Attitudes.

ONE OF MY favorite quotations about dance--and I know I have quoted it more than once--is also one of the saddest. It is the now virtually forgotten choreographer David Lichine (1910-1972) saying, "Choreography is like moisture in the mouth of an orator." The phrase obviously doesn't mean quite what Lichine meant it to mean, for choreography is the product of a choreographer, whereas mere moisture is not the product of an orator--hot air, perhaps. Still, the subtext of Lichine's remark instantly strikes home. Choreography, and indeed the fabric and substance of dance itself, are fragile things and without care can dry up as quickly as the morning dew.

Take Lichine himself: An occasionally exciting, if erratic, star dancer, he was never a major choreographer. His most durable work was his 1940 Graduation Ball for de Basil's Original Ballet Russe, which very occasionally turns up onstage. I last saw it in I Havana little more than a year ago, exuberantly danced by pupils of a school of Ballet National de Cuba. On the other hand, I was not unduly surprised when recently told by Renato Zanella that for his Vienna State Opera Ballet he was making a completely new choreographic version, keeping the bubbly Antal Dorati arrangement of Johann Strauss's music but with a slightly amended story.

THE REST of Lichine's output? I suppose American Ballet Theatre could possibly mount Helen of Troy, another of his bullets houffes, this time to Offenbach, but I doubt whether it ever will. No one surely could remember the 1936 Protee, which had music by Debussy and a lovely decor by Giorgio Chirico, but all I can remember of it is that it perversely did not use any turnout and started with Roman Jasinsky (originally Lichine himself) sensationally diving into a pool. Nor are his two ballets for Boris Kochno's Les Ballets des Champs-Elysees--La Creation, for himself and his wife Tatiana Riabouchinska, and La Rencontre for Leslie Caron and Jean Babilee, both in 1948--likely candidates for any early resuscitation. Even less likely is a revival of what ironically was probably his very best ballet--a total choreographic reworking for de Basil's Ballet Russe in 1938 of George Balanchine's The Prodigal Son, complete with Prokofiev score and even the old Georges Rouault designs. A fine ballet, not seen since 1947, but unfortunately not so fine as Mr. B's.

So Lichine seems virtually forgotten in the present millennium, yet he actually was a better choreographer than most. Ah, but you say, Lichine was essentially a freelance choreographer with no real company to inherit his repertoroire. True. Of course, every dance company has to move on to fresh fields and rind new creators, yet New York City Ballet has hardly neglected its founding choreographers, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Their repertoires seem secure, and organizations have been set to propagate and standardize their work across the entire world. But how many choreographers are in that happy position?

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is now in its forty-sixth year and Ailey himself has been dead since December 1989. The company he founded, now directed by the most important of his muse-protegees, Judith Jamison, uses his name with great respect and even flourish. But to judge from the company's last New York season, Ailey's own works seem somewhat thin upon the ground. Apart from Revelations, which ended no fewer than twenty-six of the season's thirty-nine programs, the troupe represented its master choreographer with just one performance of Blues Suite, three performances apiece of the solo Cry and of Memoria, four performances of Night Creature, and three programs of excerpts called "Ailey Classics." This is not, perhaps, the smartest way to handle a heritage repertoire.

IS THIS an exception? The last New York season of the Limon Dance Company presented just two Limon works. Antony Tudor was once described by Mikhail Baryshnikov as "the conscience of American Ballet Theatre." Well, its conscience hasn't been pricking ABT too hard lately, despite sequential revivals of Dim Lustre and Pillar of Fire. Frederick Ashton--this year is his centennial--is still performed by his own Royal Ballet in London, but even at Covent Garden he is given rather less stage time than his junior, Kenneth MacMillan, and literally more than a dozen major Ashton works have been allowed to lapse.

The Stuttgart Ballet remains fairly loyal to its founder, John Cranko, although even there, there appears some slippage. It doesn't worry me personally, but there isn't much Serge Lifar at the Paris Opera these days, and although the nineteenth-century August Bournonville is still rightly revered by the Royal Danes, Harald Lander and Flemming Flindt, admittedly far less distinguished, seem to have virtually gone by the board. What has happened to Michel Fokine, Leonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, Kurt Jooss, Doris Humphrey, Agnes de Mille, Eugene Loring? What is going to happen to Yuri Grigorovich, Roland Petit, and Maurice Bejart? Martha Graham is still the main business of the Martha Graham Dance Company, but what is going to happen, when they retire or die, to Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor?

Moisture in the mouth of an orator--choreographies and choreographers lost, discarded, or forgotten. Many of them and even more of their ballets deserved their fate. But did they all? Do they all? It is fine to have new ballets, but surely not at the expense of old. Remember every, ballet is a new ballet to someone who hasn't seen it before. And look at all the names mentioned above. Is the current generation of choreographers so superior that these greats can be cast aside?

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