There is no time like the present to look at the future of American dance. So much keeps coming, so much is left behind, and the uncertainty and immense promise of all that lies ahead tell us that the young century is witnessing a watershed in American dance history. Candid shots of American artists on the move reveal a wide-open landscape of dance, from classical to modern to postmodern and beyond.

Each of our dance traditions carries a distinctive flavor, and each demands attention: the living legacies of George Balanchine and Antony Tudor, the ever-surprising genius of Merce Cunningham, the all-American exuberance of Paul Taylor, the social commitment of Bill T. Jones and Joe Goode, together with a vibrant new generation of American dance-makers who are responding to the amazing growth of dance companies and their audiences from coast to coast.

Most of all, the optimism and sheer daring that have long marked American dance are alive and well from New York to San Francisco, from Miami to Seattle, and from Houston to our capital in Washington, D.C. They are alive in Mark Morris's cheery iconoclasm, in Lar Lubovitch's invention, in Michael Smuin's jazzy abandon, in Broadway's newfound love of dance, in every daring bit of performance art that tries to redefine what dance is and what it is not. American dancers today represent the finest, most exciting, and most diverse aspects of our country's cultural riches.

The phenomenal aspect of dance is that it takes two to give meaning to the phenomenon. The meaning of a dance arises not in a vacuum but in public, in real life, in the magical moment when an audience witnesses a performance. What makes American dance unique is not just its distinctive, multicultural mix of influences, but also the distinctively American mix of its audiences. That mix is even more of a melting pot as the new millennium unfolds. And it makes for a uniquely varied, gripping tale of dance and dancers facing a new era.

Ours is a constantly changing tradition whose very vitality is what we will bequeath future generations: the cowboys and sailors alongside the magical swans and sugar plums, the dances of political questioning and the dances of pure joy of movement, the selflessness and optimism, the generosity of spirit, the elemental theatrical excitement that is the promise of each rising curtain. American dance stays alive by ensuring that it never remains the same, that it is a living tradition, the American tradition. Enriching that tradition involves not just looking ahead to the next surprise but also looking back with both pride and affection at the giants of American dance who have made the future possible.

The Balanchine Legacy
"Ballet is like a rose," George Balanchine once said. "It is beautiful and you admire it, but you don't ask what it means." In the colorful garden of 20th century dance, Balanchine, who was born and studied dance in Russia, cultivated the American rose: exuberant, bright, optimistic, and triumphant. He revolutionized ballet for all time, changed the meaning of classicism, nurtured the speed and athleticism he found in the New World, and made these qualities integral to the very nature of beauty in motion.

More than a century ago, Petipa took the French style of ballet to Russia and transformed it into what we know as classical ballet. In the United States in the 20th century, it took an atmosphere of openness to change to nurture the genius of George Balanchine, and it took a lifetime of dance to change the classical ballet once again, to create an American ballet. Yet Balanchine shunned bravura, and he worked consciously against the stellar virtuosity that marked the Petipa style. He deliberately distorted the classical style even as he revitalized its tradition.

Like Petipa, Balanchine loved shifting geometric patterns and cultivated their intricacies with stubborn insistence. He absorbed the rhythmic freedom of American jazz and made the dancer's body reflect it. To this day, Balanchine dancers boast feet flexed almost as often as they are pointed, hips loose and jutting, extensions impossibly high, turned-in poses, and unexpected resolutions in motion that could suddenly make sense of an entire musical score. The living style Balanchine created is drenched in both musical and kinetic logic: the sense of connection from phrase to phrase, the miraculous absence of preparation and the virtual explosion of movement when it emerges, the utter integrity of music and dance. The man created works for every venue, from the Ringling Brothers Circus, from Broadway shows and the American Ballet Theatre, to his very own New York City Ballet.

The tradition of American neoclassicism that Balanchine started is an exuberant work in progress, much of it being carried out today by muses turned ballet masters. Peter Martins, Balanchine's handpicked successor at New York City Ballet, is perhaps the chief guardian of neoclassicism and continues to delight with new ballets that reveal hidden possibilities within the syntax and speed of the American style. Helgi Tomasson, the most sublime male Balanchine dancer of his generation, is the artistic director of San Francisco Ballet and oversees one of the most exciting neoclassical repertories anywhere.

In both New York City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, young Christopher Wheeldon is at the forefront of a new generation of choreographers who create valid new works that are extending the definition of American ballet. Arthur Mitchell has been performing his own miracles in Manhattan as founder and director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Edward Villella is reproducing and elaborating on the sensual Balanchine style in his Miami City Ballet. The fiery Suzanne Farrell has created her own Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Not one of these troupes looks like the others, and not even New York City Ballet looks the way older fans remember it. The dance goes on.

That is Balanchine's legacy, and it is part of our past. But something so irretrievable as the past cannot hold back something as promising as the future. Balanchine's biggest gift of all may well turn out to be the revelation of the endless possibilities of American ballet.

Dance As Theater
Those possibilities, of course, go beyond neoclassicism. It was another immigrant, Antony Tudor, who most radically changed the face of American dance by injecting a dose of emotional truth to the 19th century symphonic ballet formula, adding depth and theatrical impact to the European narrative dance tradition. The American Ballet Theater, the late Tudor's home and today's American national company, continues in the 21st century a tradition of dramatic ballets that are thrilling reminders of the immediacy, of the vitality, of this art form. Lar Lubovitch's Othello, choreographed for both the American Ballet Theater and San Francisco Ballet, is the most ambitious and successful among recent narrative ballets, but there have been many from coast to coast that prove there is more to American ballet than neoclassical steps: the revitalized repertory of Gerald Arpino's Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, Stanton Welch's Houston Ballet, and Mikko Nissinen's Boston Ballet; the continuing balletic explorations of the African-American experience by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater under Judith Jamison; works as diverse as Yuri Possokhov's Magrittomania, Dennis Nahat's Blue Suede Shoes, Michael Smuin's picaresque The Christmas Ballet.

If American ballet presents a varied and colorful panorama, American modern dance boasts a veritable kaleidoscope of possibilities in the new century. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company amazes at least as much today as it did when Cunningham first teamed up with John Cage in 1953 to declare the independence of both music and dance from any restrictions other than those of the human mind.

Paul Taylor is no longer the new kid on the block, but this greatest living American choreographer and his Paul Taylor Dance Company continue to challenge and entertain with the originality of new works as well as the depths time brings to continuing revivals of what are by now classics of modern dance: Eventide, Company B, Esplanade, Black Tuesday, and many more.

The Mark Morris Dance Group, which like Taylor's troupe has regular seasons around the United States and frequent tours abroad, marries affection for the classical tradition with the impish freedom to smile and make its own rules: Irreverence and disarming sweetness combine with exquisite musicality in Morris's choreography, which revisits classicism with gusto while investing steps with a riotously contemporary spirit. Morris is a classicist with a true populist's heart.

A Return to Meaning
But perhaps it is on America's West Coast, with the particular flavor of the arts of the Pacific Rim, that American modern dance is witnessing its most original developments. Working in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Patrick Makuakane has been revolutionizing the world of Hawaiian dance and redefining the meaning of the folk art known as hula with his unique company, Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu. His work proclaims the universality of Hawaiian culture even as he mixes hula and contemporary rhythms in a giddy multicultural frenzy.

Also in San Francisco, the Lily Cai Chinese Dance Company creates a uniquely American blend of traditional Chinese stage pictures, international pop, and the cutting edge of post-modern dance. Cai's all-female, quite beautiful company also boasts a determined desire to entertain, even as the choreographer subtly nurtures a new dance language that stands a radically new Chinese-American fusion.

The African-American experience, gloriously expressed in dance by pioneers from Alvin Ailey to the more recent Bill T. Jones and David Rousseve, has its most youthful and original proponent today in Robert Moses. His West Coast company, Robert Moses' Kin, mixes jazz, blues and rap,poetry and street talk, casual movement and rigorous postmodern syntax in new works -- including Never Solo and the masterful Word of Mouth -- that add up to a slice of African-American life, a universal dance message, and, perhaps above all, a gripping theatrical experience.

Margaret Jenkins, a student of Merce Cunningham, makes dances that reflect the coincidence and disjunction, violent clashes and sudden rests that make up much of modern life: Her Margaret Jenkins Dance Company is a seismic force in the American dance avant-garde.

Difficult to classify but impossible to ignore, fellow Californian Joe Goode makes dances that explore and often explode the primal, mythic values of the American heartland. He is the real thing, never boring, always surprising and utterly original, and his highly theatrical work is deeply personal, the truth of it universal. With his Joe Goode Performance Group, the San Francisco choreographer blurs the boundaries of theater and dance while enriching both fields with irresistible insouciance. In his profoundly moving millennial epic The Maverick Strain, irony yields to emotion, movement to ecstasy, nostalgia to hope.

Some of the most original modern dance anywhere is being created by The Foundry, a dance collective founded by Alex Ketley and Christian Burns whose electrifying performances and theatrical use of avant-garde video techniques contain much that is new, and even more that is daring. Perhaps the best news about Burns and Ketley's work is the conviction embodied in their project: Cunningham's revered abstraction for its own sake has been left behind as a glorious aesthetic of the 20th century and, in the dawn of the 21st, dance is returning to meaning, to important themes, to drama and musicality, and to renewed technical virtuosity. The Foundry is at the vanguard of American dance.

Redefining Dance
Dance in the United States today is unique. From classical and neoclassical ballet to the frontiers of modern dance, it is safe to say that there is nothing quite like New York City Ballet, the American Ballet Theater, or the Paul Taylor Dance Company, like the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company or the Joe Goode Performance Group, like Robert Moses' Kin or The Foundry. These are only some of the best examples, but more could be cited: the brilliant dance satire of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and the intimate dance jewels of the Lawrence Pech Dance Company, the earthy sensuality of New York's Ballet Hispanico, the rock-and-roll energy of Ballet San Jose, and the jazzy elegance of Smuin Ballet. Young Americans are challenging and redefining our definition of dance.

Dance in the United States is a kaleidoscopic art form that reflects a wildly varied, multifaceted culture. Dance after new dance appears like so many reflections in a living mirror, their lights adding up to a constellation of optimism. American dance reflects American life.

Octavio Roca is the chief dance critic for the San Francisco Chronicle,and he has been theater, music, and dance critic for the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and the CBC-Radio Canada network. The author of Scotto: More Than a Diva, Roca has also translated several works for the stage, including The Coronation of Poppea, Orpheus and Eurydice, The Soldier's Tale, and Our Friend Fritz. He collaborated with the composer Lucia Hwong in the cantata The Uncertain Rhythm of Your Pulse, which was premiered by the San Francisco Women's Philharmonic in 1993.