PERFORMING ARTS / CLASSICAL MUSIC, DANCE, OPERA : Cultural Roots on Rewind : A collection of six videotapes and booklets on the music and dance traditions of the Americas, despite some gaps, offers a broad view on the evolution of artful expression.

Ever visit another country and find the natives taking your picture, as if you came from the most exotic culture imaginable? Well, you do. And though it may be hard to accept that everything in your life is folklore to somebody else, the Americas have long been an extremely fertile field of study for anthropologists and ethnologists.

The latest evidence: a six-videotape, six-booklet collection searching through North, South and Central American music and dance for the oldest, purest performance traditions--and also for the mixed, new forms that evolved into contemporary pop culture.

At a cost of $300 (volumes not available separately), “The JVC/Smithsonian Folkways Video Anthology of World Music and Dance of the Americas” is more likely to end up in libraries and university dance departments than in video stores, but it’s important for supplying a cultural overview of the Americas at a time when many of the traditions it documents are vanishing forever.

It also rights a wrong. Five years ago, a 30-videotape, nine-booklet set appeared titled “The JVC Video Anthology of World Music and Dance.” Assembled by Japanese ethnologists, it placed Asia in the center of the universe and grew more and more questionable the farther it ranged from home.

Korea and Indonesia were given two tapes each, for instance, China and India three each. But North America was covered in one--with 31 minutes of very problematic footage on the Plains Indians representing the U.S. Nothing else.

Co-produced by Stephen McArthur with editorial input from Anthony Seeger, Mark Greenberg and an impressive advisory board, the new six-hour anthology suffers from major lapses of its own, but is highly impressive in several key areas--the evolution of song-forms across cultures and continents, for instance, and the ways African slaves changed their new homelands. The clips include some performances by famous artists (blues master Sonny Terry, bossa nova composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, salsa star Tito Puente) but generally concentrate on vernacular music and dance, before professionalization.

As in the 30-volume 1990 anthology, preexisting film and video sources are excerpted, so picture and sound quality varies. Another JVC tradition: No narration. Instead, I.D. titles keyed to the data in the booklets keep you oriented, while the booklet essays help establish context and possibilities for further study.

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Canada and the United States: Canada--Francophone Traditions, Native and Anglophone Traditions. United States--African American Secular Traditions. (59 minutes).

Only a third of the tapes in the 1990 JVC “World” anthology offered more than 20 selections each. This one programs 32. The result is fragmentary and frustrating. The booklets warn that “individual selections should be watched before or after reading the notes, or perhaps both.” However, it often takes longer to read about a selection here than to screen it, making the text the central experience and the tape a kind of adjunct.

Case in point: the three Inuit vocal games crammed into one minute of screen time: the only examples of an Arctic Circle culture dating back 4,000 years and fascinating for the remarkable vocal technique called “throat singing.”

Canadian step-dancing and ballad traditions will also represent major discoveries for many viewers, and the evolution of the blues is artfully traced. Booklet essays by Barbra Hampton and Charles Sykes distill remarkably sensible perceptual principles?? from nearly 400 years of African American culture.

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The United States: European Traditions in the New World (59 minutes).

Beginning with feisty New England-style fiddling and ending in a blaze of salsa, this tape provides a kaleidoscope of Americana. You can hear classic tunes such as “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “Old Smokey” and “John Henry”--often in tangy, idiosyncratic versions--and sample Cajun, bluegrass, country, ranchera and Texas honky-tonk vitality as well. You may find yourself fascinated with how the music and dance forms introduced on the first tape (notably ballads and step-dancing) change and develop in different regions. And many of the selections are long enough to allow pleasure as well as edification.

Highlights include balladeer Margaret MacArthur’s classic rendition of “The Lake of Champlain” and Jean Ritchie’s environmental protest “Black Waters,” along with a klezmer performance by the Kapelye CQ??????? group that typifies the folk revival movement that has invigorated the U.S. arts scene in this generation.

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The United States, Sacred Traditions: African American Sacred Traditions. European and Other Sacred Traditions (43 minutes).

This is the shortest of the six tapes, focusing on what the text calls “Protestant, British-based religious music, primarily from the southern United States,” as well as African American spirituals and gospel music. In the latter category, the tape boasts a thrilling performance of “Precious Lord” by pop star and minister Al Green. However, for once, the pickings are curiously skimpy.

Obviously, one could wish for more than 50 seconds of sacred harp singing, but the sins of omission here go beyond tape editing: With about 15 minutes unused (compared to the other five tapes in the set), where are the Southwestern Indian ceremonials--and in particular, the Pueblo matachina dances--that belong in even the most cursory survey of North American religious music and dance?

The inclusion of a Hawaiian dance-song in honor of the goddess of fire and volcanoes takes the concept of “Other [American] Sacred Traditions” beyond Christianity--as well it should. But why stop there?

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The Caribbean: Barbados, Cuba, Curacao and Bonaire, Dominica, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, Carnival Montage (59 minutes).

With well over 40 performance components, this tape provides the briefest of audio-visual introductions to these music and dance traditions. If all the quick fade-outs prove less infuriating than in the first volume of the set, perhaps Caribbean idioms launch themselves more emphatically (especially through rhythm) than some of their North American counterparts.

Many of the performances were shot at annual celebrations or competitions, and selections range from a scorching Cuban rumba to the ravishing sweetness of a Rastafarian song from Jamaica.

Unfortunately, the “Carnival Montage” finale descends to the level of a tourist promo, with even the text notes acknowledging “these brief clips are too short for analytic purposes but when taken together they convey the stunning beauty and high energy of Caribbean carnival masquerading and dancing.” Maybe so, but this is supposed to be JVC, not MTV.

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Central and South America: Belize, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Guyana (54 minutes).

If editorial priorities and limited screen time minimize dance elsewhere in the set, here an array of ritual, popular and processional forms do make their intended effect. And if the selections sometimes include idioms covered in the original “World” collection (the Brazilian capoeira, for instance), nobody is likely to complain.

Samba stirs up the most excitement, perhaps, but the atmospheric footage of an annual Pehuenches Indian fertility rite in the highlands of Central Chile has an incomparable grandeur, incorporating horseback riders and the misty landscape itself in a prayer for communal prosperity.

The set ends with two rare glimpses of Guyanese traditional culture--Afro-Caribbean in style and, as such, highly relevant to the set’s commitment to tracing African influences in the New World.

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Central and South America: Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Venezuela (55 minutes).

As on the 30-volume 1990 “World” collection, Mexico is seriously undervalued, receiving scarcely 10 minutes of attention--about the same as the coastal black traditions of Peru. Moreover, the Mexican selections largely document border cultures: the Mayans of Chiapas as well as hybrid song forms often dubbed Tex-Mex.

Peruvian diversity is better served and the unexpected courtliness of western Nicaraguan saint-day celebrations also emerges strongly. The tape (and anthology) ends with haunting Venezuelan woodwinds of various types followed by the sweetest, most inviting devil dance you could imagine--a dance in which the masked participants pay homage to the Virgin and are rewarded by cascades of joyous church bells. Lucky devils.*

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“The JVC/Smithsonian Folkways Video Anthology of World Music and Dance of the Americas” is available from Multicultural Media, 6655 Granger Road, Barre, VT 05641. Price: $299, plus $7 shipping and handling. (800) 550-9675.