From 1928 to 1931, Leonide Massine staged weekly ballet productions at the Roxy Theatre, in New York, including a full-length _Schéhérazade_, with four performances daily, Massine acting both as choreographer and leading dancer. In 1930, he staged Stravinsky’s _Le Sacre du Printemps_, for four performances in Philadelphia and two at the Metropolitan Opera House, in New York, with the collaboration of Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and with Martha Graham making one of her rare appearances in ballet, in the leading role. That is the story. Hardly a well-tilled ground in which to sow balletic seed with the hope of a bumper crop. It is not surprising that all my friends and all my rival colleagues in the field of management prophesied dire things for me (presumably with different motives) when I determined on the rebirth of ballet in America in the autumn of 1933. Their predictions were as mournful as those of Macbeth’s witches. The ballet situation in the Western World, after the deaths of Diaghileff and Pavlova, save for the subsidized ballets at the Paris Opera and La Scala in Milan, was not vastly different. If you will look through the files of the European newspapers of the period, you will find an equally depressing note: “The Swan passes, and ballet with her” ... “The puppet-master is gone; the puppets must be returned to their boxes” ... and a bit later: “Former Diaghileff dancers booked to appear in revues and cabaret turns.” ... In England, J. Maynard Keynes, Lydia Lopokova, Ninette de Valois, Marie Rambert, Constant Lambert, and Arnold L. Haskell had formed the Camargo Society for Sunday night ballet performances, which organization gave birth to Marie Rambert’s Ballet Club and the Vic Wells Ballet. In 1933, the glories of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet were hardly dreams, not yet a glimmer in Ninette de Valois’ eye. In Europe there remained only the Diaghileff remains and a vacant Diaghileff contract at Monte Carlo. This latter deserves a word of explanation. Diaghileff had acquired the name--the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo--thanks to the Prince of Monaco, himself a ballet lover, who had offered Diaghileff and his company a home and a place to work. René Blum, an intellectual French gentleman of deep culture and fine taste, took over the unexpired Diaghileff Monte Carlo contract. Blum was at hand for, at the time of Diaghileff’s death, he was at the head of the dramatic theatre at Monte Carlo. In fulfilment of the Diaghileff contract, for a time Blum booked such itinerant ballet groups as he could. Then, in 1931, he organized his own Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. George Balanchine, who had staged some of the last of the Diaghileff works, became the first choreographer for the new company. For the Monte Carlo repertoire, he created three works. To it, from Paris, he brought two of the soon-to-become-famous “baby ballerinas,” Irina Baronova and Tamara Toumanova, both from the classroom of Olga Preobrajenska.