Elektra Offers a Contemporary Septet

Maybe dance fans should hang the mistletoe over the VCR this year, since a major record label has just launched a dance-video catalogue with seven new releases.

Most of the titles in Elektra Nonesuch’s “Dance Collection” will be familiar to local audiences from screenings on cable or public television. However, only Twyla Tharp’s “The Catherine Wheel” has previously been available to the home video market in this country.

Issued on both videocassette and laser disc, the collection is strongly weighted toward the contemporary, with even “The Nutcracker” drastically modernized in two different versions.

Up to now, you might expect to find a Kirov Ballet “Swan Lake” in a label’s video catalogue--but certainly not Paul Taylor’s sardonic, Emmy Award-winning “Speaking in Tongues.” With Elektra Nonesuch, you get both.

Shot without an audience two years ago, the Kirov performance features company firebrand Igor Zelensky back when he still paid attention to his partners--and before he became a blond. His finest dancing comes in the first-act pas de trois.

Kirov-watchers should note that Elektra Nonesuch offers the venerable Konstantin Sergeyev production of “Swan Lake,” not the abomination that recently replaced it. At 116 minutes, the video version may run slightly shorter than a theater performance (no time lost for applause), but the lighting looks much brighter and the camera positions more varied than would have been possible in a conventional theater shoot.

The liabilities of a live telecast loom especially large in the Royal Ballet “Prince of the Pagodas,” which takes up two discs or two cassettes and includes an illuminating hourlong documentary on its choreographer, the late Sir Kenneth MacMillan.

With a plot that combines “Beauty and the Beast” with elements of “King Lear,” the ballet itself holds historical as well as artistic interest--for the score by Benjamin Britten and as MacMillan’s last full-length work. But the television transcription smears major plot points and key sections of dances.

Darcey Bussell and Jonathan Cope uphold standards of Royal Ballet sweetness and refinement as the lovers, though MacMillan makes their lyricism less prominent than the virtuosity showcased through no fewer than five subsidiary male roles. Neither the ballet nor the documentary has yet been seen on American television.

Among the more familiar titles, “Speaking in Tongues” commands attention as Taylor’s daring attempt to re-conceive for television an acclaimed, hourlong stage work. Shown on PBS a year ago, it enlists a score by Matthew Patton in a bitter examination of American moral values and, in particular, religious hypocrisy.

Originally shown on PBS in 1983, “The Catherine Wheel” also satirizes the American family, but in a broader, less coherent manner, especially when Tharp piles up the close-ups and editing effects for maximum disorientation. The final 15-minute “Golden Section,” however, finds her and composer David Byrne absolutely inspired and the Tharp company dancing like gods.

Elektra Nonesuch has moved to the end of the video a useful quarter-hour interview with Tharp that used to precede “The Catherine Wheel.” Compared to the edition on Thorn EMI/HBO, images are slightly brighter.

The two “Nutcracker” stagings each attempt a psychosexual reinterpretation of the 19th-Century Christmas classic. Mark Morris’ “The Hard Nut” (to be shown Wednesday on PBS) updates the familiar Christmas party and dream scenes to the 1960s, then uses the last-act Candyland music to tell more of the original “Nutcracker” story.

Morris aims outrageous humor at classical ballet conventions, societal gender roles and (again) the American family. But his approach to Tchaikovsky’s score remains dead serious, if unpredictable. 90 minutes.

Led suavely by Elisabeth Maurin and Laurent Hilaire, Rudolf Nureyev’s opulent Paris Opera “Nutcracker” ends with little Clara fleeing from her home into the snow--presumably to freeze to death.

Originally telecast in this country three years ago on Bravo cable, Nureyev’s “Nutcracker” also suffers from hopelessly unmusical choreography. Happily, Elektra Nonesuch offers a more satisfying look at the Paris Opera Ballet: “Paris Dances Diaghilev,” first shown on A&E; cable in early 1991.

Besides capable performances of Fokine’s “Petrushka” and Nijinsky’s “L’Apres-midi d’un Faun,” the program features a near-perfect one of Nijinska’s “Les Noces.” The real revelation, however, may be “Le Spectre de la Rose” as performed by Manuel Legris “Logris” in the video booklet): a far more supple and sensitive interpretation than the stylistic simplifications offered by Nureyev and Baryshnikov in earlier telecasts.

According to Elektra Nonesuch, the videotape and laser-disc versions of each title are identical in content. List prices: $30 for tapes, $40 for discs--except “Speaking in Tongues” ($25/$3891887713