Attitudes.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the theater the other day--I left. I was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and I was watching the new, reorganized Forsythe Company from Germany in Forsythe's Kammer/Kammer. But I saw only one Kammer. I left at the intermission.

So why was this funny (funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha)? It's because I have been attending dance since 1942, professionally since 1950, during which time I reckon I have seen nearly 9,000 performances--and yet this was the first time I ever walked out on one. Now that's a claim needing a little elaboration, for I don't count leaving early (or arriving late) and missing a work or cast with which I was already familiar, or nipping in to see a particular performance or even a snippet of a performance. These are necessary tactics for a professional critic. No, I mean deliberately walking out on a performance I had never seen. Ankling out--showing a cleanish pair of heels!

I left for a number of reasons: partly because I was bored stiff, partly because I was feeling outraged that the performance was an insulting fraud of no redeeming artistic value. And partly because I was genuinely upset to see Forsythe, an artist I had, admittedly with reservations, admired, so absorbed by his own ego (or perhaps cut down by intellectual laziness and lack of aesthetic rigor) that it had apparently devoured his talent. But I really left because I was saddened and disturbed by what I perceived as not so much an event as a diagnostic of something in the dance world already endemic and perhaps threatening one day to become pandemic: dance without dancing.

What do I mean by "dance without dancing"? It's a trickier question than it might seem, and I am very well aware of its general trickiness. Was, for example, Epic, with Paul Taylor standing stock-still in a business suit at that now notorious 1957 concert, dance without dancing? Bet your sweet life it was--and the kid got over it. But there are nowadays other less obvious, and therefore more insidious and more dangerous examples, of the non-dance dance genre.

First off, I recognize that dance in virtually any non-social form is a kind of theater. I also recognize that at times theater and dance can become fused almost to the point of confusion. Consider Robert Wilson's totally enthralling--at least to me--staging of Wagner's Lohengrin, recently revived by New York's Metropolitan Opera. I doubt whether the singers Ben Heppner and Karita Mattila would regard themselves as dancers, but much of what Wilson has them doing could be construed as dance, even if in the slowest of motion.

Yet more and more what is nowadays called dance appears to exhibit a grave tendency to be more theater and less dance. And that theater is hardly avant-garde; often it is positively dadaist. It is easy enough to scrawl a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, but at the very best this 1919 Marcel Duchamp trick has become an event about art, not art itself.

The danger of such objections is that one can sound fuddy-duddy. (Although, come to think of it, if I'm not going to sound fuddy-duddy at my age, when do I get to start?) And fuddy-duddies occasionally have their points to make and their functions to perform. Here in the year 2006, rushing into the 21st century in what I can only regard as untimely haste, my function is to shout out from the rooftops that the purpose of dance is dance, and by fulfilling that very purpose it illuminates its innate theatricality.

Of course there are dance steps in this Forsythe verbally inclined monstrosity. But the steps are banal and conventional, placing the emphasis on the cheap, but clearly expensive, trick of TV closed circuitry and screens (about a dozen of them in varying sizes), the device of partially hiding the physical action behind a barrage of scenic flats, and most of all the campy conflation of two novellas, one about a young man who becomes the lover of an older rock star and another concerned with a woman of mature years who fancies herself as Catherine Deneuve. Oh Pina Bausch, what have you wrought in the name of dance!

When I first heard that the good burghers of Frankfurt had, after many years, removed their subsidy from Forsythe--wanting I assume a touch of the old Petipa--my knee-jerk reaction was one of shock and outrage. How dare the sacred rights of an artist be imperiled. But looking at Kammer/Kammer, and recalling the rest of Forsythe's recent work, I say, "Right on, Frankfurt! Wake up the dance world!"

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