NED WAYBURN’S MODERN AMERICANIZED
BALLET TECHNIQUE
I HAVE invented a method of teaching the ballet that eliminates the long and tedious training formerly considered necessary, and fits the pupil for a stage appearance in the briefest possible length of time. That my method is a perfect success is evidenced in the best theatres everywhere. I have taken amateurs who never did a ballet step in their lives, put them in training by my personally devised method, and made perfect solo dancers of them in a few months' time, secured them engagements, and their fame as ballet dancers par excellence is today world-wide. Elsewhere in this book I shall name several of these whom you know best, and you will admit that I am right in what I have just said when you peruse their names.
I am assuming that you are aware of the fact that in all foreign countries the ballet student is taught for years before she is allowed to attempt a public appearance or permitted to consider a professional engagement. This ultra-conservative custom has been brought across the water, and the idea has always held here in America that the four, six, ten year apprenticeship was a necessity; that no dancer could qualify for a professional appearance in a shorter period. It was taken for granted that there was no short cut to this trade, and up to the recent present there has been none. But our American girls who are gifted with a talent for this superb form of graceful dancing will not consent to devote the best years of their lives to unproductive labor. The idea of signing away several years of their happy lives in order to become entitled merely to a critical teacher's approval, and all this time without compensation of a financial nature, does not appeal to any, and least of all to that very person, the young person who would make the best dancer.
Yet there was an increasing demand for capable ballet dancers, and the supply was limited and dwindling. So, in order to make a world happy, I put my wits to work and evolved a plan that has revolutionized the entire industry. And I have called it Ned Wayburn's Modern Americanized Ballet Technique; and it is a Ballet Technique at its very best. If I had done nothing else in the years of my theatrical experience, I should still feel that I had accomplished much that is worth while.
And, really, it is all very simple. The wonder is that others did not figure it out before I did. And it is no secret. I am going to tell you all about it, and what the results have been, and then you can see for yourself why it is no longer best or necessary to go to foreign lands and take lessons the old way, for years and years.