In this case, idea and money came together simultaneously, for the Mordkin school and company had Lucia Chase, with ambitions and interest as well. Lucia Chase had money--a great deal of it--and she wanted to dance. She had substantially financed the Mordkin company. Pleasant went ahead with his plan for a grandiose organization--with his ideas and Chase’s money. The Mordkin company was closed up; and a new company, on a magnificent scale, calling itself Ballet Theatre, was formed. The Mordkin venture had been too small, too limited in its scope, too reactionary in thought, so Mordkin himself was pushed into the background, soon to be ousted altogether, and the tremendous undertaking went forward on a scale the like of which this country had never seen. In a Utopia such a pretentious scheme would have a permanent place in the cultural pattern, for the company’s avowed policy, at the outset, was to act as a repository for genuine masterpieces of all periods and styles of the dance; it would be to the dance what a great museum is to the arts of sculpture and painting. The classical, the romantic, the modern, all would find a home in the new organization. The company was to be so organized that it could compete with the world’s best. It should be large. It should have ample backing. The company’s debut at the Center Theatre, in New York’s Rockefeller Center, on 11th January, 1940, was preceded by a ballyhoo of circus proportions. The rehearsal period preceding this date was long and arduous. The company’s slogans included one announcing that the works were “staged by the greatest collaboration in ballet history.” It was a “super” organization--imposing, diverse and diffuse. But it was a big idea, albeit an impractical one. Its impracticability, however, did not lessen the impact of its initial impression. More than thirteen years have elapsed since Ballet Theatre made its bow, and one can hardly regard its initial roster of contributors even now without an astonished blink of the eyes. There were twenty principal dancers, fifteen soloists, a _corps de ballet_ of fifty-six. In addition, there was a Negro group numbering fourteen. There was an additional Spanish group of nineteen. The choreographers numbered eleven; an equal number of scene and costume designers; three orchestra conductors. Eighteen composers, living and dead, contributed to the initial repertoire of as many works. Although the founders were American, as was the backing, there was no slavish chauvinism in its repertoire, which was cosmopolitan and catholic. Only two of its eleven choreographers were natives: Eugene Loring and Agnes de Mille. The company was international. Three of the choreographers were English: Anton Dolin, Andrée Howard, and Antony Tudor. Four were Russian: Michel Fokine, Adolph Bolm, Mikhail Mordkin, Bronislava Nijinska.