Fingers go tap tap tap

EVER since DVD began replacing VHS as the preferred home-video format four or five years ago, the discs have delivered whole archives of data and insights about our favorite movies. We’ve been dazzled by “making of” featurettes, voice-over commentaries, cast interviews, deleted scenes, alternate endings, the lowdown on stunts and effects.

Perhaps for economic reasons, video dance projects have been slow to seize the opportunities for involvement and education that this technology allows. But happily, four recent releases go way beyond the norm, with special features that make them indispensable even if you own the VHS editions previously available of two of them.

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‘Tap’

Take “Tap,” the 1989 feature film in which the late Gregory Hines played an ex-con trying to get back into a dance career and, in the process, become a bridge between tap tradition and innovation. Besides a commentary by director Nick Castle and a documentary about how the film came to be made, the new Sony Pictures Home Entertainment DVD includes a tribute to Hines, a rundown of the so-called tap old-timers in the film and a segment called “What Tap Is” that just might be the best thing of its kind anywhere.

Like the other “Tap” extras, “What Tap Is” includes recent interviews with vintage hoofers Bunny Briggs, Jimmy Slyde, Henry LeTang and others along with current tap phenomenon Savion Glover (a teenager when he appeared in the film). Trading opinions and steps with equal dexterity, these masters take you deep into their art -- how it looks, how it feels, how it sounds. We shall not see their like again.

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‘Gaite Parisienne’

The new Video Arts International DVD of “Gaite Parisienne” is equally overloaded with goodies and fabled dancers. This is the once-legendary black-and-white film of Leonide Massine’s effervescent showpiece for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, shot illegally at performances from 1944 to 1954 by the late Victor Jessen, an obsessive amateur filmmaker who worked at one time for the L.A. Department of Water and Power. After sneaking his camera into theaters for a decade, he smuggled a tape recorder into a performance to record the Offenbach score and then edited the film to that accompaniment.

Ballet Russe stars Alexandra Danilova, Leon Danielian and Frederic Franklin are central to the romantic intrigues depicted in the work, and Franklin provides not only the DVD’s voice-over commentary but an interview as long as the ballet itself about interpretive changes to it over the years, Ballet Russe politics and Massine as man and artist. VAI also includes optional subtitles that identify major soloists in the corps and a documentary that supplies valuable information about Jessen’s career as ballet bootlegger. (He shot 24 complete dance works, including the Royal Ballet’s “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty.”)

Franklin, Massine and “Gaite Parisienne” also figure prominently in “Ballets Russes,” the recent feature-length documentary by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller about two companies with similar names and repertories battling for ballet supremacy starting in the 1930s. Unfortunately, the special features on the new Zeitgeist Films DVD edition aren’t all that special: mostly deleted scenes (some merely fragments) of interest primarily to students and historians. They don’t add context or deepen the viewing experience; they’re just more of the same. The film itself, however, remains a treasure.

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‘Amelia’

Los Angeles audiences first saw Edouard Lock’s plotless “Amelia” onstage in the UCLA Live series and on film in the brilliant and very different version Lock directed that was shown in the Dance Camera West series. The new Opus Arte DVD (available from Naxos of America) again finds the dancers in Lock’s La La La Human Steps company performing a furious fusion of modern dance and ballet to music by David Lang -- but that’s only the beginning.

Every few minutes, an on-screen graphic symbol invites the viewer to press the “Enter” button on the remote control to get backstage views of the production, many of them showing details of camera motion, the hairstyling and makeup for the dancers, and the big wraparound set.

There’s also Lock’s commentary track and a booklet with an essay by him and photos, plus a whole extra DVD offering La La La biographies, a photo gallery, music and video clips -- all celebrating the company’s 25th anniversary. As you might expect, the incomparable, indomitable Louise Lecavalier (Lock’s first muse) is prominent in the historical footage.

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‘Cursive II’

The least familiar work on these new DVDs is “Cursive II,” the middle section of a abstract trilogy created by Lin Hwai-min for his Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. Using music by John Cage, Lin based his choreography on his fascination with Chinese calligraphy: not so much the look of it, he says, as the energy he finds in the brushstrokes. It’s a perfect subject for him, since his body of work has always been more compelling for its visual beauty -- its sense of movement and spatial design -- than because of any physical power.

Infused with the techniques of Chinese meditation, his pieces can seem picture perfect but bloodless -- a problem camouflaged here by the extraordinary sensitivity of the camerawork and editing, supervised by director Ross MacGibbon.

Opus Arte comes up with another deluxe package: a booklet, plus two documentaries that last longer than the work itself. “Dragon Flying and Phoenix Rising” explores the origins and themes of the “Cursive” works, focusing on Part 2, while Reiner E. Moritz’s “Flying on the Ground” devotes an hour to an overview of Lin’s life and career, including excerpts from many of his earlier creations.

Although all four of these DVDs are generous with extras, there’s something important missing in three of them: the additional film or tape images that would have given us glimpses of other Gregory Hines vehicles besides “Tap,” other Victor Jessen films besides “Gaite Parisienne” and, most crucially, all the groundbreaking music-video projects for La La La Human Steps. They’re often talked about or listed on these discs but remain unseen. Only Lin gets a comprehensive career survey.

Including such footage would have required potentially troublesome and expensive legal clearances, but who cares? The lust for extras is insatiable. It’s not about preserving cultural history -- that’s a bonus -- but about wanting to know absolutely everything concerning what we love, wanting to possess a film, a company, a dance utterly.

Impossible, of course, but the need brands us all as hopeless Romantics, searching for a sense of ultimate completion not along some moonlit lake haunted by swans, sylphides or wilis but among aisles of plastic cases at our local Blockbuster.

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Segal is The Times’ dance critic.