70 years of dancing on Broadway.

The Broadway musical over the past seventy years was too effervescent an art form to follow a single set of rules or standards. By turns bawdy and energetic, innovative and poignant -- but always beloved by its audiences -- it has been shaped as much by its dancers as by its composers, lyricists, designers, and directors. Last season, for example, Broadway saw the stunning revival of The King and I, with former Ballet Theatre dancer Jerome Robbins's choreography restaged by former modern dancer Lar Lubovitch. Along with this nostalgic look back, there was the ferociously entertaining chronicle of American black history tapped out by choreographer Savion Glover and his cohorts, Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk.

Musicals have always reflected American life. Along with the nation's stories and songs, musicals have absorbed a wealth of dance influences, ranging from vaudeville routines to the popular figures of the ballroom to the rich inventions of the African American community. As twentieth-century dance matured into an art form by absorbing the ideas of emigre choreographers and ballet masters, Broadway reached out to creative and performing talent trained in modern dance and ballet studios.

Seventy years ago Hollywood had begun to turn to New York City to fill its needs for musical talent on a screen that had learned to talk. Broadway star Al Jolson had starred in Warner Bros.'s The Jazz Singer. By the mid-1930s such noted Broadway performers and dance arrangers as Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Fred Astaire, and Busby Berkeley were working in California. Gene Kelly, after impressing audiences in the 1940 Pal Joey, a Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical about the offstage life of a small-time hoofer, left the stage behind for a film career. The dance emigration would continue until Hollywood ceased producing musicals in the 1980s. One outstanding exception: Gower Champion, a vaudeville, nightclub, and Broadway performer who went to Hollywood to make films, then returned to New York City in the late 1950s to choreograph and direct a string of hits for David Merrick.

One learns what the 1926-27 Broadway season was like from The American Dancer (the ancestor of Dance Magazine), launched that season. Forty-eight musical entertainments were offered. The shows were marked by the standard trappings of the era: beautiful girls (the more, the better), songs and sketches that generally focused on the aspects of love, stars to bring in the glamour, and dance "arrangements," especially theme pieces framed in intricate patterns to be performed in precise symmetry.

Among the hits were Earl Carroll's Vanities; Oh, Kay! (by George and Ira Gershwin, featuring the New York debut of British-born Gertrude Lawrence, who had started her career as a child dancer on the English pantomime stage); and Sigmund Romberg's operetta, The Desert Song. Rio Rita, the season's runaway success, opened the lavish new Ziegfeld Theatre, designed by Joseph Urban. Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. outdid himself in casting a hundred beautiful women, including the Albertina Rasch Dancers, who performed on pointe. Other shows featured the tap dancing of Ruby Keeler (Lucky) and the Charleston (Hit the Deck). And the summer opening of Ziegfeld Follies of 1927 cost $289,000 to produce -- a fortune, even by that impresario's standards.

Dance in these musicals contributed to the decor as much as to the pacing. It was synonymous with plenty of scantily clad women, chosen for their faces and figures rather than for any special gifts or training (except for the Rasch Dancers). The musicals were often in revue format or were barely disguised offshoots of the vaudeville stage, in which dance was part of the formula, giving audiences a little of this and a little of that -- singing, dancing, and comedy, with costumes and sets that grew ever more lavish.

The dance arrangers, as they were called at the time, had been hoofers themselves, learning on the job as young performers who absorbed what worked onstage. The responsibility for creating the dances included rehearsing the chorines to a knife-edge precision -- an offshoot of the nineteenth-century Amazon Drill that employed phalanxes of women dressed in abbreviated military garb and helmets in unison-marching formations. The Amazon Drill which reappeared decade after decade -- and remains to haunt us at football games in the half-time routines of the Kilgore (Texas) Rangerettes -- had perhaps its last gasp in the 1929 Hoboken, New Jersey, production of The Black Crook, which featured Agnes de Mille as Stalacta, Queen of the Amazons.

Change was already on the way by the mid-1920s. Denishawn, the modern dance company led by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, headed out in the fill of 1927 for a thirty-eight-week tour as a part of the Ziegfeld Follies. While Denishawn was considered a cut above the rest of the cast, a clause in the contract stated that the Denishawn performers would perform as standbys for the Ziegfeld girls in case of injuries. Martha Graham had appeared in 1923 and 1924 as the "art spot" in the Greenwich Village Follies, and by 1933 Charles Weidman would be hailed for his dances for the Irving Berlin revue As Thousands Cheer. Helen Tamiris and Hanya Holm, modern dancers who would eventually choreograph for Broadway, were still involved with the concert stage in America and Germany; and the young Russian emigre George Balanchine was choreographing for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

The dance world around this time included thriving schools throughout the United States; the vaudeville circuits, with their song-and-dance acts; and the "prologs" at movie palaces (a tradition that continued into the 1940s at theaters in major cities and beyond at Radio City Music Hall and the Roxy Theater in Manhattan). Each part of the dance community would be drawn into shaping the musical, which mirrored the image of the country as a melting pot. The American Dancer, merging into Dance Magazine in 1942, would chronicle the evolution of the musical stage, covering the kids in the chorus line as often as the men and women who arranged the dances.

How endearing it is to turn the pages of the early issues of The American Dancer and find glimpses of young dancers who would turn into stars or read about names now forgotten. What a surprise to find Agnes de Mille producing a concert of dances, including a Czech May Festival at the Hollywood Bowl, long before she became famous for Oklahoma! Or to read a bit of gossip about Vera Zorina decamping from a New York musical before its opening to follow her husband, Balanchine, to Hollywood. Then there are photographs of a very young Jerome Robbins cast in two production numbers at Camp Tamiment. The old pictures are both tantalizing as portents of the future and important as documents of dance and theater history.

By the 1930s, musicals turned more and more to book shows with cohesive plots and characters, a structure that became as popular as the revues. The dances were tied to the general locales, always taking time out for a romantic interlude.

If ever a show was prophetic of the decades to follow, in terms of dance, it was On Your Toes (1936), which offered songs by Rodgers and Hart, direction by George Abbott, and choreography by Balanchine. (The show marked the first time the word choreography appeared on a Broadway show's playbill.) Dance, specifically life backstage in a ballet company, was the subject of On Your Toes. Tamara Geva personified the ideal of a leading lady dripping with charm, while Ray Bolger of the long legs, goofy grin, and impeccable soft-shoe routine, represented the homegrown style of dance.

This trend of the message driven by the medium -- the Broadway show that made dance its theme, as well as the manner of presentation -- would culminate in 1975 with Michael Bennett's A Chorus Line, a glorification of the nameless chorus kids who had kicked in the upstage shadows. It would be echoed by Bob Fosse's 1978 Dancin', the 1989 pastiche Jerome Robbins' Broadway, and Glover's Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk.

Musicals took on patriotic tones with the outbreak of World War II and the country's in-ward look at what it meant to be an American. Agnes de Mille, who had created Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1942, was tapped a year later to choreograph Oklahoma! The ballet-trained de Mille knew well that dance could tell a story, as well as decorate it, thus transforming the musical into a more evocative form. De Mille's theatrical translation of the Freudian writings on the significance of dreams brought forth another convention: the dream ballet that summed up the unspoken yearnings of the central character. Robbins's 1957 West Side Story took de Mille's work a step farther: dance carried the plot, as much as did the dialogue and lyrics.

But the hoofers were there all the time, dancing their hearts out at the side of the ballerinas. Bob Fosse, who had learned his craft as a child performer in vaudeville, later appearing in nightclubs, musicals, and films, burst into Broadway prominence in 1954, when he choreographed the novelty number "Steam Heat" in The Pajama Game. After winning Tony after Tony, he swept the field of major awards in 1973: three Emmys for the television special Liza with a Z; an Oscar for the film version of Cabaret; and a Tony for directing and choreographing Pippin. Bennett, who was a member of the 1961 road company of West Side Story, would emerge as an important choreographer with Promises, Promises (1968) and Company (1970).

In 1987, the year that saw the deaths of Bennett, Fosse, and Champion, there was uncertainty about successors to fill their oversized dancing shoes. A decade later, with a growing appreciation of less lavish -- and more economical -- productions, Broadway was awaiting world premieres of musicals to be choreographed by Susan Stroman, Lynne Taylor-Corbett, and Mark Morris, among others. The dancing beat goes on -- new shows, revivals, and touring companies. There is ample evidence that dance in the Broadway musical remains as lively as ever.