Following in the footsteps

Revivals, reconstructions, evocations, fake antiques: The dance world’s attempt to turn its own history into box-office magic takes many forms.

Like some of Hollywood’s updated remakes, an iconic title might be all that remains of a landmark achievement after contemporary hacks are through with it. But even the worst adaptations often tell us what attracts us about classics and what we prefer to prune away.

Among recent dance releases on DVD, the uses of the past loom large. Indeed, quite apart from the lost choreography it reconstructs, the disc titled “Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance” illuminates the process of researching and reanimating a forgotten dance in such detail that it becomes a kind of handbook on the subject.

Available from Ohio State University at https://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/jmueller/Dfa.htm, the DVD includes studio and live performances by Jessica Lindberg of a career-defining 1896 Fuller solo set to Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

There’s also a documentary on Fuller (an American actress-turned-dancer who died in 1928), films of Fuller and her imitators, and answers to just about every question you might ask about how Lindberg pieced together this artifact of early modern dance. Shawn Hove’s editing is a model of tact -- but you can also choose to see the solo straight through with no changes of camera angle.

Best of all, Lindberg’s scrupulous performance re-creates the sense of dance-metaphor that Fuller achieved with billowing fabric and colored lights, making us understand how this kind of dancing inspired audiences and formed a potent alternative to classical ballet (then in decline in Western Europe). Fuller didn’t just dance around a fire -- she seemed enveloped in swirling flames, a volatile force of nature.

By coincidence, two DVDs from different sources showcase major ballet companies in works by French choreographer Pierre Lacotte that attempt to evoke 19th century classics long unseen in any authentic version.

As usual, Lacotte’s interviews here focus on the importance of the original works and leave unresolved major doubts about the historical accuracy of his productions. And you do wonder whether such projects are intended to attract conservative audiences with something -- anything -- famous from the history books beyond the mere handful of antique ballets that survive in any form their choreographers might recognize.

Under the circumstances, it’s best to consider Lacotte’s rep as informed impressions -- especially when he updates male virtuosity to 21st century standards in “The Pharaoh’s Daughter,” a full-evening ballet-spectacle based on a much longer 1862 epic choreographed by the great Marius Petipa.

Performed by Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet, and available through Harmonia Mundi at www.belairclassiques.com, the ballet is Egyptian with a vengeance.

Pyramids dot the landscape, mummies come to life, the pharaoh sentences a slave to death by snakebite, and when the titular heroine throws herself into the Nile, the god of the waters summons dancing ambassadors from other rivers to pay tribute to her.

Happily, Svetlana Zakharova proves worthy of their watery homage, and all by herself -- through her remarkable freshness, technical ease and personal radiance -- this former Kirov star upgrades an energetic but generally undistinguished company performance.

Opposite her, Sergei Filin copes with his technical and partnering challenges expertly. (Bolshoi-watchers should note that he, Zakharova and nearly every other first-rank Bolshoi star will be among the missing in the company’s upcoming engagement in Costa Mesa -- so see them here or not at all.)

Egyptians in tutus

Lacotte’s sets and costumes are often a hoot, but since the story represents a drug-induced hallucination, all those wildly anachronistic Egyptian tutus on view seem merely another antique pipe dream -- and a good reason to just say no. Finally, so much of the choreography remains tepid and predictable that you wish he’d attempted a genuine reconstruction using the notated Petipa choreography now in the Harvard Library.

The really, really dreadful music by Cesare Pugni doesn’t help.

Apart from some disorienting close-ups in the underwater corps passages, director Denis Caiozzi delivers a proficient video transcription, and the 24-page booklet will help anyone unable to follow the interviews with Lacotte (in French, no subtitles).

His most famous version of a lost ballet remains “La Sylphide,” based not on the 1836 ballet of the same name by August Bournonville (still in the repertory of the Royal Danish Ballet and other companies) but the original 1832 Parisian “Sylphide” by Filippo Taglioni to different music. TDK has issued it in a sleek, miscast Paris Opera Ballet performance available from Naxos of America at www.naxos.com.

Like “Pharaoh’s Daughter” and many other Romantic ballets, “La Sylphide” is about a man in love with an unattainable woman from a parallel sphere of existence.

The Bournonville version is more astute dramatically and, of course, it’s the real thing: dance dating from the 1830s. But the Lacotte/Taglioni edition could achieve genuine poignancy with more suitable leads.

Gifted with the most refined technique imaginable but little emotional investment in their roles, Aurelie Dupont and Mathieu Ganio turn the doomed lovers into passionless divertissement dancers.

Dupont makes a strangely worldly and even carnal sylph, and Ganio plays the ballet’s resolutely ordinary hero with the aristocratic manners of a nobleman in disguise. Forget tragedy; these performances are all about style.

Director Francois Rousillon misses some of the key actions of the ballet, but the central problem remains the expressive vapidity of the performance as a whole and the endless repetitions in the score by Jean-Madeleine Schneitzhoeffer.

In 1979, French choreographer Roland Petit reinvented a classic from another genre by turning Johann Strauss’ operetta “Die Fledermaus” into a two-act ballet titled “La Chauve-Souris,” “Il Pipistrello” or “The Bat,” depending where it was danced.

The story of a wife who forcibly domesticates her philandering husband, it now arrives on DVD in a generally winning performance by Italy’s La Scala Opera Ballet, again on TDK. (The box carries the French title, but expect to see nothing but Italian when the credits roll.)

She’s a party girl

For Americans, the performance provides an opportunity to see the superb Alessandra Ferri -- normally cast in such heavyweight dramatic roles as Giselle and Juliet in her guest appearances with American Ballet Theatre -- play flouncy, showgirly farce.

The strain sometimes shows, especially in director Tina Protasoni’s ultra-close-ups. But Ferri looks great in all her leggy party-wear and dances splendidly in her complex duets with the tireless Massimo Murru.

A veteran of the original cast, Luigi Bonino adds verve in the role of the ballet’s resident conspirator.

Petit’s fizzy, gesture-based style alienates some audiences, but he’s a natural: Clever, surprising ideas about movement and staging flow from his imagination, even in a resolutely minor work such as this.

Moreover, after hours and hours of Lacotte’s dutiful approximations of the past, it’s great to see genuinely creative choreography again -- new-minted ballet with plenty of precedent but essentially intent on making history rather than becoming a footnote to it.