Blast from the past.

Choreography by Balanchine Nonesuch. Two DVDs. 110 minutes each, $39.95 each.

Swan Lake. Bolshoi Ballet, 1957 Video Arts International; 80 minutes; $34.95.

Romeo and Juliet. Bolshoi Ballet, 1954 Video Arts International; 91 minutes; $34.95.

Spartacus. Bolshoi Ballet, 1977 Video Arts International; 92 minutes; $34.95

The Balanchine releases releases recall the glories of both the New York City Ballet in the incomparable decade preceding the choreographer's death in 1983 and the era when PBS' Dance in America was a major force in the cultural life of this country. Nonesuch has transferred four hour-long TV programs to DVD, all taped in 1977 in the Opryland studios in Nashville under the visionary direction of Merrill Brockway, and all looking infinitely crisper than they did in their old VHS formats.

The first DVD contains Tzigane, the Andante from Divertimento No. 15, The Four Temperaments (somewhat rechoreographed for video), excerpts from Jewels, and Stravinsky Violin Concerto. The second includes a revised Chaconne, Ballo della Regina, and Elegie, as well as Prodigal Son, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, and Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux--the latter three works commemorating Mikhail Baryshnikov's brief tenure at NYC Ballet. Suzanne Farrell, Peter Martins, and Karin von Aroldingen ale the standouts elsewhere.

The VAI releases, all original theatrical films, represent Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet at a time when the mere name of the company conjured for American audiences a vision of pyrotechnical heaven. The dancing here is truly the stuff of legend. Start with the film of Leonid Lavrovsky's Romeo and Juliet, the first version of the story to attain international renown, and marvel at tire sublime delicacy of Galina Ulanova, the youngest 44-year-old Juliet in ballet history. Maya Plisetskaya's tragic Odette and her smoldering Odile suffice to recommend the Swan Lake, despite the cuts and the cheesy audience reaction shots. Although Yuri Grigorovich's stirring Spartacus (here reissued in its original letterbox format) defines itself as Soviet-era kitsch writ large, the performances of Vladimir Vasiliev, Natalia Bessmertnova, Maris Liepa, and the unforgettable Nina Timofeyeva look like heroic portrayals danced on an epic scale. When will we or the Bolshoi--ever see their like again?

Envisioning Dance on Film and Video

Edited by Judy Mitoma, Elizabeth Zimmer, and Dale Ann Stieber. New York, Routledge, 2002. 376 pages, illus., with DVD. $95, clothbound; $40, paper.

These 53 articles on the problems, innovations, and resources in the field of dancemaking for the electronic media provide an enlightened primer for dance and film artists, as well as for leaders interested in both the accomplishments of fine past and the possibilities to come. You can learn how choreographers like William Forsythe, Bill T. Jones, Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, and Gene Kelly have bent film and tape to their own aesthetic ends. You can meditate on hoax a change of medium automatically alters the nature of the dance itself. You can survey the history and heartbreak of producing dance for television.

The caliber of the contributions varies disconcertingly, the omissions are startling (where, in the name of Terpsichore, is Fred Astaire?), but the inclusion of a DVD containing 40 excerpts of the works under discussion represents a landmark in dance education. It is wonderful to read Norton Owen's essay on Ted Shawn and then watch air excerpt from Kinetic Molpai; or read Philip Szporer's piece on independent dance films in Canada, then go though six of the movies he discusses. Most of the snippets are tantalizingly brief, and one suspects that the editors' wish list was compromised by rights problems, yet the door to more intense scrutiny and more accurate multimedia scholarship has at last been opened. Virginia Brooks' timeline, "A Century of Dance and Media," is the invaluable prologue.