Review of 'Rhythm and Colour', by Richard Emerson, TLS

Rhythm and Colour is, on the face of it, a hefty biography of three avant-garde dancers, now largely forgotten: Margaret Morris and her sometime students Loïs Hutton and Hélène Vanel. One could read this book as the tale of three independent, unmoneyed women triumphantly “making it” in a patriarchal world, with each of them enjoying success and notoriety even as the fight for women’s suffrage raged on around them. But Richard Emerson has much to say as well about the artistic movements, cultural centres and luminaries of the first half of the twentieth century. Rhythm and Colour is a giddying dance, as these remarkable women’s lives whirl from Chelsea to the French Riviera to Paris amid eccentric millionaires, celebrity painters, modernist writers and tastemakers of the day.

Born in 1891, Margaret Morris spent her first five years in France. At the age of two-and-a-half, she was overheard by her mother fluently reciting La Fontaine’s fables to her dolls. By the time she was three, she was on stage, reducing audiences to tears and, on more than one occasion, acting in front of royalty. Back in England, she was taught from age seven to seventeen by John d’Auban, ballet master at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. D’Auban’s approach to ballet broke with purist convention. “Dancing”, he proclaimed in 1894, “is a dance danced with the whole body and not merely with the feet.” Grace and flow were governing forces in his choreography; layered skirts were manipulated with fluid arms.

It was this embellishment of tradition which shaped Morris’s attitude to dance as a sort of holistic aesthetic which would make costume, colour, set design, and the whole arc and contortion of the body as essential components of her art. Rejecting the rules of classical ballet, she described dancing (as the theosophist Josephine Ransom put it in 1919) as “making pictures with movements of limbs and bodies”, seeing it “from the visual point of view of the artist”: “seeing movements as combinations of shapes and lines, and ballet as pictures with the possibilities of actual movements added”. Painting and drawing were integral to the development of a new art of dance, as was “the power of backgrounds and costumes to intensify”, both of which Morris’s dancers would design for themselves.

By her early twenties, Morris had established a theatre school and a private members’ club just off the King’s Road in Chelsea. Serving as a kind of alternative Bloomsbury, the club attracted avant-garde writers and artists of the day, including Ezra Pound, Katherine Mansfield and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Morris also set up summer schools, for both adults and children, first at home – in Wales and Devon – and then in France. It was through these summer schools that Loïs Hutton (1893–1972) became Morris’s principal dancer and second-in-command. Hutton’s diary, quoted in full by Emerson, describes these halcyon days – Pourville, in 1921, was the “very best Summer School we ever had” – while also speaking of the deep affection that the two women felt for one another. It tells of many a breakfast in bed with “MM”, intimate discussions, beach walks, wild swimming, pub trips and picnics – all packed in, that is, around a busy schedule of teaching, dancing, painting, designing and play-writing.

Hélène Vanel (1898–1989) completed the trio in 1922 when she arrived in London at the Margaret Morris Theatre, which she describes as cramped, dark and a bit sinister. “Yet”, Vanel added, “the moment one entered this strange little theatre perched above the shops in the King’s Road, one came to life.” As one of the company’s dancers, she was, for a while, “simply making up numbers”. She makes an idiosyncratic eyewitness to the times, nonetheless. In 1923, for example, at the summer school in Cap d’Antibes, she noted how Picasso – summering there with his family, including his wife, the former Ballets Russes dancer Olga Khokhlova – would silently observe her performances. “His look was intense, dark and brilliant . . . perhaps he was interested in our combinations of abstract shapes.” On his return to Paris in October, in fact, Picasso told Clive Bell and Roger Fry that the twenty-four Margaret Morris ladies “swam divinely but couldn’t dance at all”.

Vanel may not have been a hit with Picasso, but in 1938 she danced at the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, collaborating with André Breton and Salvador Dalí. The glittering world that the Margaret Morris dancers had entertained on the French Riviera was captured by F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tender Is the Night. James Joyce’s daughter Lucia was among their pupils. David Bomberg fell in love with another member of the troupe. Hutton had a love affair with Edna St Vincent Millay. Vanel was pursued by the Scottish Colourist painter Leslie Hunter. Occasionally, it is difficult for the reader to disentangle these various encounters, and the idea of being “avant-garde” blurs somewhat, as the term takes on artistic, social, or sexual inflections in turn.

There is, indeed, a lot of life in these pages. Drawing on a formidable array of sources, including largely unpublished diaries, letters and memoirs, Emerson allows Hélène, Loïs and Margaret, as well as their contemporaries, to do much of the talking – a strategy that has clear advantages. There is the self-mythologizing flavour, for example, to Vanel’s description of her birth: “I was born into flames, or almost so”. (Her mother gave birth to her, alone in her flat, as a fire raged through the hospital across the road; the mirror at the end of the bed reflected its flames.) There is, also, for Emerson, the conundrum of how to describe what these dancers actually did on stage. We are told, for instance, of Morris’s “extraordinary Poisson D’Or”, which she would perform in “an orange and red sequinned sheath with a blue and grey-green front that shimmered in the half-light”. Costume and lighting aside, though, this routine remains a tantalizing mystery. We are told nothing of its choreography but presented with a shadowy monochrome image of a glittering figure, arching her back and reaching into the black space behind her.

Such snapshots suggest the (often sexually charged) daring of Morris and her acolytes, and in this respect at least something of their art can be recaptured – the abundance of illustrations in Rhythm and Colour speaks to their emphasis on the visual. For Morris, dance was a “living art”, one that “must be capable of expressing the ideas and emotions of the 20th century”. It lives and dies at the moment at which it is performed. As best it can, though, Richard Emerson’s book revivifies the “ideas and emotions” of these pioneering “intellectual danseuses”. Here they are preserved – just caught in motion – for posterity’s sake.