ATTITUDES FINALLY FIN DE SIECLE.

So we are here. We have made it through another millennium without self-destructing--although now and again it was a near thing--and the year 2000 is virtually upon us. But let me admit my mind does not take kindly to the idea of year 2000 or even 1000. I mean, I know it happened (unless Descartes is playing some awful trick with my mind!), but I cannot easily envision such concepts. My head gets dizzy and plays games with the rest of me. So, in this last column of our millennium, I am disregarding the heady idea of a thousand years to concentrate on the more manageable concept of "20th-century," once a synonym for all that was modern.

Now, think of that recent movie, Sliding Doors, which had Gwyneth Paltrow rushing to catch a London tube-train, catching it in one instance, missing it in another, setting up two parallel lives--or, considering the ripple effect on everyone and everything with which she had contact, two parallel universes. But what, you ask, has all this time-machine mumbo-jumbo to do with the art of dance? Everything.

No man is an island and no event is a cul-de-sac. Life is chancy, a charmed sequence of things that happened, as opposed to the uncharmed sequence of things that might have happened but didn't. Like everything else, dance history is a concatenation of accidents. So, in these final moments of the millennium, I thought I'd touch on a few of our century's might-have-beens.

Say Diaghilev had not fallen in love with Nijinsky. Or, for that matter, that Nijinsky, on that 1911 January night at St. Petersburg's Maryinsky, had not forced his dismissal from the Imperial Ballet by refusing to accede to demands that he put knickers over his tights while dancing Albrecht in Giselle, a dismissal that made him available full time to the Ballets Russes.

Remaining with the alternative doings and don't-ings of only famous Russian male dancers, imagine the difference to world dance if Rudolf Nureyev had chosen the other door--the one not metaphorically marked freedom--at Le Bourget airport that June 1961 morning in Pads. Or if Mikhail Baryshnikov, coming out of the O'Keefe Center stage door in Toronto that summer evening in 1974, had taken a wrong turn and missed the limousine waiting to bear him to freedom, fame, and fortune.

But, unquestionably, my favorite what-ifs concern two of the century's greatest choreographers--Frederick Ashton and George Balanchine, Sir Fred and Mr. B. Say--just say--that circumstances had twisted around a little transatlantically, and perhaps we could have ended up with Mr. A and Sir George. "Impossible!" you say?

Listen to this scenario. Lincoln Kirstein comes to Europe to find a choreographer to lead America into dance's Promised Land. Initially he is not unduly impressed with Balanchine, noting in his diary such first impressions of that Paris venture, Les Ballets 1933, as "Too much choreography for one man for Balanchine to do perfectly. He's no Fokine.... "Now say in this mood of mild disenchantment, Kirstein had gone to his friend and taste-mentor Virgil Thomson, who was a great friend of Ashton, who in turn was a fringe member of London's Bloomsbury Set, which Kirstein much admired. Could not Kirstein have been persuaded to take on the more malleable twenty-nine-year-old Ashton rather than the more experienced twenty-nine-year-old Balanchine? And as for Balanchine, his biographer Bernard Taper wrote: "If he could have had his way, he would have been happy to settle in England." After his fracas with Col. W. de Basil, and the collapse in London of Les Ballets 1933, Balanchine could have worked for the showman Sir Charles Cochran until the time came when, Ashton being in America, Ninette de Valois called upon him for the Vic-Wells Ballet. He was already half in love with one of its ballerinas, Pearl Argyle; greatly admired the other, Alicia Markova; and, long before she married the late Lord Menuhin, rather fancied Mim Rambert's Diana Gould, So--bingo!

You don't like that playlet? Okay, here's another, more factual. It's September 5, 1939--two days after Britain has declared war on Germany--and Richard Pleasant is drawing up the blueprints for Ballet Theatre. Pleasant writes to Ashton inviting him to become a part of Ballet Theatre's first season. The same day he writes to Antony Tudor-and the results we know. But Ashton's letter goes to 24 Harton Street in London. Ashton lived at 24 Wharton Street. There is no Harton Street, so some time later Pleasant's letter is returned to sender, marked "Address Unknown." But just suppose Ashton had gotten the offer. Might he not have been tempted? With the Vic-Wells Ballet in wartime uncertainty, might he not have come to New York City?

For that matter, Margot Fonteyn was also approached and showed interest. But then--if you are looking for possible switches of fate--what would have happened in 1944 if the buzz bomb that so narrowly missed the New Theatre in St. Martin's Lane, while Fonteyn and the entire Sadler's Wells Ballet was onstage dancing Swan Lake, had made a direct hit?

Now let's go back to Ashton, fancifully--and successfully--ensconced in the United States while Balanchine is doing the best he can with Ballet Theatre and later with Sergei Denham's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Kirstein had been drafted, and on his return he and Balanchine start Ballet Society, but it never really catches on. As a final fling they try a few performances at City Center. In 1948, Balanchine creates Orpheus. Morton Baum, head of City Center, sees it and hates it! He does not invite Ballet Society to become New York City Ballet. Kirstein can raise no more money, and decides to devote himself to art and Shakespeare. Ballet Theatre--with Ashton at its head, remember, and with Fonteyn, who was persuaded to come aboard after the buzz-bomb incident, as its prima ballerina--becomes America's only major troupe.

A discontented Balanchine, unhappy with his earlier Paris Opera experiences, in 1950 is invited by an Ashton-less, Fonteyn-less de Valois, who just had her final row with Leonide Massine over his Clock Symphony, to come to Covent Garden to mount Ballet Imperial. Balanchine falls in love with the then most famous ballerina in the world, Moira (The Red Shoes) Shearer, and rediscovers the joys of English tailoring. He stays. Bingo! Sir George (not to be confused with Sir Georg Solti) and, back here in America, Mr. A.

Senior editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1956.