Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/305

 "Body must be disassociated from mind in order to express universal emotions," Ilona had proclaimed. "True dance is abstraction. Ballet is an artificial straitjacket. An artist of the dance thinks only with her muscles. A creative dancer must be receptive however to all influence. You cannot create anything with the brain."

"How can she get away from her mind?" she had asked Vida, and had to laugh at her answer, though she wished Vida would be serious about the dance.

"That should be easy for Ilona."

The room became silent. The dance was to begin.

To an accompaniment of a constant beat of the F-minor chord on the piano against the six-eight of a tom tom, five-eight of two sticks, and three-four of cymbals, Ilona stomped with no effete arched foot nonsense. In the background her three pupils swayed and semaphored.

"Isn't it wonderfully primitive! It really does something to me," whispered an intense fat woman.

Lucy's lips parted as if the better to receive Ilona's meaning and relieve the reverberations on her eardrums. She shifted her eyes to see if anyone else wanted to laugh. The rapt gaze of the neophytes was sobering and she squinted as some bewildered art lovers do in trying to grasp the tangibles of intangible form in non-representational painting. Maybe, she rebuked herself, I just don't appreciate this kind of art. She would ask Ranna what he thought.

She felt embarrassed watching the concluding orgasm of Ilona's virgin imaginings.

Well, for heaven's sake, I should think she'd be ashamed to do that in public, the poor thing. Maybe she doesn't know what she's doing.

She politely joined in the wild applause.

"I had no idea what an acrobatic technique your latest type of dancing is—what does 'Oestrus' mean?" she asked Ilona.

"Frenzy—but the title is unimportant. The pure dance does not have to mean anything," Ilona replied loftily. A Broadway dancer was a fine one to ask about meaning, she thought. "Art does not have to mean anything if it has 'significant form.'"

"If it doesn't mean anything, why call it Frenzy?" persisted Lucy, eager to understand.

"Because my dance is symbolic of Universal Emotion, rooted in the Pelvis."

At "pelvis" the pupils of Lucy's eyes widened to black out what Rh