TV REVIEW : BALLET HIGHLIGHTS ON ‘DANCE IN AMERICA’

Mikhail Baryshnikov in Mikhail Fokine’s “Les Sylphides,” three of American Ballet Theatre’s most promising young dancers in Kenneth MacMillan’s “Triad”: These combinations of dancers and roles have been previously denied local audiences. No longer.

Now a 90-minute PBS “Dance in America” telecast includes them--along with the familiar Natalia Makarova staging of dances from Marius Petipa’s “Paquita”--on a Ballet Theatre program videotaped at the Metropolitan Opera House June 11. (It is scheduled at 8 p.m., Friday on Channel 24; 9 p.m. Friday on Channels 28 and 15; 8 p.m. Saturday on Channel 50.) Not all of it is worth the wait.

Baryshnikov makes a memorable “Sylphides” cavalier--raptly dreaming this midnight encounter with ghostly yet benign spirit-maidens and dancing with awesome sensitivity and refinement, as if he could reach them only through the purest classicism at his command. Marianna Tcherkassky, too, dances as if entranced: delicate, grave and remote in contrast to a steely Cynthia Harvey and a cheerful Cheryl Yeager, each fatally outclassed. Paul Connelly conducts with exaggerated tempo fluctuations.

Set to Prokofiev’s first violin concerto (conducted urgently by Alan Barker, with Dennis Cleveland as soloist), “Triad” is a florid psychosexual drama from 1972 about brothers (Robert La Fosse, Johan Renvall) who want the same woman (Amanda McKerrow).

This situation allows MacMillan to explore the same overwrought exhibitionism dominating many of his later works. There’s a strenuous gymnastic pas de deux--McKerrow repeatedly belly-flops into La Fosse’s arms--that stands for true love here but looks like the wedding-night rape in “Mayerling.”

MacMillan seems to be reshuffling the components in that granddaddy of Prokofiev ballets, Balanchine’s “Prodigal Son,” with McKerrow cast as an impassive, virginal siren, La Fosse playing the optimistic, generous aspects of the prodigal and Renvall the character’s darker, brutalized side. All three dance powerfully, but the work remains a collection of pretentious effects.

“Paquita” boasts big stars in this staging: Cynthia Gregory and Fernando Bujones--she rather unmusical in the adagio but always a glittering prima, he making just about everything except lifting look not only easy but perfect. Connelly conducts with, again, too much awkwardness to let the work reach a genuine crest.

This telecast shows us a company generally unable to bring off the major contrasts in dance style that the bill exploits. The hyper-intense “Triad” calls for acting powers that only Renvall can begin to supply. The muted neo-Romanticism of “Les Sylphides” and the Spanish-flavored classicism of “Paquita” emerge mechanical and synthetic.

Since the company can’t seem to bring off any style here as if it owned it, the choreography is treated primarily as showcase opportunities.

This accounts for the arbitrary choreographic arrangements in the suite from “Paquita,” and the composite version of “Les Sylphides” that stitches together in a single role (Tcherkassky’s) the solo created for Alexandra Baldina and the pas de deux that originally featured Anna Pavlova. It uses an alternate male solo as well.

No such tampering takes place in “Triad,” but MacMillan’s style is built on so much emotionally fraudulent technical bravado that passages with an unbroken musical/dramatic flow are interrupted by applause whenever a dancer does something especially difficult.

Breaking the flow even more, television director Brian Large inflicts restless camera work on each ballet--often leaving something important unseen while focusing on whatever catches his fancy.

Thus the “Dance in America” series, which made its mark by trusting choreography, is once again guilty of dismembering it. But, this time, most of it was in pieces to begin with.