Attitudes.

At times it's useful to consider, perhaps reconsider, basics. The other day sitting at my desk, idly staring at the Chelsea Hotel, I found myself wondering about a stupid question upon which few might have a definitive answer but all will have a definite opinion. What is dance? And how did it get that way? As we barge mercilessly into the 21st century, I seem to find the answer in this Alice-in-Wonderland world "curiouser and curiouser."

When I was growing up--a process I like to believe has not actually finished, even if it has perhaps imperceptibly slowed down--it appeared to be a simple matter. I actually knew what dance was, could hold it in the palm of my hand, feel it on the sole of my foot. This was during World War II in London, spiced up with air raids and rockets, and my hometown was dancing through the blitz. Dance then was a quantifiable constant. For starters, there was theatrical dance and non-theatrical dance.

Theatrical dance was mainly thought to be classical ballet--Les Sylphides, Swan Lake, that kind of stuff with pretty girls (yes, they called them girls in those days) and pointe shoes. Then there was "other" dance. In those days in Britain we didn't call it modern dance; it was expressionist dance and--this didn't help its popularity--apparently came from Germany. Of course, The Ballets Jooss company--although German and expressionist--was OK because, jack-booted out by Hitler, it was regarded as a British company and was also extraordinarily good, even without those toe shoes! Other companies, such as those of the Wigman-trained Ernst and Lotte Berk or the Laban-influenced Hettie Loman, appeared less acceptable.

Also we had ethnic dance: Indian dance, represented by Ram Gopal; a few Spaniards, or pretend Spaniards; and by the end of the war there was Jamaican Berto Pasuka's Ballets Negres--which, while no challenge to Katherine Dunham (then unknown outside the U.S.), was the first black dance company in Europe. There was also show dancing--ranging from Bluebell Girls, Windmill Girls (those striptease chorus girls who showed off most of their all), tap dancers, novelty dancers, and semiacrobatic "adagio" dancers. This was before Agnes de Mille and Oklahoma! arrived in 1947.

Additionally, of course, Britain had social dancing--waltzes, fox trots, even tangos. Plus, a new revelation was imported from the cinema: the jitterbug, a shocking freestyle kind of dance and a specialization of visiting (and bewilderingly racially segregated) American servicemen. Finally there was folk dancing: seriously, above the border, with Scottish Highland dancing; not so seriously, but devotedly, below the border with English Morris dancing. And the Irish community had step dancing, often referred to as the Irish jig.

Yes, 60 years ago I knew what was dance. Now I'm less certain--about what it is and what it isn't. Today, dance in the theater can stray over those old pure dance boundaries into various areas of theater or mixed media--not necessarily a bad thing, but undeniably a different thing.

In general as society has progressed technologically from the Industrial Revolution, our general culture has reflected that progress. The technological changes--from steam engine to microchip--have advanced at an awesome rate. The arts offer a parallel universe where change has been equally remarkable, The entire spectrum of the arts in the 20th century, that shock of the new, changed more rapidly in a hundred years than it had in all of previously recorded time.

Some things in dance remain much the same. Classical Petipa and modern Graham are still more or less in place, and some say even the waltz is making a return to the ballroom. But ever since modernism, Dada, and in 1957 Paul Taylor standing stock still in a business suit and calling it a dance, all basic definitions of dance are off. Nowadays it seems a dance doesn't even have to move like a dance for us to call it a dance.

In this 21st century of ours, dance, theater, and drama in the Western world have drawn closer together. In Eastern cultures, such artistic cross-fertilization is not at all unusual, and it should widen our scope of dance. Yet it should not blur it. As cussedly fuddy-duddy as it may sound, I firmly believe that the business of dancing is still predominantly dancing, rather than mixed media, where the likes of Robert Wilson and Robert LePage are obvious masters. The purely kinetic factor is something I see less of in the current work of some present-day icons I myself once admired, such as Pina Bausch and William Forsythe, not to mention the offerings of many other choreographers of lesser renown. So, let's just shake those booties! Remember Paul Taylor didn't stand stock still for very long, and Merce Cunningham has always been on the move, even up to the iPod generation.

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