TV DANCE REVIEW : 2 Balanchine Works on PBS

Fifteen years ago, PBS telecast a New York City Ballet performance of “Serenade,” part of a German co-production that left George Balanchine utterly discouraged about the artistic distortions of his ballets on television.

Eventually, the producers of the new “Dance in America” series persuaded him to collaborate in the shooting of his works, a project that extended through 1983, the year of his death. Many of those programs set a standard for adapting stage dance to the small screen--a standard not always met by a new PBS version of “Serenade” at 10 tonight on KCET Channel 28.

Distinguished by Darci Kistler’s sumptuous execution of the central role--with Kyra Nichols and Maria Calegari well cast, respectively, in the principal allegro and dramatic challenges--this brightly lit, blue-on-blue performance avoids the crude, disorienting editing effects that made the more stylishly danced German version disastrous.

However, producer-directors Judy Kinberg and Thomas Grimm do sometimes indulge in the kind of brief, unmusical switches between cameras that Balanchine criticized in an early interview about dance on television.

Although it arrives with freeze-frames at the end of every section, “Western Symphony” suffers less--indeed, has enough virtuosity and comic effects to absorb the Kinberg-Grimm camera-work painlessly.

Set to Hershy Kay’s arrangement of folk songs, this 1954 cowboy divertissement combines regional mannerisms with classical steps much as Petipa did with Spanish and Hungarian sources in “Don Quixote” and “Raymonda.”

Though Stephanie Saland achieves just the right parodistic edge in the adagio, her partner, Robert LaFosse, wildly overplays the gosh-and-gee quotient. It’s Peter Boal, who steals the telecast by flying through the twisty bravura of the finale.