Abstract

Vaudeville: Vaudeville's Prestige

In the first decade of this century the stage ballet was regarded as a routine-ruled form of art, compounded mostly of acrobatics and entirely deficient in the creative spirit. The romantic revolution in the dance started by Isadora Duncan, Ruth Dennis, and a few others voiced the resentment of the cultured sections of the public with this state of the classical ballet, but the latter remained unaffected and continued to hold its position somewhere on the fringe of the aesthetic consciousness of the period. Then, in 1909, Serge Diaghileff, whose lamented death has just been recorded, opened his first season of Russian ballet in Paris, and the startled world suddenly realized that ballet, even classical Italian ballet, was not at all dead but merely slumbering, and that higher artistic standards and inspired leadership were enough to awaken it to a new life.