Another Century, Another Show.

LET ME TELL you a secret--1948 always seemed a particularly new New Year to me, so what I am going to do with the year 2000 is anyone's guess. But I am looking forward to the new century and, for that matter, the new millennium with a certain amount of insouciant delight --for I consider myself probably unlikely to see the start of another new century, and I have already ruled out the possibility of lasting out the next millennium. Science can do only so much, and is not likely to do that--not in my deathtime at least.

One of the joys of any New Year, vastly exaggerated when New Years mark the start of new centuries, is the cool sense of blank-sheeted possibilities they hold out. Everyone can make New Century Resolutions, and, of course, we can all play a magic mixture of Nostradamus and the Farmer's Almanac in foreseeing both the near and distant future--it becomes a once in a lifetime invitation to prophesy. So what will happen in the dance world during the next century?

This month, in keeping with the time and mood, we have invited some of our contributors to offer a few guesses, insights and prophecies into the always murky future of dance-and these gathered gems are to be found on page 48, while Richard Philp has done a little gathering of his own from assorted celebrities, friends and other strangers, which are to be found on page 12.

For my own part, although never backward in pushing forward, I am for once at something of a loss. After all, remember how Ken Tynan once described critics as back-seat drivers facing the wrong way, and certainly critics are usually pretty good on the past, moderately good on the present, and helpless and hopeless for the future. Show me a visionary critic and I'll show you a man (or woman--for fate is an equal opportunity employer) who is in the wrong business. If I knew the future of dance I'd be doing something about it, not sitting here, twiddling my computer and writing about it.

However, sheer inadequacy has never held back a critic, or for that matter a politician or a representative of many other professions far too numerous to insult individually. So, unheld-back, I will offer a few thoughts, but first a strong and long warning.

What, my friends, would we be writing here and now if some weird time machine had transported us back to January 1, 1900. Where was our dance world then, and how were we going to escape out of it! Think. It is a world with only 16 cities of populations over 1 million. The population of North America is 81 million. Scott Joplin has just written the "Maple Leaf Rag," Britain is about to win the Boer War in South Africa, Lenin will start a five-year exile in Switzerland, Puccini is about to premiere Tosca, and Sigmund Freud to publish The Interpretation of Dreams. But how about dance, comrades, how about dance?

Classic ballet--after the Romantic glory of the Parisian `forties--had rather declined during France's Second Empire, fizzling out perhaps in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War with "Coppelia," and even there the male hero, Franz, was performed by a young lady en travestie. It survived in Russia and in Denmark, but elsewhere, in, may we say, more fashionable environments, it was in a poor state--an after-dinner entertainment at best.

Who could have foreseen that 19-year-old Michael Fokine was going to create his first ballet in five years' time, that 27-year-old Serge Diaghilev, newly appointed as artistic adviser to the Maryinsky Theatre, was in nine years' time going to present an eye-opening season of Russian opera and ballet in Paris? Who knew that in four years' time Georgi Melitonovich Balanchivadze was to be born in St. Petersburg, Russia, or Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton in Guayaquil, Ecuador?

Who could prophesy that in just two years' time the now 22-year-old Isadora Duncan was going to wow them in Budapest, or that in 15 years' time the now-20-year-old Ruth St. Denis would be establishing the Denishawn School with the now-18-year-old Ted Shawn, or that in 14 years' time the now 13-year-old Mary Wigman would make her debut recital after study with Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and Rudolf von Laban?

History is the future seen through the wrong end of the telescope, and one view of history is that it is the massed biographies of the people who create it. Yet there is another view, more formulaic, more pragmatic, that suggests that those people are merely the agents of some historic inevitability, and if Fokine and the others had never been, others would have been there in their place. Who knows?

One thing certain is that dance in the 21st century is going to be able to take advantage of what promises to be an ever-quickening pace of technological development. Indeed, virtual reality may not be too far away, and three-dimensional, reproduced, frozen--yet, for the first time, realistic-- dance may be available for home consumption and, just as important, permanent preservation. And while fashions will come and go, it may be that eventually the social and political orders in the world will find a more stable place in their priorities for the performing arts, which, in turn, should benefit from the internationalization of everything from custom to customs, from currency to trade.

Of course there could be snags. In 1952 I wrote a book called Ballet in Britain Since the War, ending with a chapter grandly called "The Future." With all the dewy pessimism proper to a 25-year-old I opened gloomily: "With half the world bending its considerable energies and multifarious talents to the production of singularly efficient means of mass destruction, the likely future for ballet is that it will become a ritual round dance in front of a camp fire; more practical than chic and very traditional."

Well, that hypothesis is still--one way or another--in the cards. But I note that I ended that chapter and the book warily cheerful. "The post-war period of ballet, with all its fine qualities and its sinister undercurrents of an industrialization reminiscent of Hollywood, is drawing to a close. Recently ballet has been subject to attacks from a number of different sources. Some of these have been justified, but all denigrators should remember that the Greeks had a muse for it." That will serve, nearly half a century later ... we survive.

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