DANCE VIDEO PROJECT: MORE NEWS AT 11.

DENNIS DIAMOND is in the midst of an experiment. If it works, we'll all be seeing more dance on our nightly TV news broadcasts.

More? Make that any, right? It's not news that dance, despite its strong visual appeal, gets little coverage. Movies, on the other hand, see plenty of airtime, and a common practice among movie studios--sending TV stations prepared clips to run with their entertainment segments--inspired Diamond's pilot project Dance/Video/News.

Diamond videotaped opening-day dress rehearsals for six New York-based companies performing this spring at Manhattan's Joyce Theater. After every rehearsal, he edited footage down to two-minute, broadcast-quality videos, duplicated them, and personally delivered them to more than twenty-five local TV stations and cable programs--a process that typically took one day per dance company. Stations then had timely footage on hand to run in their weekend highlights segments, entertainment news, or even as visuals for their closing credits. Tapes also included an accompanying press packet and performance information at the top of the reel, lightening the workload considerably for TV producers.

Diamond--a thirty-year dance video veteran, former director's assistant for PBS's "Dance in America" series, and brother of Dancemaker documentarist Matthew Diamond, figured the dance companies would have better luck coming to the stations, rather than trying to get stations to come to them. What typically happens when dance companies try to entice TV crews to their dress rehearsals, he said, is that they'll say, "Yeah, we're interested--oops, the President is coming to town." Videotapes make life easier for the stations, especially those with limited film crews.

The project, proposed by Diamond and consultant Robert Yesselman, and funded by a $26,000 grant from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, "exposes producers to the fact that dance is a visual medium," Diamond said. It costs the companies and the stations nothing, and can be used several times over. The dance companies retain ownership of the video, which they can send out to TV stations in every city they tour: Diamond copies the tape in formats compatible with American and European broadcasting systems. And as Foundation program officer Darcy Hector pointed out, companies may have even greater chances of getting their footage aired outside of New York, where they don't have to compete with jam-packed news days. "It seemed like a brilliant, cost-effective idea," said Hector of the proposal.

Diamond thinks the project, which he believes is without precedent, can be expanded to include more companies. The companies involved in the pilot project included Donald Byrd/The Group, Ballet Tech, Trisha Brown Company, Monte/Brown Dance, Jennifer Muller/The Works, and the Parsons Dance Company.