LESS THAN GRAND FINALE OF L.A. BALLET

The black plastic box is only 4 1/2x8x1 inches and weighs less than a pound, but it holds what may be the last remains of Los Angeles Ballet: 81 minutes of the company’s final season preserved on videotape.

Titled “Pas de Deux,” the $49.95 VAI cassette includes excerpts from the company’s four-program International Ballet Festival, held from Aug. 14 to Sept. 2, 1984, at the John Anson Ford Theatre in Hollywood.

You may remember that 1984 was a year of crisis for Los Angeles Ballet, with the debt-plagued company canceling its spring season and later withdrawing from the Olympic Arts Festival.

Soon after the evenings documented on “Pas de Deux,” new difficulties occurred: The company was evicted from its studio/office space and then bowed out of a scheduled “Nutcracker” engagement at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. After 11 years of struggle, time was running out.

Reportedly a private John Clifford venture rather than an official company-sponsored project, the International Ballet Festival seemed to some observers a desperate attempt to give standard Los Angeles Ballet repertory programs the status of special events. The gimmick (or lure): pairs of stellar guests to garnish each evening with brief showpiece duets. Even so, the festival failed to attract full houses.

Of course, “Pas de Deux” offers a different viewpoint. “The summer of 1984 produced a dance event of truly international proportions,” intones narrator Alan Mandell, definitely not speaking about the Olympic Arts Festival. Mandell then goes on to call the under-attended performances “highly popular” and the controversial local company “critically acclaimed.” Obviously, this isn’t “60 Minutes.”

Clifford himself then appears to introduce the dancing but spreads more misinformation as well--for example, giving Patricia McBride the bogus title of New York City Ballet “prima ballerina.” Senior, perhaps; prima, no.

McBride appears in the opening “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” opposite Los Angeles Ballet’s hard-working cavalier-by-default, Reid Olson (replacing guest Sean Lavery, who was himself a replacement for the originally scheduled guest, Ib Andersen).

This unscheduled casting circumstance--a New York City Ballet star and a far-less-celebrated local dancer performing together as nominal equals--recalls the company’s earliest seasons, when both hope and Clifford seemed to spring eternal and when members of the home team performed on the same mixed bills as prestigious visitors.

The Bluebird pas de deux also achieves this same accidental epiphany: Due to an injury and a resultant short-notice substitution, guest artist Yannis Pikieris (of the Bavarian State Opera Ballet) dances the male variation, leaving the rest of this excerpt from “The Sleeping Beauty” to tense, mismatched Clifford dancers Nadezda Zybine and Luis Astorga.

Ironically, Pikieris gives a more distinguished performance here than in his “official” festival assignment: a “Corsaire” pas de deux (opposite Marielena Mencia) marked by forced flamboyance and rather cold, competition-level technical values.

Indeed, most of the festival guests deliver unengaged, almost impersonal professionalism--with Yoko Morishita and Tetsutaro Shimizu (Matsuyama Ballet of Tokyo), Ghislaine Thesmar and Michael Denard (Paris Opera Ballet) and even the unsinkable McBride looking far less effective than when they danced these same choreographies for television cameras on earlier occasions.

The major exception: the vibrant, playful Linda Hindberg and the ardent, noble Arne Villumsen (Royal Danish Ballet) in a highly stylish performance of the “Flower Festival in Genzano” pas de deux. (The festival’s visiting duos from Australia, Great Britain and Switzerland are listed in the credits of “Pas de Deux” but are omitted from the dance footage without explanation.)

Television director Ted Lin can’t seem to keep the dancers’ limbs inside the frame for long and the tape editing seems primitive at best, disorienting at worst: We see a close-up of Denard posing while Thesmar is dancing, for instance. Still, this video souvenir is arguably a less frustrating experience than the actual performances.

The dancers at the Ford Theatre, after all, performed to over-amplified taped music: a tacky economy for an event with pretensions to “truly international” importance. But the viewer now controls the degree of amplification, and who can object to taped music when the dancing itself is taped?

More significantly, the festival took place on a high and remote platform stage. (An attempt to extend the dance-space of the Ford Theatre caused ruinous sight-line problems from the front third of the house, so the audience was moved farther back.) However, the video version neutralizes the gulf that existed between dancers and audience. Close-ups now serve where formerly binoculars were necessary. We should be grateful.

The last moments of “Pas de Deux” belong to Los Angeles Ballet’s own Ellen (a.k.a. Elena) Bauer and Damian Woetzel. She soon joined National Ballet of Canada, he New York City Ballet.

Their performance of the “Sleeping Beauty” wedding pas de deux is hardly world class. But in Woetzel’s exceptional potential as a cavalier and in Bauer’s blank, unmusical efficiency as a ballerina the perpetual hope and perpetual disappointment of Los Angeles Ballet’s 11-year history return freshly to mind. Yes, this is why we indulged the company for so long and this is also why we ultimately turned away.

Three years ago, a Ballet News cover story called Los Angeles Ballet “the company that would not die.” Today, however, the magazine is just as dead as the company, but memories and artifacts do survive--on VHS and Beta if nowhere else.