[4] Ballets Russes had held a London season most years but when Sergei Diaghilev died in 1929 the company collapsed, heavily in debt.
Britain's best known dancers Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin had been in England since the collapse of Ballets Russes but had no large scale company to dance for.
The committee included the young composer Constant Lambert as resident conductor, the semi-retired ballerina Lydia Lopokova as choreographic advisor and her husband the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes as treasurer.
The one received best was Pomona by the rising choreographer Frederick Ashton,[9]: 119 in which Anton Dolin partnered the American ballerina Anna Ludmila in the lead roles.
Ashton also created pieces for the December performance at the Arts Theatre Club; Job, A Masque of Poetry and Music, of which the critics did not know what to make,[1]: 21 and a series of tableaux illustrating Shakespeare's narrative poem A Lover's Complaint in which Lopokova herself took a part.
[8]: 72 After several more modest ventures the society hired the Savoy Theatre in 1932 for an ambitious four week summer season, in which Olga Spessivtseva danced the lead parts in shortened versions of Giselle and Swan Lake.
The other productions were Ballade (Chopin), The Enchanted Grove (Ravel), Fete polonaise (Mikhail Glinka), High Yellow (Spike Hughes), Job (Vaughan Williams), The Lord of Burleigh (Mendelssohn), Mars and Venus (Scarlatti), Mercure (Satie), The Origin of Design (Handel), Regatta (Gavin Gordon) and The Rio Grande (Constant Lambert).