See it live Frederick Ashton’s The Dream on PBS BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

THE DREAM

Choreography by Frederick Ashton. Music by Felix Mendelssohn. Performed by American Ballet Theatre for Great Performances: Dance in America. Airs this Wednesday, April 21, at 9 p.m. on WGBH Channel 2.

Ballet’s treasure house of great works can be seen live by only a pathetically small audience. In most companies today, ballets, new or old, get done in a home season or two; maybe they go on tour to a limited number of cities. Then that’s it unless a revival gets put together down the line. Public television has played a primary role in resolving or at least alleviating this paradox.

Since the mid 1970s, the Great Performances and Dance in America series, under executive director Jac Venza, have brought repertory to a mass audience. These PBS productions have greatly enhanced our national dance awareness and, more than that, our literacy about specific ballets and modern dance works.

The PBS production of Frederick Ashton’s The Dream that premieres this Wednesday was filmed in performance at the Orange County Performing Arts Center last summer. American Ballet Theatre revived this gem of a ballet a couple of years ago, and it’s already disappeared from the company’s repertory.

Set in a shadowy forest in the Victorian era, Ashton’s one-act translation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was choreographed in 1964, just two years after George Balanchine’s much more extended and traditional version of the play. Ashton’s ballet is marvelously English. It was made for young dancers who became legendary stars of the Royal Ballet, Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell (who staged the ABT revival), and it’s imprinted with English wit and charm — dithery lovers and hearty pantomime bumpkins, an imperious, possibly parodistic fairy nobility, and Mendelssohn’s lilting music complete with treble voices crooning lullabies.

Trying to televise a live ballet performance has built-in drawbacks. As Venza admits in a contribution to the new dance-on-screen anthology Envisioning Dance (edited by Judy Mitoma and published by Routledge, with illustrations on an accompanying DVD), big ballets are expensive to transfer to a studio. Venza’s teams have developed some wonderful repertory renditions in the controlled studio situation, but trying to capture Swan Lake, or The Dream, straight through a performance in a theater is a challenge they haven’t surmounted yet.

Matthew Diamond, the director of the Dream telecast, admits in another essay in the book that the live-performance situation isn’t ideal for the camera. He approaches the problem assuming, I guess, that in the flat and static plane of a television screen, nothing moves by itself. His set-up for The Dream called for eight or so cameras positioned at various distances out front and to the sides of the stage. Constant cuts from one to another are meant to simulate movement by changing the viewer’s perspective.

In the PBS Dream, this process disrupts the flow of the dance itself. Throughout the hour-long ballet, the dance phrase is chopped into small pictures. You’ll be seeing the corps de ballet in full-stage view, then two measures later, half the corps, then one dancer close up, then another half of the corps from another angle. The video editing substitutes its own continuity for that of the choreography.

The solos, especially those of Ethan Stiefel as Oberon, suffer the least in this situation. Usually Stiefel is alone on stage, and just one or two cameras stay with him, keep his whole body in the frame, and allow us to appreciate his beautiful line and elevation. All the other dancing, including that of Titania (Alessandra Ferri), Puck (Herman Cornejo), and Bottom (Julio Bragado-Young), comes across less distinctly.

Diamond handles the storytelling as if it were separate from the dancing, as in a 19th-century ballet, and he cuts to whoever’s "acting." But Ashton doesn’t break up the story and the dancing that way. The comedy and the choreographic line are often shared by the battling or reconciling couples. If you don’t see them both, you lose reaction, you lose the dance phrase. Besides that, close-ups are unkind to ballet dancers performing for an audience. They reveal the dancers’ effort, magnify their small movement adjustments, and make caricature out of acting designed to read in the back of a theater.

Diamond’s cuts are unusually respectful of the music, but he makes them with a heavy hand. I mean that there’s metric musicality and then there’s another, far lighter musical notion that Ashton was pursuing. The Dream is just that, a fluid, confusing thing where stories overlap and identities keep changing. It’s about concealment and desire, and tenderness that underlies petulance. Mortals and fairies forgive, and finally, they sleep.

Ashton’s Dream is all illusion. No wonder it succumbs to the realism of "live" TV.