“Follies” Director Comes to Stage Pageant Dances

[portrait upper-right identified as “BLAKE SCOTT”]

The World War drove Blake Scott to dancing. The dance director of “The Romance of a People” would still be juggling invoices and worry­ing about the tariff situation in an import and export business if he had not contracted neuritis while sta­tioned in Siberia and subsequently taken up dancing to cure this malady.

Scott doesn’t look like an invalid. He doesn't look like a dancer.

For the last six years Scott has been connected in a directorial capa­city with Eva La Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theater, where he has appeared in “Peter Pan,” Romeo and Juliet” and other productions. He hopes some day to realize his drama of movement in something like Maeterlinck's “Pelleas and Melisande.”

Meanwhile, he is dancing. And he is teaching several hundred young Clevelanders to dance in the spectacular pageant-drama which is to open here March 12.

“I don’t tire while I'm dancing,” he explained. “The more I dance, the more energy I acquire. I discovered this when I first took up the the work. That was in 1920. I had taken cold in Siberia, where I was stationed with the Canadian Islanders. I became paralyzed through my entire left side from neuritis and nothing would cure it.

"Against all medical advice, I thought I would try exercise. Dancing and fencing seemed to be the most likely to have effect since they use all the muscles in the body. My neuritis disappeared in a short time, and I never have felt a trace of it since.

“A year after I began studying—with the famous Fokine in New York—I had an opportunity to appear with Fokine and Mme. Fokine at the Hippodrome. I left my import and export job and kept to dancing. Why should I go back to a desk when I could be free and do the sort of work that kept me physically fit? I had been studying dancing at night after I left the office.”

Scott never had liked ballrooom dancing and still doesn’t. He prefers solo dancing, but would rather direct 500 than five dancers. He has been associated with the Zeigfeld “Follies,” the Ravinia and Cincinnati Opera Companies and the “Grand Street Follies." Under the direction of Isaac Van Grove, now production director of “Romance of a People,” Scott presented Ravel’s “Bolero” with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.