AN AFTERNOON WITH THE FAUN

A Word of Advice to the Censor

ETTORE MARRONI

FIFTEEN years ago we were ravished by the completely dressed Florodora sextette. Then we worshipped the gray clad choruses of the "Quaker Girl." Our choruses, even as late as the Follies of 1907, were clothed within an inch of their lives. The censor had no scope for his talents. Modesty was rampant. . . . Then someone came back from London and spread the news that Maud Allan was dancing on the stage of the Palace Music Hall in her bare feet! Soon after that it was shouted aloud that Isadora Duncan and Regina Badet, in Paris, were dancing with bare legs!! Instantly the American stage was crowded with dancers more or less deshabillees. We had Salomes and Mendelssohn Springs and Lady Godivas and Living Pictures and Gilded Statues and Classic Posturers—and now, it's Fauns.

The censor rushed from theater to theater and was met everywhere with the simple explanation: "It's Art." The Winter Garden followed with its bare-legged choruses. And now here comes the poor Faun.

Where is it all going to stop? With a direct, Hellenic nudity? With feminine beauty as accessible, as usual, as much a matter of course, as short walking skirts?

ALAS! the woman of today is not beautiful enough to meet the test. Her loveliness is not Hellenic. It is not even Academic. The sedentary feminine creature of Nineteen-sixteen is kept alive by hypophosphates. Looking at her emaciated grace, her skin-and-bones fragility, we wonder whether the Venus of Milo wasn't after all a little too muscular? The modern woman is like modern art—she is a stimulating, baffling, nerve-racking, grotesque sort of creation at best.

She is all activity; a creature of electrical mobility. She needs the most fantastic hat, the shortest skirt, the maddest shoes to set off her absurd originality. She is the living symbol of a cynical age, an age more intellectual than instinctive, an age which prefers anticipation to realization, desire to fulfilment. It would be a great mistake for the modern woman to rise out of her enticing silks and satins, cut of the billowy frothiness of the Mode, like Anadyomene from the sea, to claim the laurels of the classic nudity of 400 B.C.!

IF the censor were only an intellectual sort of man, with a touch of the cynic in him, he would permit, he would even encourage the most archaic simplicity in stage costuming. He would realize that the pendulum of public taste is going to swing back inevitably to the Florodora sextette and the Quaker Girl. The spectacle of unadorned beauty on our stage would pall on us in a year, simply because it is the bitter truth that the demi-deshabillée is often more suggestive than the nude.

New York may be a modern Athens, but New Yorkers do not evoke memories of the stad'um. Our men and women were not modelled, as they were in the golden age of art, in identical and absolutely perfect patterns.

THE only wy to stop the suggestive costuming of our modern operettas, pantomimes and ballets is to do away with costuming altogether. Then we should be sure to have a lugubrious and solemn season of half empty theaters—then a violent reversal to the Quaker Girl type of veiled, draped, masked and swaddled actress. Then, through a period of ten or fifteen years, a gradual removal, an almost imperceptible discarding of accessories—first the swaddles, then the masks, then the draperies, then the veils—a sort of crescendo of daring—each fresh indiscretion drawing crowded houses—down to nudity again, and then another reaction to mummy-wrappings.

That sort of thing has been going on ever since the world began. Each time the censor objects to the casting off of a veil, he retards the return to temporary modesty. He should hurry the eventual discarding of frills and fripperies. If Rabelais had been censor, if Voltaire had been censor! Can't you imagine them stripping these half clothed choruses and driving us, in sheer desperation and weariness, back to Puritanism again? Good Heavens, Mr. Censor, where is your knowledge of human nature? The Faun and the Ballet Russe, indeed! Didn't you realize that that was your one great chance to send us back to Florodora?