A GOLDEN AGE OF DANCE PERFORMANCES : PBS TRACES ART FORM'S LEAPS FORWARD.

Byline: Donna Perlmutter Special to the Daily News

If you're a dyed-in-the-wool dance-watcher, tuning in tonight to ``A Renaissance Revisited'' will seem like a playback of big moments in the theater.

But if you somehow managed to be missing throughout the mid-'70s dance boom that lasted for a decade, then this 20th-anniversary special of Great Performances' ``Dance in America'' surely will spark belated interest in what the producers are rightly calling a golden era.

Who made it that? Pioneering choreographers such as George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Martha Graham, Jerome Robbins, Agnes de Mille, Kurt Jooss, Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris. And dancers who, in the last two decades, performed their works: Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Makarova and Judith Jamison, among many others.

Of course, you can imagine the ridiculously fast cutting required to cram so much into one short hour - not to mention how many of the hallmark performances never even made it to the mix.

So what the show provides is no more than a sampler, a kaleidoscope of images that would make good postage-stamp subjects. One of them features Baryshnikov dancing Balanchine's 1929 ``The Prodigal Son.'' Made in Paris for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, it was revived as a vehicle for the Russian heartthrob when he came to Mr. B.'s New York City Ballet shortly after his defection (from both the then-Soviet Union and later American Ballet Theater).

We can't know what the role's originator (Serge Lifar) was like, but Baryshnikov, who all but chews the scenery, also manages to devour space and defy gravity. The one enduring image of him - hanging in the air with one leg extended like an arrow and the other bent under it - qualifies for the postal department's endorsement.

Otherwise, the role was symbolic for him. Leaving the glitter of ABT stardom to become a low-paid acolyte at the House of Balanchine was looked upon as a noble sacrifice. At the finale (which you will not see), he crawls back to the bearded patriarch, who scoops the prodigal into his arms. A case of life imitating art.

But you won't glimpse Baryshnikov as a Cagney-esque song-and-dance man in Tharp's ``Push Comes to Shove,'' another worthy memento among many equally compelling ones.

There is, however, a whole spectrum of genres for those just trying to get their bearings: the German Expressionism of Jooss' ``The Green Table''; an anti-war satire preserved by the late Robert Joffrey (the two choreographers are shown talking in a two-second clip

); the Americana of de Mille's ``Rodeo'' (never mind that it was plagiarized from Eugene Loring); the soul-searching and agonized modernism of Graham's ``Clytemnestra.''

True, this collection of brief clips is ultimately too abbreviated to be arresting. But as an hour of tokens, it constitutes a capsule archive.

Never mind some of the hyper-elementary narrative (Joanne Woodward answers the question ``What is dance?''), the juxtapositions are startling. Like Paul Taylor's ``Rite of Spring,'' told as an entirely off-the-wall cartoon of a detective story, against Balanchine's kitschy ``Stars and Stripes,'' a ballet on pointe set to the Sousa march with a giant American flag as backdrop.

One thing both fans and newcomers will understand is that dance, which runs the gamut from storytelling to absolute abstraction, is an all-encompassing affair.

THE FACTS The show: ``A Renaissance Revisited.''

When: 9 tonight on KCET (Channel 28).

Running time: One hour.

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Photo

Photo: Mikhail Baryshnikov's athletic performance of ``TheProdigal Son'' is a picture-perfect moment in PBS' ``A Renaissance Revisited.''