21 Leaps into the 21st Century.

WHAT CAN we expect from dance in the next one hundred years, and perhaps more to the point, what can dance expect from us? Here we seek enlightenment from an array of experts: Dance Magazines editors, contributors, critics and correspondents, old and new. What's ahead for the twenty-first century? Watch this space ...

1 CD-ROM with a view BY KATE MATTINGLY

TWENTY-FIRST century technology transforms choreography - where it is made and how it can be viewed. For choreographer and digital artist Anita Cheng, dancemaking can occur between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. Her muses are a Power Mac, modem, television and VCR--equipment worth a year's rent--that convert an ephemeral art form into a portable five-inch disc. Nine months after each concert, her choreography is "burned"--transferred from video to CD-ROM to become part of Cheng's dance archive. On the CD-ROM, Cheng's movement can be viewed, slowed down, and manipulated. It can also be presented in online media, as well as in museums and galleries, opening up new venues for her work. Cheng creates CD-ROMs, digital video, and Web pages. For her, the process of digitizing her own work adds new artistic challenges: "You have to make every detail of the picture, then decide how to move the elements and design the interface." Cheng's "Repertory" CD-ROM identifies selections with photos as well as titles, and lets the viewer move through pieces of choreography by means of an arrow along the bottom of the screen. Unlike video, CD-ROMs do not disintegrate after excessive use or require rewinding and fast-forwarding to pinpoint part of a piece.

If CD-ROMs are changing the process of making dance, they are also changing the process of choosing dance. For presenters who screen hundreds of videos a year, the discs speed up selection processes by providing a wealth of information at the click of a mouse.

With technology within the grasp of the artist herself, the ramifications are massive. Says Cheng, "Historically, artists have instigated conceptual change, and I think today's choreographers will continue that impetus."

2 Umbrella's Inclusive Reign BY VICKI SANDERS

PRESENTER JEREMY ALLIGER, director of the Dance Umbrella in Boston, has been out on the edge so many times that being there doesn't even make him dizzy any more. The risks he's taken to bring together experimental and underrepresented dancers nearly cost him his organization last spring, but the rewards for artists and audiences alike are far-reaching.

Alliger has put together three festivals recently that have legitimized cross-cultural or marginalized movement forms: one for jazz, tap, and hip-hop dancers, one for wheelchair dancers (14 companies from around the world) and one for aerial dancers (12 companies). In so doing, he's redefined dance and supported new consortiums while giving the next generation of potential audiences something to get excited about.

"My personal passion is to present performances that shatter people's preconceived notions about what dance is, about who can be a dancer, and about what a dancer might look like," Alliger says. Evidently, audiences love the process of discovery as much as the artists do. In the past five years, Dance Umbrella has seen its ticket sales double, from 20,000 to 40,000 annually.

Alliger's initiatives have also opened doors for the specialized groups that would never have been unlocked for them individually--collaborative opportunities such as international tours, artist roundtables, even something as nuts-and-bolts as centralized databases.

Predicts Alliger: "It's a vision of things to come."

3 Of Longevity and Latinos BY RITA FELCIANO

TWO EVENTS will change the look of American dance. Neither has much to do with artistic intent; it's demographics that will do the trick. America is getting older, and by the year 2005 Hispanic Americans will constitute the largest minority population.

Mexico and Latin America have had a thriving modern dance and ballet culture for years. Yet except for ethnic companies, dancers with Hispanic surnames are still rare in U.S. ensembles. However, as the Latino population becomes more diversified, this will change, aided, in part, by groups such as the Bay Area's recently established Latino Dance Consortium.

Today's Paloma Herreras and Carlos Acostas will do for Hispanic dancers what Nureyev did for male dancers, and what is now a trickle will not even be a trend, but the norm. America's population is graying, including its dancers. Fortunately, in the last thirty years training and performance facilities, physical therapy, and working conditions have greatly improved. Today's dancers are in better shape and able to perform longer and in a wider range of repertoire. As their numbers grow, new standards of excellence will emerge, and faster will no longer be better. White Oak, Netherlands Dance Theater III, and Dance Galaxy are just the beginning. Who knows? In the not-too-distant future we may even see a ballet called King Lear.

4 Balanchine Rampant BY DORIS HERING

SEVENTEEN YEARS after his death, George Balanchine is America's most widely performed ballet choreographer. Under the imprimatur of the George Balanchine Foundation, about fifty of the master's works are currently circulating among companies from Seattle to Miami.

Today, Serenade, The Four Temperaments, and Concerto Barocco lead the roll call of most-requested Balanchine ballets. Next among the top ten are Theme and Variations, Allegro Brillante, Rubies, Apollo, Divertimento No. 15, Tarantella and Agon. But opulent, expensive-to-mount works like A Midsummer Night's Dream, Jewels and Stars and Stripes have recently gained ground, suggesting that there are enough well-trained dancers to do justice to the stylish, challenging choreography, as well as enough full-scale companies to mount them.

It is doubtful whether Balanchine's contemporaries-Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor and Agnes de Mille-will ever match his penetration into the American ballet landscape, if for no other reason than that they were less prolific. As for Martha Graham and Jerome Robbins, formal structures for distributing their works are not yet in place.

A larger question remains. During most of the twentieth century we had Balanchine as the brilliant heir to nineteenth-century classicist Marius Petipa. As we leap into the new century, how--and by whom-will that double legacy be extended?

5 Do You Speak Dance? BY MARTHA ULLMAN WEST

CHOREOGRAPHERS IN Oregon are becoming polyglots in the language of dance. In both the ballet and modern worlds--where the boundaries are increasingly blurred--dancemakers are incorporating an extraordinary range of styles, forms and techniques.

Minh Tran's early training in Saigon was in traditional opera dance. Today, in Portland, he combines its shapes and slow tempo with the hard-edged, highly charged contemporary Western movement he learned at Portland State University in the mid-1980s and in workshops with choreographer Stephen Petronio. Portland's Keith Goodman travels widely; evidence of his journeys may be seen in the Caribbean and Southeast Asian techniques that are laminated onto his spiritually oriented, dramatic contemporary choreography.

On the other side of the aisle, Trey McIntyre, choreographing for Oregon Ballet Theatre, successfully melds classicism with hip-hop sound and text. OBT artistic director James Canfield does likewise with rock music and special effects. Down the highway in Eugene, British-born Toni Pimble, artistic director of the Eugene Ballet Company and Ballet Idaho, has a uniquely idiosyncratic view of American cultural phenomena that often forms the raw material of her work. Her ballet about the silent film era uses the classical vocabulary, and she's invented an entirely new lexicon for Skinwalkers, her choreographic take on Southwest Native American culture.

As other choreographers add to their own vocabularies, making art that is often political and sometimes humorously so--Portland's Gregg Bielemeier is killingly funny about the uneasy times in which we live. The language of dance is likely to become--when it works! a complex rewarding conversation for twenty-first century viewers.

6 A life in dance, a dance in life BY JANICE ROSS, PH.D.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY began with a lack of definition of the role dance should play in American life. Dance teaching skills were weighted heavily in favor of teaching how to do dances, rather than how to understand them. Only in later decades was dance analyzed, given context and justified. Dance scholars in the century ahead will doubtless continue on this quest to quantify dance's social, cognitive, and emotional benefits.

Community-based dance projects, too, are likely to flourish. Having been effectively eliminated from the curricula of the middle- and upper-class kids' schools, dance is thriving in youth centers, senior homes, children's shelters, and even jails as a positive force. In the next decade, look for pockets within communities around the nation where dance will be a practice not for amusement, recreation, or rehearsal, but for a better life.

7 Wellness Gets Better BY DR. LINDA HAMILTON

WHEN IT COMES to dancers' wellness, the theme for the new millennium is "treat the whole person." To combat occupational stress, dance medicine specialists are emerging in a variety of fields, from physical therapy to nutrition. Mental health professionals have also begun to focus their expertise on dance, tackling problems familiar to sports psychologists: performance anxiety, eating disorders, self-sabotage, career transitions.

Dance schools, too, have widened their focus to include wellness seminars in their curricula. At the School of American Ballet, Pete Libman, the director of student life, says, "We're taking a holistic approach, preparing students for adulthood whether or not they have a professional career." Some schools are also re-evaluating dancers' weight requirements in light of the risks associated with dieting. At the National Ballet School of Canada, for instance, artistic director Mavis Staines recognizes that for young women, "there's a period between the ages of 15 and 17 when they need to be a bit more voluptuous" to be healthy. Her approach coincides with cutting-edge research by Dr. Michelle Warren, medical director of the Center for Menopause, Hormonal Disorders and Women's Health, suggesting that excessive dieting in adolescence may cause irreversible changes in bone density--a problem associated with stress fractures and osteoporosis.

As efforts to enhance dancers' wellness intensify in the twenty-first century, the benefits to the profession are likely to be artistic as well as personal.

8 Dances with Agents BY ROSE EICHENBAUM

WHEN JULIE McDonald asked her boss at Kazarian Spencer and Associates for a desk and a phone back in 1985, she never dreamed that she would revolutionize the dance profession. Her hope was simply to elevate the status of dancers and choreographers on the West Coast. But when 300 dancers responded to her ad for representation in a Los Angeles trade paper, she knew she was onto something.

Until that time, members of the dance community had no organized voice or representation in the entertainment business. Contract negotiations for adequate pay, residuals, screen credits, etc,. were haphazard, as was their safety when asked to dance on slippery surfaces or jump off tables onto concrete floors. Dancers had no one to guide them and encourage them to develop their craft and image.

All that has changed. Fueled by the music industry, dance today is booming. Many L.A. commercial talent agencies now have fully developed dance divisions or at least recognize the specific needs of the dancer/choreographer. Professional dance agents are feverishly placing their clients in feature films, commercials, television, music tours, music videos, industrial shows, and cruise ships, and in live entertainment shows in amusement parks, Las Vegas, and even Broadway.

9 Cuba Steps Up BY SUKI JOHN

LA TECNICA CUBANA, or the Cuban Modern Dance Technique, promises to enthral the international consciousness at the start of this new millennium just as Cuban music has at the end of the last. Despite, or perhaps thanks to, the U.S. embargo of that rhythmically rich island, Cuban culture has flowered into exotic fruition in an isolated hothouse. As political barriers gradually give way, Americans are rediscovering Cuba's artistic wealth.

A sensuous hybrid of Afro-Cuban folklore, ballet, Graham, Cunningham, and flamenco, la tecnica cubana pulsates with creative possibilities, training dancers of exceptional versatility and ability. They soar, spin, and dive to the floor, then spiral swiftly back to shoulder stands, splits and endless balances. Torsos vibrating, they extend their sculpted legs in classical lines. Their sudden changes of dynamic and direction defy the laws of physics.

The mythology, music, and ever-present dances of the widely practiced religion Santeria were central to the development of this revolutionary dance form. La tecnica cubana exults in virtuosic control, vertiginous daring, percussive punch and sensuous freedom. Emerging from and extending beyond its many roots, la tecnica cubana is something all its own, unique and spectacular, a brave new world of dance.

10 Flash Gets a Pan BY ELIZABETH KAYE

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY will bring to ballet an ever less discerning audience that develops its theatrical taste from Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals and its appreciation for movement choreographed to music from acrobatics and ice skating on television.

In recent years, this audience applauded fervently for those tours a la secondes in which the danseur lowers his working leg from passe to cou de pied and is set spinning with a force that justifies its given name: the ice skater finish. It is an audience, in other words, inclined to view ballet as ice skating without ice and skates--or as acrobatics without a mat.

If this seems harsh, consider the Kirov's first New York performance of its restored Sleeping Beauty, during which the Aurora raised her extended leg from a la seconde to her ear, sending the audience at the Metropolitan Opera House into a frenzy of applause and rapturous bravas.

This particular hyperextension found its way into ballet in the 1980s and is known as the six o'clock position, because the legs resemble the way a clock appears at that hour. Its originator was Sylvie Guillem, a Rudolf Nureyev protege who, not incidentally, was a gymnast before she became a ballerina. The growing popularity of the six o'clock position suggests that the corruption of taste progresses with reciprocity. When dancers do tricks to ingratiate themselves with an uneducated audience, they are likely to get the audience they deserve: one that has more enthusiasm for feats than feet, and mistakes flashiness for artistry.

And, in case you wondered: That's the same Metropolitan Opera House from which the 1999 MTV Awards show was broadcast.

"The notion of the struggling dancer is slowly being replaced by the image of a confident performer who has control over his life and can make a living doing what he loves," says McDonald. Promoted to Executive Director of Dance and Choreography at KSA, she represents such successful choreographers as Kenny Ortega. (Dirty Dancing), Marguerite Derricks (Austin Powers), Vincent Paterson (The Bird Cage), Toni Basil (Bette Midler's tours), and Daniel Ezralow (numerous projects).

"Dancers and choreographers have options and career opportunities they never had before," says McDonald. "They are expanding their horizons and creating phenomenal work. The future for dance has never looked brighter."

11 Here's the Story BY OCTAVIO ROCA 

AT THE DAWN of the twenty-first century, I see a happy dialectical turn away from the fetish of abstraction and toward an ideal synthesis of all the arts in ballet. This was Diaghilev's noble goal a hundred years ago, and it is the impulse behind the work of Angelin Preljocaj and some of the other great choreographers of the present generation.

Preljocaj once said that it is the responsibility of today's dancemakers to carry on Diaghilev's adventure. He is right. And this may take some readjusting of critical lenses so long clouded by a cultish mantra that the story ballet is somehow inferior, that philosophy and literature have no place in choreography.

Critics, of course, work from a theoretical framework as well as from a knowledge of history. But it is worth remembering that what makes a difference in the success of a ballet is not adherence to any theory at all. Bad criticism takes us away from the experience of dance and into the realm of theory. And when our theories, from geriatric neoclassicism to diluted Foucault or pumped-up Derrida, suggest there is something less than sublime and necessary about the narrative impulse in ballet, our critical theories do an injustice to the phenomenology of dance. It is better simply to recall Pascal's clever dictum that the heart has reasons that reason does not know: Audiences understand this.

At the twentieth century's dusk, there was more than a touch of the ostrich to American ballet criticism, what with our heads so often buried in the sands of abstraction. We may yet look back and find that William Forsythe's Orfeo, Roland Petit's Proust and Preljocaj's Romeo and Juliet or La Stravaganza are not only masterworks but also models for the future: Music, drama, painting and philosophy are allies, not distractions in creating truth on stage and suggesting ineffable mysteries. Ballet began by telling tales in motion. There are new tales to tell, new truths to find. This is an exciting time for dancers and for dance.

12 Swing for the Fences BY STEPHANIE FORSTER

IN CENTURY 21, choreographers will need to rely on collective resources, brain-power, and vision. Performance spaces are diminishing and funding continues to be sparse. The existing paradigm of the salaried dance company ensemble with an administrative staff and not-for-profit status is not a viable model for future choreographers. Quite simply, the funding infrastructure doesn't exist for salaried dance companies to play a large part in the dance scene of the next century.

Currently there are no apparent solutions or new models, nor mentors. Sound bleak? Of course. But that negative space holds an opportunity for choreographers to empower themselves by creating new ways of making and performing dances.

The absence of conventional company structures gives dancemakers more direct and immediate access to dancers and to resources. That access is an avenue to more community- and project-based work.

Dance in the streets, in parking lots, in galleries, on the tops and on the sides of buildings and in cyberspace will become more commonplace. The number of choreographers who will forge alliances with artists from other media, broadening audiences and breaching disciplinary boundaries, will steadily increase over the next decade. Not only will contemporary/cutting-edge dance work appear in alternative performance sites, but choreography on film will flourish.

It's a time for risk, for young choreographers to step up to the plate and demonstrate a certain reckless abandon, innovation and vision. In short, it's a whole new ballgame.

13 Ballet, Still Viewed Through Spectacles BY IRIS FANGER

LET'S IMAGINE an evening at the Maryinsky Theatre, c. 1900. The audience has gathered to watch a full-length work devised by balletmaster Marius Petipa. His fairyland spectacles--Le Corsaire, Paquita, The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake--hold the stage this season, as they did in the past and will in the decades to come, with a sumptuous glory of huge casts, a cascade of decorative costumes, and ever-changing settings of scenic wonder. The choreography is resplendent with roles for the company's virtuosic dancers, each commanding a claque of loyal fans.

Fast-forward one hundred years: Ballet has moved out from Russia to become a popular art form throughout the West, especially in the United States, where dozens of ballet companies have been founded since the late 1930s. Although the century has seen profound social and political changes, including the demise of the tsar and his family, patrons of the troupe at the Maryinsky, the repertory of choice here and now is still the spectacle ballet, little changed from its predecessors one hundred years ago.

Petipa, after all, was godfather to the big "new" ballet at New York City Ballet in spring, 1999, Peter Martins's staging of Swan Lake. American Ballet Theatre premieres Kevin McKenzie's version in March, 2000. Le Corsaire and La Bayadere were among the Petipa favorites of ABT's season at the Met last spring. As for new works by contemporary choreographers, the Boston Ballet will end its spring 2000 season with a full-length Cleopatra, a collaboration with Houston Ballet and Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, choreographed by Ben Stevenson, who provided last year's production of Dracula, complete with maidens flying on wires devised by Foy.

The ballet world is mindful of competition for the entertainment dollar--think Cats, The Phantom of The Opera, and the multi-media tours of the rock stars--in its quest to sell tickets. Don't look for the 100-year-plus formula to change at the turn of the millennium--or beyond.

14 Broadway the Fast Way BY HILARY OSTLERE

MILLENNIUM DANCE THEATER. Shorter, faster, cheaper. Quickie entertainments like the 60-minute The Spirit of Broadway proposed for Time Square's Lyceum Theatre are afoot. Watch for more big dance-theme shows like Burn the Floor (ballroom and social dancing taken to the max), Swing, and Riverdance on Broadway, which attract younger audiences, tour extensively, and can fill arenas. Promoted by pre-released videos, not just commercials. Retro's important. Danced-through musicals that tell a compelling story but have no big song numbers will buck once-popular sung-through musicals. Yes, there will always be revivals: The Music Man and Kiss Me Kate this year. Oliver!, Jesus Christ Superstar, Finian's Rainbow, waiting in the wings. They'll be reviving Rent--if it ever closes-maybe as a City Center Encore! Big-scenery musicals like Disney's -- yes, Disney's --Aida and Martin Guerre, though Broadwaybound, will probably go the way of big hair. Blackstone promises a magic touch. New faces, great talent:Deborah Yates, blonde bombshell of Contact, Michael Beresse, Kiss Me Kate; Amy Spanger, ditto; tiny Kristen Chenoweth, star of Epic Proportions; Audra McDonald, Marie Christine; Taye Diggs, The Wild Party. Innovative choreography: Mathew Bourne, Sean Curran, Mark Dendy, Kathleen and Rob Marshall, Susan Stroman, Lynne Taylor-Corbett. Cats will close. The Fantasticks won't.

15 Seeing Delight BY ALEXANDRA TOMALONIS

FOR NEARLY TWO decades, "new" American ballet has generally meant either full-evening dansicals or ballet-Muzak. As the century bumps and grinds to a close, ballet will awake, look inside itself, and leap into the twenty-first century with a high, proud grand jete en avance.

The twentieth century's artists took their cue from Diaghilev's famous exhortation, "Etonnemoi" ("Astound me"). Diaghilev was as taken by Balanchine's "Apollo" as by Nijinsky's "Faune," yet "astonish" soon came to mean novelty and shock for its own sake.

After a century with more than its share of blood and chaos, there is a need to cleanse, a yearning for harmony, a lust for the sun. It's time for the Outsider to slink back to his underground and the Hero to re-emerge. There's a longing for heroes, and beauty, and dancers so glorious in their perfection as to be a metaphor for all that the human body and spirit can accomplish. It's time for the artist to lead and inspire, not merely reflect all-too-familiar imperfections and terrors.

Diaghilev was not a man to repeat himself. Were he here, his exhortation for the twenty-first century might be not to astound, for we have become enervated by astonishment, but to delight.

Ballet Rules! BY ROBERT GRESKOVIC

I'M LOOKING AT a new century where the battles fought between ballet, with its long-standing danse d'ecole, and modern dance, with its personal, idiosyncratic languages, will turn into a victory celebration for the winner. The victor--in my considered view and that of substantial, interested audiences all over the country, and in spite of those who deem academic, classical dancing negatively elitist and generally suspect--is ballet. Ballet, with its elemental understanding of the human physique and character at its most harmonious, noble and legible, has continued to speak to a clear-eyed public, even as sundry pundits, ideological grant-givers and sociological/political thinkers have maligned it. The interesting and perhaps most telling aspect of ballet's popular strength resides in the ironic fact that the art continues to win interest without a champion or leader of singular authority; we have worthy acolytes at best and false disciples at worst. Yet the power and strength of ballet dancing and theater shine forth. So my eyes are focused on the horizon, where an individual truly worthy of the name "ballet master" will assume the reins of Apollo's blazing quadriga and take the beauties of ballet to unparalleled heights.

16 Hi-Hop Hooray! BY KEVIN GIORDANO

THE HIP-HOP nation has consumed more than rock `n' roll in its twenty-plus-year rise to pop culture phenom. Fashion, art, films and Broadway have all been influenced by urban culture, which has also given birth to the current boom in Latino music. Hip-hop rose in urban centers, launched by breakdancers and carried forward by emcees (rappers), DJs and graffiti artists. Today, as any ghetto--fabulous b-boy (breakdancer) will tell you, hip hop is a lifestyle, reaching beyond mere popping and locking. And lately, hip-hop has influenced some modern choreographers. For evidence-and Evidence--check out Brooklyn-born Ronald K. Brown and, from Philadelphia, Rennie Harris Pure Movement. Twentysomething Nicholas Leichter and his company, nicholasleichter dance, offer traditional African dance mixed with Jose Limon-influenced movement and breakdancing. Doug Elkins, a breakdance aficionado; David Neumann, who won a 1998 Bessie for one of his solos, and Ben Munisteri meld modern with old-school, street-style tradition. Dance being the last traveler to board the hip-hop train, it may also be the one to journey the farthest.

17 Jazz Dance's New Riffs BY DON MCDONAGH

THE DYNAMIC RISE of jazz dance from bawdy house to Broadway has marked the ascent to acceptability of an expressive outcast. Jazz dance had been considered a kind of pelvis-twisting outlaw hovering on the margins of respectability. It now appears that full-fledged entry into the mainstream of modern dance is no longer a question of if, but when.

The dean of contemporary classical choreographers, George Balanchine, worked fruitfully with jazz dance practitioners for two decades in the movies and musical theater. Early on in his ballets he brought the accents of contemporary jazz-influenced movement to the ballet stage. His successor as artistic director of New York City Ballet, Peter Martins, has repeatedly used jazz scores, notably by Wynton Marsalis, in his ballets. Lincoln Center has recognized jazz as a serious form of musical expression by incorporating it under its artistic umbrella. As choreographer Danny Buraczeski has noted, jazz dance is dancing to jazz music. Time will shortly tell how fully the choreographers using jazz music will become another unit of serious dance expression. As Martha Graham astutely noted, "There are only two types of dance, good and bad." The people who do jazz dance couldn't agree more.

18 Something to Dance to BY KEITH R. KNOX

LIVE MUSIC. Physical production of music reintegrated with dance. It's as ancient as mankind and as contemporary as Stomp.

This assertion, at the turn of the twenty-first century, elicits the same responses as a restaurant critic implying that fresh produce is the wave of the future. In fact, it's the same argument. Gutenberg, Marconi, and Michael Jackson were on a detour that is coming out where it began in the first millennium. Hotter technology just reminds us that we want to engage all our senses with the genuine, rich experiences they evolved around.

Here in Milwaukee, a strong cost-benefit case can still be made for maintaining house musicians. Collaborations between dance and musical companies broaden audiences and enrich repertoire. Milwaukee Ballet boosts attendance by performing with its own fine orchestra or distinguished guests. Ko-Thi, our African dance company, trains and presents its musicians and dancers together, with dazzling results. When Danceworks, an explosive new modern troupe, dances with Present Music, a brilliant contemporary classical ensemble, each illuminates the other's often unfamiliar material.

Our kinesthetic and auditory senses will always share close quarters. Every venture outside our cubicles for a ballgame, religious service, or dance performance reunites them. We feel something at once ancient and promising, balanced and harmonious, human and divine.

19 Notating the Millennium BY MURIEL TOPAZ

FOR A LONG while we have been searching for the perfect solution: an authentic way of documenting our rich and prolific art form. Those methods that are most accessible, the visual media, have proved neither totally detailed nor particularly permanent. Those that are most detailed and permanent, such as notation, are neither time-efficient nor universally acceptable.

These two streams, visual and notated media, have been developing side by side. Current fast-breaking technological advances may bring them together to definitively solve the conundrum. We will soon have a way of combining both the visual and the graphic.

The Dance Notation Bureau, located in New York, and its extension at Ohio State University are working with software maker Credo Interactive to create a link between Labanotation and the program known as Life Forms. Once it's refined, a dancing figure on the computer screen will be able to "perform" the dance score. Conversely, the "performer" will be able to generate a rough Labanotation score that can be refined by a notator.

Another project is to create a database correlating a video document with a Labanotation score so that both can be seen simultaneously, immediately accessed at any point, and supplemented by additional production information. Once developed, the database would be available to the entire dance community.

What can be accomplished in the year 2000? A second-generation prototype for the Life Forms/Labanotation interface is to be completed by June; the planning stage of the database project is expected to be completed by March. Perhaps not all our problems will be solved, but we will be on our way.

20 Technology, the Newest Dancer BY SYLVIANE GOLD

LONG SWATHS of colored fabric swirl and loop to music in a lingerie commercial. Blinking lights on an advertising sign pulse and pop in ordered arrays to an unmistakable -- though silent -- beat. These are not examples of dance as we know it, but they may well be examples of dance as it will be redefined in the twenty-first century.

With the invention of animated film, the twentieth century saw dance disembodied for the first time: Walt Disney was only mimicking human movements when he gave Mickey a buck-and-wing, but he was working in another realm altogether when, for Fantasia, he made choreography on a two-dimensional corps of broomsticks. With the kind of 3-D imaging possible with computers, there's no limit to the kinds of objects--real, not drawn--that will be able to dance in the twenty-first century.

But will it matter? Dogs, ponies and elephants have been doing "choreography" for centuries without threatening the primacy of the human body as the instrument for dance. But you could argue that in the case of the Zingaro horse shows, for example, such "dancing" has indeed attained the level of art. It's only a matter of time before choreographers seize on the new technologies not just to replicate dance, but to stretch it beyond the limits imposed by the human form.

21 Picturing Futuredance BY ROSE ANNE THOM

WITH HIS EXTRAORDINARY synthesis of technology and art in Biped, his latest dance, Merce Cunningham raised the curtain on the twenty-first century. The future offers unlimited possibilities; at the micro level, technology should allow us to examine the multiple mental and physical systems of the inner dancer and perhaps to glimpse the core of artistic enterprise. Simultaneously, technology will surround us with dance's multifarious expressions. Sounds, sights, maybe smells, will indulge our senses and heighten our sensibilities. The globe will be one vibrant, dancing neighborhood. The records of our collective dance experience will probably be displayed three-dimensionally on our personal home stages. Perhaps we will participate in what we see. Could I insert my dancing body into a large-screen holograph of Balanchine's Serenade? Could I join Gene Kelly dancing in the rain? In both intimate and public spheres, technology will allow us to transform the art and enhance it with unanticipated imagery and sounds. Nothing need be lost but everything may be altered. Will these advances reverse the impoverished status of dance in this country? Will dance finally become an essential part of American culture?