TWO-CITY COMPANIES, A NEW TREND IN DANCE

The Joffrey Ballet is well along with its plans to become a bicoastal ballet company, based both in New York City, its home for 28 years, and in Los Angeles. The Cincinnati Ballet is negotiating to become the New Orleans City Ballet part of each year, and the Hartford and Fort Worth Ballets are working on a plan to co-produce the classics.

All this activity is evidence that dance troupes are more and more exploring the idea of multiple home bases as a potential solution for economic hard times. In a period of diminishing government support and increasing competition for private funds, dance companies are deciding that two home cities will give them the potential for two sources of financial support.

''It's beginning to look like a trend,'' says Victoria Uris, codirector with Jill Bahr of Uris-Bahr and Dancers, a modern-dance and ballet company in New York that is negotiating for a second home in Memphis.

Rachel Lampert and Dancers, who are performing through tomorrow at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, recently returned to New York after a 31-week residency in Little Rock, Ark. The company is hoping to establish a second home in Arkansas. Miss Lampert is working with a group of Little Rock businessmen and young dancers' parents to start with a 10-week residency there. What Is Gained?

New York can no longer support companies like theirs, Miss Lampert and Miss Uris maintain, because the competition for shrinking financial support is great and the costs of rehearsal facilities, in particular, are prohibitive.

What happens when a dance company establishes a second home? What are the gains and what are the liabilities? Miss Lampert and her eight-member modern-dance company arrived in Little Rock for a residency based at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in September 1981, and immediately established themselves as a lively addition to the cultural - and political - life of the Arkansas capital. Just before the dancers arrived, the State Legislature abruptly refused to approve $38,000 in state funds allocated to help finance the troupe's $113,000 residency, which was also supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arkansas Arts Council. Editorial Comments