"Always. Each company has few that can be ranked as soloists, and this is because good dancers are not numerous. As I have suggested before, the American girl is not sufficiently ambitious in this line; their stage yearnings are mostly for speaking parts on the dramatic stage, and they are not very devout worshippers at the shrine of Terpsichore."
"How are American ballet girls paid?"
"Pretty well; but nothing like what they got before the war. Madame Gallati, who was my wife, before the rebellion, never got less than $150 a week, and after the war was paid $100. Premieres now do not get more than $75, and they are in very good luck when they get that much. The coryphees and others get from $35 a week down as low as $15. And out of this they must furnish their own wardrobes. They must lay out from $5 a week upwards for their stage clothes, and when a ballet is on that requires rich dressing the wardrobes may exceed their whole week's salary; but then, you know, they can prepare for an emergency of this kind by laying by a portion of the salary of the weeks in which no new ballet is brought out. Some of the ballets run for a month, but the usual run is two weeks."
"The maitre does not always dance?"
"No, he dances very seldom; but he earns his money though. He is kept busy two or three hours every day, Sunday included, teaching the old and young ideas of the ballet, how to shoot out their limbs, pose, pirouette, etc. It requires all the time I can give to it to prepare a new ballet. Just as soon as a new one is put on the stage I begin to train the girls in another one, and this training is kept up until the day before the novelty is to be presented to the public. During this time of preparation I have the entire troupe on the stage two hours every morning, except matinee days, when, of course, there is no rehearsal. I show them the steps and they have to practice them. They are supposed to practice some at home, but, of course, the majority of them never do so."
"Have you many applicants now-a-days?"
"Not very many. Once in a while a girl or two will apply, but nearly all of them are unworthy in point of physique to be received, and so are sent away. I do not care so much for nice features, for the ugliest can be embellished sufficiently to look handsome before the foot-lights but good forms are indispensable, and particularly strong, symmetrical limbs. The applicants come from all grades and classes of life, and not a few are young girls of good but obscure connection, who have ambition to win glory and money and all that sort of thing from the public, and who fondly imagine that the ballet girl lives a butterfly existence, instead of being the hardworking, temptation-beset creature that she really is."
"And they all want to get on the stage in a very short time?"
"Yes, the invariable question is, 'Can I dance in a few weeks?' and then they want me to show them the 'steps' and to let them try to duplicate them. I tell them there is no use; if they want to dance they must, as the Irishman says, begin at the beginning. You can't know music without learning the notes; you can't read without knowing the A B C; and so with the ballet, you can't dance without first having acquired its alphabet."
