EXPERIENCE
IF I hadn't had many years of stage experience myself, I'd not be competent to instruct any one on the subject. I am not only a teacher of dancing, I am also a dancer, and can do all the steps as well as tell you how to do them. My experience as a stage dancer began in a store basement in Chicago, where I tried to imitate the best dancers I had seen at a Variety show. I put on wooden shoes and whistled my own clogs and jigs for hours at a time, till I brought myself by main strength, and no personal instruction, to a point where I could exhibit my home-made steps to a professional dancer. That is a hard way to get experience. You are more fortunate than you may realize in having everything that you have to do to become a dancer all worked out systematically for you, and told you and shown you by a simple method which anyone can learn, with perfect music and everything else that modern science can devise to aid you.
In the old days the beginner in dancing went direct to the stage door and stated his or her desire to become a dancer. The applicant was sometimes accorded a tryout. If he or she appeared awkward or was slow to catch the tempo, or not physically developed to please the eye, that was the end of it. There was no time to waste in helping to overcome minor defects, no personal interest shown whatever. He or she was dismissed summarily without any advice of a helpful nature.
If the candidate exhibited qualities that recommended her or him to the producer, he or she was given a stage training in chorus work following a tryout. The training was obtained in rehearsals, conducted for weeks, without compensation. The instructor might become impatient at any evidence of slowness of comprehension or execution; he might resent tardiness, absence, or slight infringement of stringent rules, and in such cases dismissal was the usual penalty.
The young lady or gentleman aspiring to become a stage dancer in that day and age paid a considerable price for the experience, as you may readily imagine.
Contrast then with now. You are acquiring this needed preliminary experience to fit you for a stage career in our courses under conditions that recommend them to ladies and gentlemen. There are no subordinates in our courses. All are equal. There is discipline, of course. You will find discipline on the stage when you advance that far. But discipline won't hurt you, not our kind. We ask for silence, attention, practice, and the conduct that ladies and gentlemen naturally observe. If you are a lady of social prominence, studying for the grace and beauty and health that our lessons impart, and not intending to favor the stage with your presence, you are accorded the same treatment that all others receive. This is a pure democracy if ever there was one.
By the old way of obtaining training and stage experience a young lady was kept for years in a subordinate place, and if she at last worked her way up out of the chorus into solo dancing, it was by "main strength," a vivid personality, aggressiveness and untiring effort.