Attitudes.

SHAKESPEARE'S Cassius perhaps had it all wrong when he observed, "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, underlings." In that we are any event he certainly wasn't talking about the dance world, even though the juxtaposition of stars and dance has always been controversial, with many claiming that stars, either self-appointed or publicly acclaimed, had only a minor role to play in the purer forms of art. Yet in dance, and indeed in the theater as a whole, stars attract attention and sell tickets.

Over the past decade it seemed that dance was becoming more available, with more dance students and more public performances. Yet on another plane, that of popularity and recognition, it apparently existed in a parallel universe where the climate was less cheerful. Could it be that this parallel universe was less illuminated than it had been by starlight and its rather tacky attendant, the moonshine of publicity?

FACE IT. Dance is less fashionable than it was ten, twenty, of thirty years ago. Fashion! Does that matter? Well, to return to dear old Shakespeare, "What a deformed thief this fashion is." Yet "deformed thief" of not, fashion exerts a powerful influence on the whirligig of popular culture, which we deny at our peril. Theatrical dance being, for the moment, somewhat out of fashion, it receives less media attention, especially less critical attention, while audiences are seemingly smaller and fund-raising more difficult. It's interesting that ballet's sister art, opera, appears to be faring better in the fashion stakes than we are. So, horror of horrors to the purer-hearted among us, could this have anything to do with our current lack of, dare I say, dance stars? Well, first let us try on a few definitions for size.

In our crazy media--obsessed world there are the fantastic shooting stars, always waiting to be shot down, ranging from Britney Spears to the latest American Idol, all savoring and exulting in their fifteen-minute Andy Warhol allocation of transient fame. Then there are the superstar artists. These might be defined as performers (there are Picasso-like exceptions, but it is usually performers) who me well known at least as name personalities to the general public. In ballet these include the likes of Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. All these dance superstars, at least the more recent batch, had something other than dance to commend them to a wider audience--they were front-page news, often through political defection or, in the revealing case of Moira Shearer, as a film star of Red Shoes fame.

These superstars were important to dance, partly because they were all great performers and partly because they drew attention to dance from people who might otherwise have never noticed. And this had its good aspects, but also a bad aspect in concentrating mass public interest on a few individuals. But how about dance stars who were not household names--or were names only in dance-oriented households? These, too, have significantly declined in number. And this could be as important a loss as the current absence of the public superstar.

WHO ARE now the stars of modern dance--the glamorous replacements for Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Jose Limon, and Katherine Dunham or, more recently, Louis Falco? Actually, today the biggest stars are Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, choreographers whose dance exploits are set in the past tense. (The only current contenders as performing stars in modern dance are Desmond Richardson and a fungus called Pilobolus.)

In classical ballet we now have admirable principal dancers, rather than readily recognizable stars--which could be a good thing in principle, but less valuable in the necessary, if vulgar, art of putting bums on seats. How many classical dancers actually have ah effect on publicity or box office as once did quite a few, from Alexandra Danilova and Alicia Markova to Alicia Alonso and Nora Kaye, flora Anton Dolin to Andre Eglevsky and Igor Youskevitch? Worldwide there are some, such as Darcey Bussell, Sylvie Guillem, and the stellar male contingent at ABT--but are there enough?

And how many dancers, of any denomination or persuasion, nowadays have the charisma of the 90-year old Frederic Franklin? He still has only to walk onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House to get a welcoming round of applause demanded partly for old times' sake but also for his sheer present presence. I am never ore for saying those were the days and dancers had faces then. But somehow--and perhaps it is merely perception making it so--it does seem that while our dancers have skills--technical, communicative, and perhaps artistic, beyond their predecessors--many lack the magic that makes the world sit up and take notice.

Is this why dance occupies a less prominent place in the public consciousness than it once held? So the fault, dear Brutus, could at least be partly in our stars. Of lack of them"

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes also covers dance and theater for the New York Post.