DVD

Jacques d’Amboise: Portrait of a Great American Dancer (VAI). This is not a talking-heads documentary lightly sprinkled with fleeting performance snippets, but an anthology of long-lost TV appearances in which one of the foremost male ballet dancers of the Fifties and Sixties can be seen in uncut versions of George Balanchine’s Apollo and Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun (dancing opposite the justly legendary Tanaquil LeClercq). Also included are four pas de deux and a rarity, Lew Christensen’s Filling Station, one of the very first ballets on American themes, set to a witty score by Virgil Thomson. The moldering black-and-white kinescopes are a bit on the fuzzy side, but d’Amboise’s charm and athleticism come through with immediate and irresistible clarity (TT).