alone’ essays, dipped
into for the relevance or the usefulness of key arguments in specific con-
texts, thus each chapter has its own internal coherence. The repetition
of dominant ideas, however, provides valuable opportunities for making
transnational and transhistorical comparison; for instance, of physical
culture in the United States (Foster), Denmark (Vedel) and Australia
(Card); or the influence of movement theorist Todd (Burt and Huxley,
and Worth). While Dancing Naturally does not provide a comprehensive
study of its topic, we hope it provokes new research and investigations of
how bodies, science and artistic expression inform each other.
As I suggest earlier, it is possible to think of nature as a framework and
provocation for thinking about culture, rather than view the natural as
a state of matter, biology or environment essentialised in the human
imagination. Even as virtual communication enters into our notion of the
corporeal, or production of the arts in the twenty-first century becomes
increasingly mediated, questions about the variability of nature and its val-
ues for creativity, as proposed by Grosz, remain ongoing enquiries in arts
practice (2005: 52). What is significant, and thus worthy of examination,
is why dance still speaks of moving naturally as a value, as if it is intrinsic
to some bodies or cultures and not others – ‘a natural sense of rhythm’; or
alternatively, how, via the exercise of specific techniques and perhaps long
and arduous training, it is possible to make extraordinary bodily move-
ments appear ‘natural’, either to that performer or to the world of dance
they are creating. We hope therefore that this book provides some insight
into the various histories, and pleasures, of dancing naturally.

Notes
1. For more detailed discussion, see Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian
shore: Nature and culture in Western thought from ancient times to the end of the
eighteenth century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
2. Philosopher and political journalist, Herbert Spencer coined this concept in
Principles of Biology, London: William & Norgate, 1867.
14 Dancing Naturally

3. The influence of Darwinism on painting nature is the subject of the essay ‘Art
and the “Entangled Bank”: Colour and Beauty out of the “War of Nature”
in D. Donald and J. Munro, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science
and the Visual Arts, Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum in association with Yale
University Press, 2009, pp. 101–18.
4. The German philosopher and medical practitioner Ludwig Büchner’s publi-
cation of Force and Matter-Empirico-Philosophical Studies Intelligibly Rendered,
1855, contentiously argued against spiritual values defining human nature by
proclaiming the materiality shaping all organic objects including persons.
5. Drawing upon Levi-Strauss’s early twentieth-century interpretation of culture,
as late as the 1970s, Sherry Ortner (1974) advanced the argument of a natural
difference between the genders in order to advance a feminist anthropology;
views discredited by the poststructural critique of gender which includes ref-
erence to the effects of power within systems of knowledge.
6. Histories of female suffrage in different countries provide accounts of the
ways in which woman’s nature, and moral purity, could define or limit her
‘natural right’ to vote, see, for example, June Purvis, Women’s History: Britain
1850–1945, London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
7. I am grateful to Stefania Mylona for introducing me to Nelly, the modern
Greek photographer.

Bibliography
Adams, W. M. 2003 Future Nature: A Vision for Conservation. London: Earthscan.
Bunce, M. 1994 The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape.
London and New York: Routledge.
Burt, R. 1998 Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, ‘Race’ and Nation in Early
Modern Dance. London and New York: Routledge.
Daly, A. 1995 Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Donald, D. and Munro, J. 2009 ‘“Entangled Bank”: Colour and Beauty out of
the “War of Nature”’, in Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and
the Visual Arts. Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum in association with Yale
University Press, pp. 101–18.
Felski, R. 1995 The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Franko, M. 1995 Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Gilroy, P. 1993 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London &
New York: Verso.
Glacken, C. J. 1976 Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western
Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Grosz, E. 2005 Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Hammergren, L. 2004 ‘Many Sources, Many Voices’, in A. Carter (ed.), Rethinking
Dance History. London and New York: Routledge.
Innes, C. 2000 A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London and New York:
Routledge.
 Nature, Force and Variation 15

LaMothe, K. 2006 Nietzsche’s Dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the
Revaluation of Christian Values. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ortner, S. 1974 ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in M. Z. Rosaldo
and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, pp. 67–87.
Purvis, J. 1995 Women’s History: Britain 1850–1945. London and New York:
Routledge.
Sellars, S. (ed.) 1994 The Hélène Cixous Reader. London and New York:
Routledge.
Tuan, Yi Fu 1993 Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature and Culture.
Washington: Island Press.
Williams, R. 1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Glasgow:
Fontana.
—— 1993 [1953] The Country and the City. London: Hogarth Press.
Wilson, A. N. 2005 After the Victorians. London: Arrow Books.
2
Constructing and Contesting the
Natural in British Theatre Dance
Alexandra Carter

For me the dance is not only the art that gives expres-
sion to the human soul through movement, but also
the foundation of a complete conception of life, more
free, more harmonious, more ‘natural’.
(Duncan, 1903, in Rosemont, 1981: 33)

The work of Isadora Duncan and her contemporaries in the first quarter
of the twentieth century is intimately connected with the idea of dancing
the ‘natural’, both as philosophical concept and bodily activity. Franklin
Rosemont, for example, summarizes Duncan’s aims in that ‘she scorned
the restrictive garb and other artifices of the stage … and developed free
and natural movements’ (1981: x). But as Ann Daly notes, ‘far from being
a tabula rasa … this “natural” body was an artistic invention as well as a
rhetorical strategy … “nature” was Duncan’s metaphorical shorthand for
a loose package of aesthetic and social ideals’ (1995: 89). Mark Franko
points to the tensions between Duncan’s desire for inner (and therefore
natural) sources of inspiration for movement and her choreographic craft
(1995: 4). Dance scholars have therefore drawn attention to a seeming
conflict between Duncan’s disingenuousness about her craft and her
acknowledgment that ‘natural dancing should mean only that the dance
never goes against nature, not that anything is left to chance … the danc-
er’s movement will always be separate from any movement in nature’
(Duncan [c.1904], 1969: 79). In terms of her choreography, Franko notes
that ‘Duncan sought not only natural movement, but syntactically natu-
ral movement, sequences developed from the unconscious’ (1995: 5).
However, he asks, ‘how can entire choreographic sequences be rendered
wholly natural …?’ (ibid.: 6). Even Duncan herself admits it is ‘not enough
to wave the arms and legs in order to have a natural dance’ (1969: 103).
16
 Constructing and Contesting the Natural 17

This concept of the natural is, therefore, revealed as strategic but mud-
dled and misconstrued, although dominant in its time and still colouring
our perception of theatre dance in the early twentieth century.
Duncan has already played hostess to a plethora of popular and scholarly
scrutiny, and it is not my intention to revisit these debates. Rather, I wish
to consider how those whose work arose from a similar, near-contempora-
neous climate made manifest the notion of the natural in the performance
principles of their dance forms and in their choreography. As case studies,
I focus specifically on two British artists, Madge Atkinson and Ruby Ginner,
whose legacy is now enhanced by the preservation and cataloguing of
substantial archive collections at the National Resource Centre for Dance,
University of Surrey.1 Without negating the work of their contemporaries,
such as Margaret Morris in the United Kingdom or Duncan in Europe, it is
the research arising from this particular archival project which forms the
basis for my examination of the ‘natural’ in British theatre dance from the
1910s to the 1930s and onwards. As such, the aims of this chapter are to
(i) situate the work of British artists during this period within international
cultural trends; and (ii) explore how one of these key trends – the ‘return’
to ‘nature’ – is constructed, and contested, in their work.
In the Art Nouveau period of the fin de siècle, the overt association of
nature with women had reached a pitch in artistic representation. Women
were not just situated in nature, but they became synonymous with it;
they were not just symbolic of flowers, they became them (Dijkstra,
1986). However, moving into the twentieth century the association with
nature takes a different course, as both men and women actively aspire
to the enhancement of their humanity rather than its disappearance,
through a return to an idealized view of the ‘natural’ human being. This
view can be summarized in the words of the writer and social reformer
Edward Carpenter, who specifically referenced dance when he dreamed
that humankind ‘on the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate
with naked dances the glory of the human form’ (Carpenter [1906] in
Delany, 1987: 39). Dance tended to be used as a symbol of bodily and
political freedom. It was a vehicle for expression of the fifth century BCE
Hellenic Greek culture, as depicted on artworks and artefacts, which was
seen as embodying harmony, balance and order in relation to the social
world and to the human psyche. (Paradoxically, and unacknowledged
by the mainly female exponents of neo-classical dance, the status of
women during this period was one of social oppression; ‘freedom’ was far
from universal and slaves, the lower classes and women of all ranks were
excluded from this political luxury.) It must be remembered, of course,
that, as Lawler points out, ‘Greek art is deliberately unrealistic, and is
18 Dancing Naturally

concerned with ideal beauty, … stylisation, rather than an exact portrayal

of what the artist saw in life’ (1964: 17). Duncan and Maud Allan based
their whole philosophy of modern dance on these ideas, filtered through
the Greek connection. There were also many ‘amateurs’, ‘lithe young
men and beautiful girls, showing in their attitudes and movements all
the exquisite grace and charm of the Greek sculptures and vase paintings,
but natural and spontaneous in every gesture … (who have … arisen all
over Europe and America’ (Urlin, n.d.: 154). Professional artists such as
Loïe Fuller, despite a highly sophisticated use of technology and colour
science, evolved her own system which she called ‘natural dancing’
(Current and Current, 1997: 194).
Despite their rhetoric and the popularity of these early dance forms –
variously called natural, free, expressive, interpretative and such like –
what they generally lacked was a publicly communicable, codified system
which would ensure the longevity of the work. Allan notes that she exer-
cised every morning before her bath, ‘not set, one-two-three-four, hands-
above-your-head … kind of exercise, but just as the spirit moved me’ (1908:
63).2 What is significant is that as the century moved on, practitioners no
longer cited their recourse to ‘inner’ inspiration – the mood of the moment
which moves them – but acknowledged their craft. This shift in approach
was evident in pedagogical practice and in more systematic methods of
training: as such, an imperative to organize and codify dance exercises
evolved from a variety of cultural conditions. For example, progressive
educators firmly believed in the relationship between physical health, per-
sonal health and the health of society. As Judith Alter summarizes:

Physical activity – exercise systems, sports, games, hiking in nature,

and dancing – were seen as a way to improve one’s health, well-being,
patriotic feelings, spirit and life. By doing these good activities people’s
lives would improve and thus society would flourish … and the inno-
vators of ‘natural’ dance joined the other advocates of exercise in for-
mulating a system of exercises which they taught to their students.
(Alter, 1994: 56)

The codification of dance was also important for other reasons. Despite
positioning itself as the antithesis of ballet, even exponents of these
‘natural’ forms would have felt the need for them to be recognized as a
viable and respectable art; to resist the oft-cited charges of amateurism. As
such, they needed to compete on similar terms and have their technical
foundations made transparent. Furthermore, a systematic approach was
needed if the work was to survive not only in the theatre but also in
 Constructing and Contesting the Natural 19

education. Spontaneity, improvisation and the ‘mood of the moment’

would not have formed the basis of sound pedagogical practice. Thus, the
development of systems which might share a status with ballet, if not an
aesthetic, and that could be understood as transferable, was essential.
The interconnections between various individuals shaping these new
dance practices are complex, despite their common impetus and shared
philosophies, and under-researched. The British artist Margaret Morris, for
example, acknowledges her debt to Raymond Duncan. She only took two
classes with him but found the physical efficacy of his exercises, based on
the athletic training and dances of ancient Greece, to be resonant with
her own needs, and she incorporated them in her technique (Morris,
1969: 20). Delsarte’s bodily expressive work and Dalcroze’s system of
eurythmics were both popular and influential. For example, fundamental
to so many of these early dance practices of the twentieth century was
the ‘skipping’ step. When executed with a slight forward lean, this was
Dalcroze’s ‘interpretative pose’ for ‘joy’ (Alter, 1994 p.168). Performed
with a variety of arm and back positions, including a vertiginous, but bal-
anced back lean, this became what Alter describes as the ‘signature pose’
of the period (Figure 2.1).
In this change towards a structuring of the dancing body as expressive
of nature, what is seen is a move from neo-Romantic fantasies about
nature in the late nineteenth century to its organization and taming as
it met, and contributed to, the modern age. In the work of practitioners
such as Atkinson and Ginner, the inherited threads of the natural are
woven into considered and crafted form.
Madge Atkinson (1885–1970) was born and spent her early career
in Manchester. Ill health and filial care prevented her from following
her ambition to be a professional actress but she became interested in
the work of Isadora Duncan, via Annea Spong who had met Raymond
Duncan. Atkinson achieved a Diploma in Natural Movement from the
Spong School in Hampstead. (The nomenclature of ‘Natural Movement’
was thus inherited, not of her own devising.) She was also interested
in the eurythmics of Dalcroze. Combining these in a training system
which embraced the relationship between movement, music and expres-
sion, she devised dances for theatre productions at the Gaiety Theatre,
Manchester, and offered public performances of her own creative work.
Atkinson opened her School of Natural Movement in Manchester in 1918
and was later joined by Mollie Suffield as her partner in this venture. Four
years later she was invited by the (now) Imperial Society of Teachers of
Dancing (ISTD) to form a Natural Movement branch with a systemized
approach to training, one which redressed this perceived lack in Duncan’s
20

Figure 2.1 Eunice Hardman in Bacchanale (NRCD reference NM/F/2/2/1)

 Constructing and Contesting the Natural 21

work.3 Atkinson’s dance form was valued for its educational benefits and
filtered through Manchester schools until the late 1930s. It was taught
at the Bergman Osterberg Physical Training College by her pupil and life
companion, Anita Heyworth, who also undertook delivery of the form at
the Cone School of Dancing in London. In 1944, Atkinson and Heyworth
were invited by Grace Cone to help establish the London College of
Educational Dance (later London College of Dance and Drama), which
was the first dance specialist teacher training college in the United
Kingdom. Atkinson died in 1970, but the Natural Movement work of the
ISTD continues not only through teaching but also in the collection of
archive and study material and the reconstruction of dances (see http://
www.istd.org/Dancestyles/naturalmovement/intro/html).
Ruby Ginner’s (1886–1978) career followed a similar pattern. Her inter-
est in movement arose from her research on adapting designs from the
Greek chorus for the theatre. Margaret Morris relates how Ginner came to
Morris and ‘was quick to learn the Greek positions’ (1969: 22). Although
this claim must be viewed in the light of Ginner’s own extensive research,
it does demonstrate the web of connections amongst these artists and
teachers. In 1913 Ginner founded The Grecian Dancers and soon after
the Ruby Ginner School of Dance. Joined by mime expert Irene Mawer,
this became the Ginner-Mawer School of Dance and Drama. As the
theatre performances declined, the education work expanded in physical
training colleges and schools. In 1923 Ginner founded the Association of
Teachers of Revived Greek Dance, from which evolved the Greek Dance
Association. Her methods were absorbed into the ISTD and adapted for
the Royal Academy of Dance Free Movement syllabus. Ginner was also an
advocate of Greek Dance in her writing, producing two books (1933 and
1960) plus articles for journals such as the Dancing Times.
Both Atkinson and Ginner presented a wide variety of dance forms,
but the focus in this chapter is on those styles which became synony-
mous with their names. Although similar in their underlying principles,
Atkinson, who also used Greek themes, focused on the idea of the natu-
ral. She admired the ideals of the Greeks, but claimed ‘we who live in the
20th century must gain what we can from these past glories, yet make our
dance for today the natural outcome of our feelings. So it is that I would
call it “natural” rather than “Greek”’ (anon., 1926). Ginner rooted her
work more explicitly in ancient Greek ideals, art and perceived practices.
From the trajectory of both their careers, the strategy of devising develop-
mental syllabi for the acquisition of performance skills plays a key role, as
does the recurring performances of dance works which signify the repeat-
ability of choreographic construction. (Interestingly, however, Atkinson
22 Dancing Naturally

resisted the notion of ‘choreography’, saying that what she did was
‘composition’ and ‘only great people do choreography’ [Kelly, interview
2008]). How did these two artists, then, deal with notions of the natural
within which their work was embedded but also, given the emphasis on
technique and performative repetition, it contested?
It must be stated, of course, that the notion of creating or executing
any art ‘naturally’ can never be taken literally for there is an inherent
contradiction in terms. Despite all efforts across the arts at chance pro-
cedures, happenings, pedestrian movement, vernacular artefacts and
improvisation, no art is made without an element of skill, experience and
knowledge. After looking at visual sources such as photographs, original
film footage and reconstructions, and participating in some technically
challenging classes in Classical Greek Dance (as it became known) and
Natural Movement at the Study Days presented as part of the Pioneer
Women project, the requirements of bodily preparation became evident.
I asked the tutors of the classes, Jacky Ferguson and Jean Kelly, what was
‘natural’ about these forms. They acknowledged this seeming paradox
but agreed that the movement styles consist of a development of basic
steps and travelling: walking, running, skipping, jumping and leaping.
From an article written by Atkinson (1926) further key principles can be
extrapolated as: (i) the feet are placed in the direction of the movement,
not turned out;4 (ii) oppositional movement, thus extending the bodily
alignment of the walk; (iii) performed in bare feet, letting articulate feet
relate to the ground; (iv) a central point of balance; and (v) co-ordination,
all resulting in, as described by Jean Kelly, ‘the nice natural easy stance of
the body’ (interview 2008). Upon these formal roots are layered levels of
complexity, with the fundamental aim of letting ‘the whole body work in
a perfect harmony of co-ordination’ (Johnstone and Atkinson, undated
mss: 1). All of these principles were built upon the physical and moral
imperative of the times, ‘to keep our bodies in order’ by using the ‘natural
actions for which they were intended’.
A reviewer of a Ginner performance in 1910 suggested that ‘she com-
bined in a rare degree the classic graces with a suggestion that she was
dancing just as the mood took her’ (anon., 1910). This tribute to the
performer’s skills also signifies the contrast between the apparent artifici-
ality of other dance forms for the stage and this new ‘natural’ vocabulary,
a contrast which suggested that exponents of the latter were performing
‘as the mood took them’, a perception which belies their craft. Ginner her-
self, however, acknowledged that ‘the new dance cannot grow except from
a firm, sound technique, a technique which must evolve from a thorough
understanding of the science of movement’ (Dancing Times, 1929: 434).
 Constructing and Contesting the Natural 23

She fully acknowledges that ‘no form of art can arrive at expressive com-
pletion, or have any lasting effect, which has not a sound technical basis’
(ibid.: 434). She linked Greek dance with the natural through the concept
of rhythm as ‘the basis of all existence’ (1960: 4), and connected human
physiology, movement and the expression of emotion in movement. In
modern life, she says, ‘the covering up of natural feelings by convention
and sophistication have crushed the instinct to express the inner life
through the movements of the body’. Here, as in the writings of many
of these artists and educators, the flow between inner experience and its
‘outer’ manifestation is rendered unproblematic.5 Nevertheless, although
there is a huge gap in the argument, there is a shared acknowledgment
that the Greeks cultivated ‘the art of dance’ (ibid.: 5).
Throughout her 1960’s book, Ginner refers to ‘the choreographer’ who
arranges the dances. It would be extremely odd, in fact, if, given the
strong technical foundation of both Atkinson’s and Ginner’s movement
language, the theatre work was improvised. Although it is difficult to find
any descriptions of the rehearsal process, improvisation was a key feature
of class work for both children and adults, when themes from nature,
known as ‘nature rhythms’, were offered as inspiration. In Classical Greek
Dance, the class often ended with the improvisational freedom of the
evocatively named ‘glory heap’ (Cornford, interview 2009). Despite these
pedagogical activities, the actual theatre works were formally constructed.
The design of the body and group in space is a dominant feature in the
photographs of Natural Movement and Classical Greek Dance repertoire.
Other sources suggest structural devices of repetition and development;
spatial design of groups and pathways are paramount. In accordance
with the founding principles of both forms, there is a close relationship
to music in structural and expressive terms. In what ways, then, did the
choreography embrace notions of the natural? It did so in three ways.
First, by utilizing the technical principles based on physiologically ‘natu-
ral’ ways of moving, as discussed. Second, by privileging a performance
interpretation of the choreography that was authentic in mood; if not
self-expressive, it aimed to be artistically expressive. Third, in the most
obvious way of presenting subject matter drawn from nature.
Across the arts, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
nature provided source material for inspiration, representation and
metaphor. Luminaries from Duncan, Fuller and Maud Allan to Doris
Humphrey in the 1930s drew on the seasons; the elements; flora and
fauna and the living world. This was often overt, as in Atkinson’s Spirit
of the Bush Fire (1927) and The Sigh of Autumn (1928) or where nature
provided a setting or general theme, as in the Legend of Daphne and Apollo
24 Dancing Naturally

(1933) and Trina and the Leaf Fairies (1936). Ginner presented works such
as Fire Ballet (c.1920s), The Sea Ballet (c.1924) and Armies of the Earth and
Air (1929). Her myth-inspired work had sylvan settings which, when pre-
sented in her regular performances at London’s Hyde Park and Regent’s
Park (1926–35) were actual as well as thematic. As Ginner summarized,
‘for inspiration of rhythm and expression we turn to nature, the rhythms
of the sea, the river, the scudding clouds, the trees tossing in the wind,
the flight of birds and the raging of fire’ (1926: 452). (It is interesting to
contemplate how rarely nature is used as choreographic inspiration these
days, either in professional or student work.)
Whatever the subject matter of the works, their expressive moods were
enhanced by recourse to the music of Romanticism: composers such as
Chopin, Brahms and Grieg provided inspiration though it must be stressed
that newly composed music was also used. Interestingly, Atkinson recounts
how, after showing Spong a work she had just created (c.1912– 15), Spong
advised her that because she ‘loved music so dearly, it was influencing my
dancing emotionally, before my technique of movement was good enough
to interpret the music’. Spong advised her to spend time ‘concentrating
and improving my movement without a musical accompaniment’ and
she subsequently worked for many months, back in Manchester, without
music (Atkinson, 1963: 3). Such advice by Spong, taken up by Atkinson,
confirms the resistance to the notion of an unmediated emotional
response to music, and the need for both performance and choreographic
skills as prerequisites for the desired quality of musical interpretation.
Central to the tenets of neo-classical/Natural Movement practice, was
the simplicity of costumes worn in the studio and often – but not always –
on stage. Although some of the latter were complex in design and
decorative features, with potential for a very strong theatrical impact,
the basic garments of tunics and longer, chiton-style dresses, belted
around the waist and simply hung from neck and shoulder, are syn-
onymous with this period. Their construction was simple, due perhaps
to economic stringencies as well as aesthetic imperatives. Suffice to say
that their main effect, enhanced by lightweight fabric, was to facilitate
movement whilst preserving bodily dignity. Thus, in the sense of it being
unrestrained by corseting, with loose fabric and uncovered limbs, the
female body was unencumbered and in a comparatively ’natural’ state.
(See Fensham, Chapter 7 in this volume for an in-depth investigation
of the nature and use of costume in Atkinson’s work.)
The environment of both the classes and the performances enhanced
the naturalism of the work. Although the majority of performances
were presented in theatres and indoor venues, dancing in the open air is
 Constructing and Contesting the Natural 25

synonymous with the period. As mentioned, Ginner presented perform-

ances in London parks; Atkinson at a large variety of garden parties and
fetes, especially in her early Manchester days. In photographs, this was
often a cultivated image; some Natural Movement pictures show danc-
ers posed in studied fashion against the sea, rocks or waves. In these, the
artifice of the design of the bodies in space draws the natural landscape
into a complete, artistic picture. In one photograph, taken in Woody Bay
in Devon during the summer of 1925, the dancer’s arms, outstretched in
an open ‘V’ shape, echo perfectly the diagonal lines of the cliffs against
which she is posed (Figure 2.2). In another, Nancy Sherwood, a talented
Revived Greek dancer, is executing a jump in a movement beautifully
caught by the camera against a skyline of trees (Figure 2.3). Other more
informal photographs show dancers in class or rehearsing in large gar-
dens; this continued in the educational work in the 1940/50s and later.
Such a trend was also significant in the European dance of the 1930s/40s,
affirming the aforementioned link between dance, health, fitness and
fresh air; and amply demonstrated in Margaret Morris’s book (Morris and
Daniels, 1925) replete with photographs taken outdoors.
In summary, the work of Atkinson, Ginner and others both evolved
from and contested notions of the natural. Their systems of training
were based on movements that theoretically anyone can execute, but
were developed into dance forms that necessitated advanced skills. If not
articulated, the choreographic craft was paramount. It is important to
stress, however, that when works were revived for later dancers, it was not
unusual to change them to accommodate their skills. For example, Jean
Kelly relates how when Atkinson taught her a work originally created for
Anita Heyworth, small adjustments were made to the choreography (dis-
cussion 2009). It was, as such, a living repertoire. Subject matter, in class
and in production, drew on the natural world for inspiration but it was a
world transformed by artistic and pedagogical values. Similarly, although
privileging the expressive aspect of performance as fundamental, they did
not accept the notion of an unmediated flowing of ‘inner’ emotion to
‘outer’ bodily movement. They did not seek ‘sequences developed from
the unconscious’ (Franko, 1995: 5) but paved the way for a more rational
approach to expressivity in dancing and dance-making.
For all these reasons, these women artists have played a key role in
the development of dance as art but their contribution, as recorded in
historiography, has been diluted or misrepresented. They demonstrate
Penelope Corfield’s (2007) claim that periods in history have been shaped
by their radical disjunctures, the perceived major points of change. As
such, the micro changes – those which embrace not only difference but
26

Figure 2.2 Natural Movement dancer at Woody Bay, Devon, 25 August 1925
(NRCD reference NM/F/2/2/1)
 27

Figure 2.3 Dancer Nancy Sherwood, a tutor at the Ginner-Mawer school and
Ginner’s main demonstrator (Pauline Grant photograph album of Revived Greek
dancers, Bice Bellairs collection, NRCD reference BB/F/l)
28 Dancing Naturally

also continuity – have been overlooked, rendered invisible, not given

value.6 I would contend that these women were on the cusp of the neo-
Romanticism of the late nineteenth century and the modern age and
as such they had, arguably, more of a footing in modernity than did
Duncan. This might be a heretical notion but it is one which contests
Duncan’s place as sole primogeniture of modern dance. As Alter suggests
(1994: 20)in her analysis of the texts of seven dance writers7 of the period:
‘similar cultural pressures and aesthetic values influenced them; they may
be regarded as compatriots in the artistic development of early modern
dance – rather than followers or imitators of a leader’. What their writings
shared was the premise that ‘movement should be natural, in harmony
with dancers’ own bodies, and with nature’ (ibid.: 81).
The work of Atkinson and Ginner, as demonstrated, was fundamen-
tally based on this premise and as such, they comprise a significant part
of an international cultural milieu.
Like others who went on to work in pedagogy (see Alter, 1994, for an
account of these in the United States) their work facilitated the coherent
transmission of dance in education. Their forms have also lived on, albeit
in the more limited context of the private sector. In the post-Second World
War period, dance in public education in the United Kingdom came to
be dominated by Laban’s Modern Educational Dance which, although
systematized on a conceptual basis, still relied in practice on notions of
the natural in its assumptions that the child will dance spontaneously.
From the 1960s, the natural became submerged under the US-imported
codified modern dance techniques. It is now re-emerging, in the guise
of ‘softer’ or somatic dance techniques such as release-based work and
the recognition of the benefits to the dancer of methods drawn from
Alexander technique and Feldenkrais. What these, Natural Movement
and Classical Greek Dance, have in common is, however, the privileging
of the physiological/organic functions of the body and their structural
relationships as the foundation for dance. They assume that, whether in
performance or choreography, a prepared and knowledgeable mind and
body are essential. These basic assumptions about the integration of bod-
ily movement with the natural as a worldview underlie the work of the
British protagonists in the first quarter of the twentieth century; those
artists who, literally, constructed the natural for the art of dance.

Notes
1. This work was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Resource
Enhancement award for the Pioneer Women: Early British Modern Dancers
 Constructing and Contesting the Natural 29

project, 2008–10. It was hosted by the National Resource Centre for Dance
in collaboration with the Department of Dance, Film and Theatre at the
University of Surrey.
2. Duncan herself believed in a loosely systematic regimen of exercises in order
to develop strength, flexibility and musicality as a means to an end, for ‘these
daily exercises make the body as perfect an instrument as possible so that
harmony of self-discovered natural dancing can permeate it completely’ (Alter,
1994: 57).
3. For Atkinson, the work was transformed over-much by pedagogical values;
she did not like the examination system necessary for the ISTD; she did not
like anything too ‘set’ (Kelly, interview, 2008).
4. The oft-made criticism of ballet’s ‘turn out’ as unnatural is undermined if
one accepts the human inclination to turn out the feet slightly for balance, a
strategy extended by ballet.
5. See Redfern (1973) for a rigorous unpacking of the problematic conception
of the relationship between ‘inner’ emotion and its ‘outer’ manifestation in
movement, particularly in relation to Modern Educational Dance.
6. See Carter 2010 for further discussion of periodization in relation to dance.
7. Alter analysed the writings of artists and pedagogues Raymond Duncan,
Isadora Duncan, Mary Beegle, Helen Moller, Eleanor Elder, Margaret H’Doubler
and Margaret Morris.

Bibliography
Anon., 1910 Daily News, 15 November (NRCD archives).
—— 1926 The Ball Room, December: 27 (NRCD archives).
Allan, M. 1908 My Life and Dancing. London: Everett.
Alter, J. B. 1994 Dancing and Mixed Media: Early 20-century modern dance theory in
text and photography. New York: Peter Lang.
Atkinson, M. 1926 ‘The dance based on Natural Movement’, Dancing Times
(December): 290–9.
—— 1963 Natural Movement Dancing Fellowship Annual, Vol. 6, pp. 2–3.
Carter, A. 2010 ‘Reshaping Dance Through Time: A critical view of historical
periodisation in relation to pedagogy and research’, Global Perspectives on Dance
Pedagogy: Research and Practice, CORD Conference Proceedings, de Montfort
University, Leicester, June 2009.
Corfield, P. 2007 Time and the Shape of History. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Current, R. A. and M. E. 1997 Loie Fuller: Goddess of light. Boston, MA:
Northeastern University Press.
Daly, A. 1995 Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Delany, P. 1987 The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and love in the Rupert Brooke circle.
Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Dijkstra, B. 1986 Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of feminine evil in fin-de-siécle culture.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Duncan, I. [1928] 1969 The Art of Dance, ed. S. Cheney. New York: Theatre Arts
Books.
30 Dancing Naturally

Franko, M. 1995 Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.
Ginner, R. 1926 ‘The ancient Greek dance and its revival today, Part III, The
Revived Greek Dance and its place in modern education’, Dancing Times
(August): 450–3.
—— 1929 ‘Expressive movement and technique’, Dancing Times (August):
433–4.
—— 1933 The Revived Greek Dance: Its art and technique. London: Methuen.
—— 1960 Gateway to the Dance. London: Newman Neame.
Johnstone, M. and Atkinson, M. ‘Dancing based on Natural Movement’,
undated/ unpublished mss. NRCD archives, NM/E/2/3.
Lawler, L. 1964 The Dance in Ancient Greece. London: Adam & Charles Black.
Morris, M. and Daniels, F. 1925 Margaret Morris Dancing – Photographs by Fred
Daniels. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
Morris, M. 1969 My Life in Movement. London: Peter Owen.
Redfern, H. B.1973 Concepts in Modern Educational Dance. London: Kimpton.
Rosemont, F. (ed.) 1981 Isadora Speaks. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.
Urlin, E. n.d.,c.1911/12 Dancing Ancient and Modern. London: Herbert & Daniel.

Interviews
Ann Cornford, interview 17 February 2009.
Cornford was a ‘bobbly’, the name given to the young children who took
Classical Greek Dance classes. She then studied full-time at the Ginner-Mawer
School of Dance and Drama, and opened her own school in Devon before train-
ing as a nurse. In the film footage of a Ginner-Mawer performance in Hyde Park
(1933, held at the NRCD), Cornford is the child in the work Santa Caterina. Her
mother was private secretary to Ruby Ginner.

Jean Kelly, interview 21 October 2008.

Jean Kelly, discussion, 6 August 2009.
Kelly first encountered Natural Movement at school around the age of eight. She
was able to continue her studies formally at the London College of Educational
Dance (later London College of Dance and Drama), where she worked directly
with both Madge Atkinson and her life partner and colleague, Anita Heyworth.
She eventually opened her own school, the Jean Kelly School of Dance, in
Leicester, where she taught ballet and modern stage, and Natural Movement.
She is a long-standing teacher, examiner and advocate of Natural Movement
and has contributed significantly to the Pioneer Women project in her role on the
Steering Committee.
3
Ideas of Nature, the Natural and
the Modern in Early Twentieth-
Century Dance Discourse
Michael Huxley and Ramsay Burt

This chapter examines the way dance writers at the beginning of the
twentieth century negotiated ideas of the natural. It argues that shifts
in the way people perceived and experienced different ways of moving,
during the first quarter of the twentieth century, represent changing ideas
about nature, the natural and the modern. This was a time when rapid
technological changes and their social effects caused anxieties about loss
of freedom and individuality. It was also a period during which there were
deep anxieties around notions of the health of the body. This chapter
proposes that discourses about dancing at this time reveal an antinomy
between two different notions of the natural. The first of these mani-
fested itself as a call to get back to nature that could sometimes betray
implicitly reactionary tendencies. The second of these is concerned with
investigations within the natural sciences, particularly in medicine and
neurophysiology, which offered people methodologies for making sense
of the way the world was changing.
A new scientific understanding of perception at the end of the nine-
teenth century brought about a crisis in the way people perceived and
made sense of the world. In this chapter we look at the implications for
dance of new scientific understandings in relation to concepts of the self
and the body, by addressing the question of how modern ideas are help-
ful in dealing with modern difficulties in matters that were taken to be
‘natural’. To do this we examine three areas of discourse: first, we trace
the way concerns about the impact of modernity conditioned the devel-
oping discourse about natural or free dancing in writings by authors such
as John Ernest Crawford Flitch, Lady Constance Stewart Richardson and
Margaret Morris; second, ideas of the natural as espoused by practition-
ers of physical culture like Eugen Sandow, Bernarr Macfadden and Bess
Mensendieck; third, we compare their approaches to the way later writers
31
32 Dancing Naturally

involved in the development of dance education and training negotiated

ideas of the natural and new scientific ideas to explore new approaches to
the practice of the self and dance. This complex discourse can be found in
the writings of authors such Margaret H’Doubler, F. Matthias Alexander
and Mabel Elsworth Todd. It permeates the writings of those concerned
with dancing, the self and the body – and signals a recognition of new
movement possibilities that were previously inconceivable.
Writing in 1912 about recent developments in theatre dance, Edwardian
essayist and dance writer John Ernest Crawford Flitch sums up what was
at stake in contemporary anxieties about the natural and the modern:
‘The modern world has lost the old graceful motions natural to man
in a less artificial state’ (Crawford Flitch, 1912: 103). He proposes that
‘the characteristic of natural movement is undulation …’ (ibid.) and he
correlated the movement of water, wind and trees with those of work
activities like scything, rowing and horse-riding that are, of course, pre-
industrial. In contrast to this, however, Crawford Flitch notes that: ‘In
the modern civilised world the body is usually exercised either too little
or too continuously in a single occupation [… so that] Human motion
nowadays tends to be not flowing but angular, abrupt, disjointed, full
of gestures not flowing imperceptibly one into another but broken off
midway’ (ibid.: 104). Although Crawford Flitch was writing just before
the creation of choreographies such as Nijinsky’s 1913 Sacre du Printemps
and Wigman’s 1914 Hexentanz, this passage seems in retrospect to antici-
pate the movement qualities of such radically deconstructive modernist
choreography. Despite this, however, Crawford Flitch himself felt that a
return to the natural practice of healthy dancing could remedy the ills
of modern life. Modernity, in his view, constrained the freedom of the
natural dancing body. If natural dancing, therefore, offered freedom from
the effects of modernity, this raises questions about what freedom meant
at that time in social and political terms.
Freedom could mean different things for individuals and groups with
different values. It meant immunity from undesirable restrictions or
interference. One gains this protection through membership of a com-
munity or nation, but this protection always carries a cost. As Isaiah
Berlin observed, ‘we cannot remain absolutely free, but must give up
some of our freedom to preserve the rest’ (1969: 126). What an individual
gives up, and to whom, becomes increasingly problematic within the
modern period. At the beginning of the twentieth century sociologists
like Max Weber and Georg Simmel characterized society as fragmented,
with many, sometimes conflicting, sources of power and an increasingly
heterogeneous culture or cultures. This situation, in which older politi-
cal or religious structures no longer determined daily life, meant that
 Ideas of Nature, the Natural and the Modern 33

individuals had constantly to negotiate between diverse and sometimes

contradictory pressures. It was no longer a simple case of paying one’s
dues to one’s God and one’s king. Science and technology, as they
radically changed the urban workplace, were undermining the central-
ity of religion to the way individuals made sense of the modern world.
Modernity was making society increasingly complex and fragmented.
This is the context in which Crawford Flitch and others express a desire
for stability within the supposedly unchanging state of nature. In order
to achieve this illusory state of stability, some proponents of physical cul-
ture, in effect, advocated freedom through discipline. Adopting Berlin’s
terms, by subjecting oneself to a course in disciplined movement exer-
cises, one gives up some aspects of freedom in order to preserve the rest.
One of the most widely known proponents of physical culture, Eugen
Sandow (1867–1925) typifies this argument.
In the early years of the twentieth century Sandow and others identi-
fied modern life as a cause of inadequate and unhealthy physiques. His
book of 1918, Life is Movement, was written at a time when the British
government was painfully aware of the physical deficiencies of the
troops that had been sent to fight in the trenches. Sandow’s remedy was
to devise a regime based on a ‘really scientific selection and application
of natural physical movements’ (1918: 77) to counter the negative effect
that modern civilization and education had had on the British popula-
tion. His movement based exercise system, natural and scientific, would
lead to ‘sound minds in sound bodies’ (ibid.: 71). Sandow, and contem-
poraries such as Bernarr Macfadden, author of Power and Beauty of Superb
Womanhood (1901), took a view of nature, science and modernity that,
as we will show, was masculine in its assumptions – most evidently so
in its body-building outcomes.1 Nevertheless, many of the fundamental
tenets associated with Sandow’s type of system are to be found in that
of a prominent female counterpart – Bess Mensendieck (1864–1957).
She too made a link between a scientific system, movement and the
natural. In 1954 she recalled how, around 1910, she had been searching
for a means to create bodies that most closely resembled the perfection
of classical Greek statues and had then come across Duchenne’s work on
electromyography. She reasoned that the ‘will power of the individual
[could] be used to stimulate specific, neglected muscles’ (1954: 6). On
this basis, her exercise system was devised:

The Mensendieck System is based upon the scientific fact that along
with food and oxygen, the body needs movement to sustain its vital-
ity and health, and also to preserve its natural graceful lines.
(ibid.: 7; our emphasis)
34 Dancing Naturally

Both Mensendieck and Sandow made an appeal to scientific facts in

order to justify giving up some freedom in order to achieve a disciplined
stability.
One of the motors for social transformation at the beginning of the
twentieth century was the transition from a mode of capitalism in which
the creation of wealth necessitated a disciplined and obedient work force
to one where further industrial growth necessitated the development of
a consumer society.2 The industrial base could only grow if customers
were encouraged to express their individuality through developing new
kinds of consumer lifestyles; Zygmunt Bauman notes that consumerism
promised ‘that a cure for all the troubles you may suffer is waiting some-
where in some shop and can be found if you search earnestly enough’
(Bauman and Tester, 2001: 114). Bauman has pointed out that, from
the beginning of the twentieth century, the development of a particular
form of modern individualism was a key feature of industrial expansion
in capitalist societies. Writing during that period, the sociologist Georg
Simmel believed that, as the individual tries to make sense of diverse
and fragmented experiences, ‘the only solid ground the person can
hope for (and even this is in vain), in the whirlwind of chaotic impres-
sions the modern urban environment never tires of supplying, is his
own “personal identity”’ (Baumann 1988: 42). This personal focus led
to a more complicated set of new demands. Bauman argues that:

the poignant experience of being a ‘self’ and ‘having’ a self at the same
time (i.e. being obliged to care, defend, ‘keep clean’ etc. one’s self,
much as one is regarding other possessions) are a necessity imposed
upon certain classes of people by the social context of their lives,
and the most relevant aspect of such context is the absence of an
unequivocal and comprehensive behaviour recipe for the ‘life project’
as a whole, as well as for the ever changing situations of daily life.
(ibid.: 41)

This curious formulation of a split between being and having a self sug-
gests that individuality is in some ways like private property. Although
it is intangible, it is, nevertheless, something that one has the freedom
to own and look after. Bauman suggests, however, that one may be
judged on how well one looks after it, therefore demanding increased
responsibility on the part of each individual to be ready for modern life.
Western dancers over the last 300 years have been very much aware of
being a ‘self’ and ‘having’ a self at the same time as they work with their
own bodies. They are particularly aware of how much effort it takes to
 Ideas of Nature, the Natural and the Modern 35

develop and maintain their technical abilities through regular classes

and rehearsals. Coupled, however, with the uncertainty of new social
forces changing communities and workplaces, Bauman proposes that
individuals feel a profound ambivalence towards modernity.
Natural dancing, we propose, was also marked by this ambivalence
that its practitioners felt towards modernity. The latter, as we will show,
exploited these feelings of ambivalence by encouraging individuals
to take lessons and courses with them which, these practitioners sug-
gested, offered a cure for the troubles and stresses facing individuals
because of the contradictory pressures of modern life.
The impact of the shift from a disciplinary to a modernist consumer
society on ideas about embodied experience can be detected in two con-
temporary statements about physical culture. Lady Constance Stewart
Richardson, in her 1913 book Dancing, Beauty and Games, argued the
case for disciplined control. Although the kind of movement she advo-
cated was very different from Sandow, both had similar ideas about the
national scale of its implementation. Stewart Richardson wrote:

That it is within the means of the majority to have a powerful weapon

to combat sins and vice that at present go rampantly on their way,
I do most sincerely believe, and that weapon is a right understanding
of the effects which Physical Culture has on the mind and body; and
that ignorance of this weapon is almost universal among the masses
is due to the fact that those who are at the head of things do not
understand and will not listen to those who do.
(ibid.: 1–2)

She appears to ask for a paternalistic imposition of Physical Culture on

those she considers incapable of taking care of themselves. Margaret
Morris, by contrast, writing in 1925, advocates physical culture for
those with busy lives:

If people led really natural lives, working out of doors, swimming

and walking constantly, systems of physical culture might not be
necessary. But, as is well known, hardly anyone is able – or even
desires! – to lead such a life, and conditions of modern civilization
make it impossible for people to get the exercise necessary to health
in the normal way.
(Morris and Daniels, 1925: 19)

Where Stewart Richardson advocates freedom through discipline,

Morris embraces the freedom of what is, in effect, a consumer lifestyle.
36 Dancing Naturally

Those who paid for one of her summer schools were, in effect, purchas-
ing a ‘cure’ for the ills of modern life.
Morris suggests that modernity forecloses possibilities for a normal,
healthy life, while Crawford Flitch points to the benefits of a return to
natural ways of moving. Sandow and Mensendieck tried to reconcile
nature and the modern through scientifically justified discipline. While
the motivation for Morris and Mensendieck might seem a desire to return
to some lost golden age, they were more concretely concerned with relax-
ing the restrictions that the nineteenth-century medical profession had
placed on middle-class women’s physical activities. Advances in medi-
cal and neuro-physiological research, however, were already discredit-
ing the justification for such restrictions. Art historian Jonathan Crary
(2000) argues that these advances changed the way individuals viewed
the world, citing the work of Sir Charles Sherrington whose research
on reflexes led to the identification of the synapse. In 1906 Sherrington
described human perception as a system that had a potential for adapting
to swiftly changing stimuli through its mobile and dynamic complex-
ity and integration. The experiences that Crawford Flitch and Morris
believed were harmful seemed entirely normal within Sherrington’s
model of psychophysical integration:

As a tap to a kaleidoscope, so a new stimulus that strikes the recep-

tive surface causes in the central organ a shift of functional pattern at
various synapses … The grey matter may be compared to a telephone
exchange, where, from moment to moment, though the end points
of the system are fixed, the connections between starting points and
terminal points are changed to suit passing requirements, as the
functional points are shifted at a great railway station. In order to
realize the exchange at work, one must add to its purely spatial plan
the temporal datum that within certain limits the connections of the
lines shift from minute to minute.
(1906: 232–3)

In this way, the human subject responds to complex and diverse expe-
riences as an integrated psycho-physical whole. Sherrington’s model of
the nervous system exposes the crudity of the repetitive, disciplinary
regimes that some teachers of physical culture and natural dancing
were then propagating. For Crary, this description of psycho-physical
integration exemplifies a new kind of attention that typifies the lived
experience of modernity. In his view, Sherrington proposes a model of
the human subject
 Ideas of Nature, the Natural and the Modern 37

in which perception is no longer conceived in terms of a classical

model of acquiring knowledge but is instead synonymous with the
possibility of motor activity. But it is motor activity advancing towards
and in some way constructing a perpetually open future of proliferat-
ing possibilities and choices. At the same time it is a model of the
subject capable of a creative as well as an efficient and productive
interface with the dynamic and mobile complexity of a modernizing
lifeworld.
(Crary, 2000: 352)

It is this dynamic complexity of psycho-physical functioning that

two other key practitioners, Todd and Alexander, who knew and cited
Sherrington’s ideas, attempted to understand.
Both Alexander (1869–1955) and Todd (1880–1956) contribute to
the discussion of the natural in this period. Alexander developed and
taught his Technique in Melbourne, London, New York and Boston. In
his writings, he is critical of the modern world and man’s response to it,
and, like Sandow, to whom he refers, comments on the crisis in health
around the time of the Great War. He does not see a remedy in exercise
regimes and gives a detailed critique of ‘physical exercises’ and expo-
nents of ‘physical culture’ in his second book, Constructive Conscious
Control of the Individual (1923). He takes issue with:

the performance of muscle-tensing movements of all kinds, and suc-

ceeding experiences in connection with posture, callisthenics, plastic
dancing, deep breathing, ‘Daily Dozens’ and other specific methods.
([1923] 2004: 40)

At the same time, he rejects the view that ‘civilization was never meant
as a mode of life for a human being’ and those who thus advocate a
‘“return to nature”’ (ibid.).
Todd taught ‘Natural Posture’ as a remedy for the strains caused by
the vicissitudes of modern life in Boston after the First World War, and
then in New York City. However, an increasing acknowledgement of
contemporary thinking during the ‘twenties led to an apparent shift or
clarification in her thinking to the extent that in her best known book,
The Thinking Body (1937), she questions the whole idea of the natural:

We frequently hear advocated the merits of ‘just being natural’ or

of doing something in a ‘natural way.’ How can we know what is a
natural way?… we cannot say that any mechanism is ‘natural’ in its
38 Dancing Naturally

functioning unless we understand the laws that govern it. Factual

thinking is necessary.
(Todd, [1937] 1968: 281)

Todd’s approach to posture also shows a radical difference from those

involved in improvement through physical culture. In the foreword to
her 1929 publication, the forerunner to The Thinking Body, she says that
‘my purpose is to offer a procedure of thinking rather than any new
type of exercise’ (1929, foreword). It is this sort of approach that distin-
guishes her, and Alexander, from those whose natural cure for modern
ills was founded on a discipline-based exercise regime.
In trying to find a new way of describing the ‘self’, Alexander is one
of a number of people to use the term ‘psychophysical’ and he employs
it in his first book of 1910. In his second book, 1923, he defines ‘psy-
chophysical unity’ to show the inseparability of what is usually termed
the ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ ([1923] 2004: 4). Todd, from 1929 onwards,
uses ‘psycho-physical’ in a slightly different sense, to suggest the rela-
tionship between muscle action affecting the structure of the human
being (1929: 8–15).3 Alexander’s employment of ‘psychophysical unity’
is deliberately linked with his consideration of the ‘self’ in terms of
how people engage in activity in the world: what he describes as their
‘use’ – thus his book of 1932 The Use of the Self: Its Conscious Direction in
Relation to Diagnosis, Functioning and the Control of Reaction.
Like Todd and Alexander, Margaret H’Doubler (1889–1992), who pio-
neered dance education in the United States, also tried to negotiate the
complex relationships between the natural and the modern. Dance his-
torian Janice Ross recognizes the historical moment where H’Doubler,
at Teachers College, Columbia University, develops her thinking on
dance education. Ross suggests that this encompasses and negotiates
the relationships between extant systems of natural dancing such as
Gertrude Colby’s, John Dewey’s philosophy of education, and emergent
scientific method (Ross, 2000). H’Doubler, herself, talks of natural danc-
ing in her early book The Dance and its Place in Education:

From the Greeks the leaders of the [new dance] movement have
learned again the educational value of dancing, and a technique,
which is based on natural rather than unnatural positions of the body.
They realize, however, that as the Greeks used their dances to express
their own reaction to the life of their time, so we of the twentieth
century must dance the life of our age.
(1925: 27)
 Ideas of Nature, the Natural and the Modern 39

Ross gives a detailed analysis of how H’Doubler developed an approach,

which was substantially based on Dewey’s educational methods. She
suggests that the method he outlined in Democracy and Education (1916)
underpinned H’Doubler’s classroom approach:

This inductive method of knowledge acquisition is precisely how

understanding proceeds in dance, as the body and the mind assimi-
late the information that leads to increasing mastery of the dancing
body. This entire scenario, really the scientific method of proffering
and testing a hypothesis, can be read as an outline for H’Doubler’s
classroom systems.
(2000: 126)

So here the science, in the form of the scientific method of analytic explo-
ration, is therefore accommodated to any manner of dancing – natural
or otherwise. Ross emphasizes H’Doubler’s direct contact with Dewey in
his seminars at Teachers College and she also notes that Dewey started
to have lessons from F. M. Alexander (2000: 128). Educationalist Victoria
Door (2009) has recently demonstrated the importance of Alexander’s
Technique in the realization of Dewey’s reflective thinking. H’Doubler,
Todd and Alexander used inductive reasoning to propose models of cor-
poreality that were compatible with the dynamic and mobile complexity
of modern experience.
This brings us back to Sherrington. He was not only the pre-eminent
physiologist of his generation, but also a biographer, thinker and philoso-
pher. He was acquainted with Alexander, and both Todd and Alexander
cite Sherrington as a source and influence. Sherrington himself spoke on
‘the natural’ in terms of theology and science in The Gifford Lectures of
1937–8, published as Man on his Nature (1940). In his biography of the
sixteenth-century French physiologist Jean Fernel, Sherrington brings
his contemporary understanding of physiology to bear on the discourses
surrounding Fernel and his contemporary René Descartes. In doing so, he
addresses a central question that has been running through this chapter –
how can modern ideas help us deal with modern difficulties in matters
that we had taken to be ‘natural’? He considers ‘willed movement or
posture’ and notes that ‘in urbanized and industrialized communities bad
habits in our motor acts are especially common’ (Sherrington, 1946: 89).
Like others, he considers what is to be done, and then, in a much quoted
passage, points to Alexander as having:

done a service to the subject by insistently treating each act as involv-

ing the whole integrated individual, the whole psycho-physical
40 Dancing Naturally

man. To take a step is an affair, not of this or that limb solely, but of
the total neuro-muscular activity of the moment – not least of the
head and neck.
(ibid.: 89)

In conclusion, we have suggested that the natural was far from a straight-
forward concept at the start of the twentieth century. It is necessary to
recognize the complex and powerful investments in ideas of ‘nature’ that
were informing physical culture and natural dancing. These areas were
developed at the same time as these fundamental shifts in scientific think-
ing took place and, consequently, new discourses effected how people in
action were conceptualized. To understand how the supposedly ‘natural’
was set in opposition to modernity and, by implication, twentieth-century
science, we have noted two different applications, by those writing about
dance and movement, of the idea of science. On the one hand, science was
used to justify a largely unscientific application of discipline; on the other,
scientific ideas were used to help rethink human movement, enabling
people to respond to changes in their embodied experiences of moder-
nity. Some exponents of dance and physical culture restricted themselves
by looking back to nature, advocating an antidote for modern life in the
contradictory ambitions of freedom and discipline. Still others understood
the complexities of motor coordination as new ways of thinking about the
self; that could realize previously unrecognized movement possibilities,
and yet accommodate the dynamics of the twentieth century.

Notes
1. Macfadden had a substantial empire publicizing his work, as did Sandow, and
published prolifically. In her study of women in social dance of this period,
Julie Malnig sums up Macfadden’s contribution as follows:

Macfadden was a fascinating and enigmatic historical crossover figure,

a man imbued with Progressive-era zeal who, by the 1920s, had trans-
formed his health credo into a million-dollar business. His philosophy of
health, which he geared in the early years to the development of strong,
brawny men, was in part liberationist in its desire to free the body from
debilitating cultural constraints and prohibitions. In his visualization of
the female form, Macfadden still seemed to yearn nostalgically for a more
idealized, voluptuous nineteenth-century body type.
(1999: 51–2)

2. Raymond Williams proposes that consumerism arose as a result of ‘the plan-

ning and attempted control of the markets [… through] the creation of needs
and wants and of particular ways of satisfying them’ (1976: 79).
 Ideas of Nature, the Natural and the Modern 41

3. Alexander first published his ideas in an article in 1894, with books follow-
ing in 1910, 1923, 1932 and 1941. Todd published articles and books on her
system from 1920, with books in 1929, 1936 and 1954. Alexander and Todd
were born on opposite sides of the world. Todd was born in 1874 in Syracuse,
New York State, was educated in Boston, and lived and worked in Boston and
New York City from 1910. Alexander was born in 1869 in Tasmania, lived in
Australia and then, from 1906, in London. During the period 1914–24 both
Alexander and Todd taught in New York and Boston. From 1924 onwards
some of Alexander’s pupils taught the Alexander Technique in Boston and
New York and in 1933 Alexander’s brother, A. R. Alexander, taught the
Technique in Boston until after the Second World War.

Bibliography
Alexander, F. M. 1910 Man’s Supreme Inheritance. London: Methuen.
—— 1918 Man’s Supreme Inheritance: Conscious Guidance and Control in Relation to
Human Evolution in Civilization. London: Methuen.
—— 1932 The Use of the Self: Its Conscious Direction in Relation to Diagnosis,
Functioning and the Control of Reaction. London, Methuen.
—— [1923] 2004 Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual. London:
Gollancz.
Bauman, Z. 1988 Freedom. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Bauman, Z. and Tester, K. 2001 Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. London:
Polity.
Berlin, I. 1969 Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crary, J. 2000 Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dewey, J. [1916] 1961 Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan.
Door, V. 2009 ‘Postural Configuration as a Missing Element in Reflective
Epistemology’, Global Perspectives on Dance Pedagogy: Research and Practice.
CORD Special Conference, De Montfort University, Leicester, June 2009.
Flitch, J. E. C. 1912 Modern Dancing and Dancers. London: Grant Richards.
H’Doubler, M. N. 1925 The Dance and Its Place in Education. New York: Harcourt,
Brace.
Macfadden, B. 1901 Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood. New York: Physical
Culture Publishing.
Malnig, J. 1999 ‘Athena meets Venus: Visions of women in social dance in the
teens and early 1920s, Dance Research Journal 3.1/2 (Fall): 34–62.
Mensendieck, B. M. 1954 Look Better, Feel Better: The World-Renowned Mensendieck
System of Functional Movements – For a Youthful Body and Vibrant Health.
New York: Harper & Row.
Morris, M. and Daniels, F. 1925 Margaret Morris Dancing. London: Kegan Paul,
Trench & Trubner.
Richardson, C. S., Lady 1913 Dancing, Beauty, and Games. London: Arthur L.
Humphreys.
Ross, J. 2000 Moving Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in
American Education. Madison: University of Wisconsin.
Sandow, E. 1918 Life is Movement: The Physical Reconstruction and Regeneration of
the People (A Diseaseless World). London: National Health Press.
42 Dancing Naturally

Sherrington, C. S. 1906 The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. Yale, CT: Yale
University Press.
—— 1940, 1951 Man on his Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— 1946 The Endeavour of Jean Fernel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Todd, M. E. 1929 The Balancing of Forces in the Human Being: Its Application to
Postural Patterns. New York: Privately Published.
—— [1937] 1968 The Thinking Body: A Study of the Balancing Forces of Dynamic
Man. New York: Dance Horizons.
Williams, R. 1976 Keywords. London: Fontana.
4
The Ancient Greeks and
the ‘Natural’*
Fiona Macintosh

To be really mediaeval one should have no body. To be

really modern one should have no soul. To be really
Greek one should have no clothes.
(Wilde, 1894)

Oscar Wilde was not simply the leading playwright, celebrity and wit
of his generation; he was also an outstanding classical scholar during
his time as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, and later at
Magdalen College, Oxford, and ancient Greece remained for him both
a sounding board and touchstone throughout his life. Wilde’s pithy
aphorism is therefore no mere, throw-away aside: on the contrary, it
is informed by a deep understanding of perceived cultural differences
at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
In the post-Nietzschean, godless and increasingly industrial, modern
Western world, the ‘soulless’ were regularly turning, as Wilde had been
doing since his undergraduate days, to a pagan alternative where, as in
humankind’s pre-lapsarian state, literal nakedness was the norm. The
early Christian Fathers had denigrated the body; and the mediaeval
Church had gone on to perpetuate the Platonic schism between body
and soul, which Descartes confined absolutely to separate spheres during
the seventeenth century. Behind Wilde’s witty summation is the widely
shared view during the fin de siècle that, by turning to the Greeks, it might
be possible to recover a ‘wholeness’ of being that Christianity and the
modern world had torn asunder.
Classical scholarship maintained that the ancient Greeks, and the
Athenians in particular, enjoyed an intimacy with their environment
that allowed them to live on equal terms with nature; and through their
political system (however imperfect), they were able to live on equal
43
44 Dancing Naturally

(democratic) terms with one another. When the British Romantic poet,
Percy Bysshe Shelley pronounced in his verse drama Hellas (1821) that
‘We are all Greeks now’, he was referring specifically to the political ambi-
tions that he and the radicals of his generation shared with the ancients
in the wake of the revolutions in America and France. By the end of the
century, the alleged ‘freedom’ of the Greeks was no less urgently political,
but its focus and its goal was female suffrage: the New Woman was seek-
ing liberation from a patriarchal system which had institutionally denied
her a voice and, especially, a body of her own.
The Greeks were deemed to have been untrammelled by moral
strictures concerning their sexuality; and Spartan women, renowned
for their strident independence, were invoked as models for the emer-
gent New Woman. By the early part of the new century, moreover,
new papyrus fragments of poems by the sixth-century BCE lyric poet
Sappho were published following their discovery in the rubbish heaps
of Oxyrhynchus (now Behnasa in Egypt). It was the British archaeolo-
gists Grenfell and Hunt who had unearthed these new scraps of papyri;
and the fragmentary remains were to prove more tantalizing than ever
as the gaps in the texts enabled readers to project their own urgent
concerns upon the female poet from the island of Lesbos. Now both
Sappho’s independence and her perceived sexual orientation provided
early feminists with further evidence of how matters relating to gender
are fixed by social rather than any supposed ‘natural’ determinants.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, developments in classical
scholarship also drew attention to ritual practices in ancient Greek religion;
and the work of comparative anthropologists in turn led classicists to focus
on ancient dance as a form of primitive prayer. The fascination with the
ancient dancer, especially with the Maenadic choral dancer who danced
in honour of the ancient patron God of drama Dionysus, was prevalent
during the first decade of the twentieth century. At this time, dancing like
a Maenad became the ‘natural’ way to dance – torso and head thrown back
with long hair tossed and tussled wildly behind in accompaniment to the
free-flowing drapery in which the dancers were scantily clad. This chapter
explores various Maenadic incarnations in this period and considers the
extent to which classical scholarship determined and shaped what became
the Classical Greek Dance of the Ginner-Mawer School.

Classical scholarship and the ‘natural’ Greeks

During the course of the nineteenth century, classical scholarship under-

went a radical change under the influence of developments in history
 The Ancient Greeks and the ‘Natural’ 45

and the social sciences. Having been hitherto predominantly philological

and text-based in its orientation, there was a new conviction in Germany
that scholarship needed to understand ancient Greece in its entirety –
as a vibrant, functioning society, with a living language and an evolv-
ing political, social and aesthetic culture. This new study was termed
Altertumswissenschaft (literally ‘knowledge of antiquity’) and it trans-
formed a classical education into the first genuine area study, for which
one needed to study philosophy, literature, history and art. The impact
of this new wave of German classical scholarship was felt from at least
the middle of the nineteenth century in Britain, where an increasingly
wide understanding of Greco-Roman culture led to new ways of thinking
about antiquity (Turner, 1981).
For most of the nineteenth century, the prevailing understanding of
the Greeks in Britain is best summed up by what Matthew Arnold referred
to in Culture and Anarchy (1869) as ‘sweetness and light’. Arnold’s con-
ception of the ancient Greeks as a serene, rational people can ultimately
be traced back to the hugely influential History of Art (1764) by the
German art historian and archaeologist, Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
According to Winckelmann, the Greek world was a utopia where man
and nature lived in perfect harmony, and where naked male bodies on
public display were a mark of individual freedom. Even as late as 1904,
Winckelmann’s imprint can be felt behind the words of an eminent
German biologist and leading advocate of homosexuality:

If there is any field at all where turning to antiquity is still today almost
synonymous with returning to nature; … then it is this ….in the hon-
esty, i.e. in the absence of hypocrisy, in the acknowledgment of natural
drives and in the unselfconsciousness of a harmless and delightful
enjoyment of life, in this we can indeed take the ancients as our exam-
ple. This is also eventually the yearning that so many of the best feel
for the beauty-loving, sensual, youthful-fresh, sunny Greece; and the
core of such an obscure feeling of longing is the often not even clearly
understood desire for liberation and the revitalization of this kind of
cult of beauty, of friendship and of love, which in the sad jargon of our
age with its frock and petticoat morality is called ‘homosexuality’.
(Friedländer, 1904: 59, cited and trans. Matzner, 2010: 74)

That Greece was happily free of the strict moral code imposed by the
Judaeo-Christian tradition was a view equally adopted by the notable fin de
siècle British aesthete, poet and critic John Addington Symonds, who was
shortly to become the first British public advocate of homosexuality: ‘the
46 Dancing Naturally

themes of celibacy and aestheticism, and of the sinfulness of carnal pleas-

ure … are wholly alien to Greek moral and religious notions’ (Symonds,
1880: 179).
Whilst the supposed ‘naturalness’ of the Greeks remained a widely held
view well into the new century, the supremely rational Greeks delineated
by Winckelmann and Arnold began to be eclipsed by alternative scholarly
perspectives in the last few decades of the century. The first to proffer an
alternative, darker, murkier vision of the Greeks was Friedrich Nietzsche
in The Birth of Tragedy (1872); and Nietzsche’s view, widely condemned
within the classical academy, was later endorsed and expanded by the
pioneering scholarship of his friend and supporter Erwin Rohde. In The
Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had identified the singing, dancing chorus as
the wellspring from which tragic drama originally developed. The unique
achievement of Greek tragedy, he averred, was that it was able both to
afford a glimpse (through the chorus) into the terrifying (Dionysiac)
abyss and equally to assuage the impact of that vision by providing the
mediating formal (Apolline) qualities embodied by the actors. For the first
time in the long history of the reception of Greek tragedy, the chorus was
accorded a primary and central role within the action. Whilst the flaws
in Nietzsche’s scholarship were damned as soon as the treatise was pub-
lished, Rohde alone defended, if not all the detail, at least the destination
of Nietzsche’s treatise because it chimed with his own burgeoning interest
in the Greek underworld and the ecstatic experience of the Dionysiac,
which was to provide the subject of his study Psyche (1894) some 22 years
later (Silk and Stern, 1981).
Even if mainstream classical scholarship in Britain remained broadly
conservative in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and
shunned, as was the case in Germany, Nietzschean-inspired insights
into the ancient world, the leader of British Aestheticism, the philoso-
pher and Oxford don Walter Pater, published two important essays in
1876 which shared Nietzsche’s interest in this darker side of ancient
Greece. In ‘Demeter and Persephone’ and ‘Dionysus’ (both originally
published in 1876, and then together in Greek Studies in 1895), Pater
explored the Greek underworld and the irrational and ecstatic in Greek
religion. By the turn of the century, in Cambridge in particular and
under the influence of the new discipline of comparative anthropology,
British classicists provided their own version of Altertumswissenschaft.
The so-called Cambridge Ritualists – amongst whom were the classical
scholars and popularizers of their subject Gilbert Murray and Jane Ellen
Harrison – continued to challenge the Winckelmannesque idealized
Greeks and again focused on the underworld and the ritual practices
 The Ancient Greeks and the ‘Natural’ 47

(especially those involving women and those surrounding death) that

informed and underpinned the very artworks that Winckelmann and
the nineteenth century had so greatly prized as ‘rational’ and ‘serene’.1
If Nietzsche, Pater and the Cambridge Ritualists drew attention to
the gods of the underworld and insisted on their equal importance (if
not their primacy) in relation to the Olympians, they were especially
attracted to what became the antithetical deity to Olympian Apollo, the
god of transformation and fertility, the dangerous, androgynous and
exotic patron of drama, Dionysus. The Cambridge Ritualists designated
dance as a form of primitive prayer and maintained that Greek tragedy
had grown out of the ritual dances in honour of the god Dionysus. If the
essence of tragedy could be located in the hitherto neglected ancient cho-
rus, the paradigmatic chorus became those intoxicated Maenadic dancers
who danced in honour of Greek tragedy’s patron god, Dionysus.
Jane Harrison had been amongst the first of the women undergradu-
ates at Cambridge in 1879, and she earned herself a popular profile by
giving public lectures on Greek art from the outset of her career (Beard,
2000). According to Harrison, it was only by studying ritual that Greek
religion could be understood (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,
1903) and that worship of Dionysus comes from group rather than indi-
vidual desires and emotions (Themis, 1912). Dionysus, in Harrison’s read-
ing, is now Nietzsche’s ‘boundary’ breaker but he is also tied to a social
collective. An essay by Gilbert Murray was appended to Themis, in which
he argued that tragedy enacted the ritual pattern of the dying ‘Year-God’
(originally Dionysus himself), according to which the tragic protagonist’s
death is assuaged and offset by the continuing presence of the tragic
chorus which ushers in the new ‘Year-God’. Harrison, in her focus on
Dionysus and his followers, not surprisingly found herself compared in a
report of one of her lectures to a Maenad ‘throwing back her head [as] she
burst into a chorus of Euripides in Greek’ (cited by Peacock, 1988: 62).

Beyond the academy

Pater’s scholarship met with mixed response from the academy,

especially when the explicit links made between Aestheticism and
homoeroticism appeared to be founded in fact in the wake of Wilde’s
trial in 1895. Despite their being no whiff of scandal surrounding the
Cambridge Ritualists, their ideas, nonetheless, proved controversial
within the classical academy because of their links to James Frazer’s The
Golden Bough (1890) and their adoption of methods from the new dis-
cipline of comparative anthropology. However controversial within the
48 Dancing Naturally

academy, these new perspectives on Greece were readily adopted and

adapted within the wider cultural sphere in the first decade of the new
century, when things ‘Greek’ became highly fashionable.
Both Harrison and Murray were key mediating figures both in their
desire to communicate their ideas widely and in their involvement
with the theatre. Whilst Harrison had appeared in amateur theatricals
in Oxford and London, and had even provided a reading of the Idylls of
Theocritus to accompany one of Isadora Duncan’s dances in a London
art gallery in 1900 (anon., The Times, 16 March 1900), Murray worked
alongside the pioneers of theatrical modernism Bernard Shaw and
Granville Barker, at London’s Royal Court Theatre from 1904 onwards.2
Murray’s translations of Euripides’ tragedies were staged at the Court
from 1904 to 1907, where they were accorded equivalent status to that
of new work. As Shaw wrote in the epigraph to Major Barbara (1907):
‘[Murray’s] English version of The Bacchae came into our dramatic lit-
erature with all the impulsive power of an original work ….’ In this
sense, classical scholarship had, like Nietzsche’s Dionysus himself, bro-
ken through the boundaries beyond its usual sphere. ‘Playing’ at being
Greeks had been fashionable in London since the opening of Liberty’s
store in the 1880s, when Greek-style dresses became all the rage amongst
the upper middle classes. Now in the early twentieth century, after two
decades of dressing like a Greek in free-flowing dresses, moving like one,
especially like a Maenad, became fashionable as well.
There were at least three main routes into Greek dance at this time:
through performance in private salons; through performance in public,
often slightly morally ambivalent, venues; and thirdly, through per-
forming in a chorus in revivals of Greek drama. The first two, exempli-
fied by the careers of Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan respectively, grew
out of the tradition of the classical tableau vivant, which can be traced
at least as far back as Marie Sallé’s performance as a statue, with her
hair hanging loose and her garment scandalously scant in Pygmalion
at Covent Garden in 1734. This classical sculptural performance tradi-
tion had enjoyed a recent revival through the popularization of the
expressive system of movement devised by the French musicologist
François Delsarte. Genevieve Stebbins had brought Delsarte’s method,
founded upon 12 poses based upon classical sculpture, to the United
States towards the end of the nineteenth century; and most middle-class
young women received some basic training in the Delsarte-system at
this time (Stebbins, 1902). It was this Delsartian training that Duncan
shared with Allan, who became her main rival in ‘Greek Dance’ in
Britain from 1908 onwards.
 The Ancient Greeks and the ‘Natural’ 49

Duncan’s professional career bears an uncanny resemblance to that

of the notoriously beautiful and beguiling eighteenth-century courtesan
Emma Hamilton. Both Hamilton and Duncan depended upon aristo-
cratic patronage for their art, notwithstanding the scandal and tragedy
that they courted in their personal lives. Hamilton’s ‘Attitudes’ were
based, like Duncan’s solo performances, on ancient sculptures and images
from Greek vases; and her work (like Duncan’s over 100 years later)
attracted vase collectors and aristocratic voyeurs alike. By contrast, Allan
became a dancer by default, having gone to Berlin to pursue a career as
a concert pianist only to discover that her talents lay elsewhere.3 But
she had the good fortune to be in the German-speaking world at a time
when she could learn from the pioneering theatrical experimentations
of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and Max Reinhardt. When Allan brought her
path-breaking solo dances to London, she introduced a new freedom of
expression that teetered (especially with her Salome dance) on the brink
of decadence. In this sense, her performances at the top of the bill at the
Palace Theatre in 1908 continued the risqué tradition of poses plastiques
that provided the standard fare at the Palace. But with the imprimatur
of Edward VII, who had been responsible for bringing her over from
Marienbad, Allan became a star in popular and high cultural circles,
which was to secure her rivalry with Duncan absolutely.4
Performing for the aristocracy in private salons in Europe and danc-
ing at the Palace Theatre on the fringes of Soho were, then, two pos-
sible routes into Greek dance. The discovery of Greek dance through
the performance of ancient drama, however, was the more common.
The revival of Greek drama in the professional theatre from the 1880s
onwards was intimately connected to the changes within classical
scholarship (the widening of the classical curriculum generally and
the institutionalization of archaeology in particular), as well as to the
broadening of the student population with the creation of new institu-
tions for women (Girton College, Cambridge, and Somerville College,
Oxford, were amongst the first to stage Greek plays). Early revivals in
Oxford, Cambridge and London during the 1880s boasted remarkably
static choruses, but by the early part of the new century the possibility
of a singing/dancing chorus in performance attracted much attention
amongst performers and audiences alike.
Whilst Granville Barker’s productions of Murray’s translations at the
Court Theatre from 1907 expended much time and energy on getting
the chorus right, there was a general consensus that this was never quite
achieved until Max Reinhardt’s showed the way in his Oedipus Rex at
Covent Garden in 1912 (Macintosh, 2009). Both Ruby Ginner and Irene
50 Dancing Naturally

Mawer, who were to become the principal exponents of Greek Dance

in the post-war period through the foundation of the Ginner-Mawer
School of Dance and Drama, came to Greek dance through performing in
ancient plays. In marked contrast to both Duncan and Allan, the Greek
dancer for Morris and Ginner was by definition a member of a chorus:
the collective rather than the solo performer was their preferred model
(Figure 4.1). Ginner had begun her professional career in the theatre in
the company of Frank Benson, who made his theatrical debut in the
part of Clytemnestra in the first Oxford Greek play, Agamemnon (1880).
Ginner’s introduction to Greek dance, in particular, came through her
training with the pioneer of speech and elocution training, Elsie Fogerty,
in whose productions of Alkestis (1902) and Antigone (1904) at Crystal
Palace Ginner performed as a chorus member. Increasingly recognized as
a specialist in choreographing Greek choruses, Ginner formed her own
company of ‘Grecian Dancers’ in 1912, which went on to perform in
numerous venues over the next couple of years.
In 1918 the Ginner-Mawer School began an annual Summer School,
which was to occupy an increasingly important slot in Frank Benson’s
Shakespeare Summer Season Festival in Stratford. It was here that work
on the Greek chorus was explored and developed for numerous pro-
fessional productions of Euripides’s tragedies in Murray’s translations.
During the Summer School in 1919, for example, the choruses for
Lewis Casson and Bruce Winston’s highly successful and harrowingly
topical production of The Trojan Women were developed. With Sybil
Thorndike in the part of Hecuba, a role she was to reprise many times
subsequently, The Trojan Women premiered at the Holborn Empire in
December 1919, with choruses led and choreographed by Irene Mawer.
When Eva Palmer-Sikelianos, the most renowned specialist on Greek
choral dance in the late 1920s, visited the Ginner-Mawer School in
London in 1929, she claimed she had found ‘the true spirit of the Greek
school’ and promptly issued an invitation for the students to perform
at the second Delphic Festival in Greece in 1930. The Ginner-Mawer
School had the unique distinction of being the only foreign company
to be invited to participate in the Festival; they gave two performances
in Athens, one in the indoor Olympia Theatre and the other in the
Herodus Atticus in the days leading up to the Festival.5

Greek dance in the interwar period

Some years after the First World War, Ginner describes the evening classes
she ran for War Workers as being pivotal: ‘under the calming joyous
Figure 4.1 Frieze Lines (Pauline Grant photograph album from the Ginner-Mawer School, Bice Bellairs collection, NRCD reference
BB/F/l)
51
52 Dancing Naturally

influence of the Greek dance, gradually one saw the terrible tension relax,
the nerve-wracked bodies rest, and for a while the tired eyes were at peace.’
Greek dance, according to one of her students, was ‘one of the sanest
influences at work in a war-tortured world’ (Ginner, 1926: 5). That Greek
Dance was perceived to afford some escape from pressing political and
social realities was recognized by at least one reviewer, who commented on
how whilst drama reflected the war, ‘the art of dance [was] untouched; …
a sure refuge from anxiety and gloom. [Ginner’s Company] took the
mind clean away into the happy realms of pure art and beauty’ (anon.,
Observer, 1917).
Ginner’s evening classes during the war led her to realize ‘the com-
munity’ implications of her practice and to appreciate the value of dance
beyond the theatre. The war years marked the end of Ginner’s career
as a professional performer and the beginning of her career as a lead-
ing teacher of Greek dance. In the post-war period, however, anyone
involved in the teaching of Greek dance had to guarantee that the Greek
dancer was dissociated from the morally tarnished reputation of one of
its leading pre-war exponents.
During the war itself, in 1918, Allan had taken a right-wing, anti-
Semitic Member of Parliament, Noel Pemberton Billing, to court in order
to defend her reputation after he accused her of leading a ‘Cult of the
Clitoris’. From her very first appearances in London with her Vision of
Salome, Allan had sent shock waves through the establishment. She had
a very wide following, especially amongst women; and rumours had
circulated about a ménage à trois between her and the Prime Minister,
Herbert Asquith, and his wife, or more frequently, of her lesbian affair
with Margot Asquith. Her supposed Sapphic relations were not atypi-
cal of those involved in Greek dance at this time – much the same was
alleged of Ruth St Denis, Loïe Fuller and Duncan herself – it was just
that in Allan’s case her sexuality was particularly flagrantly on display.
And she was perceived to emblematize what was deemed a cosmopolitan
corporeality that was not only Sapphically pleasure-seeking, it was also
undermining the war effort itself (Walkowitz, 2003). Allan lost her case
and her reputation, and in turn she besmirched the image of the Greek
dancer in the interwar period.
There were various ways in which the Ginner-Mawer School cleaned
up the image of Greek dance in the wake of Allan’s trial. In marked
contrast to classical ballet, Ginner maintained that Greek dance was
equally accessible to the ‘average’ as well as to the highly talented
child; and that it provided an ‘outlet and aid to the child’s imagination
today.’6 In 1924 the Association of Teachers of Greek Dance introduced
 The Ancient Greeks and the ‘Natural’ 53

exams, under the auspices of The Association of Operatic Dancing of

Great Britain (later the Royal Academy of Dance) to standardize practice
within this relatively new area of dance. Not only did the curriculum
include dance, it involved in the more advanced stages the study of the
visual arts, literature and myth as well. ‘Ladies’ Greek’ in the Victorian
period had meant Greek without accents and the need to struggle with
a parallel translation. In many ways, the ‘Ladies’ Greek’ of the early
twentieth century became ‘The Revived Greek Dance’, in which dance
classes and Greek civilization were now afforded to the sisters of those
young men who learned the classical languages at school. The pupils
at the Ginner-Mawer School were being offered genuine insights into
what was formerly forbidden territory. Although Greek dance was
always more ‘respectable’ than other kinds of dance for young ladies, it
increasingly widened its social base through the Ginner-Mawer School.
In addition to providing a rounded ‘education’, The Revived Greek Dance
also acquired respectability through its supposed ‘health’-promoting
qualities. From the outset, the revival of Greek dance was inextricably
linked to other ‘health’ movements in Britain and Europe from the end of
the nineteenth century. In 1908, the year of intense rivalry between Allan
and Duncan, not only were the world’s top athletes on display in the
Olympic Stadium in West Ham but also Baden Powell’s anti-urban Boy
Scout Movement was founded. The Greeks were deemed the best guides
in the promotion of healthy living because their early training in physical
education and dance was said to have developed their ideal physiques. In
a manual entitled The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal (1914), Diane Watts
identifies the ways in which the modern body falls short of the ancient
ideal. Watts systematizes a series of movements (as with Delsarte, largely
based on Greek sculpture) that allegedly enables the reader to recover the
Greek ‘ideal’.
Watts’s exercise programme was considered no marginal, cranky
venture but received wide endorsement in medical circles, including
amongst ophthalmologists, who maintained that failing eyesight could
be stemmed by an improvement in posture in accordance with the
Watts-method. (See, for example, Bates, 1920.) Ginner’s 1960 study
A Gateway to the Dance similarly receives medical endorsement with a
preface by Professor A. P. Cawadias, Professor of General Practice, who
proclaims Greek dance as a way to counteract ‘the general restless-
ness, exaggeration and neurosis of the world today’ (Ginner, 1960: vi).
Like Watts, Ginner maintained that Greek dance led to a ‘healthy and
beautiful physique, to a perfectly controlled expression of mind and
soul’, which the modern world with its ‘rush and hurry’, its ‘too much
54 Dancing Naturally

mechanism’ and ‘loss of mental and physical control’ denies. In a world

in which ‘jerk and loss of rhythm’ has become the norm, there is a con-
sequent ‘loss of healthy vitality and joy’.7
A note of caution was sounded against Ginner’s emphasis on physical
beauty as the goal to which all should aspire. It came from the Christian
Socialist, the Reverend Stewart Headlam, who reminded Ginner and the
members of the ‘Dancers’ Circle’ at her lecture in 1922 that reverence
for the Greeks needed slightly less Romanticism: Christianity, he cau-
tioned, had gone one important step further in pointing out that bodily
deformity did not necessarily preclude beauty. As a fierce champion
of the theatre generally and dance in particular (against its opponents
in the Church) and a staunch and unorthodox Anglican supporter of
the pilloried (it was Headlam who had raised bail for Oscar Wilde),
Headlam’s voice was one not easily dismissed.8 Moreover, his impor-
tant intervention serves to highlight the interconnections at this time
between ‘The Revived Greek Dance’ and the theory of Eugenics.
For Ginner, Greek dance was the perfect ‘admixture’ of two racial
groups: one the indigenous, Pelasgians: ‘a short, dark-haired race, with
all the passionate, superstitious, imaginative, and artistic qualities of
the Southerner’; the other from the North: ‘fair-haired, tall and warlike,
with the stern repression of passion peculiar to the Northerner’, one
sub-group of which, the Achaeans, were ‘blue-eyed … of a magnificent
physique … brave, chaste, self-controlled and law-abiding’ (Ginner,
1933: 1, 3). Not only does this sound remarkably similar to contem-
porary racial theory (the ‘Southerners’ sounding identical to Matthew
Arnold’s Celt as well as widely held stereotypes of the so-called ‘Jewish
character’, and the Northerners becoming synonymous with the Aryan
ideal of Nazi ideology),9 it also draws much of its detail from Ginner
and her colleagues’ reading of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. In the
Introduction to her study of 1960, Professor Cawadias praises Ginner for
‘insisting on pure Greek dancing’ and having thereby ‘stopped it deviat-
ing towards Dionysiac disorder and gymnastics’ (Ginner, 1960: vi).
Greek dance was the ‘most beautiful, the sanest type of movement’,
Ginner insisted, and a necessary antidote to ‘the neurotic movements
that monopolize theatres and ballroom dances to the hideous and
nerve-tearing din of jazz bands.’10 Indeed, jazz is regularly cited in the
1920s by Ginner and other exponents of the art of Greek dance (notably
Duncan) as the decadent ‘other’ against which their own art form is
being routinely defined (Duncan, 1928: 244). Jazz with its roots in Black
American culture is deemed primitive and exotic – a kind of drug which
caught the war-torn Western world when it was at its most vulnerable
 The Ancient Greeks and the ‘Natural’ 55

and which induces ‘imbecilic’ movement and often promotes immo-

rality.11 According to Mark Perugini, husband of Irene Mawer, what is
necessary in the post-War period is for the Western world ‘which has
known the exalted calm of classic Greek art, the orderly logical, yet
virile mentality of Latin culture and Anglo-Saxon progress’ to recap-
ture the ‘idyllic classic days, for inspiration … beauty, joy and – sanity’
(Perugini, 1928: 9).
If Allan had made Greek dance appear perilously cosmopolitan (for
which read German and/or Jewish), it was essential in the post-war period
that it be aligned with ‘healthy’ Anglo-Saxon culture. In the 1920s Greek
dance is regularly invoked as a model for the embryonic British Dance
movement on account of its ‘open-air and athletic’ character (Colebrook,
1925: 45; Ginner 1926: 45). The Greeks and the British routinely become
one in their alleged shared love of games and the great outdoors; and the
Greeks’ athletic dances are appropriated readily and effortlessly, we are
told, by the English-speaking peoples of the twentieth century.
Throughout the late twenties, the Ginner-Mawer School consolidated
its reputation, both within Britain and across the Empire. But these per-
formances did not always meet with commendation. By the second part
of the twenties, reviewers frequently detect a note of tiredness about ‘The
Revived Greek Dance’ – as if it were at the end of a long tradition that
began with Duncan. Veritable praise for Ginner’s performances apart,
there is a suggestion that outside influence is vital for the creativity of
Greek dance, even if there is an equally strong realization that its survival
is guaranteed owing to its pedagogical value.12 No doubt the critics of
Greek dance were right – it needed outside influences in order to survive
aesthetically. By comparison with the vibrant, intercultural mode that
was the norm in 1920s Paris, where jazz wasn’t shunned as ‘barbaric’
but was being eclectically adopted by Cocteau and Diaghilev’s company,
a re-classicizing of dance could still thrive and Ninette de Valois and Marie
Rambert later showed what could be done by combining the strengths of
the new Russian ballet with aspects of Greek dance (Genné, 1996).
Ginner, in the pre-war days, had been a political radical in her involve-
ment with the suffrage movement. Like many of her generation in
Britain, she had become enthralled by a particular strand of German
Altertumswissenschaft that was inextricably linked to spurious scientific
racial theories that were to legitimize the extermination of the Jews and
other minorities in Europe over the next few years. In 1936 during the
Berlin Olympics, a production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia staged the trial
between Apollo and the Furies in the final play of the trilogy as the
victory of the Aryans over the Untermenschen. Winckelmann’s serene,
56 Dancing Naturally

rational Greek who lived in harmony with nature, privileged by Ginner

through dancing, no less than by intellectual contemporaries in Britain
who espoused the theory of Eugenics, led ultimately to repression of the
‘Dionysiac’ nature of corporeality in favour of the Aryan ideals of Nazi
ideology.

Notes
* I am most grateful to Emily Churchill, Archivist, and Laura Griffiths, Archive
and Research Assistant, on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded
project at the University of Surrey, ‘Pioneer Women: Early British Modern
Dancers’ for their help in accessing the Ginner Papers in the National Resource
Centre for Dance (NRCD), upon which much material for this chapter depends.
(See Ch. 2, Note 1)
1. On Pater, see Evangelista, 2009; on Murray, see Stray, 2007.
2. On Murray, see Hall and Macintosh, 2005.
3. On Allan generally, see Cherniavsky, 1991.
4. For Allan as controversial Maenad, see Macintosh, 2010.
5. See the scrap-book of the tour in the Ginner Papers (NRCD, BB/F/2).
6. For a report of Ruby Ginner’s lecture, under the auspices of the Bedford
Froebel Society, see anon., The Bedfordshire Standard, 1923.
7. Ginner’s Lecture in Leamington, 17 December 1922, ‘The Position of
Dancing in the Education of Ancient Greece. An Address read by Miss Ruby
Ginner at the last Dancers’ Circle Dinner’ (NRCD, BB/N/10).
8. Anon.: The Morning Post, 1922; The Telegraph, 1922; The Era, 1922. For
Headlam, see Foulkes, 1997: 166–86.
9. On the ubiquity of the theory of Eugenics at this point, see Blom, 2008:
338–52. See anon., Lady’s Pictorial, 1917: Ginner and Morris are praised for
teaching ‘the eugenics of joy in the fullest meaning of the term’.
10. Lecture at Leamington, see n.12 (NRCD, BB/N/10).
11. See, for example, anon.: The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 1923; The Bedfordshire
Standard, 1923.
12. See anon.: The Birmingham Post, 1925; The Dancing Times, 1925; The Dancing
Times, 1926.

Bibliography
anon. 1900 The Times, 16 March.
—— 1917 Observer, 24 June.
—— 1917 Lady’s Pictorial, 20 October.
—— 1922 The Morning Post, 18 December.
—— 1922 The Telegraph, 18 December.
—— 1922 The Era, 24 December.
—— 1923 The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 10 August.
—— 1923 The Bedfordshire Standard, 26 October.
—— 1925 The Birmingham Post, 10 July.
—— 1925 The Dancing Times, August.
 The Ancient Greeks and the ‘Natural’ 57

—— 1926 The Dancing Times, August.

Bates, W. H. 1920 ‘A Lesson from the Greeks’, Better Eyesight: A Monthly Magazine
(June).
Beard, M. 2000 The Invention of Jane Harrison. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Blom, P. 2008 The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900–1914. New York: Basic Books.
Cherniavsky, F. 1991 The Salome Dancer, the Life and Times of Maud Allan.
Toronto: Dance Collection Danse Presse.
Colebrook, F. M. 1925 ‘Why not a British Dance?’ The Link, 1.4 (July): 45
Duncan, I. 1928 The Art of the Dance. New York: Mitchell Kennerley.
Evangelista, S. 2009 British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception,
Gods in Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Foulkes, R. 1997 Church and Stage in Victorian England. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
Friedländer, B. 1904 Renaissance des Eros Uranios. Die physiologische Freundschaft,
ein normaler Grundtrieb des Menschen und eine Frage der männlichen Gesellungs-
freiheit. Berlin: Otto Lehmann.
Genné, B. 1996. The Making of a Choreographer: Ninette de Valois and Bar aux
Folies – Bergères. Studies in Dance History no. 12, Minneapolis, MN: Society of
Dance History Scholars.
Ginner, R. 1926 The Link, 2 (March), Special Issue ‘The Greek Dance Festival’.
—— 1933 The Revived Greek Dance. London: Methuen.
—— 1960 Gateway to the Dance. London: Newman Neame.
Hall, E. and Macintosh F. 2005 Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914.
Oxford: Oxford University Press
Macintosh, F. 2009 Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
—— 2010 ‘Dancing Maenads in Twentieth-century Britain’, in F. Macintosh (ed.),
The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.188–208
Matzner, S. 2010 ‘From Uranians to homosexuals: Philhellenism, Greek
homoeroticism and gay emancipation in Germany 1835–1915’, Classical
Receptions Journal, 2: 60–91.
Peacock, S. J. 1988 Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Perugini, M. 1928 ‘On decadence in art’, The Link, 3.3 (July): 27–9.
Silk, M. S. and Stern, J. P. 1981 Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Stebbins, G. [1902] 1977 The Delsarte System of Expression, 6th edn, revised and
enlarged. New York: Dance Horizons.
Stray, C. (ed.) 2007 Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International
Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Symonds, J. A. 1880 Studies of the Greek Poets, vol. 2. New York: Harper.
Turner, F. 1981 The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. New Haven, CT, and
London: Yale University Press.
Walkowitz, J. 2003 ‘The “Vision of Salome”: Cosmopolitanism and erotic dancing
in Central London, 1908–1918’, American Historical Review, 108: 337–76.
5
From the Artificial to the Natural
Body: Social Dancing in Britain,
1900–1914
Theresa Jill Buckland

In the years adjacent to the outbreak of the First World War, social
dancers and their critics in Britain testified to a shift in corporeal norms
in the fashionable ballroom. No longer determined by strict Victorian
conventions and gendered moral codes governing social relations, the
ballroom of the upper and middle classes increasingly became a space
for young men and women to express themselves more freely in move-
ment. Ragtime, a rhythmically exciting choreomusical repertoire sourced
from the United States, threatened to oust the melodic decorum of the
European Waltz and Quadrille. Whereas sublimation of the self and bod-
ily restraint had characterized dancing of the ideal Victorian ballroom,
new dances such as the Boston (performed to waltz music), the Turkey
Trot (a ragtime dance) and, later, the Argentine Tango (typically danced
to a habanera rhythm) tendered opportunities for personal emotion and
physical display. Rejecting the dancing of their parents and earlier genera-
tions as old-fashioned and artificial, many young Britons embraced these
new public ways of moving together, approving them as more modern
and natural.1
This trend was by no means endorsed by all factions in British society.
A high-profile debate for and against the new dances raged between
new and old practitioners of social dancing, dance teachers, clerics,
educators, worried parents, professional dancers and self-appointed
guardians of national morals. In a number of instances, the British press
happily fuelled the ongoing debate, publishing occasional provocative
leaders, misleading reports, sheer fabrication and subversive images of
what was considered unseemly behaviour on the dance floor. Dance’s
proclivity to activate moral panic, especially where matters of bodily
proxemics among the young were concerned, provided excellent copy
for the rapidly growing and influential media of the period. Across
58
 Social Dancing in Britain 59

Europe and America, similar responses greeted the introduction of these

popular dance fashions which, regardless of social and moral condem-
nation, were eagerly embraced by the young and fashionable.2
The emergence of New York as a global centre for choreographic
innovation, codification, transmission and approval in popular dancing
began in the early part of the century to supersede the centuries-old pre-
dominance of Paris. Nonetheless, the French capital continued to exer-
cise influence through its aristocratic and émigré population of pleasure
consumers and suppliers. The seal of approval from Paris, ancestral
home of the ballet and thus, in Eurocentric eyes, of civilized dance in
general, continued, however, to hold sway until the 1920s when the
evolution of modern dancing, in which ‘movements are made in a
natural way, somewhat as in ordinary walking’ (Richardson, 1946: 11)
passed to London. During those years immediately prior to the outbreak
of war, opposition to ragtime dancing signalled alarm over an unset-
tling break with familiar bodily codes of class, gender, age and race.
In this mix of cultural exchanges, histories, power struggles, exigen-
cies and tastes, circulating discourses on social dancing in Britain fre-
quently appealed to ‘the natural’. Such essentialism served to bolster
the cases of those both for and against the new style of dancing. To
appreciate more fully this contested ground, where ‘the artificial’ versus
the ‘natural’, the ‘modern’ versus the ‘old-fashioned’, and the ‘primi-
tive’ versus ‘the sophisticated’ were interconnected sets of oppositions
in the debate, it is helpful to examine the claims made in the previous
century for the ballroom as a microcosm of civilized society; for, in the
eyes of critics, ragtime and other new social dance forms swept in under
the rubric of ‘modern dancing’ were the complete antithesis of civilized
behaviour.

Victorian fashionable dance culture

For much of the nineteenth century, fashionable social dancing in

Britain was led by the royal court whose model was largely imitated,
though with varying inflections, through the different strata of society
(Richardson, 1960). Hierarchical divisions had hardened during
Victoria’s reign; this rigid class structure operated in conjunction with
aspirational and actual social mobility to create a society that was
finely tuned to nuances of social distinction. Social dancers in towns
and cities performed a similar repertoire. This was dominated by round
dances such as the Waltz, Polka and Galop, all turning dances executed
by individual couples moving anti-clockwise around the ballroom; and
60 Dancing Naturally

square dances, notably the First Set of Quadrilles and Lancers which are
typically danced by four couples, each positioned along the sides of a
square.3 At state balls and other prestigious dance events, the Quadrille
functioned as the opening ceremonial dance, its places around the
square given to the highest ranking present. Male/female couples faced
one another across the square, underlining the potential for social inter-
action and observation afforded by the choreographic structure, while
the movements of the dance at such events were executed with the
stately elegance and polite distance that served to betoken an essential
aspect of aristocratic demeanour. The Waltz, initially condemned by
moral and social commentators upon its arrival in fashionable soci-
ety of the early 1800s for its close embrace and for its rapid, whirling
motion, was now performed in genteel circles with minimum body
contact between men and women. It constituted an ideal vehicle for
celebrating a romantic prelude to heterosexual union, the basis for
reproducing the unique social and cultural power group, made up of the
leading aristocratic families in the land, known variously as Society, the
Upper Ten Thousand and the Upper Ten.
These royal and aristocratic bodies were models of refined deport-
ment and movement, their embodied cultural inheritance reaching
back to the days of Louis XIV. In the courtly ballroom, emulated by
the middle and upper classes, order, rank and stability were performed
through unquestioning embodied rituals of etiquette, dress, deport-
ment and dancing that were intended to reflect a microcosm of a wider
civilized society. Each individual knew their place and subjugated their
personal needs for the greater happiness of all present by perform-
ing their allotted role as part of a greater machine that functioned
smoothly, harmoniously, gracefully and evenly; literally, no one was to
step out of line or place to upset the balanced rhythm that drove Society
(Engelhardt, 2009).
Such references to the epitome of polite and civilized behaviour in the
ballroom are a recurrent motif in Victorian prescriptive literature (see
Wilson, 2009). Of course, the ideal was not always realized, but for many
decades, the cultural hegemony exercised by the cultivation of gentility
among the middle and upper classes was endemic in English metropoli-
tan dance culture of the period. Politeness and attention to the rules
of the ballroom were key markers of personal, family, class and racial
distinction: the English Society ballroom was considered by its guard-
ians to be populated by the natural leaders of civilization. This belief
was seriously challenged by the younger generation’s fascination with
the Boston, the One-Step, and the Argentine Tango which, as morally
 Social Dancing in Britain 61

suspect and decadent forms in the eyes of many, compromised the once
unquestionable superiority of Society.

The decline of bodily artifice

Harmony in the Society ballroom had, however, been under threat for
some time prior to the onslaught of American ragtime dances; during
the 1890s there had been considerable complaint about the ‘rowdy’
style of dancing adopted by the young, who aimed to inject energy into
what they saw as a tired and restrictive repertoire (Buckland, 2011). The
time-consuming and ornate modes of greeting and deportment had also
grown less exacting over the nineteenth century, as the leaders of an
economically progressive empire eschewed movement behaviour that
might be interpreted as potentially insincere and unnecessarily fussy.
The English upper classes and bourgeoisie prided themselves on direct,
honest action and calm behaviour; gesticulation and highly codified
deportment and movement were thought best left to the foreigner.
Nonetheless, the British upper classes were still recognizable from oth-
ers by their deportment which retained many of the features of earlier
aristocratic embodied codes of social distinction: a stiffly held, upright
torso, restrained gesture, an even-paced unhurried gait and above all,
when dancing, a graceful demeanour which did not invite an observer’s
eye. There were of course gendered differences but the lack of individual
expression and condemnation of exhibitionism were shared traits: such
behaviour was considered vulgar, suggestive of the lower classes and of
the foreigner.
These movement codes of gentility and refinement were believed to
be innate among the upper classes. Their superior breeding was deemed
evident in their posture and movement in everyday life and was on
display especially on the dance floor. The aristocratic habitus was also,
however, one that, especially for women, was further cultivated by danc-
ing and deportment teachers. The role of the high-class dancing teacher
in inculcating bodily social distinction reflected the social status of his
or her clientele. The manner of performing the Victorian social dance
repertoire further reflected the cultural capital of the social elite whose
access to the latest Parisian and London dance fashions indicated their
wealth and connections. The choreographic simplicity of the new dances
from America, however, beginning with the Barn Dance in the 1880s, the
Washington Post and Two-Step in the 1890s (Richardson, 1960; Franks,
1963) and the new technique of the Boston (Richardson, 1946), which
gained favour among the more affluent upper-middle classes in London’s
62 Dancing Naturally

West End from around 1903, arguably rendered regular dancing classes
unnecessary.

The dancing craze, 1910–1914

From the 1890s, whether in the dance academies of the metropolitan

and suburban dancing teachers, or in the rising number of restaurants
and hotel ballrooms frequented by the affluent in London’s West End,
interest in social dancing as a regular leisure pursuit by the urban middle
classes quickly accelerated. London’s reputation for its theatres and night
life attracted audiences eager for new sensations. If not as morally shock-
ing as those performances available in Paris’s Montmartre, famous for its
Bohemian and libertine culture of artistic innovation, then at least the
new dance acts appealed to a growing desire for spectacles of fashionable
glamour and a curious gaze at the apparent exoticism of other cultures.
From 1910 until the outbreak of war, London was witness to a succes-
sion of new social dances, mostly from America via Paris, profiled on the
musical comedy stage and in music halls, theatres, restaurants and hotel
ballrooms. Exhibition ballroom dancers such as Oscar and Régine (later
Suzette) and Oscar’s more famous brother Maurice Mouvet and Florence
Walton, Marquis and Florence Clayton, and Almanos and Odette
became international celebrities, performing and teaching an affluent
clientele who possessed a hunger for fresh sensational dances such as
the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, the Bunny Hug, and variations on the
Boston and the Tango. Audiences clamoured to see more exhibitions of
moves such as lifts, raised and swivelled hips and shoulders, close bodily
contact between the couple and sudden dips to the floor, all of which
were forbidden in polite ballrooms, but which were all the more desir-
able to imitate in order to fulfil the directive to be up-to-date.

The new repertoire

For centuries, fashionable dance culture across Europe had required

the services of a dancing master; ragtime, on the other hand, appeared
to demand nothing more than an instinctual response to the driving
rhythm. Codified steps based on ballet technique and set choreogra-
phies became discarded among the fashionable in favour of an improvi-
sational approach which the new repertoire facilitated. The Boston had
heralded a more pedestrian technique that employed stepping in paral-
lel, as if walking, rather than employing the turned-out and pointed
foot favoured by Victorian dancing teachers. It also enabled the man,
 Social Dancing in Britain 63

leading his partner, to select his own pathway through space, rather
than, like an automaton, unthinkingly following the predetermined
and constant circling around the ballroom. Individual changes in direc-
tion by each couple, of course, threatened the overall coherence of the
ballroom, especially since the Boston was performed to waltz music:
old and new styles of waltzing literally collided in the space. The con-
ventions of orderly circling in one direction around the room in the
Victorian style of waltzing might be stopped short by a couple dancing
the Boston cutting across the circular flow of dancing traffic; not for
nothing was the Boston known in some quarters as the zigzag waltz.
Similarly, the ragtime One-Step (Humphrey, 1911) afforded an imme-
diate response to the music which might take dancers on a potential
collision course. Based on simple walking, one step to each beat, the
One-Step also enabled a couple to change direction without much warn-
ing. The compulsion to move to the music proved irresistible to many
lovers of ragtime: ‘Once on your feet and the band strikes the first notes
of the alluring “Ghost Walk”, you go, you move, oblivious of all around,
content to revel in the very joy of what you are doing’ (Hyatt-Woolf,
1911: 5). In this loss of self-awareness, however, couples ran the danger
of displaying insufficient concern for other dancers in the same space.
More alarmingly for guardians of correct etiquette and morality, the
much advertised animal dances such as the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly
Bear presented new opportunities for mimicry and play in public,
encouraging child-like behaviour in adult venues which hitherto had
been dedicated to stately decorum. ‘A couple waltzing’, complained
Pearl Humphry in The Daily Express in 1912,

will find themselves sent flying by a clucking, swooping young

woman or a young man who bears his body before him and his hands
behind his head in an attitude which no negro would recognize.
Or a pair will step down the room opposite each other, staring in
each other’s eyes with an expression of furious hatred. At the most
unexpected moment, the girl will fling herself bodily into the man’s
arms; he clutches her round the shoulders – the movements are best
described by any realistic French novelist.

Such lively dancing in the ballroom, regarded as harmless fun by a genera-

tion of increasingly liberated young women, was designated by Humphry,
whose descriptions here refer to the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear,
as more appropriate to ‘a set of drunken women from Montmartre’.
When the Tango became the next dance sensation, its close hold and
64 Dancing Naturally

sinuous style invited release from conventional polite restraints upon the
evocation of sensual heterosexual pleasure (Cooper, 1995; Savigliano,
1995). The expression of natural high spirits as childish play in the ragtime
dances was reprehensible enough; but the introduction of such appar-
ently risqué choreography caused many parents and moralists to wonder
at the type of natural expression that might be unleashed on the British
dance floor.

Contested ways of dancing

Modern dancing, its advocates claimed, allowed for the expression of

authentic, natural emotion rather than the repression of genuine feel-
ing, masked by dull convention. The right to self-expression through
movement was often legitimated by its devotees through the construc-
tion of music and dance as visceral art forms through which genuine
feeling might be made manifest. Contrasting the Victorian repertoire
with modern dancing, Elizabeth Hyatt-Woolf opined that dancing in
the past was ‘stilted, imitative, correct, delightfully charming and pleas-
ing to the eye, but ignorant of the real emotion that the music and
dance should create’ (1911: 5). Interestingly, she draws analogies with
Post-Impressionism, ‘or rather what their devotees claim for it – an
expression of the emotions, the real ecstasy of the spirit of the music’.
‘Real emotion’, and certainly public displays of ecstasy, however, in the
eyes of modern dancing’s critics, were human attributes that civilization
was designed to contain and control.
Among dance professionals, the most vociferous of modern dancing’s
critics in Britain was the older generation of dancing teachers, whose live-
lihoods and sense of moral decorum and aesthetics were threatened by
the call to dancers to enjoy instinctual reflexes rather than seek codified
tuition. Edward Scott, the most prolific writer on social dancing during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Buckland, 2003) had
long fought a public battle against what he regarded as ‘vulgar’ dancing,
the chief culprits of which in his opinion were the lower classes.
Following the widespread conviction among the dancing clientele
whom he and his peers served, Scott considered that the lower classes had
barely risen from animals in the evolutionary scale and that refined danc-
ing, as espoused by the upper classes and imitated by the middle, reflected
a civilized state to which all should aspire. Unrestrained bodily movement,
close contact between male and female partners, and the ready expression
of feelings, especially of a sexual kind, were, according to this world view,
symptomatic of animalistic behaviour. The new dances suggested that just
 Social Dancing in Britain 65

such a reversal in civilization was imminent, more especially so because

the source of these dances was not among the European peasantry whose
dances, in a much altered state and ‘refined’ for the polite ballroom by
dancing teachers, had for centuries supplied fashionable society with the
latest dance craze. Instead, according to prevailing notions of social evolu-
tion, the source was even more damaging to the standards of civilization
for it lay in the dancing and music of ‘primitive Africa’.
During the dancing season of 1912 to 1913, when the Tango craze
was at its height, a debate broke forth in the national press over the
supposed decadence of dancing in Society and the potential hazard to
the morals of the young. Edward Scott led the first major barrage in The
Daily Telegraph during February 1913, but it was an unnamed ‘Peeress’
in May of that year who in The Times unleashed a torrent of correspond-
ence among the ‘chattering classes’ of the day. For several weeks, The
Times published letters and commentary under the headings of ‘Modern
Dancing’ and ‘Dancing and Manners’, fanning the flames of a debate
that to many dancers of the new repertoire appeared to rest on igno-
rance and false impression rather than on any genuine knowledge of
what was actually taking place in the contemporary ballroom.
There was little doubt, though, that Society dancing had for several
years been in a state of decline and that the overworked repertoire of
Waltzes and Quadrilles was in urgent need of resuscitation. Some cor-
respondents expressed little surprise that these new dances were gaining
ascendancy over the established repertoire and etiquette still observed
at State Balls: contemporary dancing in Society, one writer argued, had
declined to the extent that it had become merely a ‘ritual without any
meaning, an inferior form of exercise, or a means of encouraging mar-
riage’ (anon.b., 1913).
The dangers of the new repertoire, according to its opponents, lay in
ignorance of the source of the new dances – especially among genteel
ladies whose moral purity might be jeopardized in the ballroom and who
needed protection from potential male predators. If only the source and
meaning of these dances were understood, Scott argued, then these new
dances would immediately be dropped from the ballroom. He remained
adamant that ‘in origin, however remote, and in expression, they are
negroid, and there is no reason for our civilization to assimilate such ele-
ments’ (22 May 1913, The Times).
For the majority of ballroom dancers, however, this attributed heritage
was not uppermost in their minds; the dancing’s illicit origins, suppos-
edly in ‘voluptuous desires of races which are only partially civilized’ (An
Unbiased Observer, 1913) may have added an extra frisson of forbidden
66 Dancing Naturally

excitement when challenging convention. But most records in favour of

modern dancing championed the pleasure that the dancers experienced
in their improvisational responses to the new music and the freedom of
opportunity for personal, not societal, control. ‘All keen dancers dance
for the love of it, for the exquisite joy of rhythm and movement and
for nothing else’, a ‘feminine Boston lover’ wrote in defence of her pre-
ferred dance (27 May 1913, The Times). Indeed, whether the Tango had
its origins in ancient Greece or South America, ‘dancers don’t care a fig
either way’ pronounced The Dancing Times (November, 1913, p. 111).
Not surprisingly given the prevalent racism of the period, empathy with
Afrocentric culture rarely registered in dancers’ endorsements. Instead,
their argument principally lay with what they perceived to be the ‘cold,
pompous dances’ of Victorian days and an old-fashioned etiquette which
masked sincerity and restricted a now desirable social interaction, based
upon personal choice rather than through the communal control of
their elders. This was a generation that upon the accession of George V
were persuaded of the advent of a new age and whose identity would be
marked by new cultural practices introduced from the young country
across the Atlantic whose political and economic star looked set to rise.
The young and fashionable aligned themselves with this new repertoire
ideologically, but its emotional and physiological sensations, it must not
be forgotten, constituted a large part of that rebellion.
The early years of the twentieth century in Britain were witness to
considerable social unrest: numerous strikes, transformative political
reforms, demands for female emancipation and representation, accel-
erating communications, international economic challenges and a
growing recognition that the British Empire was no longer the foremost
world power (Harris, 1994; Searle, 2004). The repertoire of previous
generations held little relevance for an age group that sought to identify
with speed, progression, freedom, intuition, spontaneity, informality
and, above all, with the new.
The fashioning of an artificial body appeared to belong to a more
leisured and formal time when the mannered ways of royal and aris-
tocratic society held sway; in contrast, the unfashioned natural body
seemed better suited to modern times of growing democracy, speed and
more direct social interaction. The aristocratic artificial body, moulded
over many years and, for females, contained in rigid expensive corsets,
had taken time and money to create; a natural body, attired in less rigid
and more comfortable clothing, appeared ready to take action and had
the benefit of appearing accessible to all in an increasingly democratic
age. The natural body was one unfettered by heavy clothing, lithe, slim
 Social Dancing in Britain 67

and synonymous with youthful action. Courtly deportment and dancing

appeared less relevant to the fashionable and affluent young woman
whose choices of leisure, especially in the physical realm, had expanded
from the narrow confines of decorous Society towards greater freedom
of movement and healthy competition. A Times writer observed that
‘[w]hether we regret it or not, hockey rather than “deportment” is the
study of the modern young lady; and it is impossible to expect her to
return to a standard of ceremony which she has abandoned everywhere
else’ (anon.a, 1913). Her male counterpart similarly embraced the shift
towards a style of dancing that was ‘more athletic’ and in tune with his
‘natural’ self to which he might give free expression.
For advocates of the new style of dancing, ‘artifice’ in the form of
consciously learned and rehearsed dancing and social action, stood in
negative opposition to the more ‘natural’ style and manners of moder-
nity. Underneath the veneer of civilization, according to this view, beat
a genuine heart:

Somewhere in the heart of each one of us, however conventional we

may be, there is the spirit of revolt and the desire of escape – revolt
against the conventional etiquette of society, against the restraints of
respectability, escape to a land of liberty, where for a little while the
emotions may be unfettered, where laughter may ring free, where
one’s real nature, swathed up as a rule in all the swaddling-clothes of
modern life, may reveal itself without fear of what the world thinks
of one’s neighbour.
(anon., 1910: 13)

Ragtime music and its dances offered such escapism (Parsonage, 2005)
within the relatively confined space of a private party; but in the
increasingly public culture of metropolitan hotel ballrooms and restau-
rants such licence of individual and improvisational movement, that
constituted new social freedoms, was not so easily contained. For the
self-appointed guardians of social and moral harmony such terpsicho-
rean liberties heralded a recipe for disorder and degeneration.

Nature and race

For those believers in the formally acquired corporeal codes of a Eurocen-

tric civilization, failure to acquire and to practise the accumulated bodily
wisdom of an elite and European past endangered the smooth and har-
monious workings of society. Nature untamed, equated with uncivilized
68 Dancing Naturally

behaviour, suggested for the conservative faction in the debate, at best,

the promotion of discourteous behaviour and an unruly ballroom and,
at worst, a descent into sexual orgies and barbarism. Cultural practices
were discussed in the debate as indicators of progress on the sliding scale
of evolutionary ascent and, for critics, wilfully misinterpreting African
sourced choreomusical repertoire, what they viewed as ‘artless’ in the
new dances resonated not with positive attributes of ‘the natural body’,
but with Victorian racist stereotypes whose potential influence as models
of behaviour was viewed as corruptive and disturbing.
Such natural responses were morally suspect in Scott’s eyes: ‘it might …
be conceded that the men who introduce exotic and unseemly antics,
and the girls who encourage them to do so, are only practising the art of
“self-expression”’ (1913: 60). Unsurprisingly dismissive of the self-expres-
sion of ragtime dances, Scott’s bigotry, shared by many of the period,
went further, classing the Turkey Trot ‘as a dance of purely negro origin,
frankly symbolic of those primitive instincts of human nature which it
is the aim of civilization to suppress’ (The Times, 22 May 1913). This was
Nature not as a celebration of all that is construed as best in the human
body, as in the contemporary revival of classical dancing fed by neo-
Hellenism, but Nature as an untamed beast of passion, whose presence
and meaning might be measured through the lens of Social Darwinism.
In the debate on the state of the British ballroom, the concept of
Nature had become overtly racialized, opponents of modern dancing
xenophobically castigating the new repertoire as foreign introductions
that were judged alien and unworthy of the ‘true’ English. Indeed, in
the desire to find a morally approvable but essentially English rep-
ertoire, some opponents to the new ballroom repertoire advocated
another aspect of so-called natural dancing by suggesting a revival of
the newly canonized folk dances that was perceived as evidence of the
ancient, rural culture of the English countryside. Perceval Lucas, mem-
ber of Cecil Sharp’s demonstration team of morris dancers, advanced
the opinion that such folk dances were ‘the product and natural
expression of the English people, as opposed to the Continental and
American importations which fill the ball-room of today’ (The Times,
5 June 1913). For the majority of socialites, however, the melodic strains
of English folk music could not compete with the rhythmic dynamism
and novelties of ragtime and the Tango.
Turned out feet, pointed toes, a stiffly held and erect torso, a studied
distance between male and female, and set choreography along a prede-
termined spatial and rhythmic trajectory became increasingly meaning-
less to a younger generation that enjoyed opportunities for greater social
 Social Dancing in Britain 69

mobility, a relaxation of gender roles, and increasing personal choice in

leisure. Parallel feet, choreographic motifs based upon walking, a more
relaxed torso, closer body contact, freedom to travel on the dance floor
and to respond spontaneously to the music were perceived to be more
in tune with contemporary social and cultural life. This corporeal para-
digm shift is discernible across both social and theatrical contexts of the
period under the rubric of modern dancing. Throughout the nineteenth
century, there had developed a growing distinction between theatrical
and social movement that respectively mapped on to cultural beliefs
of the artificial and the natural and the moral superiority of English
Society. By the early twentieth century, Victorian social dancing with its
roots in the ballet technique was regarded as artificial and antiquated,
and its social values were positioned as irrelevant to modern life.
The Boston, One-Step and Tango, followed later by the Foxtrot in
1915, had popularized a style of dancing based upon pedestrian move-
ment and which, when codified by the ballroom branch of the Imperial
Society of Teachers of Dancing during the 1920s, formed the basis of
modern English ballroom dancing. Once adopted, these dances became
representative of an international style, one which required a less rigid
deportment but which, nonetheless cultivated the sense of elegant effort-
less in movement that had signalled the ‘natural’ good breeding of the
English social elite. In this fusion of the grace and gentility of former
aristocratic corporeal codes with a simpler, direct and easy mode of
propulsion around the ballroom, the more aesthetically progressive yet,
nonetheless, socially conservative teachers and dancers shaped English
ballroom dancing away from the stiff posture and courtly artifice of
Victorian dancing and etiquette. They also condemned the extremes of
improvisational movement in ragtime and the ‘go-as-you-please’ manner
of the new repertoire, dismissing untutored natural movement as racially
marked, regressive and uncivilized.
By the 1920s, the artificial corporeal codes of the Victorian social danc-
ing teacher may have been finally rejected, but so, too, for the fashionable
dancer now espousing a return to genteel values, were the natural bodily
impulses of dancers’ spontaneous responses to music. In any case, regard-
less of its ideological attributions, Nature unrestrained had proved to
be too socially and physically disruptive and needed to be tamed to a
certain extent in order to prevent actual collisions on the dance floor. A
more respectful manner between dancers needed to be inculcated, more
congruous with and symptomatic of the cult of gentility which in the years
after the First World War spread further across the middle classes. In this
ever more socially mobile and democratic age, the aristocracy could no
70 Dancing Naturally

longer lay sole claim to innate good breeding; many among the mid-
dle classes now considered themselves as genteel and of good family.
The natural body, not as essentially primitive or indeed as expressive of
a lower social status, but instead as inherently refined, came to be re-
articulated and profiled through the modern ballroom dancing style of
the English middle classes. It was they who now assumed cultural lead-
ership on the dance floor, their style of dancing steered by the dictates
of committees of professional dancing teachers and ballroom dancers. A
more ‘natural’ yet still genteel style of dancing, appropriate to the mid-
dle classes’ sense of Englishness, replaced the extremes of individualism
and improvisatory liberties that had been unleashed and had largely
gone undisciplined in the pre-First World War craze for natural and self-
expressive dancing.
Over subsequent decades that interest in, and appetite for, less-codified
styles of social dancing that might be easily imitated, be more spontane-
ous and personal in expression, did not disappear but later resurfaced and
gathered momentum after the Second World War. As successive genera-
tions rejected the dancing of their elders, continuing to look towards the
latest in African-American culture, the dance floor, where long-held con-
ventions of social order had been so dramatically challenged in the early
1900s, retained a significant role as a key space for embracing the new
and rejecting the old. In the process, the desire to move naturally, follow-
ing instinct rather than dictated pattern and defying the boundaries of
social corporeality, frequently resonated with the wider contestation of
political, cultural and social authority that characterized so much of the
twentieth century.

Notes
1. For a fuller treatment of many of the topics raised in this chapter, in particu-
lar the values of class, gender, ethnicity and modernity in relation to social
dancing, please refer to my book, Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England
1870–1920, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. I wish to thank the Arts
and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy and De Montfort
University for their generous support of the research upon which this chapter
is based.
2. This phenomenon has been the subject of recent investigation by dance his-
torians. Of particular relevance here are the analytical studies of early twenti-
eth century popular dance in America and in France; see, in particular, Cook
(1998, 1999); George-Graves (2009), Jacotot (2007), Malnig (1992, 2009) and
Robinson (2004, 2006, 2009, 2010). These countries exercised considerable
cultural influence on Britain and in international ballroom matters.
 Social Dancing in Britain 71

3. For reconstructions of these dances from nineteenth-century dance manuals,

see Aldrich (1990).

Bibliography
Aldrich, E. 1990 An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals ca.
1490–1920, for the Music Division, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.
govn/ammem/dihtml/dihome.html.
Anon. 1910 ‘Bohemia in Mayfair’, The Dance Journal (May): 11–13.
Anon.a 1913 ‘Modern Dancing. A Controversy and a Retrospect. The Need for
Beau Nash’, The Times (23 May).
anon.b 1913 ‘The Moral of the “Turkey Trot”’, The Times (26 May).
An Unbiased Observer. 1913 The Times (4 June).
Buckland, T. J. 2003 ‘Edward Scott: The Last of the English Dancing Masters’,
Dance Research, 21.2: 3–35.
—— 2011 Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870–1920. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Cook, S. C. 1998 ‘Passionless Dancing and Passionate Reform: Respectability,
Modernism, and the Social Dancing of Irene and Vernon Castle’, in Washabaugh,
1998.
—— 1999 ‘Watching our Step: Embodying Research, Telling Stories’, in E. Barkin,
and L. Hamessley (eds), Audible Traces: Gender, Identity and Music. Zürich:
Carcifoli Verlagshaus.
Cooper, A. 1995 ‘Tangomania in Europe and North America 1913–1914’, in
S. Collier, A. Cooper, A. S. Azzi and R. Martin, Tango: The Dance, the Song, the
Story. London: Thames & Hudson.
Engelhardt, M. 2009 Dancing Out of Line. Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in
Victorian Fiction and Culture. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Franks, A. H. 1963 Social Dance: A Short History. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
George-Graves, N. 2009 ‘“Just like Being at the Zoo”: Primitivity and Ragtime
Dance’, in J. Malnig (ed.), Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom
Dance. New York and London: New York University Press.
Harris, J. 1994 Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914. London: Penguin.
Hewitt, C. 1912 ‘The Turkey Trot’, The Dancing Times (November): 80–1.
Humphrey, W. 1911 ‘Can You Do The One-Step?’, The Dancing Times (January):
80–1.
Humphry, P. 1912 ‘Hostesses’ Standpoint’, The Daily Express (19 February): 8.
Hyatt-Woolf, E. 1911 ‘Passing of the Waltz’, The Dance Journal (May): 5–6.
Jacotot, S. 2007 ‘The Inversion of Social Dance Transfers between Europe and the
Americas at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Choreographies of Migration:
Patterns of Global Mobility, 2007 Conference Proceedings, Congress on Research
in Dance, pp.106–11.
Malnig, J. 1992 (ed.), Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom Dance.
New York and London: New York University Press.
—— 2009 ‘Apaches, Tangos, and Other Indecencies. Women, Dance, and New
York Nightlife of the 1910s’, in J. Malnig (ed.), Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham,
Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader. Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press.
72 Dancing Naturally

Parsonage, C. 2005 The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935. Aldershot:

Ashgate.
Richardson, P. J. S. 1946 A History of English Ballroom Dancing (1910–1945).
London: Herbert Jenkins.
—— 1960 The Social Dances of the Nineteenth Century in England. London: Herbert
Jenkins.
Robinson, D. 2004 Race in Motion: Reconstructing the Practice, Profession, and
Politics of Social Dancing, New York City 1900–1930. Unpublished PhD thesis,
University of California, Riverside.
—— 2006 ‘“Oh, You Black Bottom!”: Appropriation, Authenticity and Opportu-
nity in the Jazz Dance Teaching of 1920s New York’, Dance Research Journal,
38.1/2: 19–42.
—— 2009 ‘Performing American: Ragtime Dancing as Participatory Minstrelsy’,
Dance Chronicle, 32.1: 89–126.
—— 2010 ‘The Ugly Duckling: The Refinement of Ragtime Dancing and the
Mass Production and Marketing of Modern Social Dance’, Dance Research, 28.2:
179–99.
Savigliano, M. E. 1995 Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Oxford:
Westview Press.
Scott, E. 1913 All About the Boston: A Critical and Practical Treatise on Modern Waltz
Variations. London: George Routledge & Sons.
Searle, G. R. 2004 A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Washabaugh, W. (ed.) 1998 The Passion of Music and Dance: Body, Gender and
Sexuality. Oxford: Berg.
Wilson, C. A. 2009 Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane
Austen to the New Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6
Dancing Based on Natural
Movement
Mary A. Johnstone and Madge Atkinson
Extracts edited by Alexandra Carter

The following extracts are taken from an unpublished manuscript held in the
Natural Movement (NM) archives at the National Resource Centre for Dance
(NRCD) at the University of Surrey (NM/E/2/3).1 This document is part of a
larger collection of papers which appears to form the basis of talks and lectures
given primarily by Madge Atkinson, the British artist/teacher who developed
the dance form of Natural Movement (NM/E/2/3/1). Care must be taken in
ascribing authorship, however, for none of the papers are signed or attributed.
Some are handwritten, some are typed, some typed with annotation. The
archives do hold a verified but undated copy of Atkinson’s own handwriting
and this can be matched against some of the manuscripts, but any certainties
are problematic for this comparison does not allow for changes in handwriting
over a period of years. Furthermore, the papers are not dated. They were kept,
perhaps for tidiness, in printed programmes dated 1928 but this is no sure
indication of date/period of writing.
The unpublished book manuscript, entitled ‘Dancing Based on Natural
Movement’, is the lengthiest document in this collection. It is typewritten, with
handwritten annotation. A typed Contents page indicates nine chapters organized
in two Parts. There follows a set of pages hand-numbered from 61–115 which
comprises Part II, only a part of the conceived whole. It is unknown whether the
rest of the book, Part I, was in progress, or whether it has been lost.
The extracts from Part II below are chosen to illustrate some key themes of
this volume on Dancing Naturally. They reveal how the late nineteenth century,
neo-Romantic fascination with nature, as source and inspiration, merged with the
crafted approach to the construction of dances which informed twentieth-century
modern dance. (Although those who are sometimes known as the precursors
of modern dance, such as Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan, carefully formed
their choreography rather than relying on improvisation, they tended not to
articulate, or emphasize, their craft.) These extracts, along with the illustrations
73
74 Dancing Naturally

found with them (of which Figure 6.1 is an example), are also important as pri-
mary sources, alongside other written, aural, photographic or kinetic materials on
Natural Movement, because they explicitly indicate the choreographic process.2
On the title page, the intended book is attributed to co-authors Mary Johnstone
and Madge Atkinson. The Manchester Guardian of 1924 reports that Johnstone
was headmistress of Manchester Central High School for Girls.3 They note that
her book The Physical Training of Girls (Sidgwick and Jackson, pp. viii, 118,
3s. 6d.net) ‘is approached with respect … Miss Johnstone discusses Swedish
drill, Dalcroze Eurythmics, the Madge Atkinson School of Natural Movement –
for which she has a very real enthusiasm – and the Greek art of Mrs. Diana
Watts’ (NM/M/2 Manchester Guardian, February 1924).4 This description, in
itself, is indicative of the expanding nature of girls’ physical education, with
the tempering of the more regimented drill with the arguably more creative and
individually interpretative Eurythmics and Natural Movement. Interestingly,
Johnstone’s name appears first in this ostensibly co-authored book, whereas
some of the annotation on the typewritten text appears to be in Atkinson’s
handwriting. This might have been a marketing strategy if Johnstone had pub-
lished previously and her name was known in the field, or possibly Johnstone
prepared the bulk of the manuscript with Atkinson’s advice.

Figure 6.1 ‘(Ed. ne Alimari) N. 26970. ROMA – Musee Vaticano. Donne che
conducono un Toro al sacrifizio. (Scultura antica.)’ Illustration in mss.papers
‘Dancing based on Natural Movement’ by Mary A. Johnstone and Madge
Atkinson. (National Resource Centre for Dance, University of Surrey. NRCD refer-
ence NM/E/2/3/1)
 Dancing Based on Natural Movement 75

Madge Atkinson (1885–1970) developed her system of Natural Movement

initially in Manchester, then later in London (see Chapter 2 in this volume for
an account of her career and work). She published a small amount of writing
in her own name (for example, Atkinson, 1926) but, unlike her contemporar-
ies Ruby Ginner and Margaret Morris, did not produce a monograph.
* * *

The extracts from the manuscript extrapolated below cohere around the theme
of dance and music. The relationship between these two art forms was central
to Natural Movement, as it was for her contemporary Ruby Ginner who devel-
oped her Revived (later Classical) Greek Dance, and to many other international
artists whose work was inspired by the ideas and practice of Emile Jacques
Dalcroze. Although initially devised to help with the training of musicians by
working with movement and sound, Dalcroze’s work was highly influential on
artists who were seeking dance/movement vocabularies as alternatives to those
drawn from classical ballet. Dalcroze introduced his system of Eurythmics to
Britain in 1910.
What the following extracts illustrate is the strong pedagogic approach;
that is, how the student of Natural Movement can learn systematically about
musical notes, structures, forms and the way that music can be used in the
creation of dance works. In class work, it would appear that ten minutes from
each class was dedicated specifically to learning about music and movement.
These sections of the manuscript are followed by brief paragraphs on Dress
and Staging and Lighting; these are included below in order to demonstrate the
general principles by which Atkinson worked in the overall stage production.
The headings are from the original manuscript; words which were underlined
in the original are here italicized.

Music and its relation to the Dance

The essential alliance between music and rhythmic movement has been
stressed over and over again in our introductory chapters. It remains
now to indicate how the two interact, and to outline the graded scheme
designed to strengthen the musical faculty of the child through the
medium of a system of training in Natural Movement.
There are different ways in which the body can respond to the music.

(a) It can move against a rhythmical background which forms the

accompaniment of the dance.
(b) It can interpret thought and illustrate some definite idea.
(c) It can give a literal translation of the notes by moving to each note.
76 Dancing Naturally

A series of exercises follows which links musical notes with travelling actions;
these exercises are developed into phrases in which qualitative values such as
tone and pitch are discussed. On the basis of this, more freedom can be given
to the student to improvise.

Free interpretation should now be tried. Form a circle and let the chil-
dren move in harmony with the music as they choose. At first, they will
probably only interpret the different dance themes as they come along,
such as running or step and hop, but they should be left with an entirely
free hand to do what they like, and generally some very good results are
obtained. It is for the teacher to guide them in further developments in free
interpretation, to make them differentiate between actual, stepping note
valuation and free interpretation to the music played. This can be done
by giving examples in some particular action such as the Slow Turn, the
sweeping arm movement possibly describing the particular passage, or the
preparation for the Lying Down, until, by easy stages, the children respond
happily and unconsciously to the music. When the dance arrives, music
and movement come with greater ease and the pupil will realise5 sentences
in the formation of the dance and the musical grouping more quickly.

There follows a discussion of various dance forms in music, with examples of

composers through the ages. These pages are heavily annotated, and factual
corrections are made, indicating that it was perhaps written by Johnstone and
amended by the musically very knowledgeable Atkinson.

The Dance

The School of Natural Movement has evolved for itself in the course of
its experiments an ideal of the Dance which has been very sympatheti-
cally and understandingly expressed by a Manchester playwright as part
of his critical estimate of the work of the School; we venture to quote it
here. ‘Movements are to the dance as words to literature, notes to music,
colours to the picture; from the careful arrangement of these, consciously
or unconsciously as the case may be, is the work of art created.’
A dance may be a work of art, a harmony in which are blended rightly
all the elements of which it is composed – the music which controls its
form, the conception which it is its mission to express, the characters
chosen to convey it, the accessories of dress and setting which lend their
assistance. If it is to have any artistic value it must be the offspring of deep
thought and painstaking effort.
The task of creating a dance may be approached in one or other of two
ways: either a musical composition suggests a certain group of movements,
 Dancing Based on Natural Movement 77

or a movement motif which takes shape in the dance-composer’s mind

drives her in search of music which can be wedded to it. As (sic) examples
of imaginative dances built up in the latter fashion may be mentioned –
the Sea-gull’s (sic) flight, the opening of a flower, autumn leaf-fall.
Music is of course a crucial and a difficult question to settle. When one
can have music specially written for the dance one may obtain an ideal
combination, but there are obvious reasons of expense and expediency
which, in general, preclude this.
The music being chosen, and the central theme of the dance being
fixed in relation to it, the dance-composer must first concentrate on
the music, getting by heart its phrasing and setting the form of note
imitation, before attempting to touch the actual design of the dance.
This rule applies more particularly to music which has not been writ-
ten specifically for the dance-movement. Next, the composer begins
to shape the movement, first sketching in the outline of the scenes as
an artist would a picture, and then, little by little, working in detail or
deleting unnecessary lines which would interfere with the unity of the
composition. This sketching in of the dance settles the arrangement
of the designs on the ground. When making steps, it has often been
found advisable to make the ground design to a definite phrase of music
with the rough idea of steps to be placed upon it, before the detail is
worked out.

Scenic Dances. The Scenic Dances to which the training given in the
School of Natural Movement leads up (sic) may be referred to conven-
iently as ‘ballets’, but it must be clearly understood that their aim and
their technique are in no sense those of the formal ballet.

The following extracts are taken from an article by Miss Atkinson published in
the Dance Journal.6 They explain her ideas on ballet production.

‘Three of the most interesting ballets I have done to music embodying

a descriptive idea are Mother Goose Suite, by Ravel, Children’s Corner,
by Debussy, and Les Tableaux d’une Exposition, by Moussorgski (sic).
In these three compositions the musicians have had descriptive ideas
which they have expressed in music, the first two being definitely ballet
themes. The last is a succession of mime scenes rather than a dance.
Another ballet I composed to ‘Fingal’s Cave’ from the Hebridean Suite
by Mendelssohn. Here the composer had certainly no idea of a ballet, but
his musical inspiration gave a wonderful idea to the dancer. I waited two
years before I could find an opportunity to produce this ballet, and during
that time I spent many hours watching the waves on the sea-shore, and
78 Dancing Naturally

in caves and pools, trying to reflect in the dance the wonderful rhythm
of the sea, as Mendelssohn had done in the music. The opportunity came
and I produced it at the Opera House, Manchester.
When I produced the first movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony
the inspiration came purely from hearing the music; it was instantane-
ous, although I had at the back of my mind the knowledge that Dvorak
had written this symphony on various dance motifs, and this brought
about the idea for my own ballet, which I called Spirits of the Dance.
I have been fortunate in having the music for three ballets, diverse in
type, composed for me. The first was Raag Deepak: the Tune of Fire. This is
founded upon an interesting old Indian legend, for which Edward Isaacs,
a very well-known northern musician, who is interested in my work,
kindly offered to compose music.7 I discussed the idea of the piece with
Mr. Isaacs and gave him my preconceived idea of the whole ballet in
movement and mime; and he illustrated it so beautifully that there was
very little alteration from the dance as originally planned when the music
was complete. It was produced at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, under
Mr. Isaac’s conductorship, and later at the Opera House, Manchester,
accompanied by the Halle Orchestra.
The second dance was a little child’s ballet scene with music arranged
by F. Anderson Tyrer, illustrating Yeate’s (sic) poem A Stolen Child. For
this I discussed the poem with Mr. Anderson Tyrer, asking if he could
compose music to the verse and round it. Thus I left him to weave the
background; and when it was completed I composed the ballet to his
music, which is a delicate and delightful interpretation principally on
muted strings.

Le Bal Masque. The third ballet, again arranged by Edward Isaacs,

linked up many dance tunes from the period of Louis Quatorze, prin-
cipally compositions by Lully, Rameau, and Rousseau; it was called Le
Bal Masque. In this case, I wove a story round a collection of old French
court dances, these dances already possessing their music. Mr. Isaacs
composed suitable music for mime, linking up the dances, until, with
his help, dance and mime harmonised perfectly.
As soon as the idea for the ballet has been formed and the music cho-
sen, I roughly sketch in the principal incidents which certain passages
of music have definitely suggested, then link them all together into a
whole, leaving all detailed movement alone until after the rehearsals
have begun. Before we start the first rehearsal I have the music played to
the dancers, explaining the evolution of the ballet as it is to be applied
to the different passages of music. I feel it is essential for the dancers to
 Dancing Based on Natural Movement 79

realise the spirit of the ballet and know how it is going to be applied to
the music, before they commence any movement.
I then show the dancers various detailed steps and movements which I
have worked out to certain passages of the music. We tackle these at once;
sometimes it is the opening, sometimes a strong movement in the mid-
dle, or even the end, which is attempted if I have got just the movement
detailed in my mind. After that we quickly sketch in the whole ballet,
and, from the scaffolding we have made, gradually work in bit by bit, all
detail. I am particularly fond of creating the effect of an arrested group
out of a seemingly chaotic stage ground-design of rapid movement; the
two extremes of action give life to the ballet and tone to the whole; again,
the music always suggests this. Needless to say, the ‘seemingly chaotic
ground-design’ has to be taken in as much detail as the most arrested
pose, or true disorder would be the outcome and nothing attained.

A brief discussion follows on how Atkinson approaches ballet in operas. The

chapter then moves on to explain principles of costume, staging and lighting.

Dress. The dress worn must bear a sympathetic relationship to the dance
itself, not only in shape but in colour. The figure of the dance and the
spirit of the dance should be carefully kept in mind when deciding upon
the character of the costumes. Slow movements and music may suggest
long flowing lines which can be created most effectively by employing
soft material and delicate colours such as pale shades of green and mauve,
dull blues and browns. For pastoral dances, shorter draperies give a crisper
gayer character, and shades of blue, green, yellow, mauve and pink are all
suitable. Colours such as red, orange, and bright shades of blue and green
suggest dances full of life and character. The success of the dress-scheme is
not dependent on its costliness. Quite inexpensive materials which drape
just as you want them, made up with the utmost simplicity, may leave
nothing to be desired in the way of effect. Ingenious brains and skilful
fingers can fabricate them at small expenditure of time and money. But,
they must be just right – trimly perfect in every detail. (A critical specta-
tor at an operatic performance has been heard to suggest that certain
garments looked as if they needed ironing.) 8

Staging and Lighting. These are of course of outstanding importance

when placing dances on a stage. They may contribute immensely to the
beauty of the performance, or they may be irritating enough to spoil it
completely for some spectators. By clever manipulation, many wonder-
ful effects may be compassed. The lights thrown on the dancers must
80 Dancing Naturally

enhance the colours of the dresses, and, what is of more moment, create
an atmosphere which will envelope the whole scene – an atmosphere
brilliant, dainty, or sombre, as the music may demand. The dance pro-
ducer who cannot afford elaborate stage equipment has no need to
repine, for a background of curtains, of suitable texture and colour, can
hardly be surpassed: there is nothing in such surrounding (sic) to distract
attention from the dance.

Dates of works cited in manuscript

Mother Goose Suite (1921); Children’s Corner (1925); Les Tableaux
d’une Exposition (1930); ‘Fingal’s Cave’ from the Hebridean Suite (1925,
titled in programmes as The Hebridean Overture ‘Fingal’s Cave’ and the
Hebridean Adventures ‘Fingal’s Cave’); Spirits of the Dance (1927); Raag
Deepak: the Tune of Fire (1916); A Stolen Child (1917, but the attribu-
tion to Yeat’s poem is not mentioned until 1926); Le Bal Masque (1915, in
programme as Au Bal Masque). My thanks to Laura Griffiths of the NRCD
for her research on these dates.

Notes
1. The manuscript was discovered during a process of preservation, cataloguing
and research dissemination facilitated by the Pioneer Women project based at
the University of Surrey (see Chapter 2, Note 1).
2. These papers also include an illustration which might have been intended
for the book (Figure 6.1). Its main caption is ROMA – Musee Vaticano. Donne
che conducono un Toro el sacrifizio. (Scultura antica) (trans. Women who lead
a bull to sacrifice). This frieze picture depicts two women either side of a
large-tusked bull. Under each female figure, there are hand-written notes,
‘backward expression of rock’ and ‘forward expression of rock’. (See Atkinson
1926 for an explanation of the ‘rocking step’.) This picture and annotation
very clearly reveals the impact of Greek artefacts and art on early twentieth-
century culture; in this case, on the development of a dance vocabulary. It
also indicates, however, the problematic nature of interpreting these sources;
rather than ‘rocking’, these gestures could equally be the artistic conven-
tion for running figures. Thus, the classicism which served as inspiration
for so many cultural activities and beliefs, not least dance, in the early
twentieth century, was based not only on an idealized view of Greek culture
and on artefacts which, in themselves, were artistic representations of that
culture, but were also interpreted in imaginative rather than strictly anthro-
pological ways.
3. This is now the Shena Simon Campus of Manchester College.
4. Diana Watts was the author of The Renaissance of the Greek Ideal (1914, pub-
lisher unknown), a book which explored the presentation of the body in
Greek sculpture.
5. The term ‘realise’ is used here to indicate the physical execution of the task.
 Dancing Based on Natural Movement 81

6. Citation given as ‘Dance Journal published by the Imperial Society of Teachers

of Dancing, July 1931’.
7. Edward Isaacs attended the Royal Manchester College of Music from 1894,
and then continued his studies in Germany and Austria. He settled in
Manchester and, despite being blinded in an accident in 1924, become a well-
known pianist, composer, lecturer and teacher.
8. In the Natural Movement costume archives at the NRCD, there are several
examples of scarves, head coverings and costume which have been ‘tie-dyed’
and are therefore rather ‘scrunched’ in appearance. It might well have been
this device about which the spectator/critic commented.

Bibliography
Atkinson, M. 1926 ‘The Dance, Based on Natural Movement: An introduction to
my system of teaching’, Dancing Times, December 1926, 290–9.
7
Undressing and Dressing Up:
Natural Movement’s Life in
Costume
Rachel Fensham

In 1938, Madge Atkinson, the British choreographer and teacher of

‘Natural Movement’, relocated from Manchester to London where she
featured in The Woman’s National Newspaper as a figure of interest. The
observant journalist visiting her studio noticed that along one wall there
were ‘dozens of shelves containing the hundreds of dresses needed for the
various ballets danced by her pupils’. From his interview, he concluded
that ‘Miss Atkinson usually designs the dresses as well as the ballets.’1
Housed now in the Natural Movement archives, the ‘hundreds of
dresses’ preserved by Atkinson’s acolytes reside in dozens of cardboard
boxes neatly labelled, and tied with string.2 Inside, delicately wrapped
in tissue paper, lie bundles of costumes – many of them tunics and
scarves but including patterned skirts, embroidered jackets, elaborate
headdresses and masks. Other artefacts include a magnificent book of
costume illustrations as well as photographs and press clippings that
document the performance history of this early twentieth-century
dance culture. In reflecting upon the absent bodies that might have
brought these costumes to life, my own interest became piqued by the
material traces in the costume details attached to lives that extended
beyond the authorial claims of Miss Atkinson.
Recent performance studies scholars, such as Joseph Roach (1996) and
Diana Taylor (2003), have discussed the intertwined roles of the archive
and the repertoire, whereby the evidence of the past illuminates the oral,
gestural and expressive performances, or ‘restored behaviours’, that belong
to previous artistic practices, cultural events and memorials. In this chap-
ter, however, I am interested less in retrieving the performative vocabulary
of the costumes and more in considering what constitutes their material
past; in order to understand how these objects constitute a network of
interpersonal collaborations and production technologies. What seems
82
 Natural Movement’s Life in Costume 83

significant is not the ‘look’ of the costume, or the ‘how’ of the textile and
design principles, but the ways in which the ‘stuff’ of the costumes par-
ticipated in construction of a ‘natural movement’ aesthetic claimed and
adopted as Atkinson’s unique innovation in modern dance.
By relocating these costumes into the cultural economy of British
textile production in northern England, specifically Manchester, in
the interwar period, I aim to consider what Paul Carter calls a ‘craft
environment’. I want to suggest that the very fibres of each dress, or
the colours of each scarf, speak in this sense of an active weaving of dif-
ferent cultural strands, as ‘the loom of multiplicity that unifies’ (Carter,
2004: 15). A craft environment consists therefore of a weaving process
in which multiple strands of creative work, and social practices, form
the warp and weft of invention, allowing a new artistic practice to come
into being through the labouring together of hands and ideas. By exam-
ining the cut, texture and colour of these costumes, I will suggest that
the dancing of the dresses, far from a solo invention, was a collabora-
tive practice, involving new and appropriated design processes, as well
as the forms of female labour, domestic and subaltern, which made the
natural active within culture.

Undressing: the tunic reveals and the scarf speaks

There is little substantive literature on the use and representation of

costumes in dance; however, art historians have written on how clothes
represent the body in visual art. In Anne Hollander’s seminal book,
Seeing through Clothes, she writes: ‘The picture the garments make on the
body pleases because of its resemblance to a current ideal of shape, line,
trim, texture, and movement’ (1993: 313–14). Garments are therefore
intricately linked to the representation of ideas about bodily form in
characteristics which align closely with dance. While early black and
white photography and film has led dance historians to theorize the
elements of shape, line, and trim, as well as musical pattern, in the flow-
ing figures of modern dance, the aesthetic properties of ‘texture’ and
‘colour’ have been neglected in movement analysis. The garments in
the Natural Movement archive have evocative shapes, but their textures
also provide formative information about the idealization of the body
at different stages of the dance practice.
At the most elemental level of studio training and rehearsal, a Natural
Movement dancer, whether child or young woman, wore a simple cos-
tume which consisted of (white) silk body-suit joined at the shoulder,
leaving bare the flesh of arms and legs. For young women whose mothers
84 Dancing Naturally

wore the long bloomers and dark underskirts of the Victorian era, this
sleek, unadorned outfit must have signalled a revolution of exposure. The
nubile female form could be fully seen in this under-garment and there is
an erotic charge associated with the crumpled panties and the potentially
sweaty flesh they once contained. Covered by a short tunic and loosely
tied at the waist by a girdle, the whole outfit resembles a truncated Greek
chiton. As a standardized costume for the studio, each child or woman
wore matching bloomers, tunics and girdles differentiated only by the
hand-stitched name label at the neckline.3 This loss of individual identity
participates in an idealizing of pure form epitomized in a photograph of
Atkinson’s Hoop Dance (1933), where the still hoop and the curved lines
of the woman from arched back to extended legs appear synonymous.4
Atkinson’s codification of the tunic went, however, beyond the formal
properties of line and shape to the repetition and variation of coloured
hues: ‘orange, tie-dyed yellow dark to white, blue through to green,
cream through to pale purples, red, white, blue through to purple, gold,
deep orange’.5 The further addition of texture through the crush-drying
of fabrics was to animate the effects of colour in a dress (Figure 7.1). In
this way, colour as tonal variation becomes a property that extends the
formal shape of a costume in dance expression.
The frequent use of draped fabric, in particular scarves, in modern
dance is a design element that has been appropriated from folk and
ethnic forms. Given the influence of Annea Spong, Isadora Duncan’s
pupil, on Atkinson’s early training, the use of drapery of varying lengths
and arrangements around the female body also became a common-
place. Not only does drapery provide an aesthetic effect for the watcher
but it also allows the dancer to experience a sense of movement close
to the skin.6 As Hollander suggests, ‘the feel of drapery involves the
action of loose cloth working against the body’s motion, it is quite dif-
ferent from the feel of tailored clothes’ (1993: 184). And like Duncan,
Atkinson’s early works also referred to the ‘Greek ideal’ in dances such
as the warlike Pyrrhic Dance, where the posing of the figures in their
soft drapes provide the ‘suggestion of the long-balanced flow of a Doric
frieze’.7 Such costumes, according to Aby Warburg in his detailed study
of the ‘body in motion’ in visual art, when linked to ‘the fictive appear-
ance of slender, young girls, with hair undone, dressed in Greek styles
with flowing veils’ were expressive of vital ‘feelings towards the past’
(Michaud, 2001: 168). Although Atkinson made her Greek pilgrimage
to the temples of Apollo in 1925, any reference to classical traditions or
art in her early work is perhaps copied less from Duncan and more from
her participation in the popular musical theatre productions associated
 Natural Movement’s Life in Costume 85

Figure 7.1 Sigh of Autumn, All-in-alls/leaf dresses, c.1931 (NRCD Reference NM/
S/3/2)

with her actor father, John (James) Atkinson. Rather than reproduce
the heavily accented draped costumes of the semi-static poses plastiques,
Atkinson became more interested in the transformative power of the
moving scarf as a source of dance experience.
During a class with the Natural Movement teacher Jean Kelly, a group
of us held great squares of gloriously coloured silk aloft, swirling their
weight through the air, shaping trails of energy along and over the fibres.
How precious these cloths seemed – liquid colour reaching beyond us –
so that the dissolution of form through the body seemed intrinsic to the
atmospherics created in performance. Films of the lone figure of Loïe
Fuller projecting coloured lights on to her swirling skirts and flying arms
draped in loose cloth have partially captured this quality, but when a
cloud of grown women dance and swirl their silks on high, like naiads at
a feast, how does this compose the texture of modern history?
In her fascinating study of Silk and Empire, Brenda King (2005) elabo-
rates upon the intricate relationships between Indian silk design and
86 Dancing Naturally

production and the cultural economy of textile production in early

twentieth-century Britain. The twin industrial cities of Manchester and
Macclesfield were called ‘cottonopolis’, because they shared economies
of trade and cultural exchange built around the cotton mills and wool
carpet manufacturers of northern England and they produced a steady
supply of silks, and coloured liquids. Throughout the imperial period,
this industrial hub had extended links with colonial ports, particularly in
countries such as India, China and the Middle East where silk production
and dyeing had sophisticated economies long before those of Europe.
King argues that the highly successful textile industry of Britain faced
three new challenges in the early twentieth century. The first was the
rapid expansion of the European manufacturing sector whose high-
quality design aesthetics were capturing the high end of the cloth market;
the second was the ready access to more cheaply produced goods from
China and other parts of Asia; and the third was the advent of the new
materials technology that was displacing cotton, wool and silk manufac-
ture. To add fresh design elements to their fabric production, several of
the leading industrialists began visiting India not only in search of the
raw materials of their trade, but in order to develop collaborative part-
nerships with the localized cottage industries and their methods of silk
and textile design. They began importing quantities of fabric, decorated
extensively with motifs and imprints using natural dyes, and also build-
ing partnerships with local Indian businessmen who could sponsor and
train Manchester women in these alternative methods of fabric produc-
tion. The Manchester Royal Jubilee Exhibition of 1887 featured displays
of Indian design technologies and the finest textile crafts were regularly
exhibited in the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, into the early twentieth
century. King also documents the rapid impact Indian silk textiles made
on design education in the Manchester School of Art and Design, the sec-
ond most important design institution in the United Kingdom between
1910 and 1930 (King, 2005: 25). In her view, interest in Indian design was
wide-spread in England, and ‘focussed on different aesthetic and techni-
cal aspects, particularly the understanding of dyes and the skilful use of
colour’ (ibid.: 165).
In the Natural Movement costume collection, long silk lengths that
might have belonged to saris or Indian headdresses then imported to
Manchester are in abundance. The forms of the cloths and their colours
correspond exactly to those in collections of Indian textile design. Take,
for instance, the twisted cloths used in Rajasthan for turbans called
leheriya (or lahariya), which literally means waves (King, 2005:. xvii).
Made from harmoniously arranged diagonal stripes, and often tie-dyed
 Natural Movement’s Life in Costume 87

in the auspicious, and clashing, colours of yellow and red, these scarves
have distinctive ways of being knotted and stored. In the costume boxes,
multiple versions of these liquid colour ribbons are knotted and stored as
if they are leheriya.8 Instead of using coloured lighting as Loïe Fuller did,
or copying Indian dances as with the American dancer Ruth St Denis,
Atkinson was investigating how to conjure new perceptions of the body
in motion through the effects caused by coloured dyes on silk fabric.
Evidence of this pursuit can be found in the Natural Movement dye col-
lection housed in a worn leather suitcase containing samples representa-
tive of colour’s globalized industry at the time: ‘Fairy dye from Glasgow;
Drummer-boy dye (complete with black man illustration); Brauns –
Stoffarbe Veilchenblau; Aurora dye from Kendal; and the indispensable
Dyeflit – The Magic Colour Remover’; there is also a neat bundle of raffia
for reproducing the tie-dye methods of resist patterning.9 Using tech-
niques of dying or embroidery, most of the Natural Movement costumes
have been extensively hand-worked and this labour adds to their intrinsic
beauty. The ‘natural’ use of dyes also creates swirls of accent or contrast
in silks and cottons that give the form of the simple costumes a softly
toned, animated effect. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this flicker-
ing through fabric is represented in a black and white photograph of
Atkinson’s life-long muse and collaborator Anita Heyworth, performing as
The Spirit of the Bush Fire.10 In this image, the scarf’s flow extends upwards
rippling through an arc which releases energy beyond the gesture.
In the store rooms of the Victoria and Albert museum, to handle this
scarf is to hold something strangely disturbing in your hands, since
the Fire Scarf is double layered – soft, but heavy since the silk has been
doubled over, and given a charcoal grey lining. This ashes side of the
scarf symbolizes the shadow on the earth after the fire, while the other,
streaked with red, burnt orange and grey, is its fury. To understand the
flowing line of the gesture is one thing but to feel the weight of the
scarf, and to imagine the suffering effects of fire, is another. Perhaps it
is no wonder that the aesthetic design of Atkinson’s ballets began to be
called by critics ‘a series of lovely tone-pictures’.11
Later works which explored the play between music and movement,
also delighted in impressionistic effect such as the pixilation of colour
in costume. For instance, with the costumes for Fingal’s Cave (1925),
Atkinson set a dance to The Hebrides Overture by Mendelssohn (1830),
using torn strips of cotton: ‘hand-dyed in sea-colours. Clinging and
simple in line with headdresses also dyed in blues, greens and greys.
Scarves were used and tossed to symbolize the waves breaking against
the rocks. The scarves were dyed in sea-colours blending into white,
88 Dancing Naturally

which – when tossed – gave the illusion of white foam.’12 In photo-

graphs of Heyworth and other dancers playing on the beach at Combe
Martin in the Summer of 1920, we can see them waving silk scarves
over their heads, draping themselves over rocks, and lifting seaweed
trails over their arms. In its review of this first London production for
Atkinson under the heading ‘Waves of the Sea’, The Dancing Times notes
the dance’s absorption in, and copying of, nature. It describes the piece
as ‘an example of her simplicity in the group dancing’, through which
‘the dancers endeavour to symbolize in movement the moving tide,
with the seaweed torn adrift by the swirling waters and left stranded
with the ebb. And that was the dance!’ Only because the dancers also
appear ‘appealing’ and ‘human’ does the writer seem to appreciate the
tonal translation of colour into symbolic gesture.13

Dressing by design: Stella Mary Pearce and Lilian Reburn

I will return to the significance of representing ‘harmonies derived

from nature’ but it is first important to acknowledge Atkinson’s artistic
collaborators. Although given little formal credit, four design artists reg-
ularly contributed drawings to her choreographic productions through-
out the 1920s: William Grimmond (mostly historical costumes), Lilian
Reburn, Stella Mary Pearce and Ella Slinn. Later Pearce became Britain’s
foremost costume historian but her early illustrations are characterized
by soft-brush work and detailed annotation.14 The costumes imitate
‘natural motifs’, such as leaves, feathers, antenna and eyes, and their
colours and shapes are copied from flowers, moths, daffodils. Although
Pearce contributed much to the design and appearance of Atkinson’s
dances throughout the 1920s, she is never mentioned in any reviews.15
Translating recognizable design forms from nature to the shape of
costume, leads to a literal translation of their movement into dancing.
‘A study in blue, white and black with the title of Soaring saw the
dancers of this duet wearing web-like extensions to their arms, dipped
in black paint that suggested a spray of feathers (Figure 7.2).16 Their
mode of representation, to use Susan Leigh Foster’s (1988) terminology,
‘resembles the bird through colours and shapes that belie the memories
of rich colours … and the poetry of motion’.17
By way of contrast with Pearce, Lilian Reburn, Atkinson’s first col-
laborator, produced more theatrical designs. Her graphic costume for a
Stork (1917) shows a bird figure with bright red leggings and red tongue
splicing its chest. Reburn is also named in the 1919 review of The Bach
Suites in B Minor: ‘originally inspired by dancing and dance forms … the
Figure 7.2 Anita Heyworth and Madge Bateman in Soaring, early 1930s, Guttenberg (NRCD reference NM/F/2/14/1)
89
90 Dancing Naturally

mythical scene [was] devised by Miss A, with costumes by Miss Reburn

on Saturday’.18 Uniquely in subsequent reviews of this same work, special
attention is given to the costume’s role as a performance effect: ‘With
costumes of varied shades the different “voices” of a fugal “subject” were
given greater clearness in development.’19 As with the Ballets Russes in
Paris, the young Reburn and Atkinson were experimenting with the
dramatic role that costume might play as an independent compositional
element in choreography.
Indeed as members of a local artistic avant garde, both Atkinson and
Reburn were associated with the Gaiety Theatre, run by the bohemian
theatrical entrepreneur Annie Horniman, and contributed to works
produced by the Unnamed Society, an artistic group that supported
new dramatic writing.20 In 1920, Atkinson choreographed a ‘lyrical
ballet-mask’ for L. Stanley Jast’s play, The Loves of the Elements, featur-
ing the mating of Fire and Air, Earth and Water.21 In this production,
Reburn’s elaborate costumes and theatre masks were inspired by Indian
Kathak dancers, ‘Utterly unlike anything we have ever seen … (its) hur-
rying, changing, picturing melodies remind one of the movement of
bright water. They depend for their effect upon dancing and on stage
they must be particularly beautiful if well performed.’22 Given Reburn’s
talent, it is perhaps not surprising that masks from The Loves of the
Elements feature in the first International Theatre Exhibition at the
Victoria and Albert in 1923. The celebrated designer Edward Gordon
Craig, writing in the exhibition catalogue, wanted it to celebrate those
artists of the theatre who refused to copy the past, preferring instead to
create new forms.23
In the costume book, Reburn’s drafting skills render the human figure
in highly abstracted style allowing for sharp and contemporary colour
contrasts. Symbolic representation of harmonic properties includes
illustrations for the dancers of the ‘Worldly Wise’ in the Bach Suites
(1919), appearing as the muses of poetry, music and dance; music is
thus represented in stark black and white as a keyboard covered in tiny
notes and staves. The subsequent production of Atkinson’s Mother Goose
Suite in November 1920, danced to Ravel’s impressionistic score, became
Atkinson’s most significant piece of early repertoire.24 Reburn’s costumes
include the Laideronette costume (Figure 7.3), Beauty from Beauty and
the Beast, and the Princess from Sleeping Beauty. The Laideronette cos-
tume has a base kimono of brilliant orange silk, which is heavily appli-
quéd in purple, deep greens and blues, simulating either an eye or a
peacock’s medallion on front and back. A local reviewer was taken aback
by the ‘riot of colour’ in the performance and two years later another
 91

Figure 7.3 Costume design for Laideronette character from Ravel’s Mother Goose
Suite, Lilian Reburn, c.1919/20 (NRCD reference NM/N/2)
92 Dancing Naturally

newspaper commentator exclaimed about the ‘many exquisite dresses –

all of them worn with an admirable sense of their delicacy and style’.25
Within this time, however, Reburn’s name has disappeared and it is sug-
gested that ‘Mother Goose is a delicious example of the beautiful way
in which Miss Atkinson handles colour and costume … there is a really
most accomplished use of costume as a decorative possibility.’26 The
erasure of Reburn’s identity as designer seems conclusive, and perhaps
this compliment led Atkinson to believe she was the creator of colour,
costume and ‘decorative possibility’ in her ballets.

Flickering effects: the aesthetic proposition

Notably, these reviewers are responding to an emergent aesthetic in

which costume, as colour and design, influences and shapes the creation
of the dance. One critic elaborates extensively on the co-dependence of
music, colour and movement that underpins Atkinson’s philosophy of
the dance:

Miss Atkinson calls colour to her aid. For a Bach fugue she costumed
four of her young ladies in rose, saffron, adust and umber, respectively –
alto, treble, tenor, bass. When alto was in plaintive mood, the young
lady in rose stepped slowly and looked pensive. When tenor was
merry as with wine, the lady in light brown tripped the light fantastic
toe. The umber young lady had most of the funeral marches, since
the composers seem to take it for granted that a deep sound must be
a heavy one, and therefore unfitted for feet to move featly.27

What is distinctive in this representation of modern dance’s tentative

steps towards an autonomous aesthetic of abstract movement is that ‘the
cut and colour of costumes were fetched in as wonderful co-operators
in producing what the cinema people call “effects”.’28
This suggestion that Atkinson’s dancing is a product of ‘effects’ linked
by the flickering ‘co-operators’ of colour and costume in motion is very
helpful in understanding my hypothesis about ‘natural movement’.
Another source of material evidence for this process of choreograph-
ing by colour is a large chart pinned with small rectangular squares of
coloured silk which range from deep purples, sapphire blues to burnt
yellows and browns. Each square is numbered and allotted a dancer’s
name. The chart therefore positions each dancer by colour in a com-
plex tonal pattern. With the female dancers draped in these swatches
of stained silk, the dance transposes their rhythmic steps into a waving,
fluid, sensation of overlapping, and contrasting, layers of colour.
 Natural Movement’s Life in Costume 93

Atkinson’s experimentation with colour harmonics in costume design

resonates with that of Orphism, the French art movement begun by
Guillaume Apollinaire in the early twentieth century, and developed as
colour theory by the visual artists Robert and Sonia Delauney. The prin-
ciples of Orphism were inspired by the Greek poet Orpheus who regarded
poetry as like music, thus these artists regarded painting as potentially
akin to the pleasures of a song designed from first principles to produce
harmonious composition. The study of moods transferred between art-
forms was noted, not always approvingly, in Atkinson’s choreography
by her critics. A complementary review from the premiere of the Mother
Goose Suite in Houldsworth Hall, Manchester, elaborates on the picto-
rial affinities: ‘Each movement becomes a picture in itself. This is Miss
Atkinson’s forte. She has built up dances from pieces of sculpture and
friezes, created “designs” from melodic phrases, and merged them into
one until the complete dance is achieved.’29
Immersed in a world in which the exotic use of colour, fabrics and
costume was being explored in the visual arts as well as in the design
economy of her native city, Atkinson’s early choreography was a creative
project which reached beyond the honouring of tradition or a straight-
forward embrace of modernity. Having begun with the historical repre-
sentation of folk dances, and undertaken research that could support the
austerities of a modern descriptive dance, Atkinson’s dance works also
explored a set of alternative philosophical values. Her exposure to Indian
spiritualism is evident in the notes written on one of her earliest solo
dances, Raag Depak (1916), a sixteenth-century version of an Orphic fable
in which the power of music and fire consumes the singer, or dancer.30 As
King notes, the interest of textile designers and manufacturers in Indian
colour harmonies in the period between 1830 and 1920 extended beyond
the principles of imitation or pattern making, required for aesthetic and
technical innovation in their industry. At other times, ‘the symbolic
nature of the designs, or the nature of the society that produced them
provided models for an idealized, traditional way of life’ (King, 2005:
166). An early photo of Atkinson’s studio includes not only cushions
on the floor, vastly different from the prim chairs of the ballet studio,
but also a turbaned statue in pride of place at the side of the room.31
In 1927, another photograph reveals Atkinson performing the female
goddess wearing a turban, the cloth of a dyed leheriya, beside a temple
grouping of nautch-like dancers.32 Adorned in lengths of silk and cotton
fabrics, Atkinson’s orientalism included access to philosophical and aes-
thetic systems that ran counter to the scientific rationalism of modern
technological progress. These idealized, more spiritual, worlds informed
her views on what a natural dance aesthetic might represent, outside the
94 Dancing Naturally

‘advanced’ industrial countries of Europe. Atkinson was no doubt aware

of the sophisticated theorizing of design and costume in the Ballets Russes
which had taken London by storm; however, the widespread transmis-
sion of many and varied concepts of identity, art, and social organization
in Britain seems critical to understanding cosmopolitan society during
the interwar years. As with many other avant garde and philosophical
movements of this period, including that of Theosophy, a rejection of
contemporary society was partially predicated on an exchange with
Eastern spiritual and artistic values, accessed here by colonial trade routes
rather than mainland Europe, that could become embodied for Atkinson
and her followers by wearing the costumes of ‘natural movement’.
While I am arguing that Madge Atkinson was not, as she claimed, the
designer of costumes for ‘all her ballets’, I regard her sophisticated use
of multi-dyed fabrics as a creative invention that extended beyond the
effects of decoration and costume, because it encourages us to see this
emergent modern dance as a process of pattern-making. I have described
how the coloured silks, and later watermarked cottons, became essential
elements in the animation of this emerging aesthetic of ‘natural move-
ment’. A vivid use of colour, of swirling and layered use of silks as tonal
and riotous states of colour, speaks of the excitement of a group of dance,
design and theatre artists attempting to make new philosophical and
artistic forms of expression in modern Britain, as much as it does of the
economics and politics of place in which this choreographic experimen-
tation emerges. This warp and weft of invention is the patterning of a
cultural history, accommodating radical ideas within artistic practice,
which takes place through dancing as natural movement.
In a London performance in 1927, an enthusiastic reviewer noted:
‘the exciting spectacle of the stage filled with leaping figures and float-
ing veils, by means of which very successfully the MA dancers sought
to transpose into another medium the first movement of Dvorak’s
New World Symphony’.33 This conception of ‘transposing into another
medium’ speaks volumes on Atkinson’s craft as a choreographer, as a
deviser of movement that evokes ‘nature’ through a sensuous response
to the colour and texture of fabric and costume. Echoing Warburg’s fas-
cination with the painted images of Florentine artworks which captured
the motion of hair, clothing and drapes, we sense in Atkinson’s costume
boxes, the ‘fleeting sensations of a distilled movement’. Rather than
freezing movement in an image of motion as most photographs do,
the colour of dancing provides further scope for an empathic response
to the sensation of the subject moving, indeed whirling at times, into
another medium. These qualities are echoed by the contemporary critics
 Natural Movement’s Life in Costume 95

I have cited, who seem to be searching for new descriptions of dance as

an impressionistic art. The experiential dimension of Atkinson’s craft
environment was undoubtedly given ever more joyous dedication by the
female dancers given occasion to wear these colour-saturated garments.
Perhaps it is no wonder that the flickering effects of Dionysius require an
ecstatic motion whereby form dissolves into patterned colour, in modes
of ‘natural’ dancing that are as much of new worlds as of old worlds, both
East and West.

Notes
1. The Woman’s National Newspaper, 27 October 1938, NM/M/6.
2. The Natural Movement archive is a permanent collection of the National
Resource Centre for Dance, University of Surrey that was catalogued and
researched during The Pioneer Women: British Modern Dancers, 1900s–1930s
project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2008–10 (see
Chapter 2 in this volume, Note 1).
3. The difficulty of keeping cheaper, and scratchier, cotton tunics straight
caused comment from previous students on the Natural Movement Study
Day, University of Surrey, 31 May 2009.
4. Danced by Betty Haworth, Longworth Cooper photo reproduced in The
Dancing Times, October 1933, NM/M/6.
5. Draft item description for Box B, Natural Movement collection, Victoria and
Albert Museum.
6. In art history, the appearance of drapery was an iconic reference to Ancient
Greek or Roman classical form.
7. Manchester City News, 20 December 1919, NM/N/2.
8. From an import shop in Munich in 2010, I purchased two silk, and tie-dyed,
scarves from Rajasthan that were identically knotted and stored.
9. The dye collection is housed in the Natural Movement collection, Victoria and
Albert Museum, accessed with gratitude to Jane Pritchard, Curator of Dance.
10. The Longworth Cooper photograph is in NM/F/2/15/1/3. On Black Sunday,
14 February 1926, devastating fires in Victoria, Australia, were followed by
newsreel films showing burnt-out parts of the landscape to raise funds for
bush fire relief, and the Bush Fire dance seems to respond to broadcasts of
that event in the United Kingdom. This dance had various names, however,
including just Fire Dance, and the potential power and destructiveness of fire
inspired Atkinson throughout her repertoire.
11. City News, 27 November 1920, NM/M/2.
12. Box C, Natural Movement catalogue description, Victoria and Albert
Museum.
13. The Dancing Times, September 1925, NM/M/3.
14. Pearce published several books on costume design, including Stella Newton,
Renaissance Theatre Costume and the Sense of the Historical Past, 1975; nota-
bly designed sets and costumes for T. S. Eliot’s The Rock, Murder in the
Cathedral and Family Reunion in the 1930s; established the Print section at
the Courtauld; and served as costume advisor to the National Gallery from
96 Dancing Naturally

1952 to 1961 (see V & A correspondence files for Eliot productions). Born
in 1901, her designs for Atkinson were created in her early twenties, and by
the mid-1930s she is married to the art critic Eric Newton and working in
London.
15. In 1921, a production of Peer Gynt, fulsomely illustrated in the costume
book, featured a young Eric Newton as Peer Gynt, who was favourably
reviewed as an actor. Newton became the leading art critic and journalist
for the Manchester Guardian over thirty years, and his influential Puffin on
European Painting and Sculpture (1941) championed modern British artists to
the reading public.
16. Photo by Longworth Cooper, also reproduced in the Daily Dispatch, 7 March
1933, NM/M/6.
17. ‘Dancers’ Performance at Altringham’, Bowdon Guardian, 24 February 1933,
NM/M/6.
18. Manchester Guardian, 27 January 1919, NM/M/2.
19. Manchester City News, 14 November 1919, NM/M/2.
20. Established in Manchester, the Unnamed Society comprised journalists,
poets, visual artists and actors who were interested in new ideas about art
and society. This group was active for about a decade, performing many
works in Atkinson’s studio and later finding its own premises.
21. Jast was the Chief Librarian at Manchester and part-time playwright,
who believed that libraries should be centres of culture, ensuring that the
Manchester Public Library built a small theatre in its basement that is still in
use today. He also developed an abiding interest in Eastern philosophy and
allegory, and wrote several books on this topic including What it All Means
(1941) on reincarnation and karma after his early retirement.
22. The ‘poetry, fancy’ combined with ‘philosophy produces results which are
strikingly clever and are often very beautiful’, New Library World, 25.8 (1923):
366–82.
23. International Theatre Exhibition: Designs and models for the modern stage, 3 June –
16 July 1922, Victoria and Albert Museum. Tantalizingly little can be found
about Reburn’s subsequent career.
24. Ravel premiered the Mother Goose music originally in a piano version in
1909; however, in 1912 it was performed as a ballet with additional musical
instruments and themes. Significantly, Atkinson’s performance of this work
is only eight years after its French premiere, with its transmission across the
Channel disrupted by the war. Her choice of original compositions, from
artists experimenting with new tonalities and patterns of instrumentation,
suggests that her milieu included young, radical and receptive musicians
who may have seized the opportunity to expand the relationships between
music and dance.
25. Manchester City News, 1 February 1919, and Manchester Guardian, 22
November 1921, NM/M/2.
26. Manchester Guardian, 8 March 1921, NM/M/2.
27. ‘Clef Club Concert’, Burnley News, 9 March 1927, NM/M/3.
28. Ibid.
29. Manchester City News, 27 November 1920, NM/M/2.
30. Musical Times, November 1916, NM/M/2.
31. NM/F/3/2/1/1.
 Natural Movement’s Life in Costume 97

32. NM/F/2/3/1.
33. The Telegraph, 22 June 1927. This production was presented at La Scala,
London, 1927, NM/M/3.

Bibliography
Carter, P. 2003 Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research.
Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Foster, S. L. 1998 Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American
Dance. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hollander, A. [1975] 1993 Seeing Through Clothes. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Jast, L. 1941 What it All Means: A brief and non-technical exposition of
reincarnation and magic as applied to the world of to-day. London: T. Werner
Laurie.
King, B. 2005 Silk and Empire: Studies in Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Michaud, P. 2001 Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. New York: Zone Books.
Newton, E. 1941 European Painting and Sculpture. Penguin: Harmondsworth.
Roach, J. 1996 Cities of the Dead: Circumatlantic Performance. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Taylor, D. 2003 The Archive and The Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.
8
Nature Moving Naturally in
Succession: An Exploration of
Doris Humphrey’s Water Study*
Lesley Main

Water Study was the first major ensemble work Doris Humphrey cho-
reographed following her departure from Denishawn in 1928 and
it continues to be staged today, most recently in New York City and
Turin, Italy, in 2008.1 The Humphrey-Weidman Company first per-
formed Water Study on 28 October 1928 at the Civic Repertory Theater,
New York. Mary F. Watkins, dance critic at the New York Herald Tribune,
found in the dance ‘the authentic feeling of the sea casting itself relent-
lessly, in torpid or in stormy mood, against the wall of some New
England shore. Real genius has gone into the creating of this’ (Cohen,
1995: 86). The work continued to receive acclaim in subsequent years.
In 1930, Watkins described Water Study as ‘inimitable … calling forth
the evening’s loudest applause’ (King, 1978: 54). Margaret Gage in
Theatre Arts Monthly described Water Study as ‘typically modernistic,
expressing one central idea and unfolding it with clarity and complete-
ness, yet with economy of detail’ (ibid.: 55). In 1932, Watkins wrote
of Water Study, ‘perhaps the most remarkable of earlier group works,
proved itself the peer of much that has come later’ (ibid.: 114). Margaret
Lloyd, long-time critic for the Christian Science Monitor and advocate for
modern dance, talked about Water Study being ‘a novelty of its time and
a delight to see’ (Lloyd, 1987: 87).
Lloyd does not specify the ‘novelty’ aspect but a strong possibility is the
absence of music. Humphrey was not alone in exploring silence at that
time, as she observed many years later in The Art of Making Dances:

For dance can dispense with sound almost entirely and be done in
silence … The dance without music – the absence of sound on a pro-
gram which is otherwise ear-filling in musical opulence – has a con-
trary effect to that which might be expected. It does not seem empty,
98
 Doris Humphrey’s Water Study 99

or as though the bottom has dropped out, but increases concentration

and attention to movement to an astonishing degree. Water Study was
composed for fourteen girls whose bodies rose and fell, rushed and
leaped like various aspects of water, the only sound being the faint
thudding of feet in running movements, reminiscent of surf.
(1959: 142)

Water Study opens with an ensemble of 14 dancers clad in skin-toned

unitards, arrayed across the stage in asymmetrical formation, bent low to
the ground in profile. From a tucked kneeling position, a series of ripples
emerges through the backs of the dancers and traverses the space, one
picking up from the other until the outward surge gives way to a reced-
ing pull back to its point of origin. This ‘first wave’ builds subtly into a
second, more fulsome form that advances and recedes. A third, fourth
and fifth come after, ever growing in speed, height and intensity until
the form dissolves and separates. From either side of the stage, dancers
swing, run, leap and fall in opposition, creating new forms that pull away,
lifting far above the ground before falling, crashing in towards each other.
The ensemble is drawn together to one side then falls as one, back and
forth across the stage. Bodies spill forward or arc high, suspended over
the tumbling forms below. These ‘tumblesaults’ give way to increasingly
expansive and powerful surging runs, up and down a diagonal pathway,
climaxing in a burst that fragments the group, some racing out and
around the stage, others being drawn into sweeping descending falls,
reminiscent of the drag of the undertow. Calm returns, but stillness is
some way off. Rocking, undulating shifts criss-cross the space, in time
returning the bodies to the low, tucked position of the opening sequence.
There is a final flurry, a ‘spray’ cascading across the group before the pull
of the tide rolls across the stage one last time. Darkness comes but the
movement, it seems, will go on, and on, and on.
As a Humphrey exponent, I regard Water Study as a corner-stone of
Humphrey’s tradition because it embodies the first representation of her
movement philosophy.2 Humphrey went on to formulate and articulate
her philosophy over subsequent years, observing, ‘only much later did
I find in Nietzsche a word expression of the meaning of these move-
ments’ (Humphrey, in Rand Rogers, 1980: 189). It was in fact in 1931,
three years after choreographing Water Study, that she read The Birth of
Tragedy (1872) and identified Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian concept
with her own theories of movement that she named ‘fall and recovery’.
Humphrey’s movement philosophy encompasses the interconnect-
ing aspects of breath rhythm, successional movement, gravitational
100 Dancing Naturally

pull, wholeness of movement and moving from the inside out. She
recognized the diametrically opposed urges toward danger and repose
that Nietzsche ascribed to ‘two conflicting, yet intertwining impulses
in man’ (Stodelle, 1995: 14), for ‘not only does the fall and recovery
make movement living and vital, but it has psychological meaning
as well. These emotional overtones were recognized very early by me
and I instinctively responded to the exciting danger of the fall and the
repose and peace of recovery’ (Humphrey, in Rand Rogers, 1980: 189).
Humphrey described the creation of this dance as ‘starting with human
feeling, with body movement and its momentum in relation to the
psyche and to gravity, and as it developed the movements took on the
form and tempo of moving water’ (Lloyd, 1987: 89). Her intention was
rooted in a broader need for experimentation. Her motivation was an
exploration of natural movement and its relationship to natural forces
including the gravitational pull, rather than any conscious decision to
create a dance ‘about’ a specific theme.
A notebook of Humphrey’s dating from this period contains the start-
ing points for the work – ‘Nature moves in succession, usually in an
unfolding succession to a climax and a more sudden succession to ces-
sation or death’ (Doris Humphrey Collection [DHC], c.1929–50, folder
M73: 6). Humphrey’s emphasis on succession is key because succes-
sional flow is a central aspect of the fall and recovery action. Her brief
description also completely encapsulates the eventual structure of the
dance itself, as it grows from a state of stillness through a progressive
series of rising crescendos to a point of climax that explodes into the
sudden cessation she describes above. She concluded: ‘all natural move-
ment must follow that law of nature – of which water is the best exam-
ple to follow as it most nearly approximates the capacity of our rhythm
and phrase length’ (ibid.: 6). Rhythm, alongside successional flow, is at
the root of the work. As Humphrey discussed in a programme note from
1928, ‘probably the thing that distinguishes musical rhythm from other
rhythm is the measured time beat, so this has been eliminated from
Water Study and the rhythm flows in natural phrases instead of cerebral
measures. There is no count to hold the dancers together in the very
slow opening rhythm, only the feel of the wavelength that curves the
backs of the group’ (Humphrey, in Cohen, 1995: 85). There is, in actual
fact, no ‘count’ in the conventional sense at any point in the dance,
one reason why dancing in, and watching, this work is so exhilarating.
The absence of a structured time frame creates a freedom for the dancers
that has a logical connection to the organic flow of Humphrey’s cho-
reography, in corporeal and sequential terms. She not only creates ‘the
 Doris Humphrey’s Water Study 101

natural’ in movement terms but she allows it to exist in a natural time

span, that is, the time the dance needs to unfold.
Eleanor King, from the original cast, commented that the dance was
‘the most satisfying of all Humphrey’s works to perform because it was a
masterpiece of flowing motion’ (King, 1978: 21). Marcia Siegel described
Water Study as ‘one of the most extraordinary works in American dance’
(Siegel, 1981: 27) and ‘still one of the most stunning achievements in
abstract dance’ (Siegel, 1993: 85). Deborah Jowitt, agreeing, observed
that it ‘beautifully expresses the analogy between the human being and
universal processes’ (Jowitt, 1988: 196). Despite Siegel’s notion of abstract
dance and Jowitt’s metaphysical interpretation, the work does conjure up
images of the movement of water and waves traversing through space,
building in speed and intensity in a seamless flow of energy. The dance
was not a literal depiction of the sea but can be read in such a way.
My route into the dance came through Ernestine Stodelle, who
danced with Humphrey from 1928–35 and performed Water Study many
times during this period. The combined exposure of performing with
and assisting Stodelle on stagings in Europe provided a deep insight into
the work. My own reconstructions never felt quite ‘right’, however, and
I couldn’t discern why. Some years ago I endeavoured to find a new way
into the dance without disrupting the dance itself. I wanted to find a
place from which to explore the dance afresh and away from the clutter
of the past. Humphrey’s ideas acted as a framework for that exploration.
Through exploring the ideas of succession and successional movement,
one particular facet emerged – the ‘forward successional curve’. This
movement occurs repeatedly and in varying guises throughout the
dance. Basing my exploration on the physiological and dynamic aspects
of this movement concept and its variant forms allowed me to develop
a new perspective from which to approach the work as a whole.
In the extract from her notebook cited earlier – ‘Nature moves in suc-
cession, usually in an unfolding succession to a climax and a more sudden
succession to cessation or death’ (my emphasis), Humphrey encapsulates
the structure of the dance. The first idea, Nature moves in succession (1),
correlates with the opening section, ‘The First 5 Waves’ as it builds from a
point of stillness; the unfolding succession (2) could describe the ‘Breakers’
and ‘Tumblesaults’, as the choreography becomes more expansive in
both time and space; the climax (3) comes in the ‘Five Big Rushing Waves’
as the movement reaches its peak; the sudden succession (4) is the ‘Splash/
Whirlpool’ as the ‘whole’ fragments; the cessation (5) is seen in the ‘Calm’
and ‘Spray’, as the power of the movement dynamic recedes; and death
(6) is the ‘Roller’, the final progression to a final stillness.
102 Dancing Naturally

‘Succession’ as a concept is suggestive of one thing after another; con-

nection; nothing happening in isolation; a natural progression, growing
and diminishing, advancing and receding. King commented, ‘in the suc-
cession patterns which determine the flow, every inch of the exhilarated
body moves, as the repeated successions pass from the toes through the
knees, hips and spine to the crown of the head’ (1978: 21). Succession is
talked about by King in experiential bodily terms but at the same time it
informs spatial terms, as the movement flows across the space, providing
connectivity within the individual body and, simultaneously, from one
body to the next. The idea of succession in Water Study cannot be consid-
ered in isolation, however, and needs a further connection to ‘nature’ and
‘the natural’. Margaret Lloyd observed, ‘in her desire to get to the living
source, Doris turned to nature rhythms as she turned to natural move-
ment’ (1987: 87). Here are two discrete yet interlinking ideas. Nature
rhythms are ever present and unchanged by time – the wind blows today
as it did in 1928, as the rain falls, as tides ebb and flow. It is not hard
to identify the rhythms created by these natural happenings. Nor is it
hard to discern that these rhythms are not constant but ever changing –
‘successional’, one might say. Through the rhythms in nature comes
movement in nature, the rise and fall of a rhythm creating the move-
ment. As a breeze picks up, for example, the movement of leaves or
branches increases correspondingly. That Humphrey choreographed
Water Study at a time when she was engaged in a detailed exploration of
natural movement based on the rise and fall of the breath and gravita-
tional pull is no coincidence, but a ‘natural’ consequence.
There are influences of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ on Humphrey’s crea-
tive process in terms of movement, rhythm and time. She talked about
‘starting with human feeling, with body movement and its momentum
in relation to the psyche and to gravity, and as it developed the move-
ments took on the form and tempo of moving water’ (Lloyd, 1987: 89).
Interesting is her reference to ‘human feeling’ and the ‘psyche’, aspects
of human nature rather than the natural world. Is there any difference,
however, between the rise and fall of human emotion? One could argue
that succession is equally prevalent in a human context. The human
spirit, by and large, is free; nature, similarly, is unrestricted. In my view,
however, the liberatory aspects of Water Study exist in terms of time and
space, because of how each of these dimensions interlink with the other.
In her programme note Humphrey referred to ‘the rhythm flow(ing) in
natural phrases instead of cerebral measures’ and ‘the feel of the wave-
length that curves the backs of the group’ (Humphrey, in Rand Rogers,
1980: 189). The implication of ‘rhythm flowing in natural phrases’
 Doris Humphrey’s Water Study 103

suggests an open time frame, but not completely without parameters

since Humphrey’s reference to ‘phrases’ implies the existence of a for-
mal structure of sorts. In fact, the actual phrase structure of the dance is
clearly defined. The amount of space the dance can cover links directly
with the amount of time it takes for the movement to unfold.
As the dance progresses, so too does the forward successional curve.
The development of the curve closely maps the development of the dance
itself, certainly in Stodelle’s version, suggesting it is the principal move-
ment motif in the work. Siegel observed something similar in her analysis
of Stodelle’s staging in 1976. She described the dance ‘as being made of
two kinds of circles. One surrounds the dancer like a wheel in front, below,
behind and above … The other circle encompasses all the space horizon-
tally around the body’ (Siegel, 1981: 31). The perspective of the dancer is
different to that of the viewer but I can see why Siegel would make such
an observation. The emphasis Siegel placed on the ‘circle’ parallels with
the emphasis that exists experientially in the forward successional curve.
The following analysis will illustrate the progression of the curve
alongside Humphrey’s ideas.

The first 5 waves – ‘nature moves in succession’ (1)

The opening section is an important example of movement design because

of the physiological connections between the shapes created and how they
recur in developed form/s later in the work. The constant running through-
out is the ‘forward successional curve’, partially executed in the First Wave
and then more completely from the Second Wave with its greater height
and volume, which produces both individual and group effects in the cho-
reography. A sense of buoyancy is an integral part of the curve. Movement
quality in terms of flow, weight and space as defined by Labananalysis, is
located firmly within its ‘bound, strong and direct’ aspects as opposed to
‘free, light and flexible’, which ‘buoyancy’ could also imply.
The movement vocabulary for ‘The First 5 Waves’ comprises a series of
variations that create an image of waves growing in height and intensity
from a state of calm. Beginning from a downstage left position, the emer-
gence of the First Wave is subtle to the point that the audience may not
be aware the dance has begun until the wave has progressed some way
across the stage. From a low, kneeling, tucked position, the pelvis lifts up
over the heels on an in-breath, with the ‘breath’ drawn up into the back
of the pelvis. A successional curve is initiated in the torso with the
palms maintaining contact with the floor and elbows lifting just off. The
feeling is one of suspension, of a long curve coming up out of the ground
104 Dancing Naturally

through the tail bone and spine, which proceeds back down into the
ground through the crown of the head to move onward through space.
For the dancer, kinaesthetic immersion begins from this first movement,
with the sensory surfaces of the body alive to the energies being generated
in both spatial and temporal dimensions. The pelvic-initiated curve is
developed into a higher, more expansive curve in the Second Wave. Here,
the fingertips lift just off the floor as the elbows billow out to enhance the
shape. As the back surface of the body is drawn up into this shape, there is
a sense of buoyancy in the hollow created by the front surface – denoted
by the quadriceps, abdomen, chest and underside of the arms. This hollow
is not an empty space but has substance and volume. The Third Wave sees
a higher curve, arms extending one in front, one behind, with the weight
shifting forward through the pelvis and right knee.
Humphrey’s style can appear effortless, which belies what is hap-
pening in bodily terms to create that ‘look’. Because of its clarity and
economy of movement vocabulary, Water Study is a revealing example
of how dancers, on an individual and collective basis, need a mature
grasp of Humphrey’s principles of successional movement. This open-
ing section is extreme in terms of how the body has to maintain power
and strength in the abdominals and quadriceps whilst creating the illu-
sion of a perfect, natural form. For the dancers who as individuals must
be part of a whole, there are physical, dynamic, rhythmic, kinaesthetic
and visual challenges, with the visual requiring considerable skill and
dexterity, depending on each dancer‘s position within the group.
The buoyant sensation, described above, increases throughout this
section and does much to instil a sense of ‘the organic’ for the dancer,
of being part of, and immersed in, a force that is alive and ever moving.
The gravitational pull of the undertow becomes more pronounced as
the wave recedes, one body picking up the resistance of the pull after
another, dovetailing to create a continuous fluid image. The opening sec-
tion progresses from calm ripples, barely discernible, much as one might
observe looking out to sea. The ripples build gradually into fully formed
waves, creating a sense of the waves coming closer toward the shore –
‘nature moving in succession’.

Breakers/tumblesaults – ‘unfolding succession’ (2)

The transition into the ‘Breakers’ signals a change in the tide. Perhaps,
even, a different tide. Humphrey did not set out to create a literal inter-
pretation of ‘the sea’ at a particular point in time and the structure of the
dance allows us to see a successional or episodic form. The end of the Fifth
 Doris Humphrey’s Water Study 105

Wave is a fleeting tableau of two waves peaking and falling, followed by a

separation as the dancers are drawn upward from the floor and outward,
into two linear formations either side of the stage. Stodelle referred to this
section in rehearsal as waves crashing and breaking against rocks. Dancers
are in unison on their respective sides and in opposition to the other
group, allowing the ‘waves’ to pull away and towards each other. The main
movement motif commences with two weighted side swings, away from
and into the centre. On each ‘up’ swing/suspension, the arms and upper
body vary the forward successional curve by expanding the space/shape
in front of the torso. Danced in profile, the audience sees the form of two
waves building to a peak, before breaking and rushing in to the centre to
‘crash on rocks’ as the dancers run and burst upward into two leaps.
The idea of ‘unfolding succession’ can be seen in the structure of the
‘Breakers’ section, first as alternate groupings and then with leaping/
falling action that draw the groups into two lines on stage left. At this
point, as the ‘Tumblesaults’ section begins, the whole group falls into a
central succession in unison and in the same direction for the first time.
Humphrey breaks the symmetry by having the front line drop to one
knee for the succession. The change in level gives added expanse to the
form of the ‘wave’, still seen by the audience in profile. The dancers again
fall out of the peak of the wave, this time running right across the stage
until the front line dancers drop down into a forward ‘tumblesault’. The
back line dancers pull up sharply on one leg into a forward successional
curve, much as the first ‘Breakers’ leap, and hover above the ‘tumble-
saulter’ in front before landing in a deep lunge as the tumblesault spills
forward. The undertow pull draws the wave back across the stage for a
second, more expansive reprise that increases in speed.

Five big rushing waves – ‘climax’ (3)

Whilst not the end of the dance, one can attribute the idea of ‘climax’ to
this section because the movement reaches its peak. The lined formation
of ‘tumblesaults’ dissolve into a cluster. Each wave begins with a deep for-
ward successional fall and suspension, a development of the side-swing
movement in the ‘Breakers’ and a further representation of the forward
successional curve. The feeling of being ‘inside’ the body of the wave is
different from earlier waves, as the bodies come together as a profoundly
unified organism for the first time. Stodelle described the running as
‘surging’ and ‘pounding’. One can feel and hear the change in intensity.
When directing the dance, the image I use for this section is drawn
from the type of waves found off the North Shore in Hawaii favoured by
106 Dancing Naturally

the ‘big wave’ surfing community. These waves are the most extraordi-
nary bodies of water, so immense and powerful as they reach a peak but
potentially deadly. The immensity can seem benign at first, belying the
true nature of the waves as they unfold. The extreme contrast inherent
in these waves parallels the extreme ends of Humphrey’s ‘fall and recov-
ery’ theory, the Apollonian/Dionysian ‘arc between two deaths’. Apollo
and Dionysus represent conflicting, but intertwining impulses of human
nature – the Apollonian drive to achieve perfection and stability and
the Dionysian desire to experience the ecstasy of abandon. Humphrey
described these states as ‘different names for the will to balance and the
will to grow’ (Humphrey, DHC, M-65), implying that one must reach
out beyond one’s known/safe experience in order to advance. Stodelle
described this growth as ‘a daring act of exploration leading to self-
knowledge or disaster’ (Stodelle, 1995: 15). Water Study is full of potential
disasters for the dancer, one of the reasons why it is so exhilarating to
perform. As the dance reaches this ‘climax’, the timing of the fall is that
‘daring act of exploration’. With no cue and no count, the dancers repeat-
edly fall together as one, trusting their collective intuition.

Splash/whirlpool – ‘sudden succession’ (4)

The ‘sudden succession’ comes out of the fifth wave. The chest/arms are
lifted for the final run with the hands performing a vigorous ‘sudsing’ action,
(a term used by Stodelle) akin to ‘white horses’ on a breaking wave,
right hand held slightly higher than the left. As the peak of the wave is
reached, five dancers link hands and stream out of the group, running
on a curved pathway down, around and upstage, spreading out along a
vertical curve. In turn, beginning with the leader of the group, each takes
a ‘splash’ curving action that decreases in height as it travels down the
group, concluding with a full spiral fall by the final ‘whirlpool’ dancer.
The runners’ sudden exit initiates a series of descending and decelerating
sideways falls in the remaining dancers. The breakout by the runners is
unexpected; hence the idea of ‘sudden’ makes sense. What follows is a
rapid succession downward to a point of stillness, reached in a matter of
seconds. This tableau is reminiscent of the fifth wave of the opening sec-
tion, with its fleeting image of a still form.

Calm/spray – ‘cessation’ (5)

Out of the stillness comes a ‘cessation’, an ‘ending’ rather than an ‘end’,

suggesting there is still some way to travel. A series of weighted, pulling
 Doris Humphrey’s Water Study 107

ripples, danced in unison, depicts calm returning after a pounding,

relentless storm. The moving image is undulating; shifting, rising and
falling on the breath, bodies crossing in space, open to the audience
for the first time – I think for reasons of movement design rather than
any intent to ‘address the audience’. It is noteworthy, however, that ‘the
dancer’ as identifiable individual has no place in this dance because of
the emphasis on form. A constant rhythm is maintained that continues
as the movement descends on to one knee then pulls round into pro-
file, into the forward successional curve once more. Rocking hinges and
curves maintain the rhythm and pull of the undertow, finishing in a final,
deeper hinge that releases down into the opening tucked curve position.
The ‘spray’ is a final flurry and release, and a delight to dance. From
stage right, in canon, the body is propelled suddenly upward through
the hips, through the forward successional curve. The left arm is flung
high in the air, and the body arcs back to the floor, landing on the fall-
ing arm, one ‘spray’ cascading up after another. The canon then reverses
back across the stage, this time with a heavy pull-around through the
outstretched arm, one pull picking up from the next to create a sweeping
successional action across the stage.

Roller – ‘death’ (6)

The movement of the ‘Roller’ passes through the First Wave then the
Second Wave before the forward successional curve extends outward
into a lunge. As the weight shifts forward, the ‘peak’ of the wave is
reached before a sustained descent into horizontal stillness. As each
dancer reaches the peak, the next one begins. The result is a sedate
expansive image flowing across the stage, ‘rumbling out to sea’ as
Stodelle used to say. The last dancer in the canon completes the descent
of the ‘Roller’ off stage. The image of ongoing motion, of a continuing
succession of movement remains even though one can no longer physi-
cally see it.
The correlation between ‘death’ and Water Study had not occurred
to me before considering Humphrey’s ideas more deeply. There is, of
course, no literal ‘death’ but Humphrey’s idea of ‘death’ relates to her
movement philosophy. She identified the ‘arc between two deaths’ from
a Nietzschean philosophy that she subsequently defined as ‘dynamic
death’ and static death’. ‘Translate Dionysian licentiousness to the pre-
carious state of off-balance motion, and you will encounter the immi-
nent danger of “dynamic death”. Translate Apollonian serenity into
the security of symmetrical balance, and you will have the locked-in
108 Dancing Naturally

perfection of “static death”’ (Stodelle, 1995: 15).3 Having considered

the Apollonian/Dionysian correlation earlier, the final position in Water
Study exemplifies the sense of ‘static death’ because there is nowhere to
go beyond the prone horizontal place each body reaches at the end.

Relating the example of Water Study to a broader consideration of dealing

with the staging of natural movement-based choreographies, the funda-
mental idea of following the natural successional impulses of both the
work and, particularly, its movement vocabulary makes sense if under-
taken from the present. The very essence of ‘the natural’ contradicts the
notion of ‘reproduction’. There is logic, therefore, in seeking a contem-
porized approach to works of this type, not to contemporize the work
itself but to allow the ‘natural’ attributes of the movement to emerge
naturally in the contemporary bodies dancing the work. In the case of
Water Study, identifying the forward successional curve and then charting
its development throughout the dance was the crucial factor that allowed
me to engage with the work from the present.4 Without changing a single
movement or direction or documented idea, I could work with the dance
in a way that made sense in the present and, more importantly, produce
a version that came close to past kinaesthetic and emotional experiences
of performing the dance.

Notes

*This chapter is taken from an extended investigation of Water Study in

L. Main, Directing the Dance Legacy of Doris Humphrey. The Creative Impulse
of Reconstruction, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
1. In 2008, Water Study was staged by Gail Corbin in New York City as part of
a Memorial programme for Ernestine Stodelle, and by Lesley Main in Turin,
Italy, for Arke Compagnia D’Arte.
2. The Dance Notation Bureau’s publication, The Collected Works, Volume 1,
1978, in the introduction to the Labanotation score makes further reference
to Water Study being an early representation of Humphrey’s philosophy of
movement, noting that ‘the dance contains the first full exhibition of the
Humphrey principle of fall and recovery, the alternate yielding to and defying
of gravity’ (Dance Notation Bureau, 1978: 4).
3. For further reference to Humphrey’s notions of ‘dynamic’ and ‘static’ death,
see D. Humphrey, ‘My Approach to the Modern Dance’, in F. Rand Rogers
[1941] 1980; Stodelle, 1995, The Dance Technique of Doris Humphrey – and its
Creative Potential.
4. A more detailed exposition on directing the past from the present can be
found in Main, 2011.
 Doris Humphrey’s Water Study 109

Bibliography
Cohen, S. J. 1995 Doris Humphrey – An Artist First, Centennial Edition.
New Jersey: Dance Horizons.
Dance Notation Bureau. 1978 The Collected Works, Volume 1, New York: Dance
Notation Bureau.
Humphrey, D. c.1920–59 Collected Letters and Writings, Doris Humphrey
Collection: Dance Collection, New York Public Library.
—— 1959 The Art of Making Dances. New York: Grove Press.
Jowitt, D. 1988 Time and the Dancing Image. New York: William Morrow.
King, E. 1978 Transformations: A Memoir by Eleanor King/The Humphrey-Weidman
Era. Brooklyn: Dance Horizons.
Lloyd, M. [1949] 1987 The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance. New Jersey: Dance
Horizons.
Main, L. 2011 Directing the Dance Legacy of Doris Humphrey. The Creative Impulse
of Reconstruction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Nietzsche, F. [1872] 2000 The Birth of Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rand Rogers, F. (ed.) [1941] 1980 Dance: A Basic Educational Training. New York:
MacMillan.
Siegel, M. 1981 The Shapes of Change. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
—— 1993 Days on Earth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Stodelle, E. 1995 The Dance Technique of Doris Humphrey – and its Creative Potential,
2nd edn. London: Dance Books.
www.dorishumphreyfoundationuk.co.uk
9
Tensing and Relaxing Naturally:
Systematic Approaches to Training
the Body
Susan Leigh Foster

This chapter examines US-based training regimens for bodily comport-

ment at the beginning of the twentieth century with special regard to
how they elaborated a notion of the natural in movement. Focusing spe-
cifically on the programmes of bodily cultivation developed by Dudley
Allen Sargent and Genevieve Stebbins, the chapter looks at how each
mobilized the musculature. Muscularity and musculature, terms that had
only been coined in the 1880s, participated in the construction of a new
conception of corporeality that was emerging during this period. As an
expanding labour force committed to routinized repetitions of specific
actions in industrial production and regimens for physical education
focused increasingly on the development of each individual muscle,
a newly volumetric apprehension of physicality began to consolidate.
Tensile and three-dimensional, any or all of one’s muscles could be sum-
moned into action, and by contrast, taught to relax.
I also use Sargent’s and Stebbins’ distinctive approaches to training the
body in order to speculate about gender roles in concert dance – how
these were changing with the emergence of the new modern dance, and
how these roles differed from earlier conceptions of gender difference.
Stebbins had adapted François Delsarte’s system of training, a system that
was widely used in a variety of contexts to assist with acting and public
speaking, such as the delivery of a sermon, and thus studied by both men
and women. Her unique approach to the system, however, explicitly con-
nected physical movements to the emotions and the expressive act, and
the vast majority of her students were women. Her teachings thus laid
important groundwork for concert dance as woman’s work. In contrast,
Sargent’s system of exercises was installed in and utilized by YMCAs
(Young Men’s Christian Association) across the United States. It eschewed
any association with emotion or expression, instead elaborating the
110
 Systematic Approaches to Training the Body 111

relationship between the body and the machine, and thereby distanc-
ing itself from other more expressive forms of physical culture. The two
systems of training thus delineate distinct and contrasting approaches to
physical culture for the two genders.
In the United States, Sargent’s and Stebbins’ work coincided with a
period of mass migration into urban centres, where daily living offered
far fewer opportunities for physical exercise. Exercise began to be seen
as an effective way of building up nervous reserves. It both interrupted
the depletion of those reserves brought on by labouring in the factory,
with its highly repetitive phrases of motion that frequently interfaced
with machinery, and at the same time it provided a respite from the
nervous taxation of city life (Whorton, 1982: 287). For many psycholo-
gists of the period, the whole body was seen as contributing to the
energy needed to maintain mental and motor activity. They also saw
the cultivation of the body as a manly pursuit, often with a religious
dimension. Sustaining its popularity in both the United States and
Britain, ‘muscular Christianity’ as the impetus to develop the physique
was rationalized by G. Stanley Hall in these terms: ‘We are soldiers of
Christ, strengthening our muscles not against a foreign foe, but against
sin within and without us’ (ibid.: 289–90). Reversing the Puritan suspi-
cion of bodily contamination of the soul, muscular Christianity advo-
cated for men’s regular involvement in exercise in order to combat sin
and purify the person.
In contrast to muscular Christianity, Stebbins’ advocacy of physical
culture, largely practised by middle-class white women, imparted a new
sense of freedom and control of the body divorced from the constrain-
ing limitations of the corset and the bulky limitations of fashionable
dress. Although performed in parlours rather than in public spaces, their
pantomimes displayed female physicality as graceful, dramatic and vital.
Serving a role akin to the relaxation that Stebbins so ardently promoted,
they carved out a space for rejuvenation. Releasing the body from the
habitual patterns associated with daily life, her exercises enabled a
re-charging of the entire self.
Sargent began to develop his approach to physical education in the
1860s while teaching at Bowdoin College, where he observed that
those students coming to college from farms or trades families, such as
blacksmithing, were notably stronger than those whose backgrounds
were more sedentary. He began to realize that taxation of the muscles
increased their strength and capacity, and, following medical studies,
he assumed a professorship at Harvard to establish in 1879 the first uni-
versity programme in physical education in the United States. There he
112 Dancing Naturally

experimented with a range of programmes for increasing strength and

endurance, including free-standing exercises, some with dumbbells or
other weights, and some using parallel bars, or other gymnastic appara-
tuses, supplemented by games such as rugby, and sports such as rowing or
cycling. He often worked with students to design individual programmes
tailored to the specific weaknesses of their physiques, and he encouraged
regular check-ups to determine a student’s progress. Sargent’s regimens,
along with several other similar systems of exercise that worked with
dumbbells, balls and ropes, helped to forge an entirely new experience
of the body as a musculature distinct from other physiological systems.
Contributing vitally to the health and well-being of the person, muscles
now needed to be developed and maintained through regular exercise
devoted specifically to them.
One of Sargent’s most important contributions was an exercise regime
that implemented pulley-weight machines that could be adjusted to the
strength of the individual and focused around the cultivation of indi-
vidual muscle groups. Pursuing rigorously the assumption that the ‘con-
tractility of muscle’ explained why it must be challenged to ‘carry a load’,
Sargent designed a comprehensive set of exercises that worked every part
of the body (Sargent, 1906: 142). By 1912 Sargent boasted that 270 col-
leges offered programmes in physical education; 300 city school systems
around the United States required it; and 500 YMCA gymnasiums with
80,000 members were utilizing versions of his machines.
Sargent’s system helped to inaugurate an entirely new approach to
bodily cultivation. Although eighteenth-century medical and exercise
literature sometimes referred to the lever system of bones and muscles, it
never specified the ways in which repetition of actions could alter mus-
cle mass and strength. Over the course of the nineteenth century, new
systems of gymnastics were developed that focused increasingly on sec-
tions of the body, striving to strengthen and fortify its ability to main-
tain an erect posture or to return to erectness after lunges or bends at
the waist. These regimens developed alongside an explosion of interest
in sports at universities and in community centres that hosted a variety
of events that were seen to develop physical strength, competitiveness
and team spirit. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the muscu-
lar Christianity movement in Great Britain had acquired substantive
momentum. Its emphasis on manliness, virtue and mastery of rough
sports such as rugby, and fist-fighting, reinforced the popularity of sports
as a vehicle for building the physique. Championed vigorously by work-
ing-class men, muscular Christianity cultivated the connection between
physical and spiritual purity, securing and fortifying a maleness that
 Systematic Approaches to Training the Body 113

had been jeopardized by unemployment at home and failing colonial

policies abroad. The spreading popularity of the Young Men’s Christian
Association in both Britain and the United States likewise promoted
sports as an ideal pursuit for the improvement of the self.
Sargent’s system, however, presented a level of detailed engagement
with specific muscles that had never been undertaken. His approach
outlined precisely the movements accomplished by each muscle and
hence, the degree of its involvement in a given movement. His regimen
also located the body comfortably in relation to a machine, thereby
referencing favourably the new relations between bodies and machines
that were transforming the workplace and all of daily life. Sargent’s regi-
men identified 156 individual muscles capable of development in diverse
exercises that used pulleys and weights attached to the floor, wall, or
overhead (Sargent, 1897: 77). Planting the body firmly in front of the pul-
leys, the exerciser held firm while pulling the weights towards the body
from a variety of locations (Figure 9.1). For each position and direction
of action, Sergeant specified the muscle groups that would be developed,
and a range of numbers of repetitions and speeds for the action that con-
toured a developmental approach to bodily training. He then outlined
a sequence of exercises that would systematically engage all the muscles
and muscle groups of the body towards the goal of achieving a compre-
hensive fitness. The exerciser, having completed his daily work-out, could
appreciate his growing strength in performing each exercise and feel con-
fident in the capacity of his physique.
Sargent outlined the motivation behind such a programme of physical
exercise as one based in the inseparability of body and mind. He believed
that enhancing physical strength would likewise expand mental capacity
for sustained and forceful thinking. His sense of the urgency and impor-
tance of proper physical education and its impact on the successful func-
tioning of the individual is well summarized in this set of claims about
the training of the body:

But when it shall be generally known that the object of muscular

exercise is not to develop muscle only but to increase the functional
capacity of the organs of respiration, circulation, and nutrition; not
to gain in physical endurance merely but to augment the working
power of the brain; not to attain bodily health and beauty alone but
to break up morbid mental tendencies, to dispel the gloomy shadows
of despondency, and to insure serenity of spirit; when men shall have
learned that much of the ill temper, malevolence, and uncharitable-
ness which pervade society arises from feeble health, and that the
114

Figure 9.1 Illustration from Dudley Allen Sargent, Handbook of Developing

Exercises (Cambridge: n.p., 1897)
 Systematic Approaches to Training the Body 115

great mental and moral disturbances which sometimes threaten the

stability of a government may be traced to physical causes, then will
the training of the body rival in dignity and importance the training
of the mind, for the interests of mind and body will be recognized as
inseparable.
(Sargent, 1906: 118–19)

Not only was the individual improved by physical education, but also, like-
wise, the health of society and the stability of government were assured
when bodily training was recognized as a crucial component of one’s
daily life.
At the same time that Sargent’s methods of physical education were
sweeping the country, a new fashion in physical culture was expand-
ing, primarily among women, based on the work of French aesthetician
François Delsarte. Taught widely in the United States and Britain in
schools of oratory and acting and in private salons, Delsarte’s theories
and exercises exerted massive influence on diverse presentations of the
self in public from dance and acting to public speaking and recitation.1
Promulgated in the United States by dramatist and theatrical designer
Steele Mackay and actress and rhetorician Genevieve Stebbins, classes
in Delsarte’s system of expression organized the body into zones identi-
fied with one of the three kinds of energy: spiritual, emotional or vital.
Large zones corresponding to these energy types were broken down into
smaller and smaller areas, each maintaining a correspondence to an
energy type. In addition to the zones, Stebbins classified positions of the
body into three types – excentric, normal and concentric. Correlations
between the kind of energy in each region and the position of that por-
tion of the body yielded an array of character attributes, emotional states
and temperaments that would enhance the persuasiveness of public
speaking. Alternatively, sequences of these positions could be arranged
and then performed as mute testimonies to the power of physical expres-
sion and the beauty of the body.
Stebbins devised numerous routines, called ‘pantomimes’ or ‘artistic
statue posing’ that transited the body through various dramatic moments
(Figure 9.2).2 For example, greeting a dear friend who, in response,
showed indifference, one might express surprise and affectionate protest
through the following sequence:

Hand now expands into conditional attitude nor.-ex., animation; little

finger pointing to normal zone of the torso. Forearm bends until little
finger is brought to left side of normal zone. A moment’s pause, then
116 Dancing Naturally

Figure 9.2 Exercises 10, 11 and 12, Elsie M. Wilbor, Delsarte Recitation Book. A
pantomime depicting Grief (4th edition, New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1905)

the shoulders lift; face expresses surprise; hand drops decomposed, posi-
tion of arm retained. Now sink elbow, pressing upper arm against side,
throwing decomposed hand into relative attitude con.-nor. Unbend
elbow, which throws hand out and up into relative attitude ex.-ex.
(Stebbins, 1886: 277)

Stebbins tabulated shapings of eyes, fingers and so on in terms of their

normal (nor.), concentric (con.), or excentric (ex.) position and asserted
their correspondence to various psychological states. For the hand, the
combination of concentric and normal signified ‘indifference, prostra-
tion, imbecility, insensibility, or death’, whereas eccentric with normal
indicated ‘approbation and tenderness’ (ibid.: 177). Unlike Sargent who
asserted, but never explored the connection between physical and moral
strength, Stebbins’ analysis of bodily movement offered a comprehensive
system for explaining and analysing the myriad connections between
body and psyche.
In Delsarte’s theory and Stebbins realization of it, mind, located in the
brain, and body were intimately connected, especially via the emotions,
also located in the mind. Emotion could activate the body’s movements,
 Systematic Approaches to Training the Body 117

or in the reverse process, the enactment of the actions associated with a

given emotion could generate those feelings. Stebbins explained:

Thus, when anger or love quickens the circulation and changes the
breathing, we recognize the physiological correspondence to the psy-
chic faculty which, if unobstructed, is further carried outward into
pantomime. Per contra, the wilful [sic] expression of an emotion which
we do not feel generates it by generating the sensations connected
with it, which, in their turn, are associated with analogous emotions.
(1886: 177)

Depending upon the intensity of the feeling, the body could be prompted
into a full pantomime-like expression of feeling. Central to Stebbins own
approach, however, was the possibility that enacting specific shapings of
the body would induce the feelings of ‘indifference’ or ‘tenderness’ as a
product of that physical action. The pantomimes and poses, therefore,
yielded healthful benefits, and they also enabled their practitioners to
journey through numerous dramatic narratives. Whereas Sargent’s regime
called upon the exerciser to maintain a stoic neutrality, engaging only in
the narrative arc suggested by the successful completion of the designated
number of repetitions, Stebbins’ system could be used to implement an
endless number of possible storylines. And whereas Sargent’s exercises
cast the machine as both adversary and assistant, asking the exerciser to
repeatedly go up against the resistance it provided, Stebbins’ pantomimes
could involve groups of participants in multiple kinds of roles and rela-
tions to one another.
Key to the successful realization of Stebbins’ bodily postures was the
preparative training known as ‘decomposing’, in which practitioners
learned to relax and let fall towards gravity different parts of the body
and even the body as a whole. Sargent’s exercises cultivated awareness of
muscular exertion through repetition and the increasing difficulty of the
exercise as the muscles tired. Stebbins invited practitioners to sense the
body’s changing relationship to gravity, through relaxation or through
the slow swaying of body parts. She believed strongly in the power of
relaxation to recuperate energy and thereby restore and equilibrate bodily
functions, and she encouraged her students to:

Lie down on the floor, relax at once as completely as possible, so

that the body shall be practically limp and lifeless, as though it was
no part of you. The mental idea is a calm and perfect consciousness
of your separate existence apart from and superior to any part of the
118 Dancing Naturally

body undergoing the exercise. This must be accompanied by rhythmic

breathing, while in imagination the mind seeks unaided a pleasing
but dreamy kind of rapport with the natural surroundings, if they are
beautiful; if not, close the eyes and make a picture of sea and sky, rose
garden or hill, lawn or bower.
(Stebbins, 1898: 33–4)

Stebbins’ supine figure, experiencing an almost complete separation

between consciousness and physical experience, could learn to control
all the voluntary musculature. Unlike Sargent whose system enhanced
awareness of one’s musculature through a cumulative tiring of all 156
individual muscles, Stebbins’ cultivation of kinaesthesia entailed the
continual comparison between relaxed and energized states for any given
muscle.
In order to expand this awareness of and control over the musculature,
Stebbins developed series of energizing exercises, seen as complementary
to the de-composing exercises, in which one muscle group would con-
tract slowly while the rest of the body remained resolutely relaxed.3 For
example, standing with the right leg raised:

Inhale, and as you do so, gradually contract every muscle until the
left leg is quite rigid at the fourth count. Hold the tension and the
breath while counting four. Slowly relax while you count four.
(Stebbins, 1898: 39)

Repeating this kind of exercise with different parts of the body, consist-
ently monitoring increasing and decreasing tension through counting
and the breath, one gained a satisfying sense of mastery over an entire
interiority. Surveying oneself from the distance intimated in Stebbins’
relaxation exercise, the body became instantiated, not as an appearance,
but as a volume.
From this enhanced awareness of specific muscle activation, Stebbins
developed sequences of actions based on spiral and successional patterns.
Delsarte had advocated for a law of opposition evident in the contraposto
shapings of classical Greek sculptures, which the poses sometimes imi-
tated. Gradually transitioning from one pose to another, the body became
integrated through the modulated flow of energy across and connecting
the zones, displaying the much desired quality of sinuosity. Quoting
Delsarte, Stebbins reminded her readers that, ‘Dynamic health depends
upon the number of articulations brought into play’ (Stebbins, 1886: 98).
Repeatedly isolating each body part and then moving successionally
 Systematic Approaches to Training the Body 119

through them, the practitioner developed a strong connection to gravity

and a sense of movement as tensile and three-dimensional. Unlike
Sargent, whose system particularized individual muscles and then simply
categorized them as used or not yet used, Stebbins, following Delsarte,
elaborated a programme that progressively brought more and more mus-
cles into dynamic interplay with one another. And where Sargent’s ideal
body maintained its erectness and integrity throughout its ‘combat’ with
the machine, Stebbins’ notion of virtuosity entailed the sinuous integra-
tion of actions within diverse parts of the body.
As distinctive as Stebbins’ and Sargent’s regimens were, they partook in
the common reorganization of kinaesthetic experience that was occurring
in relation to new technologies and new modes of work. Hillel Schwarz
(1992) has argued that a range of new innovations, from the escalator to
the zipper, privileged continuous motion, the kind that both Stebbins
and Sargent were promoting in their various exercises. Schwarz shows
a preoccupation throughout childhood education with continuous and
rhythmic motion, encouraging it as a key factor in good penmanship,
accurate drawing, and also reasoning. At the same time, new methods
of organization within the factory stipulated repetition of discrete move-
ment patterns, and scrutinized both the parsing of these patterns into
actions assigned to individual workers and their performance of those
actions in terms of efficiency. On the one hand, there was a celebration
of the musculature and all that it could accomplish and, on the other,
a strong mandate to economize on expenditure of effort, now seen as
existing on a continuum between full exertion and relaxation.
Both Stebbins’ and Sargent’s regimens also relied upon a degree of ana-
tomical knowledge that helped to rationalize their training programmes
as the most natural way to approach the care of the body. They each
referenced anatomy as a reality about physical structure that must be
experienced, asking their students to notice the lengths, connections
and actions of specific muscles. Stebbins, however, subsumed anatomi-
cal structure within her more basic theory about the zones of the body
and the types of actions of the muscles, whether concentric or excentric.
It was these zones and types of muscle actions, shared by all peoples of
the world, that constituted her theory of a universal schema for analys-
ing and interpreting movement. Sargent, in contrast, noted the wide
variety of sports and other forms of physical exercise world-wide, and
he even tied specific physical defects and types of physique to national
training programmes and to national character types. The superiority
of his approach was based in its reliance on anatomy, since ‘Anatomy
and physiology are the same the world over, and there cannot be a wide
120 Dancing Naturally

difference in school methods where the facts and principles taught by

these sciences are adhered to’ (Sargent, 1906: 15).
In dance training, the importance of anatomy can be traced back at
least as far as the writings of eighteenth-century Dancing Masters John
Weaver and Jean Georges Noverre, who each made strong cases for dance
training based in a sound knowledge of the skeleton. In his Anatomical
and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing, Weaver also listed the major actions
accomplished by individual muscles, yet he provided no exercises to
cultivate the muscles. Instead, he explained how the body should con-
form to a set of geometric specifications governing proper alignment as
it executes each step within the standard dance vocabulary. Identifying
what he called the ‘Line of Propension’, an imaginary line located at
the midpoint between the feet in any given position, and the ‘Line of
Innixion’, an imaginary line drawn from the centre of the body through
to the weight bearing leg, Weaver carefully described the location of
each line for each position and for the basic steps. The Fourth Position,
for example, consisted of a Line of Propension falling in between the
two legs positioned in front and behind one another while the Line of
Innixion was located along the posterior leg that was bearing the body’s
weight. He then described walking in this way:

A Transition of this Position from one Foot to another, translates the

Body from one Place to another, and produces what we call Walking.
As this Position is the most graceful Posture of Standing, it is requi-
site that we endeavor to account for the Beauty of it, by shewing [sic],
it is also the most natural.
(Weaver, 1721: 106)

Weaver explained that the naturalness of the Fourth position derived

from the simple fact, easily experienced by anyone, according to him,
that it is less tiresome to stand on one leg at a time than to continually
stand on both feet.
In contrast to Weaver, who used anatomy largely as a structure on to
which the basic positions in dance could be grafted, Noverre elaborated
more fully on the relationship of exercise to physical improvement at
dancing. Arguing that the turn-out of the hip is exceedingly unnatural
while at the same time the single most important capacity for the dancer
to acquire, Noverre resorted to anatomy to show how the young and sup-
ple body needed to be trained to acquire turn-out. Instead of focusing on
the feet as many teachers did, Noverre argued that turn-out originated in
the thighs, and he noted that ronds des jambes and battements tendus could
 Systematic Approaches to Training the Body 121

help substantially to increase turn-out (Noverre, 1966: 119). He also noted

that defects in the feet or legs, such as flat arches or knock knees, would
have repercussions throughout the rest of the skeletal structure, even in
the shoulders (ibid.: 114). Both Weaver and Noverre invoked anatomy in
order to explain a natural way of training the body, although they did not
consider the musculature in any detail, nor did they approach the body
as a dynamic and volumetric entity. Instead, they examined the body as
a kind of silhouette whose outline should have the proper appearance.
Noverre also made specific reference to the defects and needs of female
dancers, who, he observed, tended to be bow-legged more often than their
knock-kneed male counterparts, and to cover up this defect through the
clever use of their petticoats. By directing and framing the viewer’s gaze
on the specific actions of the feet, they achieved, in Noverre’s opinion,
a more dazzling brilliance of execution (1966: 116). Weaver accounted for
the finesse and quickness of female dancers’ performances by pointing
to the fineness of their bones (Weaver, 1721: 12). Both Dancing Masters
worked during a period when the vocabularies for male and female danc-
ers differed in degree, of numbers of turns, heights of jumps, or speed of
step, and the like, but they did not differ in kind. Only with the develop-
ment of pointe work in the early nineteenth century did male and female
roles develop substantially different skills, vocabularies and roles.
Sargent’s and Stebbins’ regimens signalled a radical departure from these
earlier systems of bodily training. They articulated a distinctive concep-
tion of the body as a dynamic and muscular volume, and they intimated a
different kind of relationship between corporeality and the expressive act.
Sargent emphasized the relationships between physical stamina and men-
tal productivity and between physical purity and moral forthrightness.
His concentration on a stalwart and dedicated drive towards improving
the physique, with its focus on achievement of measurable goals, affirmed
the importance of physical development for individual and social well-
being without directly addressing or involving the emotions. Stebbins, in
contrast, fused physical and emotional development, and centred much
of her practice in the exploration of dramatic narrative. Whereas Sargent
appealed to anatomy with its investigation of the musculature as the vehi-
cle for understanding a natural way of moving, Stebbins incorporated that
knowledge into her synthetic vision of the natural principles of motion
and emotion. Sargent’s regimens focused exclusively on individual
practice, with men sometimes performing side by side on similar sets of
equipment, Stebbins’ routines were far more collaborative, often drawing
several women together into the expression of a single story and likewise
involving performance for a potential or actual viewer.
122 Dancing Naturally

The two distinctive systems thus gesture towards a division of labour

along gender lines, one that was evident in the newly emerging modern
dance. Insisting on the difference between what they were representing
and the performances of the feminine staged in burlesque or in ballet, the
early women modern dancers, including Duncan and St. Denis, intensi-
fied and dramatized the relationship between motion and emotion.
They mobilized the dynamic muscularity that programmes like Stebbins’
helped to construct for the purpose of evoking an equally dynamic
psyche. Even when performing a solo, their movements engaged with the
surrounding space as partner in the process of revealing and tracking the
flow of feeling. Much of the power of their performances derived from
their ability to establish a sinuous flow of movement and to demonstrate
the tensile relationship between muscular force and the relaxation of
that force.
For male modern dance artists, combating the prejudices against dance
as a frivolous pursuit and the compromised masculinity that ensued from
dancing on stage, Sargent’s assertion of the virile manliness that was
produced by his regimens may have proved more helpful. Ted Shawn,
for example, although a strong exponent of Delsarte’s theories, none-
theless championed rigorously a physical fitness measured in terms of
muscle mass as well as athletic locomotion and leaping. The majority
of his dances staged images of men striving to achieve something, and
some were based in the specific vocabularies of physical labour. Much as
Sargent had conceived of the relationship between mind and body, they
depicted physical combat and conquest as a metaphor for mental doubt
and the transcendence of that doubt. And the group pieces often staged
men in unison moving alongside one another rather than in an organi-
cally shaped ensemble.
Daly (1995) has discussed the influence of Stebbins’ work on Duncan,
and her connections to St. Denis and to other modern dancers have also
been established by Ruyter (1979). Rather than trace the explicit con-
nections between Stebbins or Sargent and any of the modern dancers,
I have tried to suggest how their training programmes tacitly laid out
approaches to bodily cultivation that may have proved useful for artists
in the new modern dance, a form of dance that had not yet devised any
standard systems for training the body. Like Tomko (1999), I envision
Sargent’s and Stebbins’ programmes as two influential strains of physical
practice that were circulating in early twentieth-century urban centres
in the United States that many students might have encountered in one
place or another. The values, specifically regarding gender, that were pro-
moted in the two systems were also pervasive throughout society during
 Systematic Approaches to Training the Body 123

that period. Together the two systems set forth a division of labour, quite
distinct from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century gender roles, that estab-
lished the natural in dance for decades to come.

Notes
1. Ruyter (1979) asserts that 80 per cent of the practitioners were women, mostly
middle class and well educated. Men involved in teaching the system focused
primarily on its use in oratory, whereas women cultivated its application to
pantomimes and presentations of posing.
2. See, for example, Shoemaker (1919), a collection of pantomimes in which the
poems to be recited are parsed line by line, annotated with specific instruc-
tions for weight change and bodily position and momentum, as well as arm,
hand and eye movements.
3. Ruyter (1988: 382) identifies these energizing exercises as one of Stebbins’
specific contributions to Delsarte’s system.

Bibliography
Daly, A. 1995 Done into Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Noverre, J. G. [1803] 1966 Letters on Dancing and Ballets, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont.
New York: Dance Horizons.
Ruyter, N. L. C. 1979 Reformers and Visionaries: The Americanization of the Arts of
Dance. New York: Dance Horizons.
—— 1988 ‘The Intellectual World of Genevieve Stebbins’, Dance Chronicle, 11.3:
381–97.
Sargent, D. A. 1897 Handbook of Developing Exercises. Cambridge: n.p.
—— 1906 Physical Education. Boston, MA: Ginn.
Schwarz, H. 1992 ‘Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century’, in
Incorporations: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shoemaker, J. W. 1919 Delsartean Pantomimes, with Recital and Musical
Accompaniment. Philadelphia: Penn Publishing.
Stebbins, G. 1886 Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression. New York: E. S. Werner.
—— 1898 The Genevieve Stebbins System of Physical Training New York:
E. S. Werner.
Tomko, L. J. 1999 Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity and Social Divides in American
Dance, 1890–1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Weaver, J. 1721 Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing London:
J. Brotherton and W. Meadows.
Whorton, J. C. 1982 Crusaders for Fitness: the History of American Health Reformers.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
10
‘Female Nature’, Body Culture
and Plastique
Karen Vedel

This chapter looks at the role of plastique1 in the numerous systems

for disciplining the body, and especially the female body in the early
decades of the 1900s.2 Based on material relating to Denmark, it will
be argued that the training of plastique created a link between other-
wise discrete genres3 of women’s body culture, and furthermore was
perceived as particularly close to, or even enhancing female ‘nature’.
Ultimately it will be suggested that the training of plastique came to
inform a double process of ‘naturalization’ taking place before, under
and after Denmark gained full female suffrage in 1915.
Deriving from Greek plastiké, the feminine form of the adjective
plastikós, the meaning of the term plastique (da. plastik) points to the
malleable and flexible, a three-dimensional quality, which, like plaster
or clay in the hands of a sculptor, may be shaped according to the ide-
alized bodies of Antiquity.4 The plastique training of a hundred years
ago shares important characteristics with the practices of the fitness
industry today with its aim of shaping or moulding the body to some
ideal form. In this sense the ‘paradigm of plasticity’ is still used in a
related manner to refer to the infinite possibilities of ‘improving’ the
body. Now, however, the notion persists in the term given to cosmetic
alterations carried out by the medical profession. As Susan Bordo points
out, this cultural plasticity has been fuelled by:

(F)antasies of rearranging, transforming and correcting, an ideology

of limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the
mortality and, indeed, the very materiality of the body.
(2003: 245)

In the early 1900s, the material shaping of the body with the help of
plastique contributed not only to the training of dancers, actors and
124
 ‘Female Nature’, Body Culture and Plastique 125

opera singers, but was found as well in civic pursuits such as private
schools for dance and gymnastics. In my discussion of these different
genres, I use the umbrella term ‘body culture’ in its direct translation
from the Danish word legemskultur to designate an unstable corpus of
corporeal practices that change according to use and historical context.
A related, but less inclusive term is the German Körperkultur, a significant
supplement to the spiritual part of the Life Reform movement in fin de
siècle Germany, which believed that ‘modern people were on a path of
progressive degeneration that could only be reversed if they once again
lived in accordance with human nature’ (Hau, 2003: 10). Influenced
by the Vitalism5 of natural scientists such as Hans Driesch and philoso-
phers such as Henri Bergson, the contemporary Danish interest in body
culture found expression in an array of activities from visual and stage
arts, to the scholarly study of human physiology, to the previously men-
tioned leisure activities in sports, gymnastics and dance.6
In a reading of selected writings on body culture and with an emphasis
on texts by key teachers from the early decades of the 1900s, my analysis
centres on the following questions: what was the role of plastique in the
project of culturing the body? What were the underlying ideas of, in par-
ticular, female ‘nature’? And last, but not least, if understood as a genre
organizing particular corporeal codes into new social contracts, what
were the obligations fulfilled by plastique in relation to the full female
suffrage obtained in 1915?
My discussion takes as its point of departure the changing, yet over-
lapping, ways in which plastique was situated in Danish society from
the staged attitudes adopted at private showings in the 1800s, to the
Romantic idealist formation of August Bournonville’s dancers that
influenced the training of actors and opera singers well into the 1900s.
Attentive to these shifting manifestations and uses of plastique, I go on
to contextualize the training in the implicit and explicit ideas of gen-
dered ‘nature’ at work in various forms of body culture from dance to
acting, to women’s gymnastics. By grounding this chapter in a material
that lies outside the canonized sources of the predominantly English-
speaking community of dance scholars, my intention is to present a
localized perspective on the topic of ‘dancing naturally’.

Plastique on stage

The history of plastique in the Danish context goes back to the early 1800s,
when Ida Brun (a.k.a. Adelaide de Bombelles) staged her ‘antique long-
ings’ modelled on classical Greek sculptures on the lawns of the family
126 Dancing Naturally

estate outside Copenhagen (Figure 10.1). Vividly recalled in the mem-

oirs of her mother, the aesthetic dimension of Ida’s education involved
the combination of ‘plastic movements’, the study of Greek mythology,
sculpture and drawing.7 Exercised with the intent of building her skills in
reproducing positions, attitudes and motifs from ancient Greece, she pro-
gressed to performing attitudes for the Danish and the European cultural
elites across Central Europe and Italy, thus following in the footsteps of
Lady Hamilton. In order not to ruin her societal status (read: marriage
prospects), she posed only in private gatherings, for artists and honoraries
such as Berthel Thorvaldsen, sculptor par excellence of the Danish Golden
Age, the German poet and naturalist philosopher J. W. Goethe, as well as
then ballet master of the Royal Danish Ballet, Vincenzo Galeotti.
Galeotti’s successor in Copenhagen, Antoine Bournonville, and his
son, the infinitely more renowned August Bournonville, also harboured
a professional interest in the plastique of neo-classicism. Writing about the
art of choreography August Bournonville prescribed a careful balancing

Figure 10.1 H. E. Hetch: Ida Brun by the bust of her mother, 1803 (by courtesy
of Christian Brun and Sophienholm)
 ‘Female Nature’, Body Culture and Plastique 127

of ballet’s academic vocabulary of steps, the use of plastically expressive

poses that comply with classic conventions of beauty and harmony, as
well as a formalized gestural sign language. In terms that echoed Noverre’s
writing on the ballet d’action, Bournonville also foregrounded ‘the plastic’
in his characterization of the pantomimic aspect of his work:

The manner in which I perceive the pantomime and as it functions

in my ballets, it is neither a dialogue nor a combination of sign lan-
guage or conventional gestus, it is a harmonic and rhythmic row of
picturesque poses, found in nature and the classic patterns, that must
be consistent with character and costume, with nationality and agita-
tion, with person and time. This row of poses and movements are in
and of themselves a dance, but without turned out feet; its attitudes
strive only for the plastic and characteristic and refrain with care from
all resemblance of virtuosity.
( [1848] 1977: 163)8

Worth noticing is that Bournonville made no distinction between males

and females in terms of these ideals. The assumption that plastic expres-
sions of Antiquity’s idealized bodies in the mid-1800s would be practised
both by male and female stage performers finds support in the journals
of Henrik Ibsen.9 In an entry discussing his impressions from a trip to
Copenhagen in 1852, he writes about the roles of a young male actor:
‘It is as if I walk through a gallery of antique statues. Pure plastique, pure
beauty’ (Ibsen, in Hov, 2005: 39).
Between the romantic idealist style of Bournonville with its notion
of being true to nature, and the more naturalist style of acting in the
early 1900s, a shift in the uses of plastique is taking place. In the context
of the naturalist theatre’s importance given to the milieu as well as the
psychological motives of the characters, plastique came increasingly to be
regarded as an instrument for communicating the stage performer’s own
feelings rather than an abstract ideal. In a text on the dramatic training
of the actor Emilie Walbom, a student of Bournonville, choreographer,
teacher of plastique, and ballet mistress at the Royal Danish Ballet, under-
lined the importance of plastique training in terms of achieving a natural
quality in the gestural expressions before an audience:

A gesture should not be too premeditated; it should come quite

naturally; when one feels, what one says, the feelings should extend
into the tips of the fingers, not until then is one ‘dramatic’. Any one
can stretch out their hand, but is it a dead lump – it says nothing; if
128 Dancing Naturally

however, every nerve or fibre is tense, but in a natural, unconscious

manner, there will be expression in the hand, and one will under-
stand, what the artist means.
(1917: 135–6)

Walbom refers to the ability to feed feeling into the movements in order
to make them plastically expressive as the ‘nerve’ that enables the actor
to convey the soul’s innermost motions to the audience in a meaningful
way.10 In a further distinction of the contemporary style of acting from
the romantic idealist style, she reminds the reader that today’s stage
expressions are less naïve than in earlier times.
The recommended repertoire of exercises for actors and opera sing-
ers in Walbom’s classes remained modelled on the recognized basics
of ballet training, such as pliés (the bending of the knees over the feet
in turn out), tendus (the extension of one leg and foot along the floor),
battements (quick, repetitive movement of one foot against the floor or
the ankle of the supporting leg) and port de bras (the calm movement
of the arms between the five basic positions). Taken together the aim of
the exercises was to sustain a harmonic development of the musculature
on the one hand, and to connect the individual student with the ‘poetic
nature’ of her inner motions on the other.
While plastique was perceived as contributing to the professional train-
ing of actors and singers with something new, it had also come to play
an important role in Walbom’s Fokine inspired ballets. In fact, some of
her critics complained that an emphasis on the plastic expression had
altogether displaced the lively steps of the old master. Other critics, wel-
coming her approach, perceived it as more international and modern
than the style of the previous century.
The polarized response to the work of Walbom and other high-profile
female professionals is emblematic of this time of political changes. With
the constitution of 1849, as the powers of the Danish King and the land-
owners had become shared with adult males members of the bourgeoisie,
the women were left behind without the same constitutional rights. By
the end of the century, however, the campaign for women’s suffrage had
grown into a broad national movement (Larsen, 2010: 168). The election
in 1901 saw the introduction of the parliamentary system as it is known
in Denmark today, and in 1907 the Social Democratic Party made the
first formal proposal for female suffrage. In 1915, however, when Danish
women acquired the same constitutional rights as male citizens, it was
very much thanks to the bourgeois women’s movement. And even then,
Danish women had to wait until 1918 before they could vote (ibid.: 177).
 ‘Female Nature’, Body Culture and Plastique 129

In terms of the parallel struggle for the recognition of women as profes-

sionals, Emilie Walbom was an important figure and often interviewed
by newspapers and women’s journals. Not only was she the first female
choreographer at the Royal Danish Ballet, she was also the first chore-
ographer since Bournonville to make a significant contribution to its
repertoire and an obvious candidate to the post as ballet master, when
Hans Beck retired in 1915. In the end she was, however, appointed not
ballet master, but ballet mistress and second in charge to her male col-
league Gustav Uhlendorff. Even if there was some disappointment, the
promotion was interpreted as victorious by her contemporary, Emma
Gad, another prominent voice in the bourgeois women’s movement,
who noted with approval that a female artist for the first time was given
an office of authority in the national ballet.11

‘Female nature’

A focus on the biological differences between the sexes underpinned the

debate on women’s rights and female citizenship at different levels of
Danish society. A question of increasing concern not only to the medical
profession and the natural sciences, biologist views were also articulated
in the broader arena of body culture both on and off stage. In the con-
servative and bourgeois institution of the Royal Danish Ballet, the ten-
dency leaned towards a growing differentiation between male and female
dancing. One of the first steps taken by Hans Beck, upon his appoint-
ment as ballet master to the Royal Danish Ballet in 1894, had been to
reform the male pupils’ training by replacing the ‘affected style’ of the
men’s dancing, which the tradition had previously demanded, with a
more ‘manly’ style (Beck, 1915: 5–6). The determination, with which he
approached the task, and the response he received from influential crit-
ics, suggests that his actions were welcomed.
Ove Jørgensen, an important Danish cultural critic, wrote retrospec-
tively in support of Hans Beck’s reforms, expressing his view on the
question of male and female ‘nature’ in what today reads like an out-
right vulgar manner:

Hans Beck’s volcanic and at times almost brutal male artist’s tem-
perament has, through a long and victorious struggle, succeeded in
removing everything unmanly in the art of the dancers and created
a distinctly virile dance, where the flaming power and appeal of the
steel-strong male body and its movements, refined through the laws of
130 Dancing Naturally

beauty and use of musical rhythms, create the most wonderful contrast
to the more voluptuous and graceful suppleness of the female body.
(1905: 304)

By contrasting the male as outgoing, active and ‘flaming’ hot with the
softly curved and more receptive female, Jørgensen’s position reflected
the widely accepted view of masculinity and femininity based in Aristote-
lian epistemology. As pointed out by feminist philosophers, the polar-
ized attributes of a gendered ontology not only identify form with male
and matter with female they also assign other significant binaries. ‘Form
is actuality whereas matter is potentiality; form is unitary and specific
whereas matter is amorphous; form is active whereas matter is passive’
(Freeland, 1998: 110).12 The general tendency in the decades of the 1900s,
moving in the direction of increasingly differentiated physical regimes
for the training of men and women, may be seen as a consequence of
the attribution of gendered ‘natures’ to humankind. It also follows that
plastique with its emphasis on mutability came to be perceived as particu-
larly well suited to address the amorphous matter of the female body in
its constant state of becoming.
The following quote from an interview with Emilie Walbom in one of
the main daily newspapers confirms that the complementary training
of dance and plastique gradually came to be seen as more relevant for
women than for men.

Dance and plastique are really a very good form of exercise, and a
particularly female one. … Between you and me: Ballet dancing is
in my opinion not a profession for men, generally speaking. A male
ballet dancer has really no justification, if he is not a Hans Beck or a
Fokine. I know one thing for sure, privately I prefer not to teach boys
and young men.
(Nationaltidende, 23 January 1920)

On the surface the differentiated training was aesthetically motivated

in terms that prescribed gender specific comportment and manners of
movement on stage. Underneath, however, ran a subtext of homopho-
bia that had long found support in other parts of contemporary Danish
culture.13 It should also be noted that Emilie Walbom, who earlier had
applauded the ongoing efforts of Hans Beck to redress ‘effeminate’ male
dancing in the Royal Danish Ballet, in this quote takes an exclusionary
stand in favour of teaching female students. Her standpoint lends support
 ‘Female Nature’, Body Culture and Plastique 131

to another point of contention in the contemporary debate on women’s

body culture, which argued that women should be taught by women.

Women’s gymnastics

The debate on the best and most appropriate training of male and
female stage performers was paralleled in relation to gymnastics and
sports.14 In 1903 the more militaristic German gymnastics in the Danish
public school system was replaced with a combination of Swedish gym-
nastics after P. H. Ling and elements of British physical education based
in sports, and in 1904 gymnastics was made obligatory for girls in the
schools of larger towns (Poulsen, 2005: 68) The 1899 manual, whereby
gymnastics was taught in Danish schools for the next 30 years, broke
with previous practices of exempting girls from gymnastics classes
and nurtured the similarities between the sexes over the differences
(Gymnastikkommissionen, 1899: 29). As a result, the majority of the
recommended exercises were identical for boys and girls. The same was
the case for the corrective goals of the physical education articulated in
the ideal of the upright standing position as a reflection of an upright
personality. By exercising the girls in largely the same manner as the
boys, gymnastics aimed to ‘repair’ the culturally ingrained, muscular
deficit of the weaker sex. There were, however, certain exercises that
girls were not allowed to engage in, such as rifle shooting and tug-of-
war. These exceptions were motivated by a combination of physical and
aesthetic considerations.
Outside the state run school system, a large number of private institu-
tions offered gymnastic classes to the general public. Among the first
to offer a teacher’s training for women alone was Paul Petersen, who
established a teacher’s education that combined dancing, gymnastics and
swimming in 1878 and the Danish Gymnastic Teachers Club in 1888,
later known as Danish Women’s Gymnastics Institute (DWGI).15 Labelled
‘rational women’s gymnastics’ DWGI’s style aimed at retaining the stamp
of femininity without losing the gymnastic character of the exercises.
Paul Petersen’s approach combined his education in military gymnastics
with service in the Royal Danish Theatre as an extra for a number of
years, thereby bringing together the two regimes of bodily preparation.
The first of these experiences had an impact on the renowned strict-
ness of his pedagogic approach; the second on the integration of ballet
exercises at the barre and other dance material as compulsory parts of his
‘rational gymnastics’. The strong interest in dance and plastique was fur-
ther underlined by the fact that DWGI was the first gymnastics institute
132 Dancing Naturally

in Denmark to use musical accompaniment to the exercises, something

for which the founder was ridiculed by his peers (Krøier, 1953: 11).
Among several contemporary proponents of teaching an explic-
itly differentiated gymnastics for men and women was also Johannes
Lindhard, who held a degree as a medical doctor from 1914. Working
from a base in physiology, anatomy and biomechanics, Lindhard taught
gymnastics theory at the University of Copenhagen from 1909, was
appointed the professorship in 1917, and two years later the leadership
of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Physiology at the University
of Copenhagen. From these academic positions Lindhard devised a pro-
gramme to complement the practical side of gymnastics teachers’ training
with theoretical insights based in physiological research. Viewed from the
vantage point of his scientific approach, the gymnastics in the national
curriculum of the Danish public school system was criticized with being
too mechanical and too forceful for women, whereas the approach of
Paul Petersen and DWGI was criticized for being too militaristic and too
balletic (Lindhard, 1914: 20).
Lindhard proposed an alternative women’s gymnastic that relied
on anatomical observations and quantifiable measurements of female
and male physiology. Bearing the stamp of Darwinian thinking, the
scientifically motivated repertoire of physical exercises was designed to
assist the evolution of women and, it was argued, humankind at large
(Lindhard, 1914: 9 and 21). In more practical terms the exercises aimed
at training equilibrium (balances with a strong awareness of the pelvis)
as well as rhythmic movements (dance), and focused on enhancing the
‘vital capacity’ of the respiratory organs, as well as strengthening the
diaphragm and the pelvic floor. Deemed unsuitable, or even unnatural
for women, were mechanical and automatic exercises, rigid poses, as well
as forceful demands on strength and their more easily agitated nervous
system (ibid.: 18). Furthermore, it was stressed that women should be
taught by women (‘whose instincts will be able to assist where insights
fall short’ ibid.: 186), and that emphasis should be placed on harmonic
and plastic movements (ibid.: 26).
Attentive as well to the aesthetic dimension, the principles governing
the choice of exercises in academic gymnastics celebrated conventional
‘female qualities’ such as beauty, ease, grace, agility and suppleness. But
first and last their purpose was to assist the development of woman-
hood’s ultimate rationale, her ‘sexual purpose’:

It is imperative to stress that the female body in contrast to the male

is shaped in accordance with the fulfilment of her sexual purpose.
 ‘Female Nature’, Body Culture and Plastique 133

If women’s gymnastics is not designed in accordance with this, it is

mistaken. Healthy women, developed in such a manner that they are
best possibly able to become mothers, are the first and most impor-
tant condition for a healthy stock.
(Lindhard, 1914: 29)

The concluding sentence is almost identical to the call made by Isadora

Duncan in The Dance of the Future for ‘improvement’ of the female
sex. Duncan envisioned a return to the ‘original strength and beauti-
ful movements of the female body’, and she charged her dance of the
future with the aim of creating perfect mothers, who would give birth
to healthy and beautiful children (Duncan, 1969: 61).
I will turn now to look in more detail at the work of Agnete Bertram,
student of Johannes Lindhard, the first woman to graduate from the
University of Copenhagen with a degree from the Gymnastics Institute
in 1920, and herself the founder of a physiologically motivated, ‘natural’
women’s gymnastics. As shown in sports historian Anne Lykke Poulsen’s
research on Danish women’s gymnastics and female citizenship (2005),
Agnete Bertram was just one among a number of influential figures at
the time. I have singled her out for the purpose of this chapter due to her
commitment to forging a system of gymnastic exercises on physiologi-
cally and ideologically founded particularities of ‘female nature’.

Plastique or not?

Among her peers Agnete Bertram’s system was criticized for being too
strongly based in plastique and dance to be considered gymnastics. To this
allegation she responded that her teaching was not plastique, but indeed
gymnastics, ‘only it does not look ugly’ (Poulsen, 2005: 141). In Bertram’s
mind, what marked gymnastics as a genre apart from expressive or theat-
rical body culture was the integration of form and function, posture and
movement, living physiological being and daily life. In a fashion similar
to the movement systems of Genevieve Stebbins (in the United States)
and Bess Mensendieck’s (in the United States and Europe), the rhythmic
and ‘natural gymnastics’ she devised relied on the study of movement in
art and the everyday.
While she was still a university student, Bertram carried out a study
of women’s standing posture. This empirical research, she emphasized,
centred not on the study of fixed positions in the gymnastic studio but
rather on ‘the comportment of the lived body in its everyday activities’
(Bertram, 1917: 4). In the introductory notes to her essay on ‘The Upright
134 Dancing Naturally

Standing Position in Women’s Gymnastics: An Aesthetic Investigation’,

Bertram further notes that aesthetic ideals reflect the time and culture in
which they are born (ibid.: 9). In the light of emerging democratic values
placed upon the individual woman in the early 1900s, she is critical of
the vertical and symmetric upright standing position with it’s even dis-
tribution of the body weight over straight legs. This, the most commonly
practised posture in gymnastics, she argues, tends to ‘highlight the least
individual qualities in the human stature’, reflecting instead on the lifeless
human figures on the sarcophagi of archaic times (my emphasis). The
celebration of uniformity over individuality in contemporary gymnastics
is further emphasized in the endlessly repeated movement motifs and the
presentation of gymnasts in rows (ibid.: 12).
Bertram proposes an alternative to the perceived conflict between
the contemporary gymnastic ideals and the demands of the democratic
nation that relies firmly on the gendered notions of ‘nature’ passed on in
the Gymnastics Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Arguing that
the symmetrical pose with its rigid and militaristic connotations is more
‘natural’ to the shape of the male figure, she recommends a female pose
of ‘balanced and composed instability’ that is in more accordance with
women’s rounded shapes and wider pelvis (Bertram, 1917: 26). In the
prescribed pose of ‘balanced rest’, the thighs are together, the knees only
slightly separated, and the downward lines converge with the weight
unevenly distributed over the feet. In its mixture of physiological and
gendered ideologies, the pose is further motivated with aesthetic refer-
ences to classical sculpture:

From Antiquity until today the separated and thus turned out legs
are rarely depicted in representations of women – from Venus of
Milo to Saabye’s [Danish sculptor] Susanne, we see the closed femora
and the convergent position of the resting leg with the knee pulled
slightly in front of the standing leg.
(ibid.: 24)

This particular position of the legs, Bertram underlines, has forever been
the emblem of femininity and a plastic expression of woman’s bond to
nature through the female womb (ibid.: 29). Her legitimizing references
to the ‘eternal’ values of Antiquity, point to some of the contradictions
being negotiated in body culture as such and her own gymnastics in
particular. At the same time as Bertram identified her larger project as
scientifically based and criticized other gymnastic systems with out-
dated views of the body, she remained blind to the ideal foundation of
 ‘Female Nature’, Body Culture and Plastique 135

the scientific categories, which continued to play a significant role in

her construction of a gendered corporeality.
Later in her career Bertram moved on from the study of the standing
posture to looking at the everyday practice of walking. Alongside investiga-
tions of more complex and dynamic movements, she developed theoretical
principles of spirals, momentum and swinging. Aiming to build awareness
of the organic and complex collaboration between the shifts of weight,
the contractions of muscles, connective tissue, and nerves involved in any
movement, she insisted on giving focus to the motion of the entire human
being rather than to isolated body parts, as was customary in most other
gymnastics (Bertram, 1937: 10). According to this organic approach, when
movement was taken to its limits, it was never to a point of stasis but to
one of transition into the next movement. As a result of the flow and suc-
cession between the different exercises, the body was continuously chal-
lenged with complex balances. In order to illustrate this point, Bertram
juxtaposed a series of photos of male soccer players in dynamic action
next to photos of female gymnasts in similarly complex contortions, but
without the ball and infinitely more graceful (ibid.: 16 ff.).
A sense of flux was also stressed in her use of the oral command, altered
in such a manner as to create continuity between the exercises. In the
instructor’s calling out the commands for the next exercise while the first
was still running, Bertram’s gymnastics replaced the more mechanical
character of, for instance, Swedish gymnastics, where commands were
called out between the exercises. Furthermore she enhanced the rhythmic
dimension of the exercises with the accompaniment of either live piano
or recorded music. Last but not least, it is worth noticing that Agnete
Bertram was successful in marketing her gymnastics internationally.16

Plastique and female citizenship

Since the earliest days of attitudes, statue posing and tableaux vivantes in
Denmark, plastique has designated a range of corporeal practices based
in an idealized image of the ‘natural body’. So far I have shed light on
the shifting roles of plastique across different genres of body culture
from performing arts to women’s gymnastics, drawn attention to the
scientific legitimacy lent to the increasing emphasis on sexual differen-
tiation in the early 1900s, and pointed to some of the manners in which
notions of ‘female nature’ were translated into principles governing
women’s physical regimes.
Judged by the frequency with which the term appears in advertisements
from private dance and gymnastics schools, plastique was one of the most
136 Dancing Naturally

popular corporeal disciplines in Copenhagen around 1920 (Vedel, 2008:

73). What was the societal contract fulfilled by plastique, and what was its
role, if any, in relation to the ongoing campaign for female suffrage and
the acquisition of more full rights as Danish citizens?
In an attempt to answer this complex question on the basis of my
observations, I propose that as plastique crossed over from the perform-
ing arts into women’s gymnastics, it also crystallized as a genre with dis-
tinctive societal uses. Viewed in this particular context as an institution,
a contract between the ideologically motivated systems of body culture
and the exercising women themselves, the societal function of plastique
became to prepare Danish women for their participation in the demo-
cratic procedures of the nation state. Most importantly it nurtured and
celebrated their role as individual subjects in the democratic nation
state, while at the same time enhancing their ‘female nature’ and affirm-
ing the primacy of their potential motherhood. Phrased differently,
I suggest that exercising plastique sustained an ideologically based dual
process of women’s ‘naturalization’ as citizens and subjects in the mod-
ern nation state.

Notes
1. In Denmark the French term plastique was introduced in the early 1800s and
revitalized in connection with guest performances of Jaques Dalcroze’s plas-
tique animée or plastique rhythmique in Copenhagen in 1901. In the context of
Danish body culture the term plastique was used alternately with the Danish
translation plastik.
2. I am indebted to Nancy L. C. Ruyter, whose writings on statue posing (poses
plastiques), Genevieve Stebbins, and American Delsartism spurred my interest
in plastique in the Danish context (Ruyter, 1996 and 1999).
3. For the purpose of this chapter, I have adapted Fredric Jameson’s definition
of genre. ‘Genres are literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer
and a specific public, whose function it is to specify the use of a particular
cultural artefact’ (Jameson, [1981] 1983: 92).
4. The definition of the Danish term plastik is found in Dahlerup, 1936: 980.
5. Vitalism designates a body of disparate theories or viewpoints dating from the
seventeenth to the early twentieth century. A key principle is the notion of a
‘vital force’ in all living organisms, termed entelechi by natural scientist Hans
Driesch and élan vital by philosopher Henri Bergson.
6. The topic of Vitalism in Danish visual arts was recently explored in an exhibi-
tion and a publication titled ‘Livslyst. Sundhed, skønhed, styrke i dansk kunst
1890 – 1940’ (trans. ‘Zest for Life. Health, Beauty, Strength in Danish Art
1890 – 1940’) by Fuglsang Kunstmuseum and Fyns Kunstmuseum, 2008.
7. Frederike Brun, an author of fiction and travel literature, published her mem-
oirs in 1824. The book came out in a new edition in 1998.
8. All translations of quotes are by the author unless otherwise stated.
 ‘Female Nature’, Body Culture and Plastique 137

9. As pointed out by Live Hov, the line between Realism and Naturalism in the
theatre is drawn differently in different contexts. In contrast to the position-
ing of Henrik Ibsen as a naturalist dramatic in Danish (and American) theatre
history, he has in British and Norwegian theatre history been read as a propo-
nent of Realism (Hov, 2008: 296). Generally speaking the naturalist theatre is
accredited with a Darwinian inspiration that assigns more importance to the
milieu and the characters’ psychological motives than the realist theatre.
10. The idea voiced by Walbom to use plastique to enhance the actor’s individual
expression resonates later in the century with, among others, the Polish
theatre director Jerzy Grotowsky. The exercises he termed plastiques were not
‘abstract or gymnastic, but done with an accent or particular motive’. They
combined technique with spontaneity, which gave the movement a personal
accent. After mastering the technique, the actors were asked to bring their
personal associations, ‘image’ or ‘moods’ or emotional tones to the move-
ments. (Grotowski, quoted in Wolford and Schechner, 200: 497).
11. Emma Gad to Dame Tidende, Politiken, 16 May 1915.
12. For other critical discussions of Aristotle based in feminist philosophy, see
for example Grosz, 1995: 5ff. and Schott, 2004: 46.
13. In 1906–7 raged what became known as the Moral Scandal (Da.
Sædelighedsskandalen), which saw attacks in the media on well-known male
homosexuals such as the writer Herman Bang.
14. A more detailed discussion about the feminization of women’s gymnastics
and female citizenship has been provided by Danish sports historian Anne
Lykke Poulsen, 2005. See also Vedel and Poulsen, 2006.
15. Paul Petersen continued with an institute in his own name alongside the
Danish Women’s Gymnastics Institute.
16. Gymnastics teachers by the hundreds, especially from the United Kingdom
and the United States, came to take courses in Agnete Bertram’s Copenhagen
school. At one point in 1928 there were as many as 200 British teachers in
the school. (Nationaltidende, 25 October 1928; BT, 19 July 1928).

Bibliography
Beck, H. 1915 ‘Minder fra min Ballettid’, in Den danske Ballet 1870–1915.
Copenhagen: Erslev and Hasselbalch.
Bertram, A. 1917 ‘Retstillingen i Kvindegymnastiken. En æstetisk undersøgelse’,
in Akademisk Gymnastik. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag.
—— 1932 Naturlig Kvindegymnastik. Copenhagen: Bertramskolens Forlag.
—— 1937 Bevægelseslove. Hvad er naturlig Bevægelse og hvorledes forholder
Gymnastik sig til den? Proceedings from Föreningen GCI’s Gymnastical
Congress, Copenhagen.
Bordo, S. [1993] 2003 Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Bournonville, A. [1848] 1977 Mit Theaterliv, Volume 1. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel.
Brun, F. [1824] 1998 Idas æstetiske Udvikling, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel.
BT. 1928 (daily newspaper) (19 July).
Dahlerup, V. (ed.) 1936 Ordbog over det Danske Sprog, Copenhagen: Det Danske
Sprog og Litteraturselskab.
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Dalcroze, E. Jaques. [1920] 1997 Rytm, musik och utbildning. Stockholm: KHM.
Duncan, I. [1903] 1969 Isadora. New York: Award Books.
Freeland, C. A. (ed.) 1998 Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (Re-Reading the
Canon). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Grosz, E. 1995 Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York:
Routledge; Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Gymnastikkommissionen, 1899 Haandbog i Gymnastik. København: J. Frimodt.
Hau, M. 2003 The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hov, L. 2007 Med fuld natursandhed – Henrik Ibsen som teatermann. Copenhagen:
Multivers.
Jameson, F. [1981] 1983 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act. London and New York: Routledge.
Jørgensen, O. Förlaget. 1905 ‘Ballettens Kunst’, Tilskueren. Copenhagen: n. p.
Korsgaard, O. 1982 Kampen om kroppen. Dansk idræts historie gennem 200 år.
Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
Krøier, J. 1953 Paul Petersen. Dansk Kvindegymnastiks Fader. Copenhagen: n. p.
Larsen, J. 1910 Også andre hensyn: dansk ligestillingshistorie 1849–1915. Århus:
Aarhus University Publishers.
Lindhard, J. 1914 Særtryk af Gymnastisk Selskabs Aarsskrift 1913–14. Copenhagen:
Græbes Bogtrykkeri.
Nationaltidende. 23 January 1920 and 25 October 1927 (daily newspaper).
Poulsen, A. L. 2005 ‘Den kvindelige Kvinde’. Kampe om kvindelighed, medborgerskab
og professionalisering i dansk kvindegymnastik 1886–1940. Copenhagen: Institute
for Sports and Gymnastics, Copenhagen University.
Ruyter, N. L. C. 1996 ‘Antique Longings: Genevieve Stebbins and American
Delsartean performance’, in Foster, S. Corporealities, London and New York:
Routledge.
—— 1999 The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American
Delsartism. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press.
Schott, R. M. 2004 Feministisk Filosofi. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
Vedel, K. 2008 En anden dans. Moderne scenedans i Danmark 1900–1975.
Copenhagen: Multivers.
Vedel, K. and Poulsen, A. L. 2006 ‘Kvindegymnastik og moderne scenisk dans
i 1920’erne og 1930’erne – i medborgerskabs-perspektiv’, in Idrætshistorisk
Årbog 2006. Kvinder, køn og krop – kulturelle fortællinger. Odense: Odense
University Press.
Walbom, E. 1917 ‘Dramatisk Plastik’, in Scenisk Kunst. Hvad enhver Teaterinteresseret
bør vide. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag.
Wolford, L. and Schechner, R. 2001 The Grotowski Sourcebook. London and
New York: Routledge.
11
Tethering the Flow: Dialogues
between Dance, Physical Culture
and Antiquity in Interwar Australia
Amanda Card

… and when at last we shall cease to move about jerk-

ily and nervously, and through the medium of the real
dance, as the Greeks taught it, learn to substitute calm,
natural movements, then we shall definitely gain tre-
mendous control over our nerves.
(Gray, 1930: 6)

By the time Mulvaney Gray penned this advice, published in Health &
Physical Culture, she was an established performer and teacher of what was
predominantly called Grecian dance in Sydney. Trained in Britain, Gray
found herself at the tail end of the flowering of what Hillel Schwartz has
called a ‘new kinesthetic of the Twentieth Century’ (Schwartz, 1992: 1).
Gray’s conflation of naturalism and control were symptomatic of her
time. Her concern for the elimination of machine-like, disassociated
action and her coupling of Natural Movement and antiquity, were also
a product of her education and development as a dancer in the 1920s.
This chapter explores the performance practices and pedagogy of art-
ists like Mulvaney Gray; dancers and educators who advocated a return
to ‘natural’ dancing through an association with the Ancient Greeks. As
we shall see, these artists understood that any claim toward naturalism
required a rejection of technique, as it was understood within the increas-
ingly codified practices of classical ballet, and the development of a more
quotidian inspired practice where motion could be offered up as a path
to embodied freedom. But, paradoxically, they also needed to develop
a technique that would constrain the potential of unruly ecstatic embodi-
ments. Their solution was a practice that offered freedom under con-
straint, a practice that could serve a predominantly female constituency;
not only as performers, teachers and pupils of dance, but also in their
139
140 Dancing Naturally

roles as daughters, wives and mothers to their men and to the nation. The
dual requirements of freedom and control led these artists into an alliance
with physical culture. But this was not a one-way exchange. The physical
culturalists sought to loosen the bolts of their practice through the intro-
duction of the expressive potential of dance; they sought freedom from
the strictures of their gymnasium inheritance. In Australia, as each group
moved to consolidate their association with an embodiment of what they
perceived to be natural, their rhetoric attempted a balance between well-
being and creativity. As this chapter will also illustrate, natural or Grecian
dance was modified by cross class differentiation, but ultimately teachers
of women from all classes in Australian society aspired to the formation
of female bodies with flowing expression. This aesthetic countered the
driving mechanization of the modern world, however, as the Second
World War approached, many found themselves in the company of those
who espoused a form of nationally inflected eugenics.
Hillel Schwartz places the flowering of his ‘new kinesthetic [sic] for the
Twentieth Century’ within an historical period book-ended by Francois
Delsarte’s lectures on movement in Paris in the 1840s and the con-
solidation of the work of America’s modern dance pioneers in the 1930s
(Schwartz, 1992:71). A dominant pedagogical principle during this period
was the belief that movement could be transformative (ibid.: 77). For
Schwartz, an association between movement and the formation of the
human subject was apparent across the teaching of a range of embodied
actions from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. At the
time, it was agreed that a person’s movements revealed their inner being.
It therefore stood to reason that a person’s inner being could be adjusted
by changing the way they walked, wrote and danced: kinaesthesia trans-
forming subjectivity. A belief in the revelatory potential of movement
was constructed by philosophers, graphologists, psychologists and chore-
ographers, but disseminated on a grand scale, at least in European socie-
ties and their colonies, through the imposition of these ideas throughout
the primary and secondary school systems. In writing, art-making, sport
or dance, students were schooled to produce ‘clean, fluid, curvilinear ges-
tures moving from the centre of the body outward through uninterrupted
but muscularly well-controlled rhythmic impulses’ (ibid.: 91). During this
period a relearning of gestural flow was framed as an antidote to an appar-
ent epidemic of ‘uncontrollable gesture’ that had manifested in the bodies
of women and men at the end of the nineteenth century. To this way of
thinking, particular movement practices could eliminate the stagnation
that had conjured an ‘epidemic of ticks, choreas, convulsions, aphasias
and strangely impermanent but recurring paralyses’ (ibid.: 92) amongst
the citizens of the modernizing world – particularly the women.1
 Dance, Physical Culture and Antiquity in Australia 141

It was under the corrective influence of this new kinaesthetic that

dancers and physical culturists met and engaged in a variety of dia-
logues, each creating various styles of movement that claimed an asso-
ciation with what they considered natural in movement for humans.
In the twenties and thirties Mulvaney Gray and her contemporaries
extolled the virtues of dance inflected with the principles of physical
culture in magazines such as Health and Physical Culture. Physical cultur-
alists such as T. A. Langridge extolled the virtues of dance in entertain-
ment magazines like The Theatre. As Langridge explained:

Without a doubt the sanest people of antiquity were the Greeks who …
brought dancing to a pitch of perfection …. Indeed, we owe no small
debt to the efforts and genius of Raymond and Isadora Duncan, and
one should add … Margaret Morris, who both in theory and practice
have so clearly shown us that physical exercises based upon the posi-
tions depicted by the Greeks’ artists bring about a perfectly normal
balance and control of the body. … Dancing is one of those delightful
occupations which help us to maintain a well-balanced and healthy
outlook upon life, to cultivate a good humoured habit of mind and
to foster within ourselves a bright and genuinely happy and cheerful
interest in the world of sane and intelligent men and women.
(1923: 23)

Dance offered physical culture an association with expression, indi-

vidualism and action as art. Physical culture gave dance access to an
increasingly popular branch of preventative health practice and a sense
of relevance to the general public. As Langridge suggested, balance was
all important; sanity, happiness and good humour depended on it.
A healthy body and mind could be achieved through a marriage of dance
and physical culture brokered by the emulation of antiquity. Under the
dual desires of Schwartz’s new kinaesthesia, flowing grace emanated
from the individual body out to the collective world, each changing in
association with the other, the new dance culture supporting a balance
of freedom and control, an embodied and a social equilibrium.
In his praise of Ancient Greek revivalism above, Langridge lists
the American Isadora Duncan, her brother Raymond and the British
Margaret Morris as three of the form’s greatest exponents. Although
Morris was often referred to as a ‘classic’ dancer, and her performance
practice had originally been inspired by an association with Raymond
Duncan and his ‘six “Greek positions”’ (Macintosh, 2010: 200), this
Ancient Greek connection merely provided the inspiration for what was
142 Dancing Naturally

to become her individual technique. Writing in 1926, Morris declared

that modern life made it ‘impossible for people to get the exercise neces-
sary to health in … a normal way’ (Morris, 1926: 18). She was, like many
others, concerned with the redemption of the flagging British body after
the First World War. She believed it was the ‘conditions of modern civili-
zation’ that were responsible for a lack of contemporary physical fitness
among the British and dance was a path to redemption, a form of dance
inflected, essentially, with key principles and expectations of physical
culture. Learning this type of movement would allow the participant to
‘walk and stand well, to breath properly, to move freely and easily, at the
same time training the mind in concentration and construction’ (ibid.:
29). Morris’s practice offered a return to the ideal of flow within quotid-
ian motion, a source considered ‘natural’ with an ability to reinvigorate
the modern body and counter the fear of disjuncture and alienation in
the contemporary world. But, like many of her contemporaries, Morris
was caught in the paradox of this new kinaesthesia. She sought freedom
through constraint.
Gladys Talma was a student of Margaret Morris. Talma began perform-
ing and teaching in Sydney in 1922. Like her mentor, Talma believed
her Grecian dance was a path to ‘health, grace and mental well being’:
not only in performance or on the dance floor but in everyday life.
For Talma her performance and pedagogy were artistic pursuits that
unlocked a creative impulse in the dancer through concentrated effort.
Referring to Talma’s dance form, readers were told in Stage and Society:

If we desire to express ourselves artistically and at the same time

improve our deportment and health, we cannot do better than set
aside a certain amount of time for the study or practice of Grecian
dances.
(anon., 1922: 31)

As a graduate of what she called the Isadora Duncan-Margaret Morris

Academy of Grecian Dancing in London, Talma successfully negotiated
the dual obligations of the inherited strands of her inspiration.2 From
physical culture she accrued a credible association with the pursuit of
fitness and health. From dance she acquired access to a personal well-
spring of self-expression and creativity. Observed in performance in
1922, Talma inspired praise; no one who had been ‘fortunate enough to
witness’ her Grecian Dancing recital at the Langridge School of Physical
Culture could question the ‘value of these arts towards the perfection,
not only in health but symmetry of form for the human body’.
 Dance, Physical Culture and Antiquity in Australia 143

In the graceful movements executed with perfect ease … any average

observer could hardly fail to notice the activity of the various muscles
of the limbs and body. These exercises … must certainly develop the
whole of the muscular system as the movements are so varied, and in
rapid succession, every portion of the body is seen to move, appearing
to the average witness as being so delightfully simple to execute. …
In all ages has dancing been known as not only an individual means
of expression, but as a national means of expressing the emotions. …
The [A]ncient Greeks were noted for their classical dancing, which
no doubt became such an important part of their brilliant physical
development.
(anon., 1922: 21)

Here we can see the way in which Ancient Greek revivalists conflated
image with actuality. The sources of inspiration for Grecian dance
(statues, images on pottery or architecture) were taken as representa-
tions of real, everyday bodies in Ancient Greece. The ‘no doubt’ in the
above quote provides the necessary slippage between imagination and
reality for its author. Speculation becomes historical truth, a leap that
was evident in most Grecian dance movements, but these imagined
associations with antiquity had real implications for dance and physical
culture in the interwar years.3
As one of her pupils recalls, Talma’s main choreographic and pedagogic
practice was called ‘follow through’. This referred to ‘the linking of suc-
cessive actions into a continuously flowing expression of the mood and
rhythm of the dance’ (Freeman, 1991: 8). Joan Freeman danced with
Talma as a child. Freeman was not famous for dancing, but for graduat-
ing with First Class Honours in Physics from Sydney University, only
the fourth woman by 1943 to have done so. She later became a nuclear
physicist in Britain. Although physics was Joan Freeman’s great love,
she also loved to dance and considered her time with Gladys Talma in
Sydney to be one of her ‘most sustained and treasured memories’.

My mother took me to a school run by an entrancing lady, whose

name was Gladys Talma. I can see my childhood image of her now,
with her long silken hair of palest gold, a delicate, creamy complex-
ion, and an expressive, gentle smile. Her lithe and graceful figure
was clad in a white diaphanous garment which added to the ethereal
quality of her every movement. I found sheer delight in learning to
repeat sequences which she performed for the small class, and in
acquiring the technique of what she called the ‘follow through’ …. At
144 Dancing Naturally

home I loved to go through my repertoire, and to invent variations

as my mother played her beloved Bechstein piano.
(1991: 8)

Talma’s notion of ‘follow through’ is yet another illustration of the

period’s dominant kinaesthesia; the ‘uninterrupted but muscularly
well-controlled rhythmic impulses’ as described by Schwartz (1992: 91).
Talma’s approach to action is also reminiscent of the turn of the cen-
tury innovations of Isadora Duncan. Ann Daly has suggested a ‘flowing,
unhurried gentility’, ‘an ease born of effortless control’, constituted ‘the
natural’ for Duncan (1995: 115) but much effort went into realizing this
apparent lack of effort. Ease was not achieved through an abandonment
of form but, as Daly makes clear in relation to Duncan, this was an ease
born of accomplishment, the embodied control of effort.

The basic body attitude of the lyrical Duncan dancer is one of sus-
pension: the chest pulled high out of a low, grounded pelvis. She
rises out of the legs and hips into the solar plexus, and that energy
continues through the head and arms. The torso (not the feet) pro-
pels the body through space, and the legs grow from an active mobile
pelvis. Control at the center [sic] is complemented by the grace of
limb …. The impetus of all movement originates in the torso ….
This impulse travels outward, like a wave, into the extremities, which
exhibit no obvious physical effort.
(ibid.: 75)

Daly’s description is gleaned from a viewing of more contemporary per-

formances of the Duncan repertoire, executed by dancers trained in the
Duncan technique, but it is useful when thinking about the way in which
such ‘flowing, unhurried gentility’ and ‘effortless control’ might have
been achieved in the past. In Daly’s description we see the dominance of
Schwartz’s ‘fluid, curvilinear gestures moving from the centre of the body
outward’ (ibid.: 91). Equally, the reinforcement of the metaphor of ‘flow’
can be seen not only in the action of the Duncanesque dancer or Talma’s
principle of ‘follow through’, but also in the description offered by
Freeman of Talma’s embodied demeanour at rest: her ‘creamy complexion’,
her ‘gentle smile’, her ‘lithe figure’, her ‘diaphanous garment’ combine
with her ‘ethereal quality’ to create the embodied ideal of the natural –
purposeful, balanced continuity of body and mind (Figure 11.1).
The techniques of Talma, Duncan and Morris had common embod-
ied principles. Their natural dancing was manufactured through the
 145

Figure 11.1 Stage and Society (Vol. 12, No. 4, 1922; Mitchell Library, State Library
of NSW, Sydney Australia, call number Q0595)
146 Dancing Naturally

acquisition of a very specific technique and their articulation of flow

required effort, study and direction. But as Ann Daly has identified
within an American context, there were many misreadings of Isadora’s
intentions and practices in the 1920s and 1930s which spawned what
Daly called: ‘a band of barefoot nymphs in Greek tunics and headbands,
each with a knee lifted high and head thrown back, frolicking quite
“artfully” ’round a tree or against the skyline’ (1995: 101).
Many exponents of Grecian dance in Australia had equally shaky
associations with pedagogical credibility. Australia’s versions of ‘barefoot
nymphs in Greek tunics’ blurred distinctions between Grecian dance,
Operatic or Fancy dancing for the popular stage, Classical Ballet or ‘toe’
dancing and Eurhythmics. This ‘inept running about with bare legs’
appalled the educator Theodora Helm (Tildesley, 1928: 6). Sydney jour-
nalist Kathleen Monypenny was equally disturbed by the Grecian imita-
tors. Quite a prolific writer for the time on dance and related subjects in
Sydney, Monypenny was a champion of the work of two other British
artists, Ruby Ginner and Irene Mawer. She also admired the practices of
Madge Atkinson. For Monypenny, this type of dancing had the ability to
construct (or reconstruct) the perfect female figure. When taught well, it
gave women an innate sense of ‘balance, muscle control, and poise’. But
‘poise is not pose’, Monypenny warned, the latter being associated with
Grecian charlatans. ‘If you are poised you are like a bird on a wave, a bird
on the wing, still, but ready for action’ (1930: 9).
Although Monypenny’s Grecian impostors took a far less structured
approach to their dance practice and pedagogy, their actions also beg
a class-based reading. Many dancer/teachers in Australia did not have the
British pedigree enjoyed by Talma and Gray, involving a study sojourn
in London, but these dancers extolled the virtues of ‘natural’ dancing
to their followers just as their middle-class compatriots did. One of the
most well known supporters of natural dancing in Australian was Annette
Kellerman. Considered by many in the first decades of the twentieth cen-
tury to have the perfect body, Kellerman was a swimmer, a performer in
vaudeville, a film star and the author of what would now be called ‘self-
help’ books. She was famous in the United States but Australia claimed
her as its own, primarily because she was born in Marrickville, a suburb
of Sydney, in 1896 and spent her teenage years in Melbourne. A staunch
advocate of dancing, Kellerman offered this advice in her popular book
Physical Beauty: How to Keep It:

There is no better way to make your mind nimble and light and
joyous. There is no better way to coordinate the parts of the body
 Dance, Physical Culture and Antiquity in Australia 147

in their individual perfection into an harmonious graceful whole.

Exercise without dancing is like a garment with the seams sewed on
the right side. You can see the joinings and the beauty is lost.
(1919: 95)

and

One of the advantages of natural dancing … is that it is not confined

to the legs alone. You can dance with your arms, your trunk, your
head, your whole body. Instead of setting yourself in a fixed position,
you can dance in any position that seems to you expressive and gives
you a sense of grace and freedom. And you can dance alone or with as
many others as you please.
(ibid.: 97)

But Kellerman did not advocate that her readers attend lessons. Her
brand of ‘natural’ dancing was far more anarchic. She suggested that the
reader simply put on a record, listen to it and dance in a way that the
music made them feel. Then you stopped, listened to the record again
and danced again. You did this until you were able to express yourself
through the music, the arbiter of the success (or otherwise) of your
dance being no one but yourself.
Another advocate for the benefits of Revival Greek dancing for gen-
eral womanhood in Australia was Doree (also known as Dolee or Doris)
Brooks, who wrote for Heath and Physical Culture in the 1930s. Brooks
worked as an ‘exhibition’ dancer for J. C. Williamson Ltd., the foremost
theatrical entrepreneurs in Australia, as well as in reviews and cabaret. For
Brooks, genre or form distinctions were of little importance. She taught
and performed a little-bit-of-this with a little-bit-of-that: classical bal-
let, exhibition dancing, fancy dancing, Operatic dancing and ballroom.
Grecian or natural dancing was just one in a plethora of possible sources
Brooks promoted for the acquisition of physical fitness, womanly perfec-
tion and the exercise of self-expression.
Like Kellerman, Brooks’s approach emerged from a democratic princi-
ple that sought to provide lower middle- and working-class women with
opportunities for self-improvement through better control and coordi-
nation of their bodies. Brooks’s clientele were among the new breed of
‘business girls’, an expanding group of young women in employment
between their youth and their (potential) marriage who took dance
classes for fitness and fun. Her pragmatic approach to form in perform-
ance and pedagogy were therefore also tinged with the practicalities of
148 Dancing Naturally

economics. Brooks earned a living from teaching as well as performing

and, as an adjunct to the former, she recommended that young women
in sedentary occupations try dancing classes as a means toward develop-
ing a natural, healthy body.
Brooks also expanded her clientele by offering the readers of Health
and Physical Culture exercises they could try at home. With illustra-
tions and text to follow, exercises were designed to create bodies that
were ‘light and nimble’ (Brooks, 1930: 7). They suggested techniques
for: ‘loosening the limbs and reducing the hips’, creating ‘a pretty foot
with an arched instep’, and strengthening the back and thighs. (ibid.).
Natural dancing smoothed out lumps. ‘[A] dancer must not have ugly
knees’, stated Brooks, and for the non-dancer, ‘in this sunny land, where
so much surfing is done, you must get rid of that protruding knee’
(1930b: 25). Her exercises created lean and willowy bodies. Balance and
proportion were essential and a notion of flow was to be emulated by
the body’s internal mechanisms as well as external action.

[Dancing’s] stimulating effect on blood circulation is well known. [It]

provides a tonic for the abdominal muscles, the care of which is so
essential to the health of girls and women, and gives a needed stimu-
lus to sluggish bodies and sluggish constitutions.
(Brooks, 1930b: 24)

For the future mothers of a developing (or recovering) nation in the

interwar years, poor circulation and a sluggish constitution were not
good physical attributes. As historian Anna Carden-Coyne suggests, the
rhetoric surrounding Grecian dance in Britain and Australia often rec-
ommended the practice to women as preparation and maintenance for
bodies that would be bearers of recovery after the devastation of the First
World War. But Carden-Coyne also suggests that historians have gener-
ally ‘underestimated the female desire for free movement as a response
to war and social change’ (2009: 215). Not only were women entrusted
with rebuilding the nation but Coyne believes that women were dancing
to celebrate ‘the sensual body as part of an overall strategy for recovery
through beauty’ (ibid.: 275). They found what Coyne calls ‘serenity in
antiquity’ (ibid.). Lightness and flight, speed and agility were key embod-
ied expressions of a complex mix of modernity and antiquity that was
manifest in the Grecian dancer. This duality is best imaged for Carden-
Coyne in a leaping figure, the ‘winged ideal’ which was expressed through
the recurring motif: a version of the grand jeté. This was not the extended
articulated leap with stretched arms, legs and pointed feet expected in
 Dance, Physical Culture and Antiquity in Australia 149

classical ballet, but a soft-footed, relaxed kneed, loose elbowed leap, in

which the solar plexus extended to the sky:

Unencumbered by time, space, and gravity, the female body cutting

through space symbolized new directions in society. … Female flight
represented escape from suffering and the journey to a future not yet
realized, a Golden Age of peace and sensual truth. Only free minds
and bodies could reach these heights.
(Carden-Coyne, 2009: 266)

Although Carden-Coyne concedes that these women were looking for-

ward to a new future, they were also looking back to an imagined past,
a Golden Age of antiquity.
Art historian Deborah Edwards acknowledges a similar desire treas-
ured within the classic revival circles of Australian painting at the turn
of the twentieth century. Norman Lindsay, one such painter, wrote
this scathing critique of Modernism and declared his preference for the
inspiration of antiquity in a letter to his brother Lionel in 1901:

Oh for a thousand roistering fellows … hairy satyrs, active nymphs

with agile limbs and sensuous bodies to drive this mumping mob of
moderns into eternal damnation … and give us back the good earth,
the gardens, the statues, the naked girls … the ancient inheritance of
we who are heirs to the ancient world.
(Lindsay, in Edwards, 1989: 24)

For Lindsay, Modernist painters were the champions of a contemporary

epidemic of uncontrollable gesticulation; a frenetic, unruly energy that
he and his compatriots found unappealing to say the least. Lindsay imag-
ined Australia as the site for a new Arcadia. His championing of antiq-
uity emerged from a similar desire of the interwar dancer to achieve her
‘winged ideal’, her body in flight: whole, ecstatic, free, natural. Although
articulated through different processes and mediums, all these artists cen-
tralized the natural in opposition to modernization. In their fantasies of
a Grecian arcadia they hoped to reinvigorate gestural flow as an antidote to
the Modernist valorization of rupture, which to them epitomized a rejec-
tion of the ‘natural’ within human embodiment and its representations.
Whether articulated as a democratized site, accessible for the nation’s
women, or an elite location for the development of a performance
practice by middle- and upper-class women, these dancers in the early
decades of the twentieth century conflated the notion of the natural
150 Dancing Naturally

with the normal. Normality, as a preferred state of being, was considered

a balanced state. Nature affirmed the symmetry of elements and to be
normal a person had to be like nature: balanced, both physically and
mentally. One needed to be at ease, relaxed, unhurried, confident, not
too fat, not too thin, strong but not excessively so. Flowing motion was
paramount. Poise was expected, but the kind of articulate embodiment
recommended by Monypenny or Kellerman, and taught by Talma, Gray
or Brook, required a centralized core of strength that allowed a floating,
unfettered continuity to emanate from that centre, and such an embodi-
ment required study and direction.
As we have seen, the natural dancing advocated by these artists and
teachers was manufactured through a combination of the principles and
aesthetics of two different traditions: dance and physical culture. The
primary sight for my articulation of this dialogue has been the pages of
contemporary theatre, health and fitness magazines from the interwar
period; places where these artists and teachers presumed they would find
their target audience and their prospective students.
One magazine is particularly revealing in relation to where this rhetoric
of the ‘natural’ in the interwar years sits within a wider social setting.
Articles from 1928 to 1934 on Grecian or natural dancing were offered in
Health and Physical Culture under titles such as: ‘While Ever You Dance You’ll
Stay Young’, ‘The Foundation of Youth’, ‘The Dance of Life’, ‘Dance Ill-
Health Away’ and ‘The Grace that Came from Greece’. They sit alongside
other articles that are increasingly concerned with waging battles against
the ‘menace of effeminacy’ and the ‘coming of the half-breed peril’
(Hertzig, 1932: 14). In 1932 an author asked his readers, ‘Will the White
Man Survive?’ This article lamented the changes that were taking place
in the modern world. In the ‘seething cauldron of humanity all sorts of
crosses are being made in breeds’ (anon., 1932: 14) This ‘mingling of
stocks’ would see a mix of ‘colours and origins’ increase at an alarming
rate and as ‘white man’s supremacy is faced with a challenge’, the author
warned, ‘its total extinction is more than an apprehensive dream’ (ibid.).
But this article conceded that Australians were in a privileged position:
the country was geographically isolated and was not ‘subject to the
intense interbreeding that has gone on for thousands of years in some
parts of the world’ (ibid.: 16).
In 1932, Australia was a fairly monocultural place, as most of the coun-
try’s citizens came from ‘a more or less homogenous stock – the British’.
But we still were advised to be eternally vigilant. Other articles suggested
that we could save ourselves from ‘careering to destruction’ if we realized
the dependency of mental agility on physical activity. In 1931 Francis
 Dance, Physical Culture and Antiquity in Australia 151

J. Gallagher declared that ‘Only Physical Education can Save Humanity’

(p. 27). For Gallagher, the white race was ‘careering to destruction because
psychology failed, and still fails, to visualize the dependence of mentality on
physical factors’ (ibid.: 27). It was the ‘culture of the body’ that would be the
science of the future. It would be one of the few things that would avoid
‘the suicide of the white races’ and the body, for Gallagher, would be-
come the prime site for the dissemination and implementation of the
principles of racial purity (ibid.). This eugenicist turn within the pages of
Health and Physical Culture adopts what historian Michael Roe has called
a ‘fascist style’ (1984: 13), reflecting what Susan Manning calls a ‘proto-
fascism’ (1993: 131) and Susan Sontag a ‘fascist aesthetic’ (1983: 49).
As Roe (1984) has noted, liberalism in the late 1920s and 1930s had lost
much of its appeal in Australia. People had grown to accept, demand and
expect principles of governance that were later attributed, almost exclu-
sively, to fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. Demands for efficiency,
stability, moral and ethical simplicity across the English-speaking world
transformed influential movements such as Progressivism and Vitalism
into ideologies which advocated an ‘exclusivist, racist and uniformitar-
ian’ brand of nationalism which reflected an acceptance of fascism (Roe,
1974: 42); if not ‘in power’ (Mosse, 1985: 153) then at least as a social
and aesthetic movement. Many Australians articulated their admiration
for the efficiencies of the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese and
their social, economic and political structures in the wake of the uncer-
tain years of the Great Depression.4 The German people were definitely
in vogue in the thirties, some believing that Australians could do worse
than emulate Germany’s rise to power and the National Socialist’s ability
to galvanize the German people into a unified political and social front.
Within proto-fascist rhetoric or a fascist aesthetic, freedom from
disease, disturbance, and distortion in the collective body was seen as
achievable through the promotion of the same in a healthy individual
body. The latter could be achieved through the emulation of flow, and
flow was achieved through endurance and mastery over the body’s
unruly corporeal possibilities. Here the ‘natural’ body was not realized
through ecstatic, untethered abandonment, but through the acquisition
of effortless control, and this balance was seen as reflective of a natural,
normal human state of being.
Australian dancing women, writing in the pages for a journal like Health
and Physical Culture, were party to (and part of) this interwar play of proto-
fascist aesthetics, styles, politics or sensibilities. Their ‘grace that came
from Greece’ was the means through which they negotiated the require-
ments of a contemporary kinaesthetic expectation: the embodiment of
152 Dancing Naturally

expressivity under control. These women successfully negotiated the con-

tradictory expectations of Schwartz’s new kinaesthesia for the twentieth
century through their coupling of dance and physical culture. They
tethered the potential volatility of their kinaesthetic flow in expressive
action, through those ‘muscularly well-controlled rhythmic impulses’
Schwartz (1992: 91) identified, which were inspired by physical culture.
During the first decades of the twentieth century this compromise proved
possible and profitable. It offered a site where the body’s disruptive pos-
sibilities could be tempered. Through self-control and physical efficiency
the dancing body became a personal site for the implementation of
broader social goals and the regulation of the potentially unruly nature
of embodied practices in a rapidly mechanizing modernity.
Through their dialogue with dance and physical culture the interwar
Grecian dancers made a productive alliance, allowing ecstasy and excess,
elation and elevation to be grounded by a controlling impulse. This,
combined with a rhetoric of self-improvement, afforded their practice
a central location in the wider social system. Whether advocating their
dance practice for the social elite or the working classes, interwar Grecian
dancers in Australia conflated the natural with the normal, and their
definition of normal was balance and symmetry in subjectivity and citi-
zenry; a notion that chimed with the growing nationalism of the period.
Through adopting the natural dance of the Ancient Greeks, as Mulvaney
Gray recommended in 1930, these dancers would no longer succumb to
modernity’s environment of agitation. Their practice would be calm and
natural, and as a result they would gain tremendous control over their
shattered, fraying, nervous interwar dispositions. For these dancers antiq-
uity was a timeless, peaceful site: the eye-of-the-storm within an uncon-
trolled gesticulating world that would soon be disrupted again by war.

Notes
1. This idea might seem to fly in the face of the collected historical wisdom that
claims a dominant human embodiment for the early twentieth century that
replicates the pervasive intrusions of a mechanizing age – particularly in social
dance through the rise of syncopated actions. Joel Dinerstein (2003) offers a
convincing reading of just such a vibrant kinaesthesia in his exploration of
jazz and swing dance as it developed among African-American social dancers
and musicians in the interwar period in the United States. But Schwartz focuses
on a set of dance artists who created, disseminated and lived their new kin-
aesthesia in protest against, rather than in concert with, the implications and
impositions of their surroundings. Schwartz supports this claim by making a
distinction between kinaesthetic ideals, ‘kinestructs’, and kinaesthetic experi-
ences, ‘kinecepts’, an idea he borrowed from Eleanor Methney’s Connotations of
 Dance, Physical Culture and Antiquity in Australia 153

Movement in Sport and Dance (1965) (Schwartz, 1992: 123 n.72). Schwartz asks:
‘Was the new kinesthetic a protest, setting its kinestructs against its kinecepts
(and technology) of our century?’ (ibid.: 106).
2. This elaborate title was not in fact used by Margaret Morris to identify her
school in London, and the reference to Duncan and the notion of an Academy
are probably derived from Talma’s need to offer her prospective pupils (and
more importantly their parents) an association with familiar, famous names:
Isadora and Raymond Duncan. This reference provides a probable explana-
tion for Langridge’s inclusion of Margaret Morris under the banner of Grecian
dance along with the two Duncans. Talma worked for Langridge in his physi-
cal culture studios and such a genealogical claim allowed Talma the heritage
necessary to call her dance Grecian – an identity that had clear associations
with grace, style and perfection for middle-class interwar women in Sydney.
It would not be unreasonable to speculate that Talma’s practice looked more
like the Margaret Morris method than that of the Duncans, although steeped
in notions of ‘naturalism’ favoured by both parties.
3. For more on Greek Revivalist movements across time within dance, see Fiona
Macintosh (2010). The manner in which successive generations claim knowl-
edge of, and association with, ancient practices is an area of interest for a
branch of classical scholarship called reception theory. As Charles Martindale
suggests, many Classics scholars now concede that getting to the ancient past
‘as-it-really-was’ (Martindale and Thomas, 2006: 2) is not essentially possible
and, indeed, of less interest than examining the reception of antiquity’s texts
and imagery as they have been reinvigorated across time.
4. For more on the appreciation of fascist regimes in Australia between the wars,
see Hammel (1933), McQueen (1979) and Pesman Cooper (1993).

Bibliography
Anon. 1922 ‘Eurythmics and Grecian Dancing’, Stage and Screen (15 June): 31.
—— 1932 ‘Will the white man survive’, Health and Physical Culture (1 July):
14–15.
Brooks, D. 1930a ‘The Fountain of Youth’, Health and Physical Culture (1 October):
6–7.
—— 1930b ‘While ever you dance you’ll stay young’, Health & Physical Culture
(1 November): 24–5.
Carden-Coyne, A. 2009 Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the
First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Daly, A. 1995 Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Bloomington: Indiana
Press.
Dinerstein, J. 2003 Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American
Culture between the World Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Edwards, D. 1989 Stampede of the Lower Gods: Classical Mythology in Australian Art,
1890s–1930s. Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW.
Freeman, J. 1991 A Passion for Physics: The Story of a Woman Physicist. Bristol:
Adam Hilger.
Gallagher, F. J. 1931 ‘Only Physical Education can save Humanity’, Health &
Physical Culture (1 January): 27.
154 Dancing Naturally

Gray, M. 1930 Health & Physical Culture (1 January): 6.

Hammel, M. 1933 ‘P.C. Clubs or Battalions?’ Health & Physical Culture (1 May): 58.
Hertzig, C. 1932 ‘The Menace of Effeminacy’, Health & Physical Culture
(1 January): 14–15.
Kellerman, A. 1919 Physical Beauty: How to Keep it. London: William
Heinemann.
Langridge, T. A. 1923 ‘The Health Aspect of Dancing’, The Theatre (1 December): 23.
Macintosh, F. 2010 (ed) The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Response to Greek
and Roman Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Manning, S. 1993 Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dance
of Mary Wigman. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Martindale C. and Thomas R. 2006 Classics and the Uses of Reception. Oxford:
Blackwell.
McQueen, H. 1979 The Black Swan of Trespass: The Emergence of Modernist Painting
in Australia to 1944. Sydney: Alternative Publishing.
Methney E. 1965 Connotations of Movement in Sport and Dance. Dubuque, IA:
W. C. Brown.
Monypenny, K. 1930 ‘Greek Dancing: Revival of an Antique Form’, Sydney
Morning Herald (4 October): 9.
Morris, M. 1926 Margaret Morris Dancing. London: Kegan Paul, Trench.
Mosse, G. 1985 Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in
Modern Europe. New York: Howard Fertig.
Pesman Cooper, R. 1993 ‘“We want a Mussolini”: views of fascist Italy in
Australia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 39.3: 354–66.
Roe, M. 1974 ‘Efficiency: the Fascist Dynamic in American Progressivism’,
Teaching History, 8.2.
—— 1984 Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought.
St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Schwartz, H. 1992 ‘Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century’, in
Jonathan Crary and Stanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations. New York: Urzone,
pp. 70–127.
Sontag, S. 1974/1983 ‘Fascinating Fascism’. A Susan Sontag Reader. Penguin:
London, pp. 305–25.
Tildesley, E. M. 1928 ‘Vocations for Girls’, The Sydney Mail (19 December): 6.
12
Mining Anatomy: Moving
Naturally
Libby Worth

We frequently hear advocated the merits of ‘just being

natural’ or of doing something in a ‘natural way’. How
can we know what is a natural way? It may be merely
a way that has become habitual to us.
(Todd, 1968: 28)

Movement educator Mabel Elsworth Todd’s blunt question remains as

pertinent now as when she wrote it in 1937, challenging the notion that
the term ‘natural’ applied to movement can be all encompassing, with
no heed paid to social, cultural, geographical or personal boundaries. She
followed her question with a consideration of strategies to avoid continu-
ous repetition of unintelligent movement behaviour. More broadly, her
remarks act as a reminder to stay alert to the wide range of interpreta-
tions the term ‘natural’ can elicit when used as a descriptor for dance. As
examined in earlier chapters, the concept of the natural could be said to
have haunted dance in the United Kingdom throughout the early part
of the twentieth century and, in different guises, even disguises, remains
a potent if contested theme throughout the century. In part, the fascina-
tion with the ‘natural’ in Western theatre dance during the twentieth
century has been tied to interest and research into human anatomy,
psychophysical practices and holistic bodywork, driven by interaction
with movement educators as diverse as Todd, Margaret H’Doubler, Moshe
Feldenkrais, Frederick Alexander, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and, from a
slightly different perspective, Joan Skinner. Each of these practitioners
emphasized experiential learning that freed students from potentially dry
anatomical texts. Although not necessarily dancers themselves, or inter-
ested in restricting their methods to performers, the application of prac-
tices that required direct physical experience held an obvious appeal for
155
156 Dancing Naturally

dancers. All such movement practices however are built on hypotheses

about human action and interaction that might reference the ‘natural’,
as Todd does in her frequent use of the phrase ‘natural functions’, but
are not natural in the sense of being neutral.1 Ensuing dialogues between
dancers and movement educators are drawn inevitably into the tension
between the constructed and the biological, the socially and culturally
determined and the genetic given of identity. At the start of the twenty-
first century interest in such debates surged again in response to the spate
of accessible texts produced by neuroscientists interested in the complex
study of the brain and cognition through examination of movement. Is
there a danger that within this challenging area of discourse born out
of an early twentieth-century haunting, dance artists, academics and
neuroscientists become newly enchanted by the notion of the ‘natural’,
equating it with fresh insights into biological functioning and forgetting
Todd’s question that necessitates investigation of movement in relation
to social context and belief systems?
Todd’s seminal text The Thinking Body, first published in 1937, brought
together her studies into human movement and posture developed
through scientific research, observation, personally developed experi-
ments and many years teaching movement. Re-published in 1968 by
Dance Horizons, Todd’s book became a popular entry on dancers’ and
dance teachers’ recommended book lists in her native United States and
in Europe and Australia. Her detailed analyses of human movement in
relation to natural forces drew on research for her Bachelor of Science
degree at Columbia University, United States, but throughout the text
the somewhat formal anatomical detail is tempered by an array of dia-
grammatic and textual techniques to keep the non-specialist engaged
imaginatively and, if willing, experientially. She avoids a mind/body
dualist approach and insists on (and she is not afraid of an occasional
schoolmarmy tone) the need to visualize movement as an integral part
of the whole human system, which is always in dynamic interaction with
its social and geographical environment. Despite a proliferation of com-
peting texts on anatomy and anatomy in relation to movement that have
superseded Todd’s work, her book has a durability that seems particularly
surprising, given how twentieth-century technological innovations have
dramatically altered scientific understanding of brain function.
As neuroscientists have refined and developed the use of, for instance,
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to show more precisely
which areas of the brain are active in response to specific stimuli, a more
nuanced and complex body of research into the relationship between the
brain and movement has emerged. Yet, even though both neurophysiological
 Mining Anatomy: Moving Naturally 157

research and dance-making and study share an engagement in explor-

ing bodily functioning and movement potential, the interdisciplinary
communication remains challenging. Alain Berthoz, director of the
Laboratory of Physiology of Perception and Action at the Collège de
France testified to this in his keynote lecture given at Manchester
University, when he lamented the fact that despite many attempts he has
been unable to sustain collaborative work with dancers (Berthoz, 2010).
In part he associates this failure with the difficulty of finding a meeting
point and, specifically from his perspective as a neuroscientist, this was
due to the dancers’ resistance to agreeing to forms of measurement con-
sistent with acceptable publication in scientific discourse. If the dialogue
between dancers and neuroscientists is potentially a fruitful one, how can
disciplinary differences be embraced in terms of content and methodol-
ogy without reducing research to a lowest common denominator?
Todd’s writing does not answer this, but it provides an unusual textual
model that combines questions and explorations spanning scientific
and artistic application. Her purposes are far reaching and in employing
scientific rigour to the detailed examination of different bodily move-
ment functions, she rarely loses sight of the significance of a holistic
approach to understanding human movement. Thus her work presages
the spate of body/mind disciplines that became prevalent particularly
during the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, Europe, Australia and
New Zealand. She, like other movement educators active in the early
twentieth century, was influential in both the rejection of the milita-
ristic and late nineteenth-century fashion constraints on posture and
in the promotion of greater ease and fluidity in ‘natural functions’ of
movement rooted in awareness of the dynamic interaction between
human anatomy, physiology, emotion, imagination and intellect.
In her preface to The Thinking Body, Todd gives two reasons for delaying
publication of her findings on human movement and balance. She wanted
to ‘avoid a formulation of ideas before these should have been validated,
not alone by my own experience, but by that of others taught by me’
and she wished to ‘prevent the premature appearance of a “school” or
“system” which so often spells the end of creative processes’ (1937: xiii).
Although the term ‘premature’ in the second of these statements intro-
duces an element of ambiguity as to her intentions, the follow through
appears to negate any desire for setting a ‘system’. If read in this way, then
both these views, I would suggest, raise important challenges for how to
validate empirical knowledge and how to formulate strong, even contro-
versial views on movement and identity whilst retaining openness to con-
trary perspectives. Driven by these assertions, in The Thinking Body, Todd
158 Dancing Naturally

developed an array of tonal communication with the reader that insists

on engagement through, for instance, taking part in practical tasks that
demonstrate a point, through responding to the high-quality illustrations
and diagrams, or being provoked by candid statements.
Todd’s analysis of sitting in a chair provides a typical example of the
strategies employed through its focus on a readily accessible functional
action that can be tested immediately by her reader. She suggests an ini-
tial postural task; to ‘slouch in a chair, in a very lazy and devitalized man-
ner; shift and see if you can emulate a pouter pigeon successfully’ (1968:
285). This task is designed to engender specific and locatable discomforts
that can be felt in conjunction with the subsequent detailed description
of the optimal position of the skeletal structure to support ease in sitting
upright. Simple diagrams of the skeleton in seated position might seem
the obvious means to demonstrate the angles of the bones in question,
but in preference she provides detailed anatomical descriptions that read
like refined notes from studio experience:

The ischia are nearer to the front of the pelvis than ordinarily imag-
ined, in fact their tuberosities upon which we should try to poise
when sitting, are directly under the center of the acetabula, where
the pelvis rests on the top of the leg bones in standing. When sitting,
these thigh joints bend at the front of the body.
(1968: 285)

Her own and/or her students’ experience seem to drive the text here,
incorporating an immediacy in the way that awareness of movement
can both confirm and extend understanding of skeletal support.
Readers in the twenty-first century might balk at the somewhat prescrip-
tive tone that bubbles through her writing at times, but the sharpness of
imagery that translates complex kinaesthetic analysis into instantly recog-
nizable actions remains engaging. For instance she suggests that to ‘deter-
mine where weights should be: sit on the tuberosities of the ischia, shrink
softly inside yourself, as if you were trying not to touch a scratchy sweater’
(Todd, 1968: 286). Todd employs a wide range of visual imagery both as
a condensed and accessible means of communicating a posture or action
and for practical application in challenging inefficient habitual movement
choices. She is clear that replacing poor movement habits with more struc-
turally intelligent ones is not just a matter of mindlessly repeating exercises
but requires a degree of awareness that will ‘change the thinking’ (ibid.:
287). The integration of visualization in her writing is therefore tactical in
that it draws on an affective and imaginative response amidst conceptual
 Mining Anatomy: Moving Naturally 159

processing of information. Practical tasks follow sections of intricate infor-

mation on mechanical forces and anatomical analysis: for instance, she
instructs that when sitting, you feel your ischia ‘sharp’ and imagine them
‘pointing through the chair seat to the floor, making another pair of legs to
the chair’ (ibid.). Or for walking, she asks the reader to imagine ‘a dinosaur
tail dragging from the end of your spine, and your legs trying to run away
from it’ (ibid.: 211). The playful aspect of doing the tasks is encouraged,
with a potential to generate creative responses and new questions more
familiar within a rehearsal room than an anatomy class.
Although within a different context, I am reminded of the dancer and
ethnographer, Sally Ann Ness’s innovative article, written towards the
start of her field work on ‘tourism and performance in insular Southeast
Asia’ (1996: 129), in which she challenged the protocols of the writing up
stage of ethnographies by producing a ‘text that breaks with the logic of
the ethnographic corporation, in this case by telling something “way too
soon”’(ibid.). Her field notes, presented ‘too soon’, ‘seek to ensure the
visibility of their own unfoldings and foreclosures, reflecting the further
possibilities for interpretation and invention still available in subsequent
site-specific compositions’ (ibid.: 44). Todd in her preface, as quoted ear-
lier, did not want to write prematurely, but, like Ness, balked at the idea
of writing as closure, or in her case a text that might be interpreted as a
system. Todd’s achievement was to work the choreography of the text to
include rapid shifts in tonal address that would stimulate active readers
to intrude into the writing, through bringing to bear their own experi-
ence of visualization and tasks on her hypotheses. Such interactions were
designed to disrupt the temporal and dynamic structure of the writing.
Although, no doubt, she assessed correctly the non-scientist reader’s need
for considerable information on the structural capacities of the body in
relation to the natural forces of the environment, she concomitantly val-
ued each reader as an expert, through referral to the range and textures
of knowledge entailed in everyday kinaesthetic experience. The insights
Todd offers on such subjects as the ways thought and emotion effect
posture and movement, or balancing forces allow rest in action, remain
valuable for the dancer, but it is her methodological approach, which
promoted a laboratory within a book, that ensured her extended influ-
ence amongst dancers and psychophysical practitioners.
Todd’s respect for the reader’s capacity to learn through taking part
in carefully devised tasks was in line with educationalist John Dewey’s
advocacy of active learning and his insistence on the motivational and
developmental potency of problem solving as a primary tool in educa-
tion. Dewey’s advocacy of greater student agency in the classroom was
160 Dancing Naturally

located within a broader desire for a fully democratic society in which

education was linked with freedom to learn and participate in commu-
nity, unhindered by class or cultural prejudice:

The principle obstacle to democratic education, Dewey argued, was

the powerful alliance of class privilege with philosophies of educa-
tion (beginning with Plato) which sharply divided mind and body,
theory and practice, culture and utility.
(Westbrook, 1991: 173)

His views were to have a far reaching impact within the development of
educational theory and practice, but their implementation was perhaps
nowhere more thoroughly embraced than in certain strands of somatic
practices, such as Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Body-Mind Centering®
(BMC) or Moshe Feldenkrais’s Awareness through Movement® les-
sons. Both practitioners acknowledge their indebtedness to Todd, with
Feldenkrais keeping The Thinking Body on his recommended reading list
for trainee practitioners in his method right up to his death in 1984,
whilst Cohen includes Todd’s work in her lineage of BMC (1993: 158).
By conceiving of the class participant as already an expert in the ability
to learn, practitioners such as Cohen and Feldenkrais directed students
towards heightening their awareness of detail in the sensations of moving.
Particularly within the Feldenkrais Method, as the ability to observe the
self following finely described movement instructions increases, so mis-
taken self-images can be confronted and substituted by a more detailed,
integrated and complete picture rooted and confirmed by sensation.
As Todd was not a dancer, she located her teaching firmly within the
more general (and no doubt acceptable) discipline of movement and
postural education, both in her private lessons and later during her
period at Teachers College, Columbia. However her work proved highly
significant in the development of specific approaches to dance as well
as within general training for dancers. For instance, North American
dancer/choreographer Anna Halprin’s divergence from modern styles of
dance prevalent in the mid-twentieth century, such as those developed
by Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey,2 entailed finding:

new compositional forms as well as new movement. That’s how the

whole idea of task-orientated movement and my particular interest
in Mabel Todd and her approach in her book The Thinking Body arose
at the time.
(Halprin, 1995: 6)
 Mining Anatomy: Moving Naturally 161

Halprin’s experience with Todd and, on a more extended level with her
tutor, Margaret H’Doubler, during undergraduate study at the University
of Wisconsin, provided her with the basis for a laboratory-style discovery
of movement in relation to anatomy. As is evident in Halprin’s apprecia-
tion of her mentor, H’Doubler shared Todd’s belief in the value of expe-
riential anatomy:

She [H’Doubler] was originally a biologist and taught dance objec-

tively from a scientific perspective. That was a wonderful eye opener.
I could learn an approach to movement based on the nature of move-
ment and its inner operation.
(Halprin, 1995: 246)

It is evident therefore that Todd and H’Doubler’s practices inspired

Halprin in her search for ‘new movement’ but in addition it was the
methods of dissemination that made an impact on her later development
of task-based improvisation, employed in both rehearsal and perform-
ance. This in turn contributed to the development of, for example, the
RSVP Cycles scoring process.3 Sally Banes has traced aspects of the impact
that Halprin’s methodology had on the radical developments of early
postmodern dance in North America (1987: 8–19), but it is important
to acknowledge that Halprin’s influence extends well beyond the geo-
graphical and time frames Banes addresses. Halprin’s workshops, train-
ing programmes and performances drew and continue to draw dancers
from across the globe, who subsequently develop their own practices in
response to their experiences.4 Whether the term ‘natural’ can reasonably
be applied to Halprin’s work is debateable, since despite her stated preoc-
cupation with ‘the basic principles of movement’ (1995: 249) described
above, her delight in nature (‘I believe that reconnecting to nature will
lend us a vocabulary for our art and our lives …’ (ibid.: 225)) and her turn-
ing away from highly stylized dance forms, these remain just contribu-
tory elements within her essentially collaborative dance-making process.
In this instance collaboration could entail stepping over boundaries set
by art forms; the denotation of high or popular culture; social class, race
or culture; trained or untrained dancers; spiritual or therapeutic or artistic
intentions; or even by national boundaries. The latter is illustrated by the
simultaneous performances of scores in many countries (Circle the Earth,
1985–91 and The Planetary Dance, 1987–2010 and continuing). Given
Halprin’s persistent refusal to limit what can be seen as dance, where it can
be performed and by whom, it would seem perverse to attempt to pin down
the complex communication across diversity which this demands under
162 Dancing Naturally

the singular term ‘natural’ rather than her own preferred term of ‘direct
movement’.
Banes suggests that ‘natural’ movement for the postmodern choreog-
raphers of the 1960s and 1970s meant ‘action undistorted for theatrical
effectiveness, drained of emotional overlay, literary reference, or manipu-
lated timing’ with everyday movements ‘executed without regard to
grace, visual appeal or technical skill’ (1987: 17). Her frame of reference
is primarily to North American East Coast choreographers and dancers
and is too limiting for Halprin’s work. Yet the term is prominent in the
Natural Dance Workshop established in 1975 in London and its perform-
ance group, the Natural Dance Theatre. James ( Jym) MacRitchie, who had
worked with Halprin at the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, and Anna
Wise founded this organization which was the first to bring Halprin’s
approach to the United Kingdom. In that time and place the term
‘natural’ in all likelihood was employed to alert potential participants to
the non-stylized nature of the dance workshops, to the view that dance
was a natural activity open to all and to indicate that no prior training
was required. This approach did not necessarily result in lack of ‘grace,
visual appeal or technical skill’ (Banes, 1987:17) but these elements were
unlikely to take the form or follow the expected processes of classical or
modern dance. In addition to running a successful workshop programme,
the Natural Dance Workshop inspired a flow of dancers and teachers to
extend their dance experience through taking part in Halprin’s work-
shops or training programmes in California. The Natural Dance Theatre,
created regular large-scale participatory dance events and site-responsive
performances including Citydance (1977) that took place in central
London based on a score developed by Halprin and collaborators.
For Halprin and linked teachers, such as those at the Natural Dance
Workshop, Todd’s major influence lay in her analytical approach to
movement in relation to natural forces. Other movement innovators,
however, drew on Todd’s use of imagery and visualization as primary
resources in their development of fresh approaches to dance making
and training. The precision evident in Todd’s choice of imagery still
testified to an anatomically analytical view of movement but the form
of expression generated a parallel strand of dance exploration that came
to be known under the broad heading of ‘Release’.
Joan Skinner, for instance, discovered after recovering from a severe
dance injury (helped by working with the Alexander Technique) that
working with imagery reminded her of ‘her childhood dance experi-
ences with her teacher Cora Bell Hunter, a student of Mabel E. Todd’
(Agis and Moran, 2002: 20). Dancers Gaby Agis and Joe Moran are of
 Mining Anatomy: Moving Naturally 163

the view that ‘Joan now recognizes these early experiences to have
been perhaps the greatest influence on the development of Skinner
Releasing Technique’ (ibid.). It was therefore Todd’s use of visualization
that assisted Skinner in her deployment of carefully selected images
‘that are metaphors of kinesthetic experience of technical principles’
(Skinner, in Moran, 2005), which she introduced to students within a
progressive programme that was influential upon the second generation
of postmodern dancers.
According to Skinner, The Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), devel-
oped during the 1960s, had ‘the same objectives as other concert dance
techniques: alignment, flexibility, strength, speed, dynamic range,
musicality and control of nuance’ (in Moran, 2005). The advantage of
this method for her lay in the amalgamation of condensed instruction
for movement for the training purposes listed above, within ‘poetic
imagery’ of a kind that ‘kindles the imagination, thereby integrating
technique with creative process’ (ibid.). In a tantalizingly brief article trac-
ing the links between her work, Todd’s and one of Todd’s students, Lulu
Sweigard, Skinner and her co-authors acknowledged their indebtedness
to a specific strand of Todd’s achievements: her use of visual imagery to
excite the motor cortex in such a way that ‘Through the imagination
power is liberated’ (Todd, 1968: 281). It is therefore not by doing the
movement but through ‘learning consciously to employ the motivating
picture to create the conditions for appropriate movement responses’
(ibid.) that old habits can be bypassed. Sweigard, who remained com-
mitted to corroborating and extending Todd’s work in her teaching and
investigations, is even more assertive:

Mental activity, then, especially that in which the thought of move-

ment is involved, is the most effective means employed thus far to
recondition neuromuscular action patterns in the body.
(in Skinner et al., 1979)

In fact movement is only likely to interfere with this ‘reconditioning’ by

re-stimulating inefficient habitual patterns.
Kirsty Alexander, one of Skinner’s students, confirms the view that
SRT teaching intentionally excludes the scientific framework and
information on neuromuscular and skeletal function familiar in many
somatic practices. She argues for the importance of foregrounding the
individual dancer’s response without diluting it with a form of analysis
which ‘explains, justifies, evaluates and facilitates the kinesthetic experi-
ence through reference to anatomy, physiology, psychology, neurology
164 Dancing Naturally

and biomechanics’ (2003). There is an interesting divergence of opin-

ion here on the role of science within the studio. Does it inhibit the
dual development of technique and creativity as advocated by Skinner
or does it empower through offering both a laboratory methodo-
logical approach and information on movement functioning that can
be sources for dance making as shown in the work of Halprin and
H’Doubler?
When dancers such as Halprin and Skinner resisted the singularity of
style taught by choreographers to their company and students, they were
party to a proliferation of movement influences and stimuli that made
subsequent categorization of an independent dancer’s choreographic
output almost impossibly complex. For instance, the term ‘Release’,
used to describe dance training and workshops, regularly appears in
dancers’ training biographies but is likely to indicate a much broader
range of practices than solely SRT. Australian dancer Elizabeth (Libby)
Dempster’s experience is indicative of the intricate web of influences on
‘new dance’ development that criss-crossed continents (Europe, North
America, Australia and New Zealand in particular) rapidly opening up
fresh ways to address both movement and dance-making.
Even whilst maintaining focus on what became known in the 1970s
as Ideokinesis, that is somatic practices relating to posture and balance
rooted in the work of Todd and her students such as Barbara Clark and
Sweigard, the strands of connection are multiple. For Dempster, as for
many new to dance in the 1970s, this was one element amidst a per-
sonally compiled education in dance, which included Tai Chi Chuan
and classes in ‘modern at the Bodenweiser School and ballet at Val
Tweedie’s Australian Academy of Ballet’ (2005), whilst watching events
and happenings taking place in Sydney. Dempster continued this broad
approach through her degree at Dartington College of Arts where she
encountered Mary Fulkerson, who was interested in the work of Barbara
Clark. According to Dempster, Fulkerson ‘regarded the ideokinetic proc-
ess as an embodiment of creativity and she developed a distinctive
approach to choreographic production based upon the imaging process’
(ibid.). Dempster describes how her contact with Ideokinesis developed
through Nanette Hassell on her return from North America where she
had worked with Sweigard’s student, and later assistant, Irene Dowd.
Dance Exchange, founded in Sydney, Australia, by Russell Dumas,
Nanette Hassell and Eva Karczag in 1976 seemed to parallel some of the
driving values of the London-based Natural Dance Workshop through its
commitment to ‘the expansion of the parameters of choreographic and
performance practices in Australia’ and its ‘workshops on Ideokinesis,
 Mining Anatomy: Moving Naturally 165

Release-based movement, Contact Improvisation and composition,

which were open to any interested person’ (ibid.). Dempster observes:

Ideokinesis offered an exploratory and experiential attitude to the

body and by extension to dancing. It became associated, through
Dance Exchange, with a critical artistic practice and it was, at that time
in Australia, part and parcel of a radical re-evaluation of what counts
as dancing.
(2005)

Like Fulkerson and Halprin, Dempster extends her appreciation of Todd

and her associates’ work beyond its impact on movement training to pin-
point elements that entered into the choreographic process. Therefore,
not only did she find Ideokinesis ‘empowering’ and that ‘it made sense
to my body’ but she also ‘perceived an intrinsic aesthetic quality in the
work. Its simplicity, elegance and coherence appealed strongly to my
growing interest in dance making’ (ibid.).
This feeling of physical ease and its determination of a specific aesthetic
can however be understood in different ways. Such experience could arise
from greater awareness of efficiency in movement stimulated by somatic
practices that challenge familiar patterns, but it could equally emerge from
rooting dance movement in habits founded in any of a range of socially,
culturally and personally constructed determinants. Here then the mean-
ing of such adjectives as ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’, which became increas-
ingly popular during the 1970s and 1980s as descriptions of non-stylized
dance practices, begins to spin out of control. Australian theatre practi-
tioner Alison Richards notes her unease in this period at ‘the tendency to
treat the body itself as “pure”, as the location and as the source of authen-
tic meaning’ (1999: 99).
To return to Todd’s question at the start of this chapter, on whether
it is possible to distinguish between the ‘natural’ and the habitual in
movement choices, I suggest that engrained in her project was the
desire to empower the individual student to find means of examining
this distinction. Not a great deal of attention is directed to the media-
tion of social and cultural imperatives in the construction of movement
patterns in The Thinking Body; but, when she does address the issue,
Todd could hardly be clearer. Her criticism is that

the sensory-motor chain of reaction in our nerves and muscles has

been gradually modified through association of ideas derived, not
from mechanical or physical considerations of what balance means
166 Dancing Naturally

or how a really straight back looks, but from moral, that is, social
concepts.
(Todd, 1968: 35)

This insight and her later elaboration of the point, which suggests just how
difficult it is to dislodge such socially imposed fashions and rules, absorbed
as they are into the very fabric of the neuromuscular system and reinforced
through constant repetition, chime more readily with current discourses
on gender and identity construction than with the concept of the body ‘as
the location and as the source of authentic meaning’ (Richards, 1999: 99).
Richards’ words of caution however, are not directed specifically at Todd
but at interpretations of somatic education that too readily discard the
social, political and cultural inflections embedded in dance practices.
In The Brain’s Sense of Movement (2000), neurophysiologist Berthoz
finds an accessible and lively way to share his research interest in the
multisensory and complex ways that the brain controls and predicts
movement. In a fashion somewhat similar to Todd, he includes miniature
experiments for the reader to test out views and employs an immediate,
conversational tone that encourages curiosity, communicates enthusiasm
and combines detailed information with frank admissions of areas yet
unknown. Within his ‘paean to the mechanics of the body in complex
beings and the brain’s accommodation to it’ (ibid.: 138), Berthoz notes
how scientists, in this case neurophysiologists, can find investigations
derailed by focusing too narrowly. His example is of the way in which

the neurophysiology of motor systems remained for a long time a

neurophysiology of connections between nerve centers. Structure
and function were not always associated.
(ibid.: 139)

Todd, however, as has been shown, did address the functionality of

movement; and H’Doubler similarly sought to broaden the study of
human movement:

But we are designed to think and feel and will. The mere mechanical
factors cannot explain the play of life. Therefore, we cannot submit to
mechanical laws alone. Psychological factors also must be considered.
(H’Doubler 1940: 78–9)

However, Berthoz’ observation of the way that researchers can become

myopic relates to the more general concern Richards expresses above.
 Mining Anatomy: Moving Naturally 167

Disciplines, like individuals, construct their own habits driven by internal

and external exigencies that, once formed, prove hard to detect. Changes
in perspective can help disrupt such patterns, whether experienced
through physical experimentation combined with awareness as advo-
cated by somatic practitioners, or through, for instance, newly encoun-
tered political or ecological paradigms, or perhaps ideally both. Berthoz
answers his own question on how to move from an analytical to a holis-
tic neurobiology with the following statement: ‘To do so we have to study
natural movement and abandon formulaic reductionism’ (2000: 139).
In this comment, ironically, we hear the brain scientist now calling for
attention to natural movement.
And so we are returned again to the challenge of knowing what is
natural in movement and whether such a construction is helpful or
simply contributes to another form of reductionism. As a term for dance
in the twenty-first century it would seem redundant and has long been
resisted by those dance practitioners and academics who have argued for
the importance of recognizing dance practices as intrinsically in dynamic
relation to their temporal, geographical, political and cultural contexts.
Yet the question that Todd posed demands a form of critical reflection
that I believe remains crucial amidst increasingly intense debates arising
out of developments in genetics, for example, and the challenges they
pose for notions of environmental determinism. Of course it is not pos-
sible to answer Berthoz’ question on why he has not been able to sustain
a collaboration with dancers without knowing more of his experience;
but, given his desire to work in a more holistic fashion with movement
function, such a form of cross-disciplinary research could be valuable and
no doubt challenging in equal measure. In her call for papers for a special
issue of Dance Research Electronic, entitled ‘Dance and Neuroscience –
New Partnerships’, 2010, Dee Reynolds and fellow guest editors list some
of the many publications, performances, conferences and television
programmes already produced in this area. UK choreographer Wayne
McGregor with arts researcher Scott deLahunta, for instance, initiated
a research project, ‘Choreography and Cognition’ (2004) with several
neuroscientists from the Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge.5
Within this potentially rich field of interaction across disciplines, it
could be helpful to remember the wide range of somatic practitioners
and movement educators some of whose work has been discussed in this
chapter. They have experienced the challenges of straddling disciplines,
working rigorously within a terrain that combines what is physically
evident and provable with what is intuited. Many dancers have been and
continue to be stimulated by this work and, as discussed here, have found
168 Dancing Naturally

a wide variety of ways to take such learning into the studio, both for
training and dance-making purposes. Todd could not have anticipated
the diverse ways that her work has been disseminated both physically
through her many students and her texts. From this perspective I suggest
that Berthoz and other neuroscientists, who remain enthusiastic in their
desire to communicate often difficult and detailed science on human
movement to the non-scientist, are in effect already initiating possible
collaborations. Just as dancers responded to Todd in unexpected ways,
through engaging with new scientific understandings about movement,
relishing her processes, and questioning the status and place of such
knowledge within the art context, so now, the forms emerging from this
field of dance and neuroscience might take place over decades and the
methodologies for these interactions might not yet be imagined.

Notes
1. Exhibitions that clearly demonstrate both the non-neutrality of anatomy
through time and the intricate interweaving with visual art include Gunther
Von Harens’ Body Worlds that has toured extensively since the first exhibition
in Japan (1995) and Spectacular Bodies, The Art and Science of the Human Body
from Leonardo to Now, Hayward Gallery, London, 19 October – 14 January
2001, curated by Professor Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace.
2. Halprin’s experiences of modern dance and eventual change in direction are
well documented; see for example, Halprin (1995), Ross (2007), Worth and
Poynor (2004).
3. For a detailed description of RSVP Cycles, further contributory elements and
examples of their application, see Halprin (1995) and Worth and Poynor
(2004).
4. For instance in my training (1984–5) with Halprin and colleagues at the
Tamalpa Institute the cohort included students from Norway, Switzerland,
Austria, Germany, Peru, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland and
the United States.
5. For details on this project, including a full list of participants, processes
employed and report on outcomes, see http://www,choreocog.net/ 2004.

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 Mining Anatomy: Moving Naturally 169

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pathy and empathy’, Keynote Address, Kinesthetic Empathy: Concepts and
Contexts Conference, University of Manchester, 22–3 April.
Cohen, B. B. 1993 Sensing, Feeling and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-
Mind Centering. Northampton, MA: Contact Editions.
DeLahunta, S. and McGregor, W. 2004 ‘Choreography and Cognition’. http://
www.choreocog.net/.
Dempster, E. 2005 Ideokinesis. http://www.ideokinesis.com/newcontrib/demp
ster.htm.
Halprin, A. 1995 Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance,
R. Kaplan (ed.). Hanover, CT, and London: Wesleyan University Press.
H’Doubler, M. 1940, 1983 Dance: A Creative Art Experience. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press.
Moran, J. 2005 ‘What is Skinner Releasing Technique?’ http://www.londondance.
com/content.
Ness, S. A. 1996 ‘Dancing in the Field: Notes from memory’, in S. L. Foster (ed.),
Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge Culture and Power. London: Routledge.
Richards, A. 1999 ‘A millennial conversation with postmodern dance’, Writings
on Dance, 18.19: 89–95.
Ross, J. 2007 Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Skinner, J., Davis, B., Davidson, R., Wheeler, K., and Metcalf, S.1979 ‘Skinner
Releasing Technique’, Contact Quarterly, 5.1; and in 2009 http://www.skinner-
releasing.com/articles.
Todd, M. E. 1937,1968 The Thinking Body. New York: Dance Horizons.
Westbrook, R., 1991 John Dewey and American Democracy. New York: Cornell
University Press.
Worth, L. and Poynor, H. 2004 Anna Halprin. Abingdon: Routledge.
Index

Bold entries refer to illustrations

active learning, 159–60 and Wilde’s aphorism, 43
Adams, W M, 7, 3–4 and women’s status, 17
Aesthetic movement, 4 see also Greek dance
Agis, Gaby, 162–3 anthropology, and culture/nature
Alexander, A R, 41n3 binary, 6
Alexander, F Matthias, 11, 32, 41n3, 155 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 93
and criticism of modern world, 37 Arnold, Matthew, 45
and critique of physical exercises, 37 Art Nouveau, and association of
and psychophysical unity, 38 nature with women, 17
and Sherrington on, 39–40 Asquith, Herbert, and Margot, 52
technique, 28 Association of Operatic Dancing of
Alexander, Kirsty, 163–4 Great Britain, 53
alienation, and class structures, 6 Association of Teachers of, Revived
Allan, Maud, 23 Greek Dance, 21, Greek Dance,
and career of, 49, 52 52–3
and Delsartian training, 48 Atkinson, John (James), 85
and exercise, 18 Atkinson, Madge, 2, 10, 17
and Greek influences on, 18 and ballet production, 77–80;
Almanos and Odette (exhibition costumes, 79; staging and
dancers), 62 lighting, 79–80
Alter, Judith, 18, 19, 28 and career of, 19–21
anatomy and choreography, 21–2
and dance training, 120–1 and contested notions of the
and experiential anatomy, 161 natural, 25
and physical culture, 119–20 and developmental syllabi, 21
Ancient Greece and Indian influences on, 93
and appeal of, 43 and key role of, 25–8
and classical scholarship’s view of, and music, 24
43–4; Cambridge Ritualists, and natural dance aesthetic, 93–4
46–8; Dionysus, 47; influence and Natural Movement, 21, 75;
of German scholarship, 45; principles of, 22
naturalness of, 45–6; Nietzsche, and nature as source material, 23–4
46; Pater, 46, 47; radical changes and open air performances, 25
in, 44–5; as rational people, 45, see also Natural Movement
46; Rohde, 46 Australia
and dance as expression of, 17 and appeal of fascism, 151
and feminist interest in, 44 and eugenics, 150–1
and Greek art, 17–18 and Greek dance, 146; advocates
as inspiration for natural aesthetic, 1 of, 146–8; female desire for free
and lack of moral strictures on movement, 148–9
sexuality, 44, 45–6 and magazines, 150–1

170
 Index 171

and natural dancing, 139–40 Cawadias, A P, 53, 54

and painting, classic revival, 149 Christian Fathers, 43
Christianity
balance and Greek dance, 54
and dance and physical culture, 141 and mind-body schism, 43
and normality, 150 and muscular Christianity, 111,
ballet 112–13
and Atkinson on ballet production, Clark, Barbara, 164
77–80 class
and pointe work, 121 and alienation, 6
and ‘turn-out’ stance, 29n4 and social dancing, 59, 60, 61, 64
Ballets Russes, 90, 94 Clayton, Florence, 62
Banes, Sally, 161, 162 clothes, see costume
Bang, Herman, 137n13 Cohen, Bonnie Bainbridge, 155, 160
Barn Dance, 61 colour, and Natural Movement
Bateman, Madge, 89 costumes, 84, 87–8, 92–3
Bauman, Zygmunt, 34, 35 colour theory, 93
Beck, Hans, 129, 130 Cone, Grace, and School of Dancing, 21
Benson, Frank, 50 consumerism, 34, 40n2
Bergman Osterberg Physical Training Contact Improvisation, 165
College, 21 Corfield, Penelope, 25
Bergson, Henri, 125 Cornford, Ann, 30
Berlin, Isaiah, and freedom, 32, 33 costume, and Natural Movement, 24,
Berlin Olympic Games, 55 79, 82–3, 85, 89, 91
Berthoz, Alain, 157, 166, 167, 168 and aesthetics of use by, 92–5
Bertram, Agnete, 133–5 and archive of, 82
body and colour, 84, 87–8, 92–3
and mind-body dualism, 43 and designers, 88
and representation of natural body, 1 and drapery, 84
Bordo, Susan, 124 and dyes, 87
Boston (dance), 58, 60, 61, 62–3, 69 and flickering effects, 92, 95
Bournonville, Antoine, 126 and Indian design influences, 86–7, 93
Bournonville, August, 125, 126–7 and Reburn’s designs, 88–92
British Dance movement, 55 and scarves, 84, 85, 87–8
Brooks, Doree, 147–8 and standard costume, 83–4
Brun, Frederike, 136n7 and textile production, 86
Brun, Ida (Adelaide de Bombelles), and texture, 84
125–6 countercultures, 9
Büchner, Ludwig, 14n4 craft environment, and Natural
Bunce, Michael, 6 Movement costumes, 83
Bunny Hug, 62 Craig, Edward Gordon, 90
Burt, R, 9 Crary, Jonathan, 36–7
culture, and nature, 6–8
Cambridge Ritualists, 46–8
capitalism, and change in mode of, 34 Dalcroze, E Jacques, 19, 75
Carden-Coyne, Anna, 148–9 Daly, Ann, 122
Carpenter, Edward, 17 and body attitude of Duncan
Carter, Paul, 83 dancer, 144
Casson, Lewis, 50 on Duncan, 16
172 Index

Daly, Ann, – continued and comparison with Emma

and misreading of Duncan’s Hamilton, 49
practices, 146 and Delsartian training, 48
dance education and training and exercises, 29n2
and anatomy, 120–1 and Greek influences on, 18, 141
and codification of exercises, 18 and improvement of female sex,
and gender, 121, 129–31 133
and Greek dance, 52–3 and misreading of practices, 146
and H’Doubler, 38–9 and myth of ‘modern dance’, 9
and new approaches, 32 on natural dancing, 16
Dance Exchange, 164–5 Duncan, Raymond, 19, 141
Danish Women’s Gymnastics dyes, and Natural Movement
Institute (DWGI), 131–2 costumes, 87
Darwin, Charles, 4
Darwinism, 4, 14n3 ecology, and nature, 7
de Valois, Ninette, 55 education
decadence, 6 and active learning, 159–60
DeLaHunta, Scott, 167 and democracy, 160
Delauney, Robert, and Sonia, 93 see also dance education and
Delsarte, François, 19, 48, 53, 140 training
and body energy zones, 115 Edward VII, 49
and emotions, 110, 116–17 Edwards, Deborah, 149
and influence of, 115 Enlightenment, and understanding of
Dempster, Elizabeth, 164, 165 nature, 3
Denmark eugenics, 4, 54, 150–1
and female suffrage, 128, 136 Eurythmics, 19, 75
and gender differentiated ballet
training, 129–31 fascism, and appeal of, 151
and homophobia, 130, 137n13 fascist aesthetics, 9, 151
and political changes, 128 Feldenkrais Method, 28, 160
and recognition of women as Feldenkrais, Moshe, 155, 160
professionals, 129 Felski, Rita, and modernity, 8
and women’s gymnastics, 131–3; female suffrage, 6, 14n6, 44, 128
Agnete Bertram, 133–5 and plastique, 125, 136
see also plastique, in Denmark feminism
Descartes, René, 43 and Ancient Greece, 44
Dewey, John, 12, 38 and culture/nature binary, 6, 7
and active learning, 159–60 Ferguson, Jacky, 22
and Alexander Technique, 39 Flitch, John Ernest Crawford, 31, 32,
and democratic education, 160 33
Dinerstein, Joel, 152n1 Fogerty, Elsie, 50
Dionysus, 47 folk dancing, 68
Door, Victoria, 39 Foxtrot, 69
Dowd, Irene, 164 Franko, M, 9, 16
Driesch, Hans, 125 Frazer, James, 47
Dumas, Russell, 164 freedom, and different meanings of, 32
Duncan, Isadora, 1, 23 Freeland, C A, 130
and body attitude, 144 Freeman, Joan, 143–4
 Index 173

Fulkerson, Mary, 164 Greece, see Ancient Greece; Greek

Fuller, Loïe, 18, 23, 52, 85, 87 dance
Greek dance
Gad, Emma, 129 in Australia, 146; advocates of,
Gage, Margaret, on Humphrey’s Water 146–8; female desire for free
Study, 98 movement, 148–9
Gaiety Theatre, 90 and benefits of, 53–4, 142–3
Galeotti, Vincenzo, 126 and choreography, 23
Gallagher, Francis J, 150–1 and fascination with, 44
Galop, and social dancing, 59 as form of prayer, 47
gender and Ginner-Mawer School, 21, 50,
and concert dance, 110 51; reputation of, 55; Summer
and culture/nature binary, 6 School, 50
and dance training, 121, 129–31 and Greek chorus, 49–50
and modern dance, 122 and improvisation, 23
and modernity, 8 in interwar period, 50–6; Christian
and natural difference between, view of, 54; criticism of, 55;
14n5 education, 52–3; eugenics, 54;
and physical culture, 110–11, 122–3 as model for British Dance
and women’s gymnastics, 131–3; movement, 55; race, 54;
Agnete Bertram, 133–5 respectability of, 53
see also women and Maenadic incarnations, 44
gentility, and social dancing, 60, and magazines, 150
69–70 and natural dancing, 139
Gilroy, Paul, 8, 9 and physical culture, 140, 141, 142,
Ginner-Mawer School of Dance and 150, 152
Drama, 21, 50, 51 and routes into: Greek drama, 48,
and reputation of, 55 49
and Summer School, 50 and Ruby Ginner, 21
Ginner, Ruby, 10, 17, 53, 146 and sources of inspiration for, 143
and career of, 21, 50 and technique, 23
and choreography, 23 see also natural dance
and contested notions of the Greek Dance Association, 21
natural, 25 Grimmond, William, 88
and developmental syllabi, 21 Grizzle Bear (dance), 62, 63
and Greek dance, 21, 49–50; as Grosz, Elizabeth, 7, 8, 13
antidote to jazz, 54–5; evening Grotowsky, Jerzy, 137n10
classes for War Workers, 50–2; gymnastics, women’s, 131–3
health benefits, 53–4; race, 54; and Agnete Bertram, 133–5
teaching career, 52
and nature as source material, 24 Hall, G Stanley, 111
and open air performances, 25 Halprin, Anna, 12, 160–2
and review of performance by, 22 Hamilton, Emma, 49, 126
and technique, 22–3 Hammergren, L, 10
Goethe, J W, 126 Hardman, Eunice, 20
Granville-Barker, Harley, 48, 49 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 46, 47, 48
Gray, Mulvaney, 139, 141, 152 Hassell, Nanette, 164
The Grecian Dancers, 21 Hayworth, Anita, 2
174 Index

H’Doubler, Margaret, 11, 32, 155, 166 improvisation, and Greek dance, 23
and dance education, 38–9 India, and textile design, 86–7, 93
and experiential anatomy, 161 individualism, and industrial
Headlam, Stewart, 54 expansion, 34
health inductive reasoning, and dance
and Greek dance, 53–4 education, 39
and personal and social health, 18 industrialization, and physical
see also physical culture culture, 110
Health and Physical Culture (magazine), Isaacs, Edward, 78, 81n7
150–1
Helm, Theodora, 146 Jaques-Dalcroze, Emile, 49
Heyworth, Anita, 21, 87, 88, 89 Jast, L Stanley, 90, 96n21
historicism, and culture/nature binary, 7 jazz, 54–5
Hollander, Anne, 83, 84 Johnstone, Mary, 74
Horniman, Annie, 90 Jørgensen, Ove, 129–30
Hov, Liv, 137n9 Jowitt, Deborah, on Humphrey’s
Humphrey, Doris, and Water Study, Water Study, 101
11–12, 23
and absence of music, 98–9 Karczag, Eva, 164
and absence of structured time Kellerman, Annette, 146–7
frame, 100–1 Kelly, Jean, 22, 25, 30, 85
and analysis of sections of: the kinaesthetics, see new kinaesthetic
first 5 waves - nature moves King, Brenda, 85–6
in succession, 103–4; breakers/ King, Eleanor, on Humphrey’s Water
tumblesaults - unfolding Study, 101, 102
succession, 104–5; five big Körperkultur, 125
rushing waves - climax, 105–6;
splash/whirlpool - sudden Laban’s Modern Educational Dance,
succession, 106; calm/spray - 28
cessation, 106–7; roller - death, Langridge, T A, 141
107–8 Lawler, L, 17–18
and critical acclaim for, 98, 101 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 14n5
and first performance of, 98 Life Reform movement, 125
and movement philosophy, 99–100 Lindhard, Johannes, 132–3
and Natural Movement, 108 Lindsay, Norman, 149
and nature rhythms, 102 Ling, P H, 131
and phrase structure of, 103 literature, and naturalism, 4
and rhythm, 100 Lloyd, Margaret, on Humphrey’s
and succession, 100, 101, 102 Water Study, 98, 102
Humphrey-Weidman Company, 98 London, and social dancing, 62
Humphry, Pearl, 63 London College of Dance and Drama,
Hunter, Cora Bell, 162 21
Hyatt-Woolf, Elizabeth, 63, 64 London College of Educational
Dance, 21
Ibsen, Henrik, 5, 127 Lucas, Perceval, 68
Ideokinesis, 164, 165
Imperial Society of Teachers of Macclesfield, 86
Dancing (ISTD), 19, 21, 69 Macfadden, Bernarr, 31, 33, 40n1
Impressionism, 4 McGregor, Wayne, 167
 Index 175

Mackay, Steele, 115 creation of a dance, 76–7; free

MacRitchie, James, 162 interpretation, 76; relationship to
magazines, and natural dancing, dance, 75–6
150–1 and naturalism, 4
Malnig, Julie, 40n1
Manchester, and textile production, National Resource Centre for Dance,
86 17
Manchester School of Art and Design, natural
86 and aesthetic of, 1
Manning, Susan, 151 and meaning for postmodern
Mawer, Irene, 21, 49–50, 146 choreographers, 162
Mensendieck, Bess, 31, 33–4 and questioning meaning of, 155,
Methney, Eleanor, 152n1 156, 167
middle class, and social dancing, natural dance
69–70 and body attitude of Duncan
mind-body dualism, 43 dancer, 144
Modernist painting, 149 and choreography, 23
modernity and codification of, 18–19
and change in mode of capitalism, and embodied principles, 144–6
34 and Greek influences on, 17–18,
and consumerism, 34 139
as contested concept, 8 and Isadora Duncan on, 16
and gender, 8 and magazines, 150–1
and natural dancing, 31; and meaning of natural, 155,
ambivalence of, 35; offers 156, 167; for postmodern
freedom from effects of, 32 choreographers, 162
and nature, 8–9 and meaning of nature, 2–5
and personal identity, 34 and modernity, 31; ambivalence
and social fragmentation, 32–3 towards, 35; freedom from effects
Monypenny, Kathleen, 146 of, 32
moral panic, and new dances, 58–9, and normality, 149–50
65 and physical culture, 140, 141, 142,
Moran, Joe, 162–3 150, 152
Morris, Margaret, 11, 17, 31 and technique, 144–6; necessity for,
and dance and physical culture, 142 22–3, 139; rejection of, 139
and Greek influences on, 141 see also Greek dance
and physical culture, 35–6 Natural Dance Theatre, 162
and Raymond Duncan, 19 Natural Dance Workshop, 162
Mouvet, Oscar, 62 Natural Movement
movement, and transformative nature and archive of, 95n2
of, 140 and ballet production, 77–80
Murray, Gilbert, 46, 47, 48, 49 and choreography, 23
muscular Christianity, and physical and costume, 24, 79, 82–3, 85, 89,
culture, 111, 112–13 91; aesthetics of use of, 92–5;
musculature, and physical culture, archive, 82; colour, 84, 87–8, 92–3;
110 designers, 88; flickering effects,
music 92, 95; Indian design influences,
and Natural Movement, 24, 86–7, 93; Reburn’s designs,
75; ballet production, 77–9; 88–92
176 Index

Natural Movement – continued One-Step (dance), 60, 63, 69

and dance, 76; creation of, 76–7 open air performances, 24–5
and music, 24, 75; ballet and Natural Movement, 26, 27
production, 77–9; creation of a Orphism, 93
dance, 76–7; free interpretation, Ortner, Sherry, 14n5
76; relationship to dance, 75–6 Oscar and Régine (exhibition
and open air performances, 24–5, dancers), 62
26, 27
and primary sources for, 73–4 Palace Theatre (London), 49
and principles of, 22 Palmer-Sikelianos, Eva, 50
and representation of the natural, 5 Paris, and influence on dance, 59
and scenic dances, 77 Pater, Walter, 46, 47
and staging and lighting, 79–80 Pearce, Stella Mary, 88, 95n14
natural selection, 4 Pemberton-Billing, Noel, 52
naturalist theatre, and plastique, 127–8 perception, and new scientific
nature understanding of, 31, 36–7
as alternative to scientific progress, 7 periodization in history, 25
as artistic source material, 23–4 Perugini, Mark, 55
and association with women, 17 Petersen, Paul, 131, 132
and changing historical significance physical culture
of, 2–5 and Alexander’s critique of, 37
and changing ideas about, 31 and anatomy, 119–20; dance
and culture, 6–8 training, 120–1
and liberatory potential, 7 and crudity of some regimes, 36
and modernity, 8–9 and cultures of exercise, 4
and re-evaluation of role of, 7 and dance, 141
Nazi ideology, 56 and eugenics, 150–1
Nelly (Elli Souyioultzoglou-Seraïdar), and expansion of physical training
9 programmes, 111, 112
Ness, Sally Ann, 159 and freedom through discipline,
neuroscience 33
and brain and movement, 156–7, and gender, 110–11, 122–3
166 and Greek dance, 140, 141, 142,
and collaboration with dancers: 150, 152
failure of, 157; future of, 168 and ideas of the natural, 31
new kinaesthetic, 152n1 and industrialization, 110, 111
and dance and physical culture, and masculinity, 111, 112–13
141, 152 and Mensendieck, 33
and fascist aesthetics, 151 and Morris, 35–6
and transformative nature of and muscular Christianity, 111,
movement, 140 112–13
New Woman, and Spartan women as and musculature, 110
models for, 44 and natural dancing, 140, 141, 142,
New York, 59 150, 152
Newton, Eric, 96n15 and reorganization of kinaesthetic
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 46, 54, 99, 100 experience, 119
normality, and natural dancing, and Richardson, 35
149–50 and Sandow, 33
Noverre, Jean Georges, 120–1 and urbanization, 111
 Index 177

and women, 111, 115 Rohde, Erwin, 46

see also Sargent, Dudley Allen; Romanticism, and understanding of
Stebbins, Genevieve nature, 3, 5
Pioneer Women project, 22 Rosemont, Franklin, 16
plastique, in Denmark, 124 Ross, Janice, 38, 39
and body culture, 125 Royal Academy of Dance, 53
and female nature, 124, 130 Royal Danish Ballet, and gender
and female suffrage, 125, 136 differentiated ballet training,
and shaping of the body, 124 129–31
and societal function of, 136 Ruby Ginner School of Dance, 21
on stage, 125–9; August Ruyter, N L C, 122
Bournonville, 126–7; Emilie
Walbom, 127–8; Ida Brun, 125–6; St Denis, Ruth, 52, 87
naturalist theatre, 127–8 Sallé, Marie, 48
and women’s body culture, 124 Sandow, Eugen, 11, 31, 33, 34
and women’s gymnastics, 131–2; Sappho, 44
Agnete Bertram, 133–5 Sargent, Dudley Allen, and physical
politics, and culture/nature binary, 6 culture, 12, 110
Polka, and social dancing, 59 and anatomy, 119–20
poststructuralism, and culture/nature and claims for benefits of training,
binary, 7 113–15
Poulsen, Anne Lykke, 133 and contrast with Stebbins’s
primitive society, and culture/nature approach, 121
binary, 6 and exercise regimes, 112; pulley-
psychophysical weight machines, 112, 113, 114
and Alexander’s use of term, 38 and focus on specific muscles, 113
and psychophysical integration, and influence of, 122–3
36 and masculinity, 122
and Todd’s use of term, 38 and new approach to bodily
cultivation, 112–13, 121
Quadrille, and social dancing, 58, 60 and relationship between body and
machine, 110–11, 113
race scarves, and Natural Movement
and Greek dance, 54 costumes, 84, 85, 87–8
and social dancing, 68 Schwartz, Hillel, 119, 139, 140, 144,
ragtime dancing, 58, 62–3 152, 152n1
and opposition to, 59 science
Rambert, Marie, 55 and natural movement, 7–8
Reburn, Lilian, 88–92 and role of, 163–4
and design for Mother Goose, 91 scientific method, and dance
Reinhardt, Max, 49 education, 39
Release technique, 162, 164 Scott, Edward, 64, 65, 68
Reynolds, Dee, 167 self, and nature of, 34
Richards, Alison, 165, 166 Sharp, Cecil, 68
Richardson, Lady Constance Stewart, Shaw, George Bernard, 48
31, 35 Shawn, Ted, 122
Richardson, P J S, 59 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 44
Roach, Joseph, 82 Sherrington, Charles, 11, 36
Roe, Michael, 151 on Alexander, 39–40
178 Index

Sherwood, Nancy, 25, 27 Souyioultzoglou-Seraïdar, Elli (Nelly),

Siegel, Marcia, on Humphrey’s Water 9
Study, 101, 103 Spencer, Herbert, 13n2
Simmel, Georg, 10–11 Spengler, Oswald, and The Decline of
and personal identity, 34 the West, 6
and social fragmentation, 32–3 Spong, Annea, 19, 24, 84
Skinner, Joan, 155, 162–3 sport
Skinner Releasing Technique, 163–4 and growth of interest in, 112
skipping step, 19, 20 and women’s gymnastics, 131–3;
Slinn, Ella, 88 Agnete Bertram, 133–5
social dancing Stebbins, Genevieve, and physical
and change in corporeal norms, 58, culture, 12, 48, 110
68–9 and adaptation of Delsarte’s system,
and civilization threat of new 110, 115
dances, 64–5, 67–8 and anatomy, 119
and class, 59, 60, 61, 64 and awareness and control of
and codification of new dances, 69 musculature, 118
and contested ways of dancing, and bodily freedom, 111
64–7 and body energy zones, 115
and dancing craze (1910-14), and connections between body and
62; emotional expression, 64; psyche, 116
escapism, 67; natural body, and contrast with Sargent’s
66–7; new dances, 62–4; rebellion approach, 121
against Victorian practices, 66 and dynamic interplay of muscles,
and folk dancing, 68 118–19
and gentility, 60, 69–70 and emotions, 116–17
and middle-class cultural and energizing exercises, 118
leadership, 69–70 and influence of, 122–3
and moral panic over new dances, and new approach to bodily
58–9, 65 cultivation, 121
and the natural, 59, 66–7; re- and relaxation, 117–18
articulation of, 70; rejection of, and routines (‘pantomimes’),
69 115–16; expression of grief, 116
and racist criticism of new dances, and women, 111
68 Steichen, Edward, 9
and self-expression, 58, 64, 68 Stodelle, Ernestine, 101, 103
and Victorian fashionable dance Strindberg, August, 5
culture, 59–61; aristocratic Suffield, Mollie, 19
deportment, 61; aristocratic Sweigard, Lulu, 163, 164
influence, 60; dancing classes, Symonds, John Addington, 45–6
61–2; embodied rituals, 60;
gender relations, 60; influence Talma, Gladys
of royal court, 59; regarded as and ‘follow through’, 143–4
artificial, 69; relaxation of codes and Greek dance, 142
of, 61; threats to harmony of, and physical culture, 142
61 Tango, 58, 60, 63–4, 65, 69
somatic practices, 12, 28, 160, 163, Taylor, Diana, 82
164, 165, 166, 167 technique, and natural dance, 144–6
Sontag, Susan, 151 and necessity for, 22–3, 139
 Index 179

and rejection of, 139 visual art, and naturalism, 4

technological change, and impact Vitalism, 125, 136n5
of, 31
textile industry, 86 Walbom, Emilie, 127, 129, 130
and Indian influence on design, Walton, Florence, 62
86–7, 93 Waltzes, and social dancing, 58, 59, 60
theatre, and naturalism, 4–5, 127–8, Warburg, Aby, 84, 94
137n9 Washington Post (dance), 61
Thorndike, Sybil, 50 Watkins, Mary E, on Humphrey’s
Thorvaldsen, Berthel, 126 Water Study, 98
Todd, Mabel Elsworth, 11, 12, 32, Watts, Diane, 53
41n3 Weaver, John, 120, 121
and holistic approach to Weber, Max, 32–3
movement, 157 Westbrook, R, 160
and influence of, 160–1, 162, 163, Whitworth Gallery (Manchester), 86
165 Wilbor, Elsie M, 116
and natural posture, 37, 38 Wilde, Oscar, 43
and psychophysical, use of term, Williams, Raymond
38 and consumerism, 40n2
and questioning of the natural, and meaning of nature, 2–3
37–8, 155 and organic community, 6
and The Thinking Body, 156; Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 45
communication with reader, Winston, Bruce, 50
157–9; influence of social Wise, Anna, 162
and cultural factors, 165–6; women
methodological approach, 159; and Ancient Greece, 44
use of visualization in, 158–9, 163 and association with nature, 17
tonalism, and naturalism in music, 4 and culture/nature binary, 6
training, see dance education and and Greek dance, desire for free
training movement, 148–9
Turkey Trot, 58, 63, 68 and gymnastics, 131–3; Agnete
turn-out, 29n4, 120–1 Bertram, 133–5
Two-Step (dance), 61 and physical culture, 111, 115
and recognition as professionals,
Uhlendorff, Gustav, 129 129
Unnamed Society, 90, 96n20 and status in Ancient Greece, 17
urbanization, and physical exercise, see also gender
111
Urlin, E, 18 YMCA, 110, 113