Psst--Wanna See a Ballet Video?

Sometimes, a single unguarded moment can propel you headlong into a life of crime.

Mine came at the 1992 Royal Danish Ballet festival in Copenhagen. At intermission, I met a young critic for one of the city’s newspapers--dangerously handsome, wickedly sophisticated, devilishly charming--and as we said goodnight in the shadow of one of the statues flanking the entrance to the King’s Theatre, he uttered the three little words that sealed my fate: “I have videotapes.”

Specifically, he had Bournonville videotapes: off-the-air telecasts, never shown in America, of ballets choreographed by August Bournonville in the mid-19th century and passed down in performances by the Royal Danes. These masterworks and rarities had been telecast year after year in Denmark, performed by dancers schooled to unmatched expertise in the unique Bournonville classical style. As my balletic tempter repeated their exotic titles--”Kermesse in Bruges,” “Kings Guards on Amager,” “A Folk Tale” (in two different productions!)--I suddenly knew I would stop at nothing to possess them.

I also knew what he wanted in return, and that it was beyond the pale. But the tapes he offered documented a golden age of Bournonville dancing and so, like Faust, Dr. Faustus and Joe Boyd in “Damn Yankees,” I struck a devil’s bargain. For all that Bournonville, I agreed to copy and send off-the-air New York City Ballet telecasts never seen in Europe, and as I exhausted my own collection and began duping tapes borrowed from friends and colleagues, I discovered a growing network of people actively engaged in swapping dances through personal contacts or over the Internet. They ranged from respected fellow professionals (critics, academics, dancers and choreographers) to resourceful civilian balletomanes such as two spirited retirees in Los Angeles with a special interest in the ballets of Frederick Ashton or an enterprising Paris Opera Ballet devotee in the City of Light.

Of course, I and all these worthies knowingly flouted international copyright laws that explicitly forbid duplication. But before you nominate me for the FBI’s Most Wanted list, note that no money ever changed hands during my transactions (I can’t speak for others), and that I never copied any tape that was available for sale or rental in the U.S.

Indeed, that’s the point. Most of the great dance performances telecast in our lifetimes can’t be bought or borrowed, and probably never will be until their copyrights lapse. If you taped them off the air, great, and if you can afford to visit archives in New York, Paris, Copenhagen and other dance capitals to view company collections, even better. Otherwise, your choice is to do without or to join the unholy ranks of dance video outlaws.

Forgetting my crimes for the moment, the problem of access to previously telecast dance programming may seem minuscule compared with the ongoing conflict over laws that forbid widespread file swapping and the copying of digital media. For those in the field, however, what’s at stake is nothing less than rescuing an important segment of 20th century culture.

For example, if a student in the dance history class that I teach at a local university wants to write a term paper on Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, their films are available for viewing in campus libraries, as they should be. But what about the creative partnership of George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky? Their collaborations defined an epoch in modern ballet and were resplendent in such landmark telecasts as the New York City Ballet tribute “Genius Has a Birthday” on the PBS “Live From Lincoln Center” series in 1982, the year before Balanchine died. With this and so many other essential tapes unavailable in any video edition for home or educational use, how do my students study the body of Balanchine-Stravinsky collaborations if not through illegal duplicates?

Obviously, many vintage dance telecasts have never been reissued because there’s no perceived profit in them. Others, however, remain unavailable because the original contracts for creative and technical personnel covered only the program’s scheduled air dates, not any future publication on tape.

Renegotiating these contracts can be prohibitively expensive, especially when it’s a live performance and theatrical unions are involved. Indeed, one Oscar-nominated dance documentary had to strip the soundtracks off performance clips from the PBS “Dance in America” series and replace them with newly recorded accompaniments because the demands of the original musicians were reportedly off the map. Other projects have stalled or been reedited because one hold-out dancer refused to sign. So historic master tapes are held hostage indefinitely--and illegal copies fill the gap.

Although off-the-air performances represent the bulk of the underground dance-video market, there’s also a brisk trade in notation tapes and do-it-yourself bootlegs. Usually one-camera shoots from the balcony, notation tapes are a company’s way of documenting choreography for future revivals, and sometimes they become the only record of an important work.

Union restrictions usually prevent anyone from viewing these tapes except people hired to restage or dance the ballets they document. When I once asked a publicist for a major international company about the casting in one of them, I was told that it would cause “terrible trouble” if it became known that I’d even seen that tape, much less obtained a copy of it.

With camcorders now nearly as small as opera glasses, and optical stabilization a standard feature, many balletomanes now bootleg what they can’t buy or rent. At the 1998 International Ballet Festival in Havana, for example, so many camcorders were switched on at some performances that the viewfinder lights made it look like some sort of candlelight vigil was taking place.

The result of such amateur recording has expanded the video repertory in the way that bootlegs have enriched the pop music scene since the 1960s and pirate opera recordings made virtually every role sung by the late diva Maria Callas accessible to anyone who knew where to ask for them.

Thus I’m glad to know that in the continuing absence of any commercial version, there are at least two amateur bootleg tapes in circulation of the 1999 Kirov Ballet “Sleeping Beauty,” a four-hour reconstruction of the Marius Petipa choreography in reproductions of the original sets and costumes.

As close as anyone is likely to come to what Petipa and Tchaikovsky intended “Sleeping Beauty” to be, this epochal production could vanish at any moment in the kind of sudden changes of company leadership that wreaked havoc on the Bolshoi and the Royal Danish Ballet in the 1990s. It needs to be preserved in some sort of film or video record for future study and pleasure--shot by the best dance filmmakers or videographers in the world, if possible. If not, the performances stolen on tape by vigilante balletomanes will serve far, far better than mere memories, photos, production data and reviews (including mine).

It’s possible that copyright holders and participating artists in the dance world will eventually sign clearances to make some of the most valuable ballet bootlegs commercially available. That’s already happened with Victor Jensen’s unauthorized home movies of the Ballets Russes “Gaite Parisienne,” shot during a 10-year period in the 1940s and ‘50s, and now available in the Video Artists International home video catalog.

Like the most celebrated rock ‘n’ roll bootlegs and pirate opera recordings, bootleg dance sometimes offers irreplaceable works and performances, the best possible reason for going legit. It may be an index of my criminal mind, but I still cherish my two-disc pirate recording of Donizetti’s “Poliuto,” with Callas, Franco Corelli, Ettore Bastianini and other La Scala opera legends, even though the same 1960 performance is now available in legal editions.

A recent opinion piece by Paul Boutin in online magazine Salon discussed the gulf between traditional copyright restrictions and the new options for duplication and proliferation of music offered by the Internet and digital technologies. It ended with a question that resonates strongly in a dance world where many historic performances and works are available only in the video underground. “Instead of telling us not to steal,” he wrote, “how about just giving us a way to pay?”

One successful way already exists for books. When, for instance, I discovered that a collection of essays I needed as a text for my dance history class was out of print, the university contacted the original publishers and arranged to issue a copy as a course reader, paying whatever royalty fee is standard in such cases.

Clearly, one university class a year is smaller than the number of people who might want to purchase, say, the knockout 1978 performance of Balanchine’s “Theme and Variations” with Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov on the “Live From Lincoln Center” series, or even the Kirov Ballet’s own notation tape of its four-hour “Sleeping Beauty.” So why can’t people get copies of old dance tapes the way they can get reproductions of old dance books?

The answer, of course, is that they can, but only illegally. And that won’t change until some fair policy exists for publication rights to taped performances not commercially available. No, I don’t exactly relish the prospect of a SWAT team crashing through my front door to seize my Bournonville contraband. But nobody reading this piece will live long enough to wait for copyright expiration dates on fabulous performances that ought to be in every university library and specialist video catalog right now. And if I do end up in the slammer in a crackdown on these crimes of the art, at least I’ll be in great company.

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Lewis Segal is The Times’ dance critic.