So I’ve made my New Year’s resolutions, and I’m already bored with them. So now I’ve moved on to making New Year’s resolutions for other people – for performing arts people, that is. There’s a long way to go in some cases. In others, all it takes is a little bit of recognition and attitude adjustment to make 2005 a better year for the dance world.

1 AUDIENCES: RESPECT THE MUSICAL PRELUDES Dance audiences behave as if performances begin only after the curtain goes up and people start moving around on stage. But really, a performance begins when the orchestra starts playing music. That’s because the overture is part of the show. In order to hear it, the audience must stop talking – which it very often does not.

There is a far more infuriating problem among us: the turn-off ring of cell phones. Many phones have tones that chime when the owner is turning off the device. The problem here is that just when the first few bars of Tchaikovsky float to your ears and the outside world begins to melt away, a shrill electronic ditty pierces the house because someone has graciously remembered to turn off their phone.

2 GENERAL PUBLIC: TRADE “CIRQUE DU SOLIEL” REAL FOR DANCE Cirque du Soliel is a glorified casino act with acrobatic tricks and storylines that are as phony as the cheese sauce on the concession-stand nachos. Why is it so popular? Modern dance has mystical, nonlinear storylines. Ballet has plenty of tricks, flips, and daredevil turns. If some tiny fraction of “Cirque du Soliel’s” audience were to buy a ticket to an actual dance performance instead of this traveling hokum, dance companies would benefit enormously. And so would those ticket holders, I suspect.

3 GENERAL PUBLIC: READ “ALL IN THE DANCES: A BRIEF LIFE OF GEORGE BALANCHINE” by Terry Teachout (Harcourt, $22, 185 pages). In this slim volume, Mr. Teachout offers an easy introduction to the work of George Balanchine, the master choreographer who founded New York City Ballet. This book is written in a simple, straightforward way – without technical terms or dance jargon. It is meant for the ballet-curious, not the balletomane.

So if you don’t know much about dance, let Mr. Teachout bring you up to speed.

4 COSTUME DESIGNER ZACK BROWN: CREATE NO MORE HEADDRESSES LIKE THOSE IN “RAYMONDA” As the costume designer for American Ballet Theatre’s “Raymonda,” Mr. Brown created a colorful aesthetic that combined art nouveau with fairy tale flights of fancy. He did his research and was inspired by the art of illustrators like Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen. But he also put Star Trek-worthy Klingon shapes on the heads of the queenly ladies. They’re enormous and unsightly. Less is more.

5 AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE PRINCIPAL DANCE PALOMA HERRERA: KEEP THE MOUTH CLOSED Ms. Herrera has so many talents. She’s a physically strong dancer who can hit rock solid balances and regularly deliver bravura with flair. But her frequently moving mouth is distracting and unappealing. “Wooow!” she seems to say to the audience when she’s done something tricky. A gentle, closed-mouth or radiant, joyful expression would do quite nicely instead.

6 NEW YORK CITY BALLET’S PETER MARTINS, BALLET MASTER IN CHIEF: MAINTAIN THE EMPHASIS ON NEW CHOREOGRAPHY – FROM OUTSIDE THE COMPANY With the Balanchine centennial behind us, now’s the time to return to the creation of new works by new names. It’s all well and good for Mr. Martins and resident choreographer Christopher Wheeldon to keep churning out new ballets, as they will in the company’s winter season – which begins tonight. But let’s have another Diamond Project already.

7 DANCE THEATER OF HARLEM: CREATE BUZZ It sounds cliched, but chatter matters. This struggling ballet company needs to make itself fashionable. It needs to market itself in such a way that those who want to see and been seen must attend performances – especially the gala. For better or worse, that’s the way money gets raised and seats get filled. A company can’t survive on buzz alone but will die a slow death without it.

8 THE JOYCE INTERNATIONAL DANCE CENTER: MAKE LOW TICKET PRICES THE GOAL The new dance venue that will open in the World Trade Center in 2009 sounds like a flop in the making. The theater is slated to be a 900- to 1000-seat house for international companies situated in an out-of-the-way location. That means the public will have to trek downtown to see far-flung companies that only breeze through town.

This as-yet-untapped audience for dance (which has successfully managed to elude other dance presenters thus far) is going to need a damn good reason to show up. And the lesson learned from City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival is that cheap tickets sell. All six nights of the festival sold out because it was the best bargain in town. Tickets were $10 each, thanks to the support of Time Warner, the Peter J. Sharp Foundation, and the Altria Group.

If the new venue can structure its fees so that ticket prices are in an affordable range, some local folks (not just tourists) might materialize.

9 BACKSTAGE SOUND GUYS: TURN DOWN THE VOLUME Music that is too loud is one of the most infuriating aspects of the performing arts today – on Broadway and at dance. Why, why must the decision makers damage our eardrums with over-miced tracks or instruments?

In June, I was assaulted by the ear-splitting loudness of the Ahn Trio, an ensemble that accompanied a performance of David Parsons’s company at the Joyce Theater. This fall, I received a note from an outraged reader who left a City Center performance of Joaquin Cortes because of the obnoxiously loud music.

Audience members who are hard of hearing tend to get themselves hearing aids – and an increasing number of us will need them if the sound levels continue their ascent. Please, for the love of Pan, turn it down.

10 ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER: EASE UP ON THE NAVELGAZING The Ailey company is at the pinnacle of American modern dance. It is a company that started out modestly, struggled, and is now a well-financed powerhouse. But too often its works of choreography look back at this past in order to publicly adore it, caress it, and revel in it.

Last season we saw a new production of Judith Jamison’s 1993 work “Hymn,” a tribute to Ailey. The music includes recordings of Anne Deavere Smith reading comments by dancers and Ailey himself about the company. This year, we were given “Love Stories,” a three-part dance that traced the history of the company.

Pride is one thing. Narcissism is another.