The two British companies alternately presenting ballet and opera provide most of the entertainment at Covent Garden, but foreign companies such as the Vienna State Opera with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, La Scala Opera, the Paris Opéra Comique, the Ballet Theatre from New York, the New York City Ballet Company, the Grand Ballet of the Marquis de Cuevas, and Colonel de Basil’s Original Ballets Russes have had short seasons there. The Arts Council is in association with the two permanent companies coincidentally operating at Sadler’s Wells--the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet and the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company. Other opera and ballet companies associated with the Arts Council are the English Opera Group, Ltd., and the Ballet Rambert, while the Arts Council manages the St. James Ballet Company. All these companies tour in Britain, and some of them make extended tours abroad. The Ballet Rambert, for instance, has made a tour of Australia and New Zealand, which lasted a year and a half, a record for that area. The Sadler’s Wells Ballet has made long and highly successful tours of the European continent. Its first visit to America occurred in the autumn of 1949, when the Covent Garden Opera Trust, in association with the Arts Council and the British Council, presented the group at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and in various other centres in the United States and Canada, under my management. A second and much longer visit took place in 1950-1951, with which visits this chapter is primarily concerned. Sadler’s Wells has a ballet school of something more than two hundred students, including the general education of boys and girls from ten to sixteen. Scholarships are increasing in number; some of these are offered by various County Councils and other local authorities, and a number by the Royal Academy of Dancing. In addition to the Arts Council, I have mentioned the British Council, and no account of Britain’s cultural activities could make any pretensions to being intelligible without something more than a mention of it. It should be pointed out that the major part of the British Council’s work is done abroad. Established in 1934, the British Council is Britain’s chief agent for strengthening cultural relations with the rest of the British Commonwealth, Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, the United States, and Latin America. It is responsible for helping to make British cultural achievements known and understood abroad, and for bringing to the British, in turn, a closer knowledge of foreign countries.