The cast will include Robert Helpmann, as Oberon, and Moira Shearer, as Titania, with outstanding and distinguished British actors in the other roles; and, utilizing the full Mendelssohn score, the production will have a ballet of forty, choreographed by Robert Helpmann.
The production will be seen at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in mid-September, 1954, for a season, to be followed by a short tour of the leading cities of the United States and Canada.
This will, I feel, be one of the most significant artistic productions to be revealed across the continent since the days of Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle. It gives me great personal satisfaction to be able to offer this first of the new productions of London’s famous Old Vic.
The other choice tid-bit to which I feel American dance lovers will look forward with keen anticipation is the coast-to-coast tour of London’s Festival Ballet with Toumanova as guest star.
The Festival Ballet was founded by Anton Dolin for the British Festival, under the immediate patronage of H.H. Princess Marie Louise. Dr. Julian Braunsweg is its managing director.
It has grown steadily in stature and is today one of Europe’s best known ballet companies. Under the artistic direction of Anton Dolin it has appeared with marked success for several seasons at the Royal Festival Hall, London; has toured Britain, all western Europe; and, in the spring of 1953, gave a highly successful two weeks’ season in Montreal and Toronto, where it received as high critical approval as ever accorded any ballet company in Canada.
There is a company of eighty, and a repertoire of evenly balanced classics and modern creations, including, among others, the following: a full-length Nutcracker, Giselle, Petrouchka, Swan Lake, (Act I), Le Beau Danube, Schéhérazade, Symphonic Impressions, Pas de Quatre, Bolero, Black Swan, Vision of Marguerite, Symphony for Fun, Pantomime Harlequinade, Don Quixote, Les Sylphides, Le Spectre de la Rose, Prince Igor, Concerto Grosso.
This international exchange of ballet companies is one of the bulwarks of mutual understanding and sympathy. It is a source of deep gratification to me that I have been instrumental in bringing the companies of the Sadler’s Wells organization, the Ballet of the Paris Opera, and others to North America, as it is that I have been able to be of service in arranging for the two visits of the New York City Ballet to London. It is through the medium of such exchanges, presenting no language barriers, but offering beauty as a common bond, that we are able to bridge those hideous chasms so often caused by misunderstood and, too often, unwise and thoughtlessly chosen words.
In unborn tomorrows I hope to extend these exchanges to include not only Europe, but our sister republics to the South, and the Far East, with whom now, more than ever, cultural rapport is necessary. We are now reaching a time in America when artistic achievement has become something more than casual entertainment, although, in my opinion, artistic endeavor must never lose sight of the fact that entertainment there must be if that public so necessary to the well-being of any art is not to be alienated. The role of art and the artist is, through entertainment, to stimulate and, through the creative spirit, to help the audience renew its faith and courage in beauty, in universal ideals, in love, in a richer and fuller imaginative life. Then, and only then, can the audience rise above the mundane, the mediocre, the monotonous.
During the thirty-odd years I have labored on the American musical and balletic scene, I have seen a growth of interest and appreciation that has been little short of phenomenal. Yet I note, with deep regret, that today the insecurities of living for art and the artist have by no means lessened. Truth hinges solely on the harvest, and how may that harvest be garnered with no security and no roof?