an article by paul ben-itzak, a new yorker who has just spent a month in paris. some food for thought?<BR> <A HREF="http://www.danceinsider.com/f1117_1.html" TARGET=_blank>http://www.danceinsider.com/f1117_1.html</A> <P> <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>...if being a dance capital also means being a<BR> town that lives and breathes dance, not just among the dance<BR> community, then the City of Light seems to come closer to the<BR> mark than the Big Apple. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>also some good info about parisian dance bookstores.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>if there's one respect in which Paris seems, on first impression, to surpass New York as a dance town, it's in the way dance is regarded by the population in general. ... In other words, this was not just dancers watching dancers.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P><BR>Ooh, this comment is too true. How many times have I gone to performances in the Bay Area and seen the same people over and over again, most of them dancers... Once a local choreographer was surprised to see me at an event because she thought it was well below the radar of even a dance enthusiast or correspondent.<P>I felt it was my responsibility to attend.<P>Question is are there other cities like Paris in which new and experimental works are regularly attended by non-dancer audiences?

In most respects the French, and the rest of the Continent, have a greater love of the Arts than we do here in England. Some of the most interesting UK modern companies perform to Parisian audiences twice the size than they would here.<P>So, I can accept that dance audiences are more extensive in Paris than in the UK and NYC. However, I have a memory that Estelle Souche, the ballet history webmistress, mentioned once that dance does less well for newspaper reviews and that dancers do not impinge on the public in the way that Deborah Bull and Darcey Bussell do here.<P>For quantity of dance I have heard people say that London is busier than NYC, I don't have a way of deciding.