The Ballet Club Frederick Ashton's first ballet was produced in 1926 when he was twenty years old, on a theme suggested by the story of Vatel, the cordon bleu who hanged himself in shame because the dinner for his royal master Louis Quaforze was spoiled. Vatel was changed into a passionate couturier who, finding his latest creation did not please, stabbed himself with his scissors. The Tragedy of Fashion was a mere episode in Nigel Playfair's revue Riverside Nights, but it showed Ashton's talent, and Diaghileff paid him the compliment of coming to see it twice. After dancing abroad for a year, Ashton returned to England and staged a long string of small-scale ballets which for want of a better title have been called ballets intimes. They were produced at the little Ballet Club Theatre (now the Mercury) attached to the - Rambert Ballet School. These per­formances were never amateurish, they were always complete, artistic and with a fine sense of style, and on Sunday evenings a growing public welcomed each new ballet. Because of the small size of the stage no com­plicated choreographic effects were possible, but the restricted canvas meant that every detail had to be perfect. The music was provided by a piano with sometimes the addition of a few instruments, and designers appeared from the ranks of the ballet or were brought in from outside. Even before the founding of the Ballet Club in October 1930 Ashton had pro­duced in the studio Leda and the Swan (1928), which was then given at the Apollo Theatre at a charity matinee, and Mars and Venus (1929) for the play Jew Suss, as well as the set of dances to Peter Warlock's lovely Elizabethan Capriol Suite, which was produced at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith at a special matinee in February 1930, with costumes designed by William Chappell, himself a dancer at the Rambert School. These charming dances have an indefinable quality of beauty and grace which is typical of Ashton's later work, and an integrity of their own which has earned them a permanent place in the public's favour. That summer Karsavina complimented the young company by appearing with them for a short season and choosing Harold Turner as her partner in Le Spectre de la Rose. Soon another choreographer appeared among the dancers, Antony Tudor, whose Cross Gartered (1931), to the music of Frescobaldi, won great praise from Massine. In Lysistrata, or The Strike of Wives (1932), he showed an excellent sense of comedy and invention, Chappell again designing the decor. What fun they were, those early Ballet Club nights! Who will ever forget The Descent of Hebe (1935), dances arranged by Antony Tudor to Bloch's Concerto Grosso for strings and piano, the prancing black horses of the goddess painted on the backcloth by Nadia Benois, her aerial car—strictly static— giving an impression of heavenly ascent and descent amid fantastic semicircular clouds of pink gauze disposed about the tiny stage? It was a flight of fancy beautifully realised, a foretaste of much to come. The previous year two of the original members of the Ballet Club, Susan Salaman, who had shown her high sense of comedy in a number of Sporting Sketches, and Andree Howard, a dancer and designer with a natural gift for poetic fantasy, emerged as joint choreographers of Mermaid, a four-scene ballet telling the story of Hans Andersen's little mermaid to Ravel's limpid music. The skill with which the storm and the shipwreck were suggested was remarkable; the shaking sail, the hand of a dying sailor vanishing under the waves, the drowning prince floating down to the ocean's depth, the wavering movements of the mermaids at the bottom of the sea, the tender conveyance of the prince up to the surface and so back to life and sunshine, was done with a handful of dancers and no stage apparatus. This was true dramatic interpretation. In the last scene came the unforgettable moment when the Mermaid's feet first touched dry land: O brave new world, so soon to prove so bitter! The pathos of this ballet foreshadowed Andree Howard's remarkable Lady into Fox Article The Ballet Club was readed 512 times.