With Ballet Theatre gone its own way, I was placed in a serious predicament. According to a long established and necessary custom, bookings throughout the country are made at least a season in advance. This is imperative in order that theatres, halls, auditoriums may be properly engaged and so that the local managers may arrange their series, develop their promotional campaigns, sell their tickets, thus reducing to as great an extent as possible the element of risk and chance involved. Since my contract with Ballet Theatre had had one more year to run, the transcontinental bookings for the Ballet Theatre company had been made for the entire season. It was necessary for me to keep faith with the local managers who had built their seasons around ballet and, since local managers have faith both in me and in the quality of the ballet I present, I was on a spot. The question was: what to do? Something had to be done to fulfil my obligations. I had no regrets about the departure of Ballet Theatre, other than that personal wrench I always feel at parting company with something to which I have given so much of myself. The last weeks with Ballet Theatre added nothing but trouble. There was a ludicrous contretemps in the nation’s capital. Jascha Horenstein, for some reason known only to himself, put down his baton before the beginning of the long coda at the end of _Swan Lake_, and walked out of the pit. As he departed, he left both the dancers and the National Symphony Orchestra players suspended in mid-air, with another five minutes left for the climax of the ballet. As a consequence, the performance ended in a debacle. Matters balletic were in a bad way. It is times such as these that present me with a challenge. There is no easy solution; and frequently, almost usually, such solutions as there are, are reached by trial and error. This was no exception. I began the trial and error period by building up, as an experiment, the Markova-Dolin company, with a group of dancers, including André Eglevsky and soloists, together with a _corps de ballet_ largely composed of Ballet Theatre personnel that had broken away because of dissatisfaction of one sort or another. In addition to Markova, Dolin, and Eglevsky, the company included Margaret Banks, a Sadler’s Wells trained dancer from Vancouver, Roszika Sabo, Wallace Siebert, and others, with young John Taras as choreographer and ballet-master. The reader who has come this far will realize some of the problems involved in building up a repertoire. Here we were, starting from scratch.