TV REVIEW : Harlem Dance Theatre Probe Trips Up Jennings

Prime-time network television usually ignores high culture, so whenever it does take a peek at the subject, it assumes no prior knowledge.

Thus “Peter Jennings Reporting: From the Heart of Harlem,” tonight at 8 on ABC (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), goes all the way back to the mid-’60s, when Arthur Mitchell stopped dancing at New York City Ballet to found Dance Theatre of Harlem. Rediscovering the old anecdotes and ironies, Jennings works hard to convey the mission and importance of Mitchell’s company--something, of course, that PBS and cable viewers knew long ago.

The focus of the hourlong telecast is ostensibly the company’s comeback from a 1990 financial collapse and six-month layoff. However, this story is incompetently reported: Only three or four sentences explain the crisis, and then only in the vaguest terms. Significantly, an equal amount of airtime is devoted to dancer opinion absolving Mitchell of any blame.

The subject of possible mismanagement is never raised, though it might have influenced donors’ slowness to underwrite the company’s future. Instead, Jennings holds tenaciously to a single issue: his belief that race alone explains both the company’s artistry and its financing predicament.

Mitchell and the dancers try to move Jennings beyond this perspective, but to no avail. Doggedly, against the evidence, he keeps isolating the plight of Dance Theatre of Harlem from the condition of the supposedly rich and securely established “white companies” (his term)--never telling us about the major financial disasters at the Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Pennsylvania Ballet and other companies during 1990 and 1991.

He also distorts the significance of Mitchell’s dancing career by ignoring the colorblind roles created for him and only showing clips from “Agon,” a Balanchine ballet in which race was indeed a factor. (Jennings tells us that “there are few recordings of Arthur Mitchell dancing,” but the feature film of him as Puck in Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” might have been chosen.)

The most engaging portions of the telecast are those following the dancers to their homes or showing them in temporary jobs during the layoff. These sequences also help clarify the promotional, feelgood intentions of the quasi-news footage--intentions most blatantly revealed when Jennings’ crew shoots a New York TV interviewer making an on-camera pitch for viewer donations. Later, Jennings jokes with Mitchell about looking straight at the camera--Jennings’ camera--when asking for money.

This ultra-cozy rapport between subject and newsman and the absence of any hard reporting mark “From the Heart of Harlem” as an infomercial. It is important because Dance Theatre of Harlem is important, because (again) networks rarely invest this much attention in American artists, and because it is likely to have a very beneficial effect on the company’s financial health. But that doesn’t make it any less shoddy as television news.