Capturing the ephemeral art.

How do you transform a dynamic art form, performed by three-dimensional, breathless dancers, into a flattened gray rectangle? Not easily, it appears. The history of dance on film and later on video and television over the past seventy years has been one of promises and disappointments as well as challenges and accomplishments. For George Balanchine, writing in The Dance Encyclopedia in 1949, "The importance of ballet for motion pictures lies in the element of pure fantasy . . . It introduces a completely imaginative world whose form is of a plastic nature . . . It has its own laws, its own meaning, and cannot be explained by the usual criteria of logic."

Others saw the value of film quite differently--as documentation. For them, the fear was that a director's choice of camera angles might infringe on the democratic options of the viewer. Facial close-ups that mar choreographic integrity, emphasis on soloists that excludes the group, the diminished force of movement, and the lack of depth are among the most blatant problems created in moving dance from the stage to the screen.

Seventy years ago the main interest for readers of American Dancer (predecessor of Dance Magazine) was learning about job openings in movie musicals. In 1927 talkies were replacing the silent film, and with this new invention came tremendous possibilities for music and dance on film. Subsequently, commercial films, from Hollywood as well as from European and Asian centers, have dominated our impressions of dance on film. Beginning in the thirties and through the forties, the Hollywood successes of Fred Astaire arid Ginger Rogers, George Balanchine, Katherine Dunham, and Gene Kelly, among others, were broadly advertised and acknowledged, as was the Powell and Pressburger 1948 British film, The Red Shoes. Lesser known but utterly enchanting is Max Reinhardt's 1935 telling of A Midsummer Night's Dream for Warner Bros., with magical fairy scenes choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska.

Choreography was a vital component in the filmed versions of Broadway musicals, such as Oklahoma! (1955), which were staples of moviegoing in the fifties and sixties. In the seventies and eighties, dancer-choreographer-turned-director Herbert Ross focused on dancers's lives, both real and fictional, in The Turning Point (1977), Nijinsky (1980), and Dancers (1987). Infrequently, commercial films of great ballets have also dotted the landscape: the Bolshoi's Giselle with Galina Ulanova (1957), or New York City Ballet's version of George Balanchine's The Nutcracker (1993).

Fortunately, the work of artists without the resources of commercial enterprise have also been preserved on tape. Less known but equally valuable are many modern dance and ballet films that provide a glimpse of seminal artists in the United States prior to television. Films such as Doris Humphrey's Air for the G String (1934), Martha Graham's Lamentation (1943), and Jose Limon's The Moor's Pavane (1950) are excellent examples. In 1942 the First All-Dance Film Festival was held at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse in New York City. Leonide Massine, Katherine Dunham, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and a number of European and Russian dancers were represented. A dance film series held at Teachers College in 1963 by Dance Films, Inc., presented a much wider range of works, including experimental and anthropological subjects. The series revealed how many films had been made in the ensuing twenty-some years.

While many artists used film as a way of preserving and documenting their stage work, others, particularly Maya Deren, saw dance on film as a creative possibility, with the camera acting as choreographer. Testing the artistic potential of new technology in manipulations of time and space, as well as using negative and positive images, Deren's imagination extended the boundaries of dance on film in the forties and fifties. Her 1945 A Study in Choreography for the Camera was made using dancer Talley Beatty. Another experimental filmmaker focusing on the possibilities presented by the moving bodies of dancers and innovative film techniques was Canadian Norman McLaren.

There is also a wealth of film footage on dance from around the world captured by dance enthusiasts, dance ethnologists, and anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, from as early as the thirties. Often filmed for study purposes, these treasures, usually found in research libraries, allow the viewer the opportunity to experience dance as an integral part of a particular culture. These too are becoming accessible. The JVC Video Anthology of World Music and Dance, comprised of thirty videos, has made dance from our own and other cultures available for home viewing.

By the fifties, television was challenging the movies as the predominant "moving image." While most dance on television consisted of variety show ensembles transforming themselves into kaleidoscopic patterns for a bird's-eye shot, other programs, such as The Ed Sullivan Show, featured the occasional pas de deux. Several full-length ballets were shown on network television during prime time in the fifties, including Frederick Ashton's Cinderella in 1955 and Balanchine's Nutcracker (1958). "Man Who Dances," a 1968 Emmy Award-winning Bell Telephone Hour documentary on Edward Villella, offered an unsentimental view of a dancer's life.

Meanwhile, the public television was beginning its forays into the arts. A sixties series for National Educational Television, Dance: U.S.A., focused on many of the major choreographers and companies working in the country at that time. The producers associated with the show made a point of rendering the dances with the integrity of their theatrical essence.

The directors and producers of Public Broadcasting Series' Dance in America in the seventies were working in close collaboration with choreographers to document their works faithfully but appropriately for the television screen or to reimagine them, as Balanchine had envisioned many years earlier. This series has been responsible for unparalleled documentation of the major American dance companies and the preeminent choreographers of the seventies, eighties, and, to a lesser degree due to diminished financing, the nineties. Individual cities with cable channels have also added arts programs to their schedules. In the New York City area, Eye on Dance, a weekly interview series produced by Celia Ipiotis and Jeff Bush, has presented the work and ideas of all manner of people associated with dance.

Also in the sixties, the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library was established as an entity separate from the Music Collection. With support from Jerome Robbins, the collection established the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image, which sought to acquire, record, and maintain an archive of dance on film and video. It is presently the largest such archive, comprised of every manifestation of dance on film and tape. It has recently acquired copies of dance programs produced by the BBC in England. This and other smaller, like-minded libraries throughout the country are inestimable resources for those who want to see commercially unavailable material.

Affordable video equipment made its way into the lives of dance companies in the late sixties and early seventies. Easier to use than film, it became a vital part of day-to-day operations, recording the earliest rehearsals of a piece through to its finished performance. Just as earlier artists had been fascinated with film, so have many choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, and Bill T. Jones, chosen to incorporate video into their creative work. Others have used video as a point of departure. Capturing artists in the act of choreographing has been elevated to an art itself, perfectly exemplified in Elliot Caplan's documentaries on Cunningham.

Probably the most dramatic change moving image for dance lovers came with inexpensive VCRs and videotapes. In the fifties, it was possible for educational institutions to rent dance films of all kinds from various university film departments. By the seventies, videotapes of performances were becoming a marketplace commodity.

Today, advertisements in Dance Magazine offer videos for studying a particular technique or with a particular teacher, for learning about history, for viewing an unfamiliar form, and for watching a favorite choreographer's work. The Nikolais/Louis Foundation for Dance offers five videotapes of Alwin Nikolais's choreography in The World of Alwin Nikolais. Using library archives, researchers have found films that offer glimpses of dancers from the early years of the century--Loie Fuller manipulating yards of fabric or Anna Pavlova in a number of solos--and have included them in larger historical perspectives of the art made for television. The Dance Films Association publishes a dance film and video guide that lists "over 2,000 films and videos . . . available for either rent or sale." Tapes can be bought from independent producers, from book clubs, and from some video, stores.

Technology accelerates relentlessly. CD-ROMs and laserdiscs today, DVDs tomorrow. The picture becomes clearer, the sound brighter, the resources of the dance world more accessible. With holography, the three-dimensional image will be captured. The screen will no longer be flat and gray.