This applies equally to all those workers in the vineyard, from East to West, from North to South, in Europe and South America. It is the friendly, personal cooperation of the local managers that helps make it possible to present so successfully artists and companies across the continent and the world we know. It is my very great pleasure each year, at the close of their annual meetings in New York, to meet them, rub shoulders, clasp hands, and discuss mutual problems.
The music and ballet lovers of the United States and Canada owe these people a debt; and when readers across the breadth of this great continent watch these folk—men and women, often helped out by their wives, their husbands, their children, striving to provide the finest available in the music and dance arts for their respective communities—do not imagine that they are necessarily accumulating wealth by their activities. More often than not, they work late and long for an idea and an ideal for very little material gain.
Remember, if you will, that it is the industrious and enlightened local manager, the college dean, the theatre manager, the public-spirited women’s clubs and philanthropic organizations that make your music and dance possible.
In the arts as in life, amidst the blaze of noon there are watchers for the dawn, awaiting the unborn tomorrow. I am of them. This book may, conceivably, have something of historical value in portraying events and persons, things and colleagues who have been, at one and the same time, motivating factors in the development and growth and appreciation of the dance in our sector of the western world. Though it has dealt, for the most part, with an era that is receding, I have tried not to look back either with nostalgia or regret. At the same time, I have tried not to view the era through rosy spectacles. As for tomorrow, I am optimistic. Without an ingrained and deeply rooted optimism much of what this book records could not have come to pass. Despite the lucubrations of certain Cassandras, I find myself unable to share their pessimism for the fate of culture in our troubled times. We shall have our ups and downs, as we have had throughout the history of man.
I hold stubbornly to the tenet that man cannot live by bread alone, and that those things of the spirit, those joys that delight the heart and mind and soul of man, are indestructible. On the other hand, it is by no means an easy trick to preserve them. While I agree with Ecclesiastes that “the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth,” I nevertheless insist that it is the supreme task of those who would profess or attain unto wisdom to exert their last ounce of strength to foster, preserve, and encourage the widest possible dissemination of the cultural heritage we possess.
As these closing pages are written, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is poised on the threshold of its third North American visit, with a larger company and a more varied repertoire than ever before. The latter, in addition to works I have noted in these pages, includes the new Coronation ballet, Homage to the Queen, staged by Frederick Ashton, to a specially commissioned score by the young English composer, Malcolm Arnold, with setting and costumes by Oliver Messel; The Shadow, with choreography by John Cranko, scenery and costumes by John Piper, and the music is Erno von Dohnanyi’s Suite in F Sharp Minor, which had its first performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 3rd March, 1953. Included, of course, is the new full-length production of Le Lac des Cygnes, with an entirely new production by Leslie Hurry; The Sleeping Beauty; Sylvia; Giselle, in an entirely new setting by James Bailey; Les Patineurs; a revival of Ashton’s Don Juan; and Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, staged by Ashton, making use of the full choral score for the first time in ballet in America.
Yet another impending dance venture and yet an additional aspect of dance pioneering will be the first trans-continental tour of the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre. This is a project that has been in my mind for more than a decade: the creation of an American dance theatre, with this country’s most outstanding dance director at its head. For years I have been an admirer of Agnes de Mille and the work she has done for ballet in America, and for the native dance and dancer. In this, as in all my activities, I have not solicited funds nor sought investors.
It is the first major organization to be established completely under my aegis, for which I have taken sole responsibility, financially and productionwise. It has long been my dream to form a veritable American dance company, one which could exhibit the qualities which make our native dancers unique: joy in sheer movement, wit, exuberance, a sharp sense of drama.
It was in 1948 that Agnes and I began the long series of discussions directed toward the creation of a completely new and “different” company, one that would place equal accents on “Dance” and “Theatre.”
For the new company Agnes has devised a repertoire ranging from the story of an Eighteenth-Century philanderer through Degas-inspired comments on the Romantic Era, to scenes from Paint Your Wagon, and Brigadoon. Utilizing spoken dialogue and song, the whole venture moves towards something new under the sun—both in Dance and in Theatre.