An African Legend in Choreography

GILBERT SELDES

The Swedish Ballet, in New York Appearance, Unites Three French Artists in a Negro Ballet of the Creation

THE natural advantage of a Frenchman setting out to write a negro ballet is that he escapes once for all the confusion between Africa and Alabain' which exists in the minds of most Americans. Like most alert Europeans, the creators of the negro ballet, which is the novelty of Rolf de Mare's season of the Swedish Ballet in New York, are perfectly well aware of the syncopation and the shuffle which the American negro has made characteristic in our music and dance. But they aren't compelled to remember it; and the use they have made of it is entirely legitimate —in the sense that they have returned to the African source, where their legend arose—centuries farther back, even, than the "spiritual"—and found there the appropriate rhythm and the proper movement for their ballet.

I was present once when the raw material of the choreography was being examined: a moving picture of certain African tribes in their native dances. But I have not seen the result, and it is only of the other factors that I have any real knowledge. The poem, the decor and the music are the work, in order, of Blaise Cendrars, Fernand Leger, and Darius Milhaud.

The last of these is now known in America, as he conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra for a time when Stokowski was absent, and his own works have been played more frequently, I believe, than those of any other of the group of Les Six.

From the piano version, played by the composer a few days after he had written it down, I can only judge that it is a characteristic work—so much depends on the orchestra for color and for mass. It seemed rather like his L'Homme et Son Desir which the Swedish Ballet will also produce; what there is of syncopation will hardly recall jazz; like syncopation in the work of Strawinsky, ithasnothing to do with impudence and is not necessarily concerned with gaiety. The poem, the legend itself, admits nothing cheap or trivial. In his work of collecting the Negro Anthology, Blaise Cendrars (whose adventures in America have little in common with those of Milhaud) arrived at an understanding of the almost terrifying simplicity with which the African negro expresses his relation to the universe. There is poetry in the Anthology of a high order; in the legend of this ballet, the beauty is condensed. It is not, in the first place, a single poem, but the spirit of many. Reduced to the outline of a ballet, it still has its capacity to evoke images:

1. The curtain rises very slowly on a black stage. In the center is discovered a chaotic heap of confused bodies: it is the tumult before the creation. Three giant deities pass slowly. They are Nzame, Nedere and N'kva, the masters of creation. They consult each other, move around the chaotic mass, utter magic incantations.

2. The central mass stirs, leaps. A tree puts forth slowly, grows bigger, bigger still, rears itself upright, and when one of its buds falls on the ground, another tree springs up. When one of the leaves touches the ground, it grows bigger, swells, swells, trembles, begins to walk, and behold! an animal. An elephant which remains suspended in mid-air, a slow turtle, an awkward crab, monkeys sliding down from above. The stage grows lighter bit by bit during the creation, and as each new animal arrives there is a violent burst of light.

3. Each creature is a dancer spurting from the center, passing through its own evolutions, making a fewsteps, then entering softly into the circle, wdiich little by little is created around the three deities. The circle opens; the three deities utter fresh incantations, and the chaos of the center is seen to boil; everything is in agitated movement; a monstrous leg appears, backs tremble, a hairy head shows itself, arms are thrust forth. Suddenly tw'o torsos are upreared and clasp each other. It is the man and the woman, suddenly upright. They recognize each other; they stand face to face.

4.And while the couple execute the dance of desire and of fulfilment, ail that remained of unformed beings on the ground appears quietly and mingles in the round, which dances in frenzy, to madness. They are the N'guils, the sorcerers, the magicians the masters of fetish.

5.The round grows calm, is checked, slows down, and dies slowly. The dancers disperse into small groups. The man and the woman are alone in an embrace which inundates them like a wrave. It is Spring.

All of this is obviously on the side of The Golden Bough and not of Batouala; it is the reduction to choreography of one of those creation myths wdiich fill the unconscious minds of civilized people and must be extremely close to the active racial memory of the semi-civilized and the savage,

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The dance for the legend must be in part ritualistic or sacramental, in part a symbol of the action. The African dance of even the present day lends itself to this treatment: it is amazingly complicated, for all that it usually seems to be based on the simplest of rhythms; and the greater part of the dances are in costume—some of them of such an elaboration as to make our fancy-dress balls seem as preposterous as they are. Intricate dances executed on stilts are not uncommon; and the French government has moving picture records of dances in which each participant carries on his head a superstructure looking rather like the top of a telegraph pole, and of similar size, and this headdress, actually a constructcd costume, was made the striking feature of the dance, for the wearers swept it to the ground, held it at all possible angles, and created the dance with it.

The poem itself requires built costumes, and Leger who has carried his fondness for such things to the extent of building himself a small skyscraper as a costume for an artists' ball, has designed structural costumes for the ballet. It is not a new idea: Jean Cocteau's Parade, done by the Russian Ballet, and his Newlyweds on the Eiffel Tower, in the repertoire of the Swedish Ballet, each have some costumes so made. Those of the creation legend will give the dancers an almost appalling height, the three deities being between fifteen and twenty feet high, and manyof the characters eight or nine. Ldger's costumes are built for a definite choreography; there is one group of some twelve convex figures, which must always pass on the stage in silhouette; others are as specifically constructed for shape and bulk, and for the effective juxtaposition of natural and geometric forms (this being one of the features of L6gcr's painting).

The treatment of the decor is perhaps the most interesting of Leger's effects, The bold conjunction of the straight line and the circle, which he developed long ago in his painting serves admirably here, as we are in the presence of two of the familiar types of negro sculpture— the extraordinarily lengthened, almost rectangular, "deformed" head, and the approach to the perfectly round head, Leger drops a curtain with the first bars of the music—a curtain in black and white, with a few dashes of phosphorescence accentuating the white lines. On this curtain are abstract realizations of the three creative deities,

At the beginning of the ballet this curtain is raised, and the three gods prefigured upon it appear as constructed masses on the stage—behind them a vague obscurity of clouds and forms, They form a setting, the three gods, but they are mobile; and as the ballet progresses they move through the stage and eventually make their way into the wings,

It is Leger's intention to do in this ballet exactly the opposite of what he tried, with not complete success, to do in The Skating Rink. That ballet is s:mple in a modern sense, almost obvious; all the possible emotions arc definite. It is based on popular dance halls, popular entertainment—a continuous round and round movement of the mass of skaters, corresponding exactly to the apparently endless circulating around the bandstand of the dancers in small French towns on fete days. In the Creation Legend he deliberately looks for the mysterious and the disquieting. The ochre, black and white, and the odd forms he has created, combine for a simplicitywhich is distant from the simplicity of an American farmer or a European peasant. It is a naivete troubling to our senses. And it maybe especiallyinteresting to Americans accustomed to the shout and the breakdown, to be made aware of the mysterious and rather tragic religious emotion of the African negro.