COMMENTARY : Step by Step, the Balanchine Way : A bad year for dance on television brightens, as new Nonesuch releases resurrect for home video some of the choreographer’s great works.

With the release of the first five titles in Nonesuch’s VHS “Balanchine Library,” a number of great ballets and performances are being exhumed from the vaults and issued on home video for the first time, their images and sound restored as closely as possible to mint condition.

Indeed, in a year in which dance on public TV has already bottomed out with an incoherent “Dance in America” adaptation of Garth Fagan’s “Griot New York,” the release proves doubly treasurable--offering an enlightened approach to adapting theatrical dance for television that stands as a rebuke to the inferiority of much current PBS dance programming.

Of course, the sudden, disorienting changes of camera angle and other ruinous directing and editing effects imposed on “Griot New York” are nothing new. Back in the early ‘70s, George Balanchine committed 15 of his greatest ballets to the care of German television--and was appalled at the results.

For starters, Hugo Niebeling’s 1973 film of “Serenade” jettisoned any sense of choreographic development in favor of impressionistic video effects: MTV-style image bombardment before MTV existed.

Later in that decade, when Balanchine was approached about participating in the brand-new “Dance in America” series, he proved understandably suspicious and imposed one revolutionary condition: “trusting the dance.” Sounds simple, even reactionary, but the last thing Balanchine had in mind was a literal transcription of any stage performance.

Since 1929, he had worked in theatrical films, using motion picture technology to the fullest. You can find elaborate moving-camera sequences, slow motion, superimposition and even the use of a “Flashdance”-style dance double in the footage Balanchine choreographed for such Hollywood musicals as “On Your Toes,” “Star Spangled Rhythm” and “The Goldwyn Follies.”

For the four “Choreography by Balanchine” episodes telecast on “Dance in America,” he took ballets regarded as masterpieces and shortened some of them, changed the placement of entrances and exits, added scenery, adopted color schemes that highlighted key motifs--and liked some of these innovations well enough to make them permanent.

However, he and his directors (Merrill Brockway and the late Emile Ardolino) trusted the dance completely enough that the telecasts became instant classics: award winners and hot bootleg items in the ballet underground ever since.

The Nonesuch “Balanchine Library” includes two of these episodes: the first hour of “Choreography by Balanchine” (with “Tzigane,” the andante from “Divertimento No. 15” and “The Four Temperaments”) and the third (with “The Prodigal Son” and the radically condensed “Chaconne”).

Nonesuch President Robert Hurwitz says it was his decision to omit the original PBS introductions to the ballets written by Arlene Croce of the New Yorker and spoken by former New York City Ballet star Edward Villella.

“The ballets should stand on their own,” Hurwitz declares, explaining that background data might be needed on broadcast TV but can be (and is) provided in booklet form in the home video edition.

Hurwitz also reveals that it took 10 years and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to negotiate the legal clearances necessary to make these telecasts available, even though such studio-taped projects have fewer legal problems than stage performances shot under contracts with theatrical unions.

“We wanted ‘Live From Lincoln Center,’ ” Hurwitz says, “but were unable to get them.” However, he intends to keep trying and also hopes to obtain a complete 1968 Canadian telecast of “Apollo” and other rarities for the Nonesuch library. Ironically, the 1993 Balanchine “Nutcracker” movie won’t be included, although Hurwitz was its co-producer: It has been issued on Warner Home Video.

Available individually at $29.97 (list price), the five Nonesuch titles come from a number of sources besides PBS and include Anne Belle’s documentary film “Dancing for Mr. B: Six Balanchine Ballerinas” and “Robert Schumann’s Davidsbundlertanze,” which was produced by short-lived CBS Cable and is the only Nonesuch Balanchine tape previously available on home video.

The recently made “Arabesque” has never been seen by the public in any format and inaugurates a library within “The Balanchine Library”: a nine-part video series titled “Balanchine Essays.” Intended for dance teachers and students, it is solely absorbed in lessons of style and execution led by New York City Ballet principal Merrill Ashley and School of American Ballet pedagogue Suki Schorer. In the fall, Nonesuch plans to release other essays titled “Passe and Attitude” and “Port de Bras and Epaulement.”

Other fall titles will include “Choreography by Balanchine, Part 2” (“Stravinsky Violin Concerto” and excerpts from “Jewels”) and another PBS production, the two-part, three-hour “Balanchine Celebration” from 1993. The fate of the 90-minute “Choreography by Balanchine, Part 4” is still in doubt, since the leading dancer in one ballet reportedly has not granted permission for its release.

Here are capsule reviews of the new releases, all of which feature members of New York City Ballet:

* Choreography by Balanchine, Part 1: “Tzigane” (with Suzanne Farrell, Peter Martins); andante from “Divertimento No. 15” (with Merrill Ashley, Tracy Bennett, Maria Calegari, Victor Castelli, Susan Pillare, Stephanie Saland, Marjorie Spohn, Robert Weiss); “The Four Temperaments” (with Ashley, Bart Cook, Daniel Duell, Adam Luders, Colleen Neary, Heather Watts). Directed by Merrill Brockway. 54 minutes.

Consider this tape a primer of Balanchine and City Ballet versatility. You want star glamour? Catch Suzanne Farrell’s nine-minute slinky mock-Gypsy solo to Ravel. You want an aristocratic tutu ballet? Watch the measured beauties of Mozart matched by serene Balanchinean classicism.

You want groundbreaking modernism? Glory in a top-of-the-T’s cast (none more perfect than Bart Cook in the Melancholic section) that dances Balanchine and Hindemith to blazes. All this plus bold directorial innovations that (for once) enhance choreographic continuity.

* Choreography by Balanchine, Part 3: “Chaconne” (with Farrell, Martins), “Prodigal Son” (with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Karin von Aroldingen, Shaun O’Brien). Directed by Brockway. 57 minutes.

Reduced to two rhapsodic duets and a finale, “Chaconne” becomes a glowing tribute to the Farrell-Martins partnership set to Gluck’s depiction of paradise. Created for the Diaghilev Ballet Russes, “Prodigal Son” is a biblical story ballet to music by Prokofiev and with scene paintings by Rouault--still one of the greatest collaborations of the century even before you factor in Baryshnikov’s performance: as sharply drawn and brilliantly executed as anything in anybody’s video-dance collection anywhere.

* “Robert Schumann’s Davidsbundlertanze” (with Farrell, Jacques d’Amboise, Von Aroldingen, Luders, Sara Leland, Ib Andersen, Watts, Martins). Directed by Brockway. 43 minutes.

Four couples and a pianist explore a spectrum of love and madness in this intimate, intuitive work that comes close to dance-drama without ever fully yielding its secrets. Biographical references to the composer’s life recur, but the dominant impression is of fluid, free-form classical partnerships in which the contrast between D’Amboise’s age and Andersen’s youth becomes as important as the difference between heeled shoes and pointe slippers in the women’s choreography.

The tape itself is historic: It is not only a record of what is considered to be Balanchine’s last great work, but it is also the last TV production he supervised.

* Dancing for Mr. B: Six Balanchine Ballerinas (with Ashley, Melissa Hayden, Allegra Kent, Darci Kistler, Mary Ellen Moylan, Maria Tallchief). Directed by Anne Belle. 86 minutes.

Through interviews and vintage footage, this documentary traces a 40-year history of Balanchine dancing in America--from before the founding of New York City Ballet to the current post-Balanchine era.

Candid and often intense, it reveals some of the cruelest career pressures of its six subjects but holds to an imposing theme: the creation of masterworks and a company to perform them. Without Farrell, the view is incomplete, but nothing else comes closer to the comprehensive, multiple-access oral-visual history this subject deserves.

* Balanchine Essays: “Arabesque” (with Ashley, Suki Schorer). Directed by Brockway. 45 minutes.

“What do you like--ice cream, diamonds or money?” With this whimsical appeal to ballerina greed, Schorer begins a demonstration of how Balanchine heightened and extended the classical vocabulary. Focusing on ballet’s most celebrated balance-in-extension, she illuminates facets of neoclassicism by using Ashley and a few others in classroom exercises and brief excerpts from Balanchine ballets.

Very basic as a production and, of course, primarily technical in content--but indispensable for dancers and worth renting for anyone interested in the process that turns students into stylists.