Audiences today: why we still need New York City.

Back in the 1960s if You wanted to be a dancer, you had to be in New York City. It didn't matter what kind of dance -- jazz, ballet, modern, postmodern, ethnic, primitive, or Broadway -- the action was in the Big Apple, where the biggest companies had their studios, professional training was readily available, casting directors did their hiring, and the thriving dance community was large, supportive, and diverse. Audiences were growing, there were free performances in Central Park and cheap tickets to performances elsewhere. In certain parts of the city, the streets were fined with studios.

Those palmy days came to an end in the mid-1970s, when the city's near-bankruptcy reduced its already meager arts support, and soaring real estate values and gentrification left many companies and studios homeless. Do the clients of the tony gyms around Lincoln Center ever think about the dance studios that may have existed on those premises before the fitness mania? How many book lovers at the Barnes & Noble on Broadway and Eighty-second Street remember that the whole upstairs was once the School of American Ballet, with a sprung floor, personally designed by Balanchine, that was the best in New York City?

Many smaller dance organizations remained headquartered in New York City, but with the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts's touring program, they began to spend long periods on tour abroad instead of at home. Meanwhile, the infusion of NEA and state arts dollars promoted the rapid professionalization of regional ballet companies. Thus, at around the same time that modern and postmodern dancers were beginning to leave New York City, at least on a part-time basis, ballet dancers were finding it possible to get most of the training they needed and the jobs they wanted without ever coming to the city.

By the 1980s decentralization had become a fact of life. In Pittsburgh, Seattle, Fort Worth, and other cities, companies were thriving and audiences were burgeoning: ballet had taken off. Soaring costs, however, kept most of these companies from extensive touring. There were occasional appearances at Washington's Kennedy Center, but only the rarest of visits to New York City, brief seasons that enhanced their prestige back home but did not make them truly national entities. Although the technical level of these companies was high and rising, none had a genuinely original style or a ballerina of major stature. With very few exceptions, the homegrown repertory didn't travel, nor, for the most part, did the dancers.

Although critics tended to ascribe the artistic doldrums of New York City dance to the demise of such titans as Balanchine or to a general dearth of choreographic talent, few remarked on the long-term effects of Not only was the dance community and becoming more insular the energy -- money -- once invested in New York City was also going elsewhere, often to Washington, D.C.

Unlike England or France, where the political capital is also the cultural capital, the U.S. keeps politics and culture headquartered hundreds of miles apart. Until the 1970s this hardly mattered. Washington pretty much ignored the arts. By the INN, however, when federal allocations for the performing arts began to plummet except in the nation's capital, it was hard not to see this as a slap at New York City, which exemplified just about everything the Reagan administration abhorred. Thus, while the research collections at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts had to slash their hours, the Music Division of the Library of Congress was buying high-priced items, such as Diaghilev's music library, at Sotheby's. Meanwhile, the Kennedy Center hosted ballet companies from around the country and underwrote new productions, something that no comparable New York City institution could afford to do.

At the same time, in city after city, gigs were disappearing for New York City-based ballet companies. In order to survive, American Ballet Theatre had to reinvent itself as a regional company headquartered in New York City. (The Joffrey Ballet has tried a similar approach in Chicago.) This move was smart and long overdue. More to the point, the shift will only enhance ABT's stature as a national organization. With a strong repertory of classics and a fine roster of dancers drawn from studios around tile country as well as from abroad, the company is diversifying its offerings more than ever. If New York City Ballet is the national flagship of the Balanchine "family" of companies, ABT holds a similar position with respect to other traditions. And the presence of a second major ballet company in New York City will only augment the city's stature as a national dance center.

The fact remains that New York City, despite all its philistine boosterism and declining finances, continues to be the nation's dance capital. This is not simply a matter of numbers, of the sheer concentration of dancers and choreographers in the New York City metropolitan area. It is also a matter of diversity. Nowhere else on a given night can you see so many different kinds of dance or attend so many dance-related activities, from lectures to seminars and gallery shows -- many of them free. As the capital of dance publishing, New York City is home to numerous writers and editors, as well as most of the country's specialist publications and the most important U.S. research collection of dance material. Finally, the city is full of people with all kinds of special expertise -- from photographers and orthopedic surgeons to tutu makers. No other American city approaches New York City in the size, diversity, and energy of its dance community.

Cultural capitals provide many services for their nations' dance companies -- visibility that could lead to international as wen as national renown, exposure to many diverse styles and art forms, and the challenge of stacking up against the best. No other American city can offer these services with the abundance of New York City. No other city can deliver an audience that turns out night after night because it cares so passionately about dance in its many forms or has so long a viewing memory and so broad a knowledge of dances past and present as New Yorkers. There are problems, to be sure -- steep production costs, high ticket prices, an aging audience, a rapidly changing population. Ultimately, national stature cannot be separated from the idea of a national center. Each needs the other to validate its identity.

Lynn Garafola who grew up in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, is a senior editor of Dance Magazine and the author of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.