Dance on Camera Festival Unveils 2026 Film Line-Up

Dance on Camera and Symphony Space have unveiled the 54th edition of Dance on Camera Festival, running from February 6–9, 2026. In the second year of their partnership, the world’s longest-running dance festival will highlight aa program celebrating artistic legacy, global perspectives, and the future of dance on film.

Selected from nearly 250 submissions, Dance on Camera will feature 33 films from 12 countries, spanning intimate portraits, technological experimentation, and reflections on history, identity, and transformation. All films screen at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater. 

Continuing a partnership that began with the 2025 festival, Dance on Camera and Symphony Space will co-present the 2026 festival’s screenings in Symphony Space’s the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater, welcoming growing audiences and expanding opportunities for dialogue around dance on film. 

“The selected films reflect Dance on Camera’s enduring commitment to showcasing diverse artistic voices and dance styles, while also spotlighting technological innovation and the expressive potential of dance on screen,” said co-curator Michael Trusnovec.

Tickets for the 2026 Dance on Camera Festival go on sale January 9th, 2026. Tickets are $10 for Dance on Camera and Symphony Space members, $14 for seniors and students, and $17 for the General Public. All Access Passes are $99 for members, seniors, and the general public and $59 for students with valid ID.

Film Lineup

FEATURES

DuEls
Jonas Åkerlund, 2024, Norway, 60m

DuEls is a dance film by the renowned Swedish director Jonas Åkerlund, based on Nagelhus Schia Productions’ successful dance performance choreographed by Damien Jalet and Erna Omarsdottir, first presented at the Vigeland museum in Oslo in 2020. Through a series of short and visceral pieces in the form of a tour performance through the museum, the dance contributes to release the concentrated energy in Vigeland's iconic sculptures

Through Memory 
Tobin Del Cuore, 2025, USA, 65m

Through Memory explores the rich dance heritage of the 92nd Street Y (92NY) while chronicling acclaimed choreographer Aszure Barton's creative process with Limón Dance Company as they bring the new work “Join” to life, commissioned by 92NY. Filmed over two years, three compelling narratives intertwine: 92NY as a crucible of American Modern dance, the enduring legacy of Limón Dance Company, and Barton's intimate journey of artistic creation. By excavating layers of choreographic memory, the film illuminates how artistic legacies endure and transform, tracing the Limón Company's evolution from its groundbreaking origins to its vibrant contemporary practice.

Rojo Clavel (Red Carnation)
Roser Corella, 2024, Germany/Spain 85m
US Premiere

Rojo Clavel (Red Carnation) follows flamenco dancer Manuel Liñán on his journey to find freedom through art and self-expression. As he takes the stage, dance becomes a space where he explores identity, love, and the human body’s power to communicate. The film challenges traditional flamenco boundaries, blending them with personal authenticity and emotional depth. Through intimate performances, Rojo Clavel delves into the tension between tradition and individuality, revealing the vulnerability and strength that define Manuel’s artistic path. Interweaving past and present, it portrays dance as both rebellion and liberation—a universal language of connection, love, and resilience that transcends cultural borders and speaks directly to the human spirit.

About Face: Disrupting Ballet
Jennifer Lin, 2024, USA, 60m
New York Premiere

About Face spotlights Georgina Pazcoguin and Phil Chan as they challenge the dance world to rid ballet of Asian racial stereotypes and make it more inclusive. Gina, a soloist with the New York City Ballet, and Phil, an author and choreographer, launch the global Final Bow for Yellowface movement. They ask dancers to jettison offensive “yellowface” caricatures from ballets like The Nutcracker and La Bayadère. In real time, the Scottish Ballet updates its version of the Chinese dance to both high praise and stinging backlash. Phil takes on a bigger challenge of reimagining a full-length ballet: the problematic Bayadére. He boldly transports the story from ancient India to a Hollywood studio in the 1920s. About Face vividly shows the tension and risks the two artists endure as they push an art form, created for the entertainment of kings and queens hundreds of years ago, to be more relevant to diverse audiences today.

Last Dance At The Sundance Stompede
Graham Clayton-Chance, 2025, USA, 50m
New York Premiere

In November 2023, over 800 people from all over the world gathered in San Francisco to attend the Sundance Stompede, an LGBTQ+ country-western dance weekend with four days of workshops and exhibition performances across three venues. After 27 years this year is the final Stompede. As we journey into the final weekend, a film about country western dancing reveals deeper insights into the power of dance - not only to create community but to offer a profound healing of bodies and minds.

Mama Dancers
Jingqiu Guan & Yang Tao, 2025, USA, 50:30m
NY Premiere

Six diverse professional dancers navigate the dance of life as they balance the rhythms of motherhood and their demanding careers, unveiling the joys, struggles, and triumphs of pursuing their dreams.

An American in Paris
Vincente Minnelli, 1951, USA, 113m
75th Anniversary Screening

An American in Paris, winner of six Academy Awards including Best Picture, is a sparkling American musical romantic comedy film inspired by the 1928 jazz-influenced symphonic poem An American in Paris by George Gershwin. Starring the incomparable Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron in her film debut, Oscar Levant, Georges Guétary, and Nina Foch, the film is set in Paris and was directed by Vincente Minnelli from a script by Alan Jay Lerner. The music is by George Gershwin with lyrics by his brother Ira, with additional music by Johnny Green and Saul Chaplin, the music directors. In 1993 the film was selected for preservation by the United States Library of Congress in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It is ranked number nine among AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals.

SHORTS

A Snake in the Grass
Fu Le, 2025, France/India, 19:24m
US Premiere

In A Snake in the Grass, a woman lives in a traditional rural village where a construction program of new houses is taking place. She meets a worker and will escape with him at the risk of creating jealousy in the village. The film struggles with the social yoke about marriage and the danger of a forbidden love in South India, the land of snakes.

CIMETRE
Jacob Bonkian, Djibril Ouattara, Clotilde Rullaud Nacoulma, 2024, France, 6:46m
New York Premiere

In the bustling heart of Bobo-Dioulasso’s Saint-Étienne quarter, CIMETRE invites us into the six-metre social radius around a home—a space where tradition, modernity and community converge. From dawn’s first stirrings to night’s impassioned dances, this visual music-journey moves through a tapestry of artisans, merchants, children and dancers, capturing the collective pulse of everyday life turned poetic. A woman in red satin in a metal-tool garage, a dancer in white immersed in black ink — each image reveals the hidden beauty of the ordinary, and the tension of coexistence. With its fusion of rhythm, movement and frame, where sound and choreography breathe as one, CIMETRE asks: how can connection and compassion survive in an age of growing isolation? Transcending the format of a music video, it stands as both a love letter to the unseen beauty of everyday lives and a reminder that shared space, collective joy, and cultural memory are acts of quiet resistance.

Desire
Deny Ardianto, 2025, Indonesia, 8:28m
World Premiere

The human body is a living creature full of mysteries. Whether we realize it or not, humans often use their bodies to understand the world, convey their aspirations, and even function as instruments of political influence. Clad in a male body, Otniel Tasman felt he had succeeded in voicing his conscience through the art of Lengger, a traditional dance typical of Banyumas, Central Java, Indonesia, which is danced by men dressed as women. He represents his body as an open door, ready to accept all the consequences of the paradoxical world. He is prepared to live in the gray area between the traditions of masculinity and feminism, which he often calls "nyawiji", namely "when two entities become one". Through Lengger, Otniel Tasman reconstructs the relationship between performing arts, spirituality, and gender identity in understanding body elements and non-binary gender struggles through traditional, spiritual, and cultural approaches.

Hidden Steps
Kati Kallio & Laura Feodoroff, 2025, Finland, 13m
US Premiere

Laura is a Skolt Sámi woman who grew up outside the Sámi region. Through quadrille dance she reaches out to her unknown cultural heritage.

Loom Body
Jessica Nupen, 2025, South Africa, 5:28m
World Premiere

Woman and a machine, both creators of unexpected beauties and art. The labouring loom and the labouring body are trained, skilled, well-oiled, hard-working bodies of processing, churning, weaving and repeating. They work with maturity and learned precision and yet wear the marks of their crafts etched into their bodies.

Chair Deconstruction
Amanda Beane, 2024, USA, 8:52m 

Chair Deconstruction, a two-part dance piece exploring the drama and comedy of communal healing, pairs filmmaker Amanda Beane with the San Francisco Bay Area street dance ensemble Embodiment Project.

De Profvndis
Nina McNeely, 2024, USA, 3:43m

Performed by CLI Conservatory, De Profvndis transforms classical religious imagery into movement. The dancers traverse themes of ascension, vitality, and mortality, finding beauty in each transition. Through love, innocence, and ritual, the piece reveals the profound connection between spirit and flesh.

FIVE BRAHMS WALTZES IN THE MANNER OF Isadora Duncan
Grigory Dobrygin, 2025, United Kingdom, 9:43m
NY Premiere

Isadora Duncan was an American dancer and choreographer, largely considered as the mother of modern dance. Her free and fluid style broke with the conventions of ballet. When Frederick Ashton saw her dance in 1921, he was completely captivated. Inspired by Duncan’s dances to Brahms Waltzes, Ashton created this ballet on Lynn Seymour, which has now been reimagined as a new film. “Drawing inspiration from Isadora’s art and biography, and from Seymour’s phenomenal interpretation, our vision was to create a cinematic experience that made the presence of the camera invisible and minimized the number of editing cuts, allowing the viewer to immerse themselves fully in the brilliance of Ashton’s choreography. We sought to highlight the emotional depth and technical precision of the dance, letting Natalia Osipova’s artistry speak for itself.” – Grigory Dobrygin

RENDERING 
Artur Miranda and Philipe Noguchi, 2024, Brazil, 13m
US Premiere

Between the skin that senses and the screen that demands, identity is written and rewritten in the space of the image. The body approaches the lens, searching for confirmation, but finds itself continuously reshaped by its reflection. Visibility is no longer free; it is formatted, mediated, curated. The film moves through this terrain where appearance becomes a form of labor, and where the act of showing oneself turns into a daily choreography of adjustment. RENDERING unfolds as an inquiry into how the body becomes visible under conditions of algorithmic self-exposure. The selfie emerges as a micro-choreography of the self: rehearsed, repeated, adjusted, filtered. The body moves closer in order to exist, and in that effort, it is continually molded. It is not about appearing more; it is about what still insists when everything has already been shown.

The Ballad of a Home
Keely Song and Robert Machoian, 2025, USA, 8:27m
New York Premiere

Conversations spoken and unspoken unfold over a family dinner. Within their fragile resolutions and tension, other opportunities for connections quietly slip away.

The Year of the Green Snake
ioulex, 2025, USA, 4:42m 
US Premiere

Martha Graham Company’s principal dancer Xin Ying embodies the spirit of the snake in a fluid metamorphosis. Drawing on themes of rebirth and reinvention, the dichotomy of repulsion and seduction, Ying’s dance improvisations evoke the Snake-woman motif in Chinese folklore and the Sorceress Medea in Graham’s “Cave of the Heart.”

MMM
Joaquin Bear, 2024, USA, 9:39m

An understudy covets the role of a star in a theatrical unraveling of suspense and unexpected.

DYAD
Katherine Helen Fisher, 2025, USA, 6:23m
World Premiere

DYAD poetically explores the resilience and fragility of the human form set against the stark beauty of California's Mojave Desert towns. Directed by Katherine Helen Fisher with choreography by Allysen Hooks, the film follows two female dancers in evocative cycles of collision and symbiosis. Cinematographer Sinziana Velicescu emphasizes the aesthetics of emptiness and the disappearing sustainability of the landscape through minimalist visuals, sparse architecture, and expansive barren terrains. Meticulous editing and immersive sound design by John Walter, combined with Astrid Sonne’s tightly driven score, heighten the film's meditation on vulnerability and ephemerality. Through metaphors of mitosis, DYAD subtly reflects humanity’s impact on Earth's delicate ecosystems, offering a contemplative vision of connection and identity in the Anthropocene.

Água Viva
And Or Forever, year, USA, 5:20m
World Premiere

A seductive duet subverts virtuosity and sexuality to capture the fleeting, poetic spark of life. Acclaimed choreographer Jodi Melnick and collaborator Maya Lee-Parritz expand upon the namesake title text written by Clarice Lispector. 

O R I G I N S
Drea Cooper, 2024, USA, 39:30m
New York Premiere

O R I G I N S is a cinematic odyssey into the heart and mind of world-renowned choreographer Alonzo King, offering an intimate look at his creative process and his profound belief in the limitless potential of the human spirit. Through his visionary company, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, dance becomes more than movement—it is a language of wisdom and transformation. With breathtaking artistry, King and his dancers break physical, emotional, and cultural barriers, revealing how movement transcends boundaries to create a universal connection. More than a film about dance, O R I G I N S is a meditation on what it means to be human.

Carmen
Andrew Margetson, 2025, United Kingdom/Spain, 4:40m
New York Premiere

Dressed in a tracksuit, a young woman walks through the backstreets of Sevilla into a housing project. This is Carmen Aviles, young superstar of flamenco. She delivers a stunning performance. Accompanied by a guitarist and two ‘palmeras’ Carmen performs a scintillating solo dance – her feet echoing round the courtyard.

In Stillness and in Motion
Sarah Niemann & Dominic Miller, 2024, USA, 5:31m
New York Premiere

Amidst the fast paced rhythm of New York City, choreographer Olga Rabetskaya is forced to redefine her relationship with movement after a sudden dance-inflicted injury. In this short documentary, we delve into Olga’s psychological and emotional world as she faces the discomfort of doing nothing — for the first time in her life. What does it mean to slow down? To be still? In Stillness and in Motion is a meditative reflection on movement, identity, and connection. The film explores how stillness can bring clarity, awaken creativity, and reconnect us to our bodies.

RISA
Kate Weare and Jack Flame Sorokin, 2024, USA, 20m
New York Premiere

In this film portrait we look intimately at renowned dancer and master-teacher, Risa Steinberg, in her New York City apartment as she reflects on her prolific and ongoing lifetime in the dance world.

We are Cumbia, We are Family
Xavier Diaz, 2025, USA, 10:05m

Colombian dancer and educator Karla Florez preserves her Colombian roots and culture through movement, storytelling and family. This documentary follows Karla as she passes down the rhythms of Cumbia to her daughters, students and community, keeping the heartbeat of Colombia alive far from home.

BOLERO.S (short version)
Mehdi Kerkouche, 2025, France, 4:15m
New York Premiere

Ravel's Bolero, thanks to its universalitý and contagious energy, transcends generations and cultures. Conceived for dance, it continues to inspire artists. Mehdi Kerkouche brings us his version of BOLERO.S, choreographed in keeping with his inclusive and visual universe.

FRAMES
Claire Marshall, 2025, Australia, 12:23m
US Premiere

Frames explores the surveillance, scrutiny, and framing of women in a post-feminist context as it works to disaggregate the coherent body so that a whole person (a woman) becomes dissected, fragmented into a composite of datasets. Including notions of peer-surveillance and self-surveillance, Frames also draws on notions of the ‘Johari Window’ (Luft and Ingham) insofar as: - What we know about ourselves that is known to others. - What we know about ourselves that is unknown to others. - What we do not know about ourselves that is known to others. - What we do not know about ourselves that is unknown to others. Frames is presented in a 1:1 aspect (square) ratio with four frame-like windows unfolding simultaneously within the larger frame in a multiple point-of-view structure. Frames features dancer Lucy Hood, cinematography by Jason Millhouse and Carolyn Hanlon, and is choreographed, directed, and edited by Claire Marshall.

SCRY
Paul Flè, 2025, France, 4:35m
New York Premiere

To scry is to divine the future through a looking-glass. Divination, a visual ritual often forbidden, deemed dangerous, and presumed feminine. This short film SCRY follows two women, cocooned in their private world as they perform a transformative rite. The women’s demeanor begins stoic and measured, and little by little their restraint unravels under the pressure of conflicting power dynamics. Their composure fractures, boundaries blur. The women strain to remain connected, for they are ultimately two faces of the same Janus-bearing coin. The viewer witnesses their bodies intertwine and enmesh, until the line between self and other dissolves into ambiguity. SCRY is set in a 1926 Belgian Spiegeltent titled the “Magic Mirror,” housed in the Musée des Arts Forains in Bercy, Paris. This symmetrical mahogany space, endowed with mirrored surfaces, serves as both vessel and echo of the film’s central themes: the transformative potential of repetition, the power of union, and the perpetuity of ritual.

Spoken Movement Family Honour
Daniel Gurton, 2025, United Kingdom, 9:48m
New York Premiere

In a British-Ghanaian household bound by tradition and religion, a young girl lives under the oppressive control of her abusive father. At the family dinner table, heated arguments reveal the deep rift between them as they confront the scars of their shared history.

Stuck In The Middle
Aubyn Armstrong, 2025, USA, 4:25m

Stuck in the Middle is a nostalgic short dance film set in the early 1970s that follows four young girls stuck at home during a record-breaking heat wave. As boredom turns to creativity, they dance through their house with playful energy, transforming the ordinary into something extraordinary.

The Crossing
Mike Tyus, 2025, China, 13:55m
New York Premiere

At the meeting of four roads stands a house caught between worlds. Its halls echo with the last rites of mortals, each soul bound to a fragment of their ending. They circle endlessly, reliving the gestures that tether them to the living. The house itself is an altar, built from memory, shadow, and unfinished prayers. Here they wait, guardians and prisoners alike, until the gods decide their crossing.

the desire of a body toward the center of the earth
Tara Knight & Rebecca Salzer, 2025, USA, 6:25m
NY Premiere

Two dancers move toward connection while navigating the fundamental disorientation of being human.