EVER since DVD began replacing VHS as the preferred home-video format four or five years ago, the discs have delivered whole archives of data and insights about our favorite movies. We've been dazzled by "making of" featurettes, voice-over commentaries, cast interviews, deleted scenes, alternate endings, the lowdown on stunts and effects.
Perhaps for economic reasons, video dance projects have been slow to seize the opportunities for involvement and education that this technology allows. But happily, four recent releases go way beyond the norm, with special features that make them indispensable even if you own the VHS editions previously available of two of them.
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'Tap'
Take "Tap," the 1989 feature film in which the late Gregory Hines played an ex-con trying to get back into a dance career and, in the process, become a bridge between tap tradition and innovation. Besides a commentary by director Nick Castle and a documentary about how the film came to be made, the new Sony Pictures Home Entertainment DVD includes a tribute to Hines, a rundown of the so-called tap old-timers in the film and a segment called "What Tap Is" that just might be the best thing of its kind anywhere.
Like the other "Tap" extras, "What Tap Is" includes recent interviews with vintage hoofers Bunny Briggs, Jimmy Slyde, Henry LeTang and others along with current tap phenomenon Savion Glover (a teenager when he appeared in the film). Trading opinions and steps with equal dexterity, these masters take you deep into their art -- how it looks, how it feels, how it sounds. We shall not see their like again.
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'Gaite Parisienne'
The new Video Arts International DVD of "Gaite Parisienne" is equally overloaded with goodies and fabled dancers. This is the once-legendary black-and-white film of Leonide Massine's effervescent showpiece for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, shot illegally at performances from 1944 to 1954 by the late Victor Jessen, an obsessive amateur filmmaker who worked at one time for the L.A. Department of Water and Power. After sneaking his camera into theaters for a decade, he smuggled a tape recorder into a performance to record the Offenbach score and then edited the film to that accompaniment.
