IF I hadn't had many years of stage experience myself, I'd not be competent to instruct any one on the subject. I am not only a teacher of dancing, I am also a dancer, and can do all the steps as well as tell you how to do them. My experience as a stage dancer began in a store basement in Chicago, where I tried to imitate the best dancers I had seen at a Variety show. I put on wooden shoes and whistled my own clogs and jigs for hours at a time, till I brought myself by main strength, and no personal instruction, to a point where I could exhibit my home-made steps to a professional dancer. That is a hard way to get experience. You are more fortunate than you may realize in having everything that you have to do to become a dancer all worked out systematically for you, and told you and shown you by a simple method which anyone can learn, with perfect music and everything else that modern science can devise to aid you.

In the old days the beginner in dancing went direct to the stage door and stated his or her desire to become a dancer. The applicant was sometimes accorded a tryout. If he or she appeared awkward or was slow to catch the tempo, or not physically developed to please the eye, that was the end of it. There was no time to waste in helping to overcome minor defects, no personal interest shown whatever. He or she was dismissed summarily without any advice of a helpful nature.

If the candidate exhibited qualities that recommended her or him to the producer, he or she was given a stage training in chorus work following a tryout. The training was obtained in rehearsals, conducted for weeks, without compensation. The instructor might become impatient at any evidence of slowness of comprehension or execution; he might resent tardiness, absence, or slight infringement of stringent rules, and in such cases dismissal was the usual penalty.

The young lady or gentleman aspiring to become a stage dancer in that day and age paid a considerable price for the experience, as you may readily imagine.

Contrast then with now. You are acquiring this needed preliminary experience to fit you for a stage career in our courses under conditions that recommend them to ladies and gentlemen. There are no subordinates in our courses. All are equal. There is discipline, of course. You will find discipline on the stage when you advance that far. But discipline won't hurt you, not our kind. We ask for silence, attention, practice, and the conduct that ladies and gentlemen naturally observe. If you are a lady of social prominence, studying for the grace and beauty and health that our lessons impart, and not intending to favor the stage with your presence, you are accorded the same treatment that all others receive. This is a pure democracy if ever there was one.

By the old way of obtaining training and stage experience a young lady was kept for years in a subordinate place, and if she at last worked her way up out of the chorus into solo dancing, it was by "main strength," a vivid personality, aggressiveness and untiring effort.

Our first and primary instruction in the courses takes the place of the years of disappointing hard work that formerly prevailed. You are not held down. Your personality is encouraged and developed. You have to do your part, of course; we are not going to make stars of you if you don't help us do it. But the experience you must have is ready and waiting, and is based on a knowledge of things theatrical, gleaned and gathered through a series of years of personal experience exclusively in that field.

So much for the easier preliminary experience.

Now you have passed the portals of our studio, fitted and trained, a solo dancer, worthy of entertaining a public who waits to pay for the pleasure of seeing you do your turn. On the way through the courses you have had some small samples of what an audience is like. There have been the visitors' days when your work was on exhibition, and a Frolic before your fellow students in our own Demi-Tasse Theatre, or perhaps some neighborhood or church entertainments near your home. Those have all been good experience for you.

Now, as you enter upon a professional career, you must be content with a moderate start. I know how far you have advanced and what you may reasonably expect to do in your first, your starting engagement. Come to me before you commit yourself to any manager's care, if you possibly can arrange to do so.

In a small vaudeville act you may be able to command $40 to $50 a week as a beginner doing a specialty. You may have a year of doing three or four shows a day on "small-time," as it is called, which is splendid experience for you. Then you may advance to bigger time, playing two shows a day with bigger pay, and then, having improved yourself and your act as you go along, you are in line for the still higher grade theatres, where your work will get the eye of some production manager who will offer you a really worthwhile engagement in a production, as a Broadway show is called.

You cannot become a star in three or four months. It is only the foolish ones who dream of such a possibility. It takes time and experience to get on at a big time house like the Palace Theatre in New York City, which is recognized as Broadway's best showroom for the vaudeville artist. Look at the history of the stars you know. Evelyn Law worked four years before she reached her present Broadway fame. Ann Pennington has been working fifteen years, Fred and Adele Astaire nearly fourteen years—and I can name all the stars on Broadway and tell you exactly how long it took them to reach the pinnacle of their present success. So expect for yourself a moderate position on the start until experience has developed you and the public learned to like you, and then your advancement should be rapid and easy.

Do you know that as the result of my years of experience I originated all the solo and ensemble dances taught in my courses? Because of the same experience I conceive and create all of the novelties, settings, costumes, ideas and theatrical effects that are used in all the productions, professional and amateur, that I stage. There is no other school that can duplicate our service, since there is no other producing director of any standing in the theatrical world connected with such an organization as mine.

You are invited to benefit by my experience in every way. It is a part of your education here that you are not asked to pay for. I tender it freely to all who become members of my family of pupils. Not only are you dancing routines of my own constructing, and listening or reading at times to my class room talks on subjects bearing oh stage-craft and showmanship, but also you are earnestly invited to consult with me about your personal ambitions and desires.

Marion Davies

MARION DAVIES

I have literally helped thousands of good girls and boys to make millions of dollars for themselves, in the aggregate, and have brought a lot of happy hours to many million people who have willingly paid their good money to see my pupils in their perfect work on the stage. Profit by my experience; let me help you with my knowledge. This will make your experience easier for you, and the more quickly fit you for the lofty position that a perfectly worthy ambition prompts you to seek.

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