Attitudes.

IT WAS, I seem to remember, Will Rogers who first observed: "Everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it!" Well, with our sadly successful efforts at global warming, that may not be quite true today, even catastrophically untrue. But the general point is well-taken, and I was reminded of it by the success a few months ago of City Center's Fall for Dance Festival. Everyone seemed to complain about the graying of the American dance audience, and the failure of American dance institutions to attract a younger clientele. But no one really did anything about it. Until Arlene Shuler, the recently appointed President and CEO of New York City Center, came up with the idea of this first annual Fall for Dance Festival. It offered what it said would be, and indeed was, "a memorable night of dance more affordable than a night at the movies."

THE BASIC idea was simplicity itself. There were 30 different dance companies spread evenly over six nights with 5 companies performing every evening with all tickets at $10. Simplicity paid off, and with the 2,750-seat City Center selling out every performance (with a long nightly line outside the box office hopefully waiting for returns) it must, in popular terms, be judged a smashing success. Whenever you have tickets selling like hotcakes (although, it occurs to me, I have never actually seen hotcakes sell) you must be doing something right. And Shuler was. If nothing else, she succeeded in the first and vital task of putting behinds in seats.

The $10 ticket is an interesting idea. The late Joe Papp, one of the most intriguing and inventive theatrical producers during the past half-century, was a believer in the principle that the theatre should be free, rather like the great public libraries of the Western world. With this belief in mind, his New York Shakespeare Festival started free Shakespeare in Central Park every summer. And although the productions of his Public Theater--the very name was redolent of the Public Library--on Lafayette Street were not free, he maintained air exceptionally low pricing policy and even cheaper student rush tickets for every performance.

Papp felt strongly that the arts should be available to all and as free as public education. For him low prices never represented low standards. When accused of losing too much money--as he frequently was--he insisted that he was not losing too much money but too little. Such ideas are probably hopelessly utopian, but we in the United States do expect the box office income in the performing arts to bear a disproportionately large part of the overall cost, with the result that ticket prices are rather too high for most of our population.

You might ask why the general public--particularly those who have no interest in the arts--should be expected to subsidize, either through direct government support or tax breaks to private donors, the pleasures of an art-loving minority. It is something for every nation--even every city or community--to decide for itself. We do not balk at the provision for hospitals, schools, libraries, or for that matter police and fire departments. Should we not be prepared to pay for the arts just as we pay for education? Certainly the arts cannot pay for themselves--except with a ticket-pricing structure that would make them even more the preserve of only the very wealthy.

IN SOME quarters--according to a not particularly well-informed piece in The New York Times--Shuler's efforts, which involved, of course, fund-raising for the event, were criticized for taking funding away from individual companies. Poppycock! I cannot think that a single dance company suffered from diverted funds. The funding objectives, largely educational, of such a venture as this festival are quite different from those of any individual institution. All the participating troupes, not to mention the art of dance in general, should have benefited from the exposure.

However, it was the audience who benefitted most from this exposure--which I believe included many newcomers to dance. And in this respect it was interesting to see how many of Shuler's programs were based on Ted Shawn's old Jacob's Pillow recipe--later taken up by the now sadly lost Harkness/Delacorte Dance Festival in Central Park--of something modern, something classic, and something ethnic. It was a formulaic mix that aimed to provide something for everyone to like. Of course, it also offered something else for a different everyone to hate, but it showed in one fell swoop the rainbow diversity of dance.

I thought it was a great festival--I was thrilled, bored, annoyed, and enchanted, but never all at once. This was the right dance sampler in the right place. And it will always be the right time.

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