An art of stolen glances

AIN’T nothin’ like the real thing, baby. That’s the cry of those in the arts world, arts journalism and educational dance who view the growing library of dance on DVD with disdain.

For them, the scale of live performances and an art based on three-dimensional movement in space can only be degraded by even the highest-tech DVD transcriptions of stage events. A flat, minuscule reduction of dance just isn’t dance, they say with a sneer. Can we really understand and appreciate the Sistine Chapel from a postcard?

Of course, these detractors do make an exception for anything conceived for celluloid or magnetic tape: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly and his umbrella, Moira Shearer and her red shoes, plus dance documentaries and all those experimental collaborations between choreographers and videographers that turn up each year in the Dance Camera West festival. Those are real films, cinema, an art in itself.

“Dance for Camera 2,” a sampling of seven short films, arrives this week from First Run Features ( www.firstrunfeatures.com). It includes pieces in which virtuoso dancing is matched by virtuoso camerawork (e.g., director Kathy Prosser’s “Horses Never Lie”), a sex-war duet that ends and depends on the kind of engulfing, realistic flood impossible in a stage piece (Reynir Lyngdal’s “Burst”), a solo that makes a child’s ordinary movement look heroic (Rosemary Lee’s “Boy”) and a sly parody of medical documentaries that incorporates dancers but is not essentially movement-driven (Mitchell Rose’s “Case Studies From the Groat Center for Sleep Disorders”).

These films are all excellent, and the dancing in them needs no apologies. But it would be hard to claim that the greatest dancers or choreographers of the age are represented. So they’re almost beside the point for the dance audience as a whole. And so is the argument that dance created or reinterpreted for the film or video camera is the only legitimate dance on DVD.

In any case, contradictions inevitably arise when this hard-line position is invoked. Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing excerpts from “Giselle” in “The Turning Point” and “Dancers” can be considered acceptable because those are feature films. But not Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing the complete “Giselle” as taped by PBS for the “Live From Lincoln Center” TV series and subsequently issued on home video -- that’s a “mere” record of a theatrical performance. So what if he’s great in it and Natalia Makarova (Giselle) even greater? Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing . . . .

The argument against reprocessed stage events might be reasonable if we lived in a world of infinite choices where dance is concerned: live dance versus DVD dance, live Baryshnikov versus video Baryshnikov. But even New Yorkers don’t live in that world, and in Los Angeles, our pleasure in dance and even our dance literacy are compromised by everything that we can’t see in the flesh. And the need to know more and especially see more of this art overrides the rather simplistic perceptual issues raised to demean DVD dance.

Although there’s a growing list of contemporary companies and choreographers showcased on DVD, I will focus here on ballet, because in America that art has been misrepresented and arguably stifled by tour presenters and venues focused on a short list of antique solid-gold titles.

You know the routine: A foreign company is told that if it builds an audience through one or two U.S. tours of “Swan Lake,” “Giselle” and possibly “Don Quixote” or “La Bayadere,” then it can dance its own original work, maybe. But by the time the company finds out that there will be no “then” and no “maybe,” the tour presenters are off offering another company the same shuck and jive.

Until that situation changes, we need dance on DVD to show us the true range of international ballet in the 21st century. Right now, the Paris Opera Ballet is widely regarded as the greatest classical ensemble anywhere, not only because of its pristine academic dancing but because of its mastery of the most idiosyncratic contemporary choreography. However, it tours once in a blue moon and then never in the repertory that most excites audiences in its home city -- at least never on Southland stages.

Its DVDs allow us to measure that repertory against what we know of such relatively familiar visitors as American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet. At one extreme are the mostly corrupt Paris editions of 19th century classics. But we can also view works by such major living choreographers as Mats Ek and John Neumeier commissioned by the Parisians.

What’s more, for those more interested in star dancers than repertory, there’s a whole world of virtuosity on DVD that you won’t often find at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion or the Orange County Performing ArtsCenter. For example, the greatest male star in international ballet during the past decade has arguably been Cuba’s Carlos Acosta, but he’s danced only once in Southern California -- a long time ago in a secondary role in the Houston Ballet “Dracula.” What he can do and why he’s become the embodiment of state-of-the-art classical prowess simply aren’t part of our consciousness. Unless, that is, we turn to DVD performances with England’s Royal Ballet or to YouTube (more on that institution shortly).

Similarly, Svetlana Zakharova (the Kirov Ballet’s gift to the Bolshoi) has never appeared in Southern California, so to keep up with her growing status as one of this generation’s reigning prima ballerinas, we must turn to DVD performances with her home company and with La Scala Ballet, where she has forged a memorable partnership with Roberto Bolle, another stellar Southland no-show (though that may change this year).

Digital enters the picture

The newest factor in the growth of video dance is technological: all those digital cameras no bigger than a credit card that can record an hour’s worth of acceptable video on a memory chip no bigger than a postage stamp. Many of them now feature optical stabilization, stereo sound and low-light clarity.

So when commercial DVD producers don’t provide performances by the current crop of bravura dancers or the rep buzzed about on every blog, dance fans now have the means as well as the incentive to do it themselves, posting their footage on YouTube or circulating their shoots via homemade DVDs.

It’s all illegal, of course -- photographing and circulating choreography and performances without permission. But it isn’t the same thing as duping a copy of “The Bourne Ultimatum” or “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” Those DVDS are available for sale and rental. Performances by the phenomenal Cuban defector Rolando Sarabia aren’t -- not aboveground -- and distributing unauthorized examples of his artistry takes nothing away from him.

Another new factor affecting video dance is the unstoppable proliferation of illegal YouTube postings (some of them very short-lived, though they’re around long enough to be duped for private collections). Their existence and popularity seem to be bending copyright issues, pointing toward a use-it-or-lose-it definition of publication rights. That definition would make a copyright owner’s failure-to-publish a kind of default, allowing a work to be up for grabs: everything out there from those tapes of CIA interrogations that Congress is seeking to any kind of stage performance when no official, authorized edition of the same material exists or will exist.

Two days ago, the dance division of the New York Public Library scheduled a three-way conversation between documentary filmmakers and a copyright attorney about the “fair use” provision of the copyright law -- and whether that provision can adequately serve the needs of film and video artists, educators, dancemakers, critics and audiences. But “fair use” may be less the issue than what might be called “fair access” when an art form is being inadequately documented.

It’s a complex situation, and I don’t want to seem to encourage illegal activity. But in the past, rock ‘n’ roll bootlegs added to the bedrock lore of the art, and some were eventually issued legitimately: evidence that commercial record producers should have been at those performances or sessions. Some important opera bootlegs (sound recordings, not videos) also gained legal status when rights were belatedly negotiated. And there are fans who have shot whole libraries of original-cast Broadway musicals, awaiting the day when they might be made available. In dance, piracy has multiplied as technology puts a video studio in anyone’s coat pocket and as commercial producers continue to have a blind spot when it comes to certain major developments.

You can argue, for instance, that the one and only innovation in international ballet since the turn of the century has been the rediscovery of authentic choreography by Marius Petipa through the use of antique ballet notation by the Kirov Ballet (Petipa’s company) and, more recently, a few others.

Petipa’s choreography for “The Sleeping Beauty” and his collaboration with Lev Ivanov (his assistant) on “Swan Lake” and “The Nutcracker” are the prime classics of the ballet repertory, along with Petipa’s “La Bayadere” and “Raymonda” and his adaptations of “Giselle,” “Le Corsaire” and a few others.

But these ballets have been continually revised and abridged in the 98 years since Petipa’s death, and only when the Kirov began a series of controversial reconstructions in the late 1990s did his complete, original movement texts become visible again to dancers, audiences, critics and ballet historians.

None of these groundbreaking reconstructions has ever been danced in Southern California, and none has yet been issued on DVD for the educational or home video market. So when commercial dance-video producers don’t step up to the plate, here’s your world of infinite choices: Be content with reading about these productions, fly to the handful of cities where the company performs them, or find a bootleg DVD -- of which there are many.

The latest reconstruction (premiered in April) is especially tantalizing because the ballet simply doesn’t exist in living memory. It’s a long mythological one-act titled “Le Reveil de Flore” (to music by Ricardo Drigo), dating from 1893 or ’94 (sources differ), midway between “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Raymonda.” D.I. Leshkov’s authoritative 1922 monograph on Petipa says “it was considered to be a masterpiece of ballet in the anacreontic style.”

“Anacreontic”? Think of Greek poems in praise of love and wine. And imagine a world of nymphs, satyrs, bacchants, fauns, gods of the woods and goddesses on pointe dancing in Petipa’s most sumptuous manner in re-creations of the 19th century sets and costumes.

Obviously, we would all feel infinitely happier (and/or less guilty) if we could order “Le Reveil de Flore” from Amazon. But we can’t. And even when experienced only on a bootleg DVD shot by a balletomane with plenty of guts and a steady hand, it’s enchanting, as close to time travel as we’re ever going to get. And face it: In the absence of a professional taping or a live performance, this contraband silver disc holds the essential experience of the work that we can obtain in no other way.

Yes, it’s a flat, minuscule reduction, but if we invest our imaginations in the viewing, it can be thrilling. We all learned very early in our lives how to interpret patterns of light projected onto a movie screen or through a television tube and construct whole worlds from them. It takes no greater perceptual leap to project ourselves into a “mere” transcription of a stage performance, becoming part of the audience for that event.

My parrot, Stevie, lives in a cage near the TV set and so has seen more dance than many Southland balletomanes -- though he much prefers car chases, parades, game shows, hurricanes and the Iraq war. Early on, he reacted to sounds from the TV (including his own voice on home movies) but not to images. Lately, however, he seems to know what he’s seeing and recognizes himself even with the sound turned off.

If he has learned to read pixels and get delight from them, maybe there’s hope for those who debunk dance on DVD.

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lewis.segal@latimes.com