Attitudes.

WHEN I decided to write a column about dance teaching in the United States, a strange thing happened. Every bell and whistle on my computer started to ring, while its keyboard glowed a disturbing red for danger. After all, I am not a dance teacher, I was never anything of a dancer, I was never a dance parent (my kids, probably shown one too many Nutcrackers, revealed not the slightest interest), and, fundamentally, as a critic, all I know about dance is really from watching it.

I am that ultimate terpsichorean consumer--a critic blindly, but honestly, trying to lead the blind with subjective but hard won and well-informed commentary and opinion. However, as my critical beat is dance and the theater, I see a lot, no, not of dance teaching, but the results of dance teaching--those results being dancers.

ONCE UPON a time, there was very little quality dance tuition in North America. In, say, 1904, there were no great ballet academies comparable to those existing in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Paris, Milan, or Copenhagen. And, needless to say, there was no modern dance being taught because there was, as yet, effectively no modern dance. However, some kind of dance teaching had been in America since 1685 when, according to the critic and historian Ann Barzel and others, a gentleman called Francis Stepney started classes in Boston, and classes in dance and deportment were soon to be found in all the colonies.

By the mid-nineteenth century there were sufficient dancers to serve in the corps for such visiting stars as Fanny Elssler. They were trained by the likes of Philadelphia's Charles Durang, whose father John is regarded as the first important American professional dancer. Mary Ann Lee, who studied with Paul H. Hazard (also in Philadelphia), went to Paris for further study with Jules Perrot, and became the first American to dance the title role in Giselle. She even formed an American touring troupe with the distinguished George Washington Smith, America's first, and aptly named, premier danseur, who taught ballet in Philadelphia until his death in 1899.

But I doubt whether there was much that we today would think of as ballet training up until the beginning of the twentieth century, although there were always modestly trained dancers for operas and such extravaganzas as The Black Crook. But following the Russian Revolution and, later, the death in 1929 of the Ballets Russes impresario Serge Diaghilev, various highly reputable Russian teachers settled in North America. Soon, America was taking dance to its heart, both ballet and modern dance, which developed during the early decades of the twentieth century. Today in the United States, I would guess we train more dancers, at least up to a certain level, than any other nation in the world. But how do we train them, how well do we train them, and to what effect?

Perhaps we first have to distinguish among fire various kinds of dance. For show business, "Broadway among (schooled in every kind of dance and imbued with a tradition) are matchless and, in a ragtag fashion, exquisitely trained, or at least exquisitely fitted to their tasks. In modern dance, our college system with students usually starting in their later teens seems to provide a very high general level of performers who gravitate into companies or specific company schools for further training. Our training systems for Broadway and modern dance appear to function extremely well, and we produce the best in the world. But classical ballet? Is our record there so high?

WE HAVE thousands of little girls and, nowadays, hundreds upon hundreds of little boys taking up classical ballet. What happens to them? Why do we see so comparatively (I stress comparatively) few of them in professional companies? Why does such an enormous proportion of the principals and even soloists in American companies come from abroad? Are we going back to the days of Fanny Elssler, where the modern-day equivalents to the John Durangs of old provide back-up artists to European stars? I'm not being chauvinistic here, just wondering why the proportion of Americans in American companies seems markedly smaller than, say, the proportion of French dancers in French companies, or Russian dancers in Russian companies, Italian dancers in Italian companies....

So is it the overall quality.' of our classical ballet teaching and teachers? Or is our pedagogic structure too removed from the theatrical experience that must eventually sustain it? Our ballet teachers are schooled in technique and trained as teachers, hut how many of them have had even modestly successful professional careers and call inspire in a conservatory environment?

We have a few large conservatory-style schools, such as the School of American Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet School, associated with companies although even here the dancers graduating into their companies--tend to have been finished by the school (a year or two, perhaps, in the senior class) rather than fully trained by it, and, often, such students come from abroad.

Clearly, we have some splendid teachers in this country'. But when we train so many dance students and produce so few dance professionals, might there not be something slightly adrift?

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater/or The New York Post, has contributed to DANCE MAGAZINE since 1956.