"This time of year, everybody wants to be reviewed. The tragedy is that dancers _do_ wait until the spring, and then they give their one-shot concert that they have been preparing all year, and it's on the same night that 17 other dancers are giving theirs. I think it's suicidal. ... We have three dance critics at the _Times_ -- Jack Anderson and Jennifer Dunning besides myself -- and in the spring, all three of us are working every day, and we still can't keep up." Anna herself attends up to nine performances a week during the busy season. Besides her regular pieces in the daily _Times_, she is responsible for a long, comprehensive article in the Sunday edition. "There has been a tremendous increase in dance activity in the past 10 years," she explained. "In 1969, the year after I joined the paper, I was asked to do a rundown of dance events, and I found there was not a single week in the year that was free from dance. That was the first time it happened. "I think the decade of the 1960s had something to do with it. That was when choreographers like Balanchine and Merce Cunningham, who used pure movement, became most popular. The audience that came to see them was a new audience that was already comfortable with abstraction. They didn't require story ballets. One of the problems with dance in the past was the people thought they wouldn't be able to understand it. But if you like plotless ballet, you don't have to understand any more than what you see. I think Marshall McLuhan was right: this is the age of television. This generation is used to watching images without getting bored." She has no favorite dancers, but her favorite choreographers come down to two -- George Balanchine and Martha Graham. "You don't have any young choreographers now who are really the stature of the old ones. I can't give a reason why, except that it happened historically that the 1930s turned out to be the most creative period in dance -- not just in the United States, but in most parts of the world. That's when the modern dance pioneers became active. People like Martha Graham are revolutionaries, and you just don't get them in every generation. ... This applies to the other arts as well. Who are the great opera composers of today? And frankly, are there any Tolstoys?" Born in Paris, Anna arrived on the Upper West Side at the age of one. She attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and later spent four years in Paris as a general reporter for several English-language newspapers, but otherwise she has been a lifelong Westsider. Dance has always been one of her prime interests: she studied ballet for 10 years while a child, and remained an avid fan long after realizing she would not become a professional dancer.