The Javanese Dancers at the Paris Exposition.

Te Aroha News, Volume VIII, Issue 484, 28 June 1890, Page 3

The Javanese Dancers at the Paris Exposition.

It is only just to credit the gout faimnde of the Parisians with preferring the Javanese dancers to the flagrant and turbulent contortions of the Gitana s. They were neither noisy nor abandoned. The music was slow, regular, and savage only in timb?c._ lb tortured the nerves in an insidious and unsuspected way only—like certain forms of Chinese punishment, which at first seem wholly bearable —and did nob assail them violently, as did that of the Spanish and Egyptian virtuosi. And to its unphrased, unmodulated monotony the dancers moved with trailing steps in slow —infinitely slow —carves, wreathing their arms, or rather their hands, with the wrist as a pivot, in a sinuous sedateness quite impossible to characterise or describe. As they circled about the little stage, a solemn-visaged youth in —perhaps—full canonicals, surrounded by a group ofattendant girls, they seemed to be performing a serious of barnyard evolutions of a slowly strutting cock encircled by his harem of hens. It was decorous to the point of solemnity, and the sense of measure was certainly preserved to an almost measureless degree. The dancers were never carried beyond themselves by the entrain of the dance, but very visibly controlled and regulated their gestures and poses. In this senise the performance was clearly an artistic one. But at the end of a half hour the observer who did not find it monotonous must have been a determined seeker after sensations. The elaborate but limited sinuosity of the waving hands and flexible wrists seemed at last perfectly insipid, and, instead of being intentional, merely the reduction to a factitious appearance of order, of movements in reality haphazard and fortuitous, by a slowing of the pace to such an extent that the sense of slowness disguised the lack of character in the design. After the Qitanas any exhibition of decorum was agreeable, but before long the emptiness of pure decorum made itself dismally perceived, and one could nob help thinking that the Paris? ian amateqrs who went into ecstasies'over the Javanese did not analyse their sensations with sufficient • assiduity.—W. C. Brownell, in Scribner.