Music: God in a Stadium

God, a benevolent old gentleman in a long white false beard, sat one night last week in a small, cramped heaven above the stage in Manhattan’s Lewisohn Stadium. Surrounded by cloudlike forms, he occupied a throne in front of a large yellow sunflower, gazed majestically down at Job and his family & friends and Satan. He gazed also at the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra and a small audience of dance lovers. It was the first of the Stadium’s three nights with the Denishawn Dancers, and the first U. S. performance of Job: A Masque for Dancing, with music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, scenario by Geoffrey Langdon Keynes after the designs of Poet-Artist William Blake, choreography by Dancer Ted Shawn. In eight scenes and an epilog were shown the machinations of Satan (Dancer Shawn) in getting Job (Arthur Moor) to curse God (William Kennedy) for taking from him his family and riches. Though Satan succeeded (as he does not in the Bible story), he was banished by God, driven back to Hell through a gateway which resembled a large dog kennel or a subway entrance. In the epilog Job, old and humble, received homage from his people, settled down for 140 years more of existence.

Heaven-scaling is bound to be less than successful in the concrete Lewisohn Stadium, hemmed in by ugly apartment houses and the unimpressive buildings of the College of the City of New York. When William Blake made his drawings of the Book of Job, he took the universe in his grasp, peopled it with supermen and angels. Save for Dancer Shawn, operatically devilish as a deep green Satan, the Denishawns did little more than suggest Blake’s eloquent figures. Composer Williams’ score was politely modern, lacked movement.

Eminent among U. S. dancers, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn have been married since 1914, are professionally inseparable as the Guitrys, Sothern & Marlowe, or Lunt & Fontanne. Full-lipped, slim, fiftyish, grey-haired since she was 18, Miss St. Denis has been dancing for 25 years — five years longer than her husband who is considerably her junior. Ambitious, intelligent, they are less academic than the late Anna Pavlova, less Dionysian than the late Isadora Duncan. Last week’s audience, like many another, found them at their best in straight forward pictorial interpretations : Miss St. Denis in the Salome dance of Richard Strauss and an Oriental Dance Balinese by Wells Hively ; Mr. Shawn in dances to four oldtime U. S. songs and a fantastic Frohsinn (Cheerfulness) to music of Paul Linke. Together they danced a charming Idyll by Roy Stoughton. Schoolchildren danced a “visualization” of the first move ment of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony: a “synchoric orchestra” of dancers which was meant to parallel the instrumentation of the score. Then Miss St. Denis, surrounded by young men from the West Side Y. M. C. A., appeared as “The Prophetess” in a dance-drama to the music of “Mars” from Gustav von Hoist’s suite, The Planets. Many an observer found its symbology muddled and “arty,” wondered what was meant by “the Cosmic Consciousness . . . realization of the Unity of Life . . . Summit of Illumination . . .” etc., etc.