To emote or not to emote: Balanchine's Agon has no acting in it. The dancers just have to dance.

Does anyone actually act in Balanchine's Serenade? Or is that a silly question? Balanchine himself noted, "Many people think there is a concealed story in the ballet. There is not. There are, simply, dancers in motion to a beautiful piece of music. The only story is the music's story, a serenade, a dance, if you like, by the light of the moon." Yes, but do they act? Do they know about the moon? Are they to show awareness of that knowledge? Would such awareness constitute acting? Do they act in Concerto Barocco, Ballet Imperial, or Apollo? (Well, perhaps they do act a bit in Apollo.)

And how about all the other Balanchine plotless ballets? How about Robbins' Dances at a Gathering or The Goldberg Variations? How about Ashton's Symphonic Variations or Scenes de Ballet or Graham's Diversion of Angels, Taylor's Aureole, or Cunningham's Ocean? Do they call for acting? Do they even call for emoting? While Dances at a Gathering involves little story, emoting-even acting--of a rather nonspecific kind is involved. But not, I think, the others.

Any dancer who approached Concerto Barocco as they would Ballet Imperial, or for that matter Agon, would be in for a disaster of interpretation. These Balanchines all demand a mood--for Barocco, think Bach; for Ballet Imperial (sorry, I forgot: Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 as Balanchine later, and foolishly, renamed it), think Petipa; and for Agon, just think.

One of the many things Balanchine created was a style. It really started with The Four Temperaments (1946), which, more than 50 years ago, I dubbed "neoclassical abstract-expressionist." The name, apt enough at the time, never caught on; the style certainly did. In Temperaments a differentiation is made between, say, Phlegmatic and Choleric, and the dancers leading the sections clearly, even by simply following Hindemith's "character music," are going to express temperament, character ... emotion. But now, fast-forward 11 years: How about Agon? Here is a work that, I feel, more than any other has influenced the course of post-Balanchine classical choreography. Yet there is certainly no acting in it--yeah, the guy leading the Bolender-Villella pas de trois is perhap called upon to look a bit cheery in a Renaissanceminstrel fashion, but that's it.

The incredible final pas de deux for Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell--as danced still uniquely by them--set the template for most of the world's subsequent choreographers. It has no acting in it. It does not call upon its dancers to emote. They don't look soulfully into one another's eyes telegraphing love. They just have to dance. They have to dance music as metaphor, music made into a Platonic statement of itself (that's Platonic as in Plato, not that 20th-century psychological vulgarism "platonic love"). Pure and simple in its attitude, complex in its choreography

Now, 50 years later, many choreographers take the style, the structural fabric of Agon, and emotionalize it. So in the work of some of the most current ballet choreographers we have dancers looking deep into one another's eyes, suggesting enough love to shatter a Shakespeare sonnet, yet with no narrative thread to support it Why are they making cows' eyes at one another, and what happens next? So we get semi-plot ballets without a storyline in sight, offering nothing but aimless, meaningless, and therefore artistically destructive, cheap emoting. It's like steps leading to no balconies, remote Romeos yearning for abstracted Juliets.

This tendency leads dancers to confuse interpretation with performance. Further, it leads audiences to wallow in a sentimental no-man's-land where the real missiles of feeling are lost in the damp ballistics of Hallmark greeting cards. This is a misunderstanding of what plotless dance really is--it's plotless! It appeals to our emotions the way Van Gogh's immortal Sunflowers may appeal to us--visually. Although in dance, because it is usually grounded in music, the reaction might be a visual kinetic response to an aural musical base.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that the general Balanchine influence, which I have here crystallized into the Agon duet, is simply promoting the example of plotless ballets. A great deal of Balanchine, from Prodigal Son on, is not plotless. Apart from plotlessness, it is just as much the sinuous, sinewy style of the Agon pattern that has been widely emulated. This is surely the reason why so many dance works (especially classical, for modern dance has more of an individualist tendency leaning toward theater work, where actual steps seem to play an ever-diminishing role) look so much alike: stylized, goldfish-like emoting, structurally caught within a Balanchinean-inspired glass bowl.

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