Classical Dance — the "Ballet": How Did It Steal into Lebanon, and What Have We of It?

Visits by European ballet companies to Lebanon have come one after another, above all of late, thanks to the Tourism Year and the emigrants' summer. Beirut has seen the performances of Yvette Chauviré and Jean Babilée, and of the Spanish company of the Marquis de Cuevas, which has soared in the sky of this art; and only a month ago, the French company of "Lycette Darsonval" — all this in the hall of the UNESCO Palace. The Lebanese' desire to watch this kind of dancing has been quite palpable, and it is a desire of recent date, for a number of their daughters have begun to dance on the tips of their toes, and they grow more numerous year by year, climbing the stairways of this refined art in magical white slippers; and because ballet, like all the arts, fosters in the soul a taste for beauty, and a feeling for the harmony of movements, their consonance, and their balance. It is, in the Frenchmen's phrase, "the best apparatus for giving beauty as the clock gives the time"; besides which, it endows the body with a suppleness, a grace, and an adroitness that captivate minds and hearts, and it breeds in the dancer a great self-confidence and a longing to create... Yet it is hard to master, demanding, talent apart, perseverance, exertion, and time. It is the shortest-armed and shortest-lived of the arts, and the most treacherous of them: after its practitioner has spent a stretch of his life reaching the degree of perfection, he finds himself compelled — and seldom has he reached forty-five, or even forty — to leave it little by little, when the flame of youth dies down and lightness of movement dwindles.

The history of this art in the European countries goes back to the sixteenth century, when it began to spread from Italy to France and Germany and then to Russia. It did not reach Lebanon until the year 1930, and the credit for that is due to certain stars of this dance stopping over in Lebanon in the course of their artistic tours. The dancer Petrovsky founded a house of classical dance which afterward grew into an institute. Then came the two ladies: Belling, at the Lebanese Academy, in 1945; and Stock, Hungarian by origin, in 1948; Maria Theresia Silvy, the German, in 1949; Elena Imaz in 1952; and lately Miss Vartadian, one of Stock's pupils.

Beirut saw the first stage appearance in 1940, and then began the annual performances that acquaint us with the buds of this art's stars — stars of a near, near future: among them Nadia Saikali, Valerie Sarrouf, and Samia Saab of the Silvy institute, who pass today from the painter's canvas to the dancing boards; May Saikali, who reconciles the worship of teeth with the worship of art; Margaret Yobson, one of Imaz's pupils, who often couples the classical with the Spanish; Leila Rbeiz, Salwa Aoun, and Ellen Malik of the Stock institute; and others — little ones, not past their tenth year, who even so sway coquettishly with the melodies...

Of these "budding stars" I spoke with three about their view of the "ballet"...

Leila Rbeiz: a student at the American University of Beirut, six years now at the Silvy institute; she holds ballet to be an art in its own right, not a dry gymnastic.