TV DANCE REVIEWS : BALLETS TROCKADERO ON KCET TONIGHT

For veteran Trock-watchers, a 4-year-old tape of excerpts from overfamiliar Ballets Trockadero choreographies is hardly a major TV event--even without the directing, editing, narrating and even titling gaucheries that are rampant in the Franco-Canadian co-production to be telecast tonight at 10 on KCET.

Shot at the Olympia Bruno Coquatrix in Paris, “Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo” features brief but illuminating rehearsal and interview segments with members of the all-male company--among them a talk with the now-deceased William Zamora, who dances a memorably decrepit Taglioni in “Le Pas de Quatre.”

Sequences from the Trockadero parodies of “Spring Waters,” “Marche Slav,” “Swan Lake” and “Pharaoh’s Daughter” are also included, executed as usual with relentless vivacity and overwhelming pseudo-classical glamour.

Unfortunately, director Dirk Sanders uses freeze-frames, superimpositions, slow motion and other video effects to jazz up the dance footage. Along with the program notes read during the ballets and the grotesque close-ups, these intrusions serve only to turn what is endearingly sly on stage into something crude and increasingly tedious on screen.