TV REVIEW : ‘Dancing’ Is Full of Talking : Culture: The PBS program on dancing around the world begins tonight. The series varies from disorganized to focused.

If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it. --Isadora Duncan

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Imagine an eight-hour PBS series about dance so dominated by talk that scarcely one full minute of dancing is ever allowed to be seen without voice-over commentary or a cutaway to an interview.

Imagine the series offering a cornucopia of dance diversity, with a special emphasis on what its creator calls “the rich and varied heritage of America”--yet Latino culture receives just two minutes of screen time in all those eight hours.

Imagine nationwide outreach activities designed to extend the impact of the series--plus educational materials, a book and a home video edition on sale. Better yet, don’t imagine: Just check out Rhoda Grauer’s “Dancing,” the most ambitious project on the subject yet attempted.

Scheduled in two-hour blocks over the next four Mondays, “Dancing” begins tonight at 8 on Channels 15 and 24, at 9 on Channel 28, with an episode so disorganized it looks like every PBS dance documentary ever shot--cut together at random.

Happily, the second hour is one of the series’ most focused: a look at dance in religion using Africa, India and Europe as examples. Executive producer Grauer is involved with every episode, but individual creative teams give the best parts of the series a distinctive shape and tone.

Frequently, the approaches clash. For example, Episode 4 begins with the line, “Dance was never taken more seriously than in the royal courts”--utter nonsense if you’ve seen the religious fervor and trance-dancing in Episode 2.

The series makes a consistent attempt to convey the importance and influence of African traditions through the use of extensive location footage, archival clips and interview segments. However, the neglect of Central and South American cultures (except as they relate to Africa) is simply unacceptable in a project that proclaims its global perspective. A token two minutes of skirt-swirling will not be any compensation to millions of Americans excluded from serious consideration here.

Common to all the episodes, unfortunately, is the assumption that no dance is so unusual or exciting or sacred that it cannot be interrupted for chitchat.

As a result, dancing is never allowed to make an effect directly, through its own resources. Instead, it simply illustrates somebody’s theory about sex or politics or social history and then vanishes.

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A capsule preview of the eight episodes with scheduled airdates:

* “The Power of Dance” (tonight): Former ballet star Jacques d’Amboise and the children of his National Dance Institute are always photogenic and Broadway virtuoso Gregg Burge is always entertaining, but this confused collage of hyperbole grows pertinent only when great dancers discuss how some performances pull them out of themselves into another reality.

* “Lord of the Dance” (tonight): Hindu, Yoruba and Christian attitudes about dance and the body are contrasted with great skill in an hour full of beauty and surprise. Even the traditional anti-dance bias of European Christianity becomes modified and softened here in unexpected ways. A model of what the whole series should have been.

* “Sex and Social Dance” (May 10): Weakened by lengthy detours, this hour contrasts the gender-based vocabularies and social alliances defined in American ballroom dancing, Cook Islands line dancing and the sexually segregated self-expression of Islamic Morocco. An epilogue examines the ways social dancing can reflect social change. Flawed but fitfully compelling.

* “Dance at Court” (May 10): Glib and self-important, this episode juxtaposes ceremonies in Central Java, Japan and Ghana with none-too-persuasive attempts to evoke the origins of ballet in the France of Louis XIV. Except for clips of the Kirov Ballet “Sleeping Beauty” (used in so many episodes it virtually becomes a sub-theme of the whole series), the dances excerpted here require more viewing time than “Dancing” provides to reveal their richness and depth.

* “New Worlds, New Forms” (May 17): The narration may mention other cultures, but what you see during this carefully organized hour is the way African forms and concepts of dancing shaped hyphenate and then national trends in North and South America. The Lindy Hop gets special attention.

* “Dance Centerstage” (May 17): Grand Kabuki in Tokyo and (again) “The Sleeping Beauty” in St. Petersburg are used to illustrate ideas about classic dance-theater during this uneven but splashy episode. Russia’s Larissa Lezhnina and Japan’s Tamasaburo Bando V increasingly dominate the dance and interview footage, offering contrasting images of the ideal woman.

* “The Individual and Tradition” (May 24): Stuffing the whole 20th Century into an hour, this episode offers a delirious roller-coaster ride through the achievements and personalities dominating modernism--but, somehow, it all terminates in Twyla Tharp. Two of Tharp’s work’s are also glimpsed in the opening titles for every one of the eight episodes in the series--an overemphasis that defies justification.

* “Dancing in One World” (May 24): Shot at the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, this episode offers glimpses of major world dance traditions previously bypassed in the series. American Indian and Australian Aboriginal dances receive particular emphasis, but there’s also Balinese, Polynesian and contemporary African-American dances on view--plus those two minutes of Mexican-American skirt-swirling and at least that much footage of festival director Peter Sellars mouthing off about world dance and L.A.

The last dance: Series host Raoul Trujillo in an expression of his American Indian heritage--a dance that, for once, is allowed to end without a word.