Attitudes.

Speaking for myself, I have never held much with New Year's resolutions. We make them eternally. They are usually concerned with either giving up something or stopping doing something, and they are almost always in the area of self-improvement. But often making them seems justification enough, and we continue in our old ways with apparent regret yet seeming determination. I forget how many New Years I resolved to give up smoking, only to relapse after a few days or a week or so. When long ago I actually did quit, it happened in May. Perhaps it was a May Day resolution.

However, to make resolutions for other people--I suppose they are called wishes--appears eminently sensible. Dancewise, some of my wishes have emerged in these columns over the years--such as the one that would have my dance critic colleagues less sure of the total rightness of their own opinions and admit the hint, slender wisp of a chance that they may once in the bluest of moons be wrong. A little compassion wouldn't be amiss either. As a much battered playwright once said to me, "No one actually tries to write a bad play"--or choreograph a bad ballet or dance a bad dance.

Then there is the wish that choreographers and dancers shouldn't always expect audiences and critics (especially critics) to beat a path to their doorstep simply because they have cajoled someone to give them space and dancers--or even saved up their own lunch money over years for that same purpose. And then I would like some choreographers to abandon the assumption that if they do classical ballet in bare feet they are doing modern dance, or even achieving a fusion of the two.

But my biggest wish for the dance world is that while looking toward the future, it also embraces the past. Remember the past: Cherish it, love it, learn it.

The other day my old friend Jacques d'Amboise called me to give me the sad news that the great Todd Bolender (see "Transitions," page 231) had died. We chatted a little about him as a person and as a dancer/choreographer, the astonishing ballon he showed as the sole male dancer in Balanchine's Danses Concertantes, the influence he had on Balanchine's "grotesqueries," particularly in The Four Temperaments and Agon, and Todd's own choreography, such as The Still Point, which Jacques had danced with Melissa Hayden in New York City Ballet's 1956 staging, a year after its creation at Jacob's Pillow.

Then, quite offhandedly, Jacques suggested that few young dancers would even know the name Bolender today. Nonsense, I said. Then chillingly he suggested, "You know, a lot of young dancers don't know the name Jerome Robbins." Not know the name Jerome Robbins, the greatest-ever American-born classical choreographer? It seemed unthinkable. Yet it made me wonder and worry.

There is no doubt that we do live in a today-culture, a cultural climate that places at least as much emphasis on novelty as quality, with the past receding like the steps of an ever-ascending escalator. The future always lies ahead but more to the still point, as T.S. Eliot wrote in the poem "Burnt Norton," "Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past." Possibly "contained" is the key word there. That ever-ascending escalator only seems to be ever-ascending. In fact it's merely a kind of revolving staircase, with the same stair coming round and round as if on a magically mechanized treadmill.

Sparked off by Einstein, time and its fourth-dimensional possibilities fascinated the 20th century, as did the idea that the other three dimensions--those familiar and ordinary dimensions of life--are somehow transportable in a kind of time capsule. Probably not. We cannot go backward like Hamlet's crab. Yet art is not truly understandable, perhaps not really communicable, without a living concept of its past. Art and artists, dance and dancers, do not simply live in the present. The past is always with us.

Dance, of course, is so ephemeral. What was that wonderful phrase of David Lichine's? (And who is David Lichine? A Ballets Russes dancer/choreographer of the 1930s and '40s. And what was the Ballets Russes? Oh forget it!) I think it was, "Choreography is like moisture in the mouth of an orator." Dances and the dancers who danced them move on--leaving even in these days of technology, little more than shadows on video. This is why it is all the more important that dancers, and the audiences who support them, learn about the past and honor it.

Yep, that's my big wish for 2007! Remember Todd Bolender.

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