Rituals And Rhythms

By John Elson

SHOW: DANCING

TIME: FOUR MONDAYS STARTING MAY 3, 9 P.M. EDT; PBS

THE BOTTOM LINE: Multiculturalism with a vengeance dominates an ambitious survey of the body in motion.

If all art aspires to the condition of music, as Walter Pater wrote, then all movement and gesture surely aspire to the condition of dance. The infant in its crib, rhythmically waving arms and legs, is, in a sense, a baby Balanchine. A shaman of Nigeria's Yoruba tribe summoning ancestral spirits to the beat of throbbing drums and Mikhail Baryshnikov executing a triple tour en l'air are both paradigms of poetry in action.

The universality and diversity of dance is the theme of this ambitious but conceptually skewed eight-part series produced by New York City's WNET in cooperation with RM Arts and BBC-TV. Dancing has its pleasures, both small and large. In one charming vignette, a great-bellied guru beats time as he teaches a tiny girl some basic gestures of Indian classical dance. Much of a segment on stage performance compares Bando Tamasaburo, a Kabuki star who excels in female roles, with Larissa Lezhnina, a dazzling young ballerina of Russia's Kirov Ballet. In surprisingly complementary ways, their performances -- his in a dance-drama called Dojoji, hers in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty -- embody Eastern and Western ideals of womanhood.

And then there is that inimitable chatterbox Twyla Tharp, who lightens a dry, cluttered program on postmodern dance. She talks up a storm about her work and, in rehearsal, cows a dancer and his ballerina into showing more feeling for each other. How did she get into choreography? "Nobody else would tolerate me so I had to make up my own dances," she explains. And so the camera catches her alone in a studio, bulky in practice clothes and noshing on a carrot, as she starts designing some steps to a Sousa march. Delightful.

Alas, Tharp, like almost every other dancer in the program, is shown in disconnected snippets, often without explanatory context. The reason is that the series' interest in dance is less aesthetic than anthropological. The message seems to be that all peoples dance, ergo all dancing is equal -- even though some tribal rites, no matter how sacred they may be, are about as interesting to watch as the growth of bamboo. What's more, Dancing is multicultural with a vengeance, meaning that the producers think it insufficient to examine the central role that dance plays in primitive societies; they must also slam-dunk colonialism and Christianity for trying to suppress native cultures. Missionaries have much to answer for, but it is surely not unreasonable that they would seek to convert tribes from religions that encouraged cannibalism (as in Polynesia) or the ritual mutilation of female sex organs (as in much of black Africa).

Public TV series that aim to educate often benefit by having a knowledgeable guide at the controls -- witness wine writer Hugh Johnson, who was host of Vintage, or art critic Robert Hughes, cicerone of The Shock of the New. The narrator of Dancing is Raoul Trujillo, a marginally telegenic modern dancer- choreographer who reads his lines with unconvincing passion. Under a more pungent guide, Dancing could have skipped a lot of repetitive propaganda. By series' end, viewers will have heard the word culture so often that some may be tempted, like Hermann Goring, to reach for their revolvers.

Trimming rhetorical fat might have allowed Dancing to note traditions that go uncelebrated: Irish step dancing, for example, or the ritual whirling of Islam's Sufi dervishes. Those peoples may not fit the series' theses, but they've got rhythm too.