Attitudes.

Another new year ... another little tentative nibble out of the third millennium. So what does the future hold for that oddly named dance form, modern dance, which has been with us now for almost a century? How modern can you keep?

Toward the end of last year--when did the leaves of calendars start to fall as swiftly as the leaves of autumn?--three events concerned with modern dance impressed me. I suppose two and one-half would be more accurate, because two of them were part of Merce Cunningham's fiftieth anniversary and his triumphant home-run canter round familiar bases. These were the openings of his New York season at the New York State Theater, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival 2002, and a month or so later, his London season at the Barbican Theatre.

The other event was a different kind of opening: the unveiling of Dance Theater Workshop's sumptuous, and superbly practical, state-of-the-art rebuilt space on its old stamping ground in Manhattan's Chelsea, the shiny, glass-encased Doris Duke Performance Center, with its new 192-seat Bessie Schonberg Theatre and the Jerome Robbins Studio. Merce in London and DTW in New York--bells rang, memories buzzed, and appraisals took place in my head with the mysterious economy of a computer.

It has been thirty-nine years since the Merce Cunningham Dance Company first went to London. It has been thirty-seven years since Jeff Duncan, Art Bauman, and a few others started Dance Theater Workshop in an almost derelict theater--long gone the way of the breaker's ball--on Manhattan's Upper East Side, although within two years it had moved to a converted garage in the West Side's Chelsea district. All in less than four decades. Yet what an enormous amount has happened to modern dance in that period. And I don't necessarily mean its artistic progress but its popularity, acceptance, and accessibility.

Forty years ago modern dance companies had very limited exposure in New York City. One of the things that helped change that was the remarkable acceptance of these companies in Europe--rarely has the old axiom of never being a prophet (or turning a profit) in one's own land been so clearly demonstrated. As a significant corollary to this, Europe itself acquired a new modern-dance tradition which has now come back and cross-fertilized the old country, in this case the United States.

The crowd that gave Cunningham a heartfelt, standing ovation at the Barbican were the spiritual children of the London audiences he first reached in 1964, when, in the words of Lewis Lloyd, the company manager at the time, "the company's appearance at the Sadler's Wells Theatre at the end of July 1964 created the kind of European critical acclaim that turns American heads."

The Barbican appearances last year-which included on the first night the world premiere of Fluid Canvas--were part of a world celebration of the company the 83-year-old Merce Cunningham started with his composer friend and collaborator, the late John Cage. None of the sixteen present smooth-as-silk dancers were born when the company started; probably quite a few of their parents weren't either. But the troupe, and, of course, Cunningham himself, has had an enormous effect on the dance sensibility of the entire world.

The programs for the tour primarily represent a Cunningham retrospective-even though the earliest work dated only from 1965--although in addition to the premiere of Fluid Canvas, both in London and New York there was another new work, Loose Time, to a sound score by Christian Wolff, first given in Berkeley, California, last February. It was interesting to note the consistency of Cunningham's dance vision--his use of stillness as punctuation, his skin in threading dance together with a skein of exits and entrances that provide a tapestry of movement unrelated to anything but its own moment in time.

Cunningham avoids any literary or dramatic associations and eschews musicality--he choreographs to silence, adding a sound score at the first performance--and his choreography, more and more barefoot classical in feel and manner, is, unlike Paul Taylor's, not particularly inventive. It is work of pattern rather than pure imagination. But its chaste beauty and eccentric humor, with its touch of Dada, its move towards abstraction, and its cool, couth understanding of dance as state of mind, was strangely at one with his century.

Cunningham was a pioneer, but one reason why he at first had to struggle for acceptance was the lack in the United States of homes for dance. This is where my third event jumps forward. A house is not a home but a home without a house is a dismal, sometime thing. Art is not bricks and mortar, but bricks and mortar rarely hurt. Dance Theater Workshop has had David R. White as its adventurous executive director and producer. Now, largely due to White's initiative, DTW fulfills a special place in New York's dance scene, stating its mission as "nurturing talented emerging and mid-career performing artists." In other words, people arriving rather than those who have arrived. Cunningham, of course, has more than arrived; he has set down roots. But had DTW existed in his earlier days, I like to think it would have made his progress a little easier.

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