This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Arthur Symons considered himself to be a genuine amateur of the European music halls and wrote frequently on his friendships and love affairs with the actresses and dancers. In these poems, Symons draws on sources as diverse as Victorian anthropological writings about ritual in tribal cultures, the meaning of tragedy in Nietzsche's philosophy, the search for the transcendent, or the noumenal, in Decadent and Symbolist writings, and the theatres' reputations for sexual trafficking.
It is a strange, sometimes unwieldy mix of sources, but the result is a recurring argument that within dance, and even within the dances of the London music halls, is the return to a more conscious connection to the universe and, as such, the means to transcend the banalities of everyday modern existence.
Late-Victorian writings on dance, whether literary or critical, generally posited the ballet and the female ballerina by extension as both conventional entertainments and exotic spectacles. In her book on the music-hall ballet, Alexandra Carter points out that notwithstanding the popularity of the ballet among women audience members the images of the ballet and of the female dancers that performed it were produced by a male elite who were "drawn to the 'world apart' produced by the exotic subject matter, colour, spectacle, and erotic connotations.
Such writings tend to connect the ballerina's erotic appeal directly to the sexual desire of the male spectator. In Henry Harland's short story "P'tit Bleu," one of the more provocative descriptions of a ballerina's performance, the music-hall ballerina evokes a thinly concealed orgasmic response from the narrator:. And she danced with constantly increasing fervor, kicked higher and higher, ever more boldly and more bravely With her swift whirlings, her astonishing undulations, and the flashing of red and black and white, one's eyes were dazzled My head burned, and my heart yearned covetously She danced with constantly increasing fervor, faster, faster, furiously fast: till, suddenly— zip!
Harland takes the sexual connotations of dance into more reified territory; instead of sexual thrills being connoted by touch and proximity between dance partners, they are transferred along erotically charged currents from the dancer to the spectators watching.
