File:Dancing with Helen Moller (14761299596).jpg

Identifier: cu31924019227044 (find matches)
Title: Dancing with Helen Moller; her own statement of her philosophy and practice and teaching formed upon the classic Greek model, and adapted to meet the aesthetic and hygienic needs of to-day, with forty-three full page art plates;
Year: 1918 (1910s)
Authors: Moller, Helen Dunham, Curtis
Subjects: Dance Dance
Publisher: New York, John Lane company London, John Lane
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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iza-tion. For example, one very conscientious student ofclassic Greek sculpture and its literature confesses herinability to do satisfactory work amid the material dis-tractions of the bustling New World; but place her feeton the modern soil (for soil remains no more old thandoes the air) of ancient Greece and her inspiration soars.To be able daily to contemplate the ruins of the Parthe-non is to find that inspiration daily renewed. She feelsherself to be, in fact, one of those favored dancers whowas patronized by Aspasia, whose movements were imi-tated by the thoughtful Socrates for the good of hishealth, and who, perhaps, danced as a model for the greatPhidias. She is not of this age at all. She belongs tothe past, in which she dwells as a shadow and whose Sixty-three A sudden realization of calamity does not always, as in the case of grief,have a crushing effect upon the body—as this living semblance to sculptureindicates in its upward and backward thrust of torso, arms and head.
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Our Debt to Classic Sculpture spirit she has not the power to restore as a living thingfor the benefit of the multitudes who are able to dwellonly in the present. Another fixes her attention upon a sculptured jointor swelling muscle and extracts therefrom a new Prin-ciple in which is centered the secret of the True Art ofDancing as revealed by herself! The secret consists ina condition of the muscles totally different from any real-ized by athletes since the time of the Greeks, a conditionof Tension, which transforms dead weight into a livingforce, and which made the Greek as different from themodern human being as a stretched rubber band differsfrom a slack one. Ah, tension, that long lost secret,which our modern athletes know nothing about! Yetyou cant pick up a pin from the floor without musculartension. Did you ever observe on the gridiron a YaleCentre Rush set himself to withstand the enemyscatapulting onslaught? That is muscular tension pureand simple. And two modern sciences—

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