I intend to work for this dance of the future. I do not know whether I have the necessary qualities. I may have neither genius nor talent, nor temperament, but I know that I have a will; and will and energy are sometimes greater than either genius or temperament.

To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in life-this is the mission of a dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.

ONCE in a term of years one may experience a totally new enjoyment of art, may come upon a revelation of beauty so perfect that it is beyond any possibility of critical questioning. Something of this feeling of having discovered a loveliness that had been hidden before, of having added a new and rare experience to the finer pleasures of life, followed upon my attendance at a performance of the Isadora Duncan Dancers in November.

In a New York newspaper, hidden by "more important" dramatic announcements, I found a note that Isadora Duncan's pupils were offering a series of matinée performances at the Liberty Theatre, in conjunction with George Barrere's Little Symphony Orchestra. The group of dancers consists of the six girls whom Isadora Duncan took as children thirteen years ago, and with whom she has studied, worked and danced in all the intervening years.

When one sees them dance one knows that these girls have been trained neither in the artificial and over-conventionalized technique of modern ballet "schools," nor in the hasty methods and modes of the current "æsthetic dancing" cult. Their bodies have been developed to a sculturesque loveliness; and their individual artistic gifts have been broadened, deepened and made expressive by constant contact with the genius of Isadora Duncan. In the work of at least three of them the flowering of art already seems perfect. Their offering is so clearly authentic, so rare and so true to the finer perceptions of beauty, that they demand praise without criticism. And one of them - the one named Anna—can be placed without hestitation among the three or four greatest living dancers.

No one can say certainly whether theirs is Greek dancing. But certainly it has the freedom of Greek sculpture, the Greek feeling for the beauty that is to be attained not in elaboration, but in surprising and expressing nature at the characteristic lovely moment. Here there are no feats of skill, agility or complicated artifice; only the rhythms of life caught and made articulate by the flowing beauty of the human body in motion. It is the perfect combination of plastic and lyric art.

New York will have further opportunity to see the dancers, and then they will go on tour in the Western and Eastern states. The reception accorded them by the public may well prove a test of American culture. Unless the Isadora Duncan Dancers are recognized as the joy-giving, beauty-creating artists they are, we must bow before the charge that art in its rarer and more spiritual forms is beyond our national capacity for appreciation. S. C.

Experimental: A Review of Plays Produced by the Washington Square Players

By JOSEPHINE A. MEYER

WHEN We are young and ideals belong to the future, where their details are blurred and they appear en masse, it is comparatively easy to march swiftly and surely toward them. The obstacles we encounter on the way serve only to ennoble our goal and make it seem the more worth while attaining. We have no time to doubt, for life never seems so short to us as when we are young. And of course, we are happy because an absorbing faith simplifies existence. But when we have come abreast our ambitions, when we can reach out and touch our ideals, and hold them aloft in our hands, it is difficult to keep on walking ahead without losing our balance. At such times we either stand still or look for further light in the distance to guide us anew. Even as we grasp our ideals they harden, solidify and die. They become at best a cult, and we who hold fast to them and worship them find ourselves the bigoted priests of a religion we have outgrown. Herein lies the danger of being successful and growing up.

When the Washington Square Players first planned a little uncommercial theatre of experiment, their concrete need of a building and a patient, sympathetic audience made these seem to be the limit of their desire. If they looked beyond, it was to feel that once equipped with these essentials, the material to experiment with would present itself. They were sure they had only to start something.

After three successful seasons, they are entering upon their fourth with their theatre and their audiences accomplished facts, and their belief in the existence of undiscovered talent (if not undiscovered genius) fully vindicated. In other words, they have realized their ambitions and caught up with their ideals. Can they go on?

A theatre like that of the Washington Square Players must grow, even though it must not grow up. It must attempt and invent; it must evolve, encourage and create. It must never really reach maturity, for that implies completion. It must strain forward to new achievements without pausing to luxuriate in the past nor even to hope too fondly for a successful future. It must continually leave the trail it has beaten clear, to seek

new ways, sometimes blind and always hazardous. As most of the pleasures of the cultured, to whom a theatre of this sort must appeal for support, is discovering in the new some affinity to the old, the typical is usually the popular. The rubber stamp is notoriously the royal road to fame in all classes. But the Players dare not stoop to the delicious safety of becoming a fad. They may grow big with gratified pride in hearing new ideas in stage settings referred to as "Washington Square Player stuff," or at having plays spoken of as "your kind of thing." These are tokens of arrival. But they cannot overlook the fact that arrival is arrestation unless they depart anew. That is why they often puzzle and annoy the conventional radical. They do not aim for the novel and the unexpected. They are seeking for something, the quest of which takes them through novel and unexpected places.

About the only thing the patrons of the Washington Square Players can count on is their sincere effort to produce to the best of their ability those plays they deem most worthy. The past has proven that they can make mistakes in judgment. Many worthy plays are not "good theatre," and the truth on the other side of the Pyrenees, which proved to be the lie on this, is no better illustrated than in Roberto Bracco's Night of Snow, that remarkable study of self-pity, so poignant to the Italian understanding, and so dull to the American that it failed even to be offensive. There are certain universal elemental themes which are the backbone of all theatrical successes. These are love, in all its changes, sexual, parental, patriotic, idealistic, social, religious and sacrificial; money-producing the business, crook, poverty, and riches plays; and death, including murder, revenge, fear and thriller plots. Propagation, the means of livelihood and the mysterious end of life are naturally enough the basic ideas of every story told by man, and the plots built directly on these arouse the strongest interest and cause the keenest emotional reaction. The more abstract and theoretical the treatment of these themes the more they are apt to lose in what is known as “human appeal." A purely intellectual play may read well, but it doesn't "take." A play that gives an audience the opportunity to sob in concert like The Music Master may run for years. Ibsen was always careful to wrap his scientific theories in moving situations and in truth; it is upon the conjunction of these forces that we may hope to build the perfect play.

Meantime human appeal has been cheapened by exploitation. A sagging plot can be jacked up by Mother, who steps in to