Spanish film "Cinetica" will be featured at this year's Dance on Camera Festival screening at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

In New York, you had to pay for it. In Ann Arbor, it’s free. Fun, too.

So Saturday and Sunday, the place to be at 7 p.m. is the Helmut Stern Auditorium at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, where the U-M 9th annual Dance on Camera Festival unfolds.

The fare, as in previous years, is a well-curated selection of films from the Dance Films Association’s Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. The festival, the oldest of its type and the grandest, just finished up its 38th year in New York. U-M faculty members Terri Sarris and Peter Sparling, both well-known in the dance and video communities, have selected screendances from the U.S., Canada, Argentina, the Netherlands, Australia and the UK for Ann Arbor’s viewing pleasure. They include many of the prize-winning films from the NY festival.

“The screenings,” organizers Sarris and Sparling write, “celebrate the immediacy, energy, and mystery of dance as combined with the intimacy of film.”

And because the program’s films are short, the show is a little like Michigan weather, changing frequently. If you don’t like 1 film, the next one is just about to begin.

Programs are the same both evenings, and admission is free. For more information, contact tsarris@umich.edu or petespar@umich.edu. Below is a list of the films proposed as of press time:

"Entanglement Theory" - Richard James Allen, Karen Pearlman and Gary Hayes, Australia, 2009: 10 minutes. A busy dancing man takes a nap in two realities. His live-self dreams and his avatar-self dreams. Neither reality is quite so simple when they wake.

"She" - Kathy Rose, USA, 2009; 4 minutes.Insectoid fantasy adapted from a live performance into a mesmerizing short, using puppetry, collage and dance.

"Trash Dance" - Oliver Fergusson-Taylor, 2008, UK, 1 minute. Hip-hop deconstruction of trash heap.

"Beguine" - Nominated for Jury Prize for Best Short. Douwe Dijkstra, Netherlands, 2009, 4:44 minutes. One man's response to losing his lover, a surreal short based on a poem by Giza Ritschl.

"The Last Martini" - Nominated for Jury Prize for Best Short. Vickie Mendoza, USA, 2009; 6:16 minutes. Inspired by the noir films of the 1940s and 1950s and the posters that publicized them, "The Last Martini" plays out the rain-soaked reverie of a man whose psyche becomes tangled in a broken dance of passion and heartbreak.

"Danse Macabre" - Pedro Pires, Canada, 2009; 9 minues. The director, who worked with Robert Lepage on this stunning short, writes, "For a period of time, while we believe it to be perfectly still, lifeless flesh responds, stirs and contorts in a final macabre ballet. Are these spasms merely erratic motions or do they echo the chaotic twists and turns of a past life?" Winner of Toronto Film Festival 2009 Shorts Category.

"Jackie & Judy" - Phil Harder, USA, 2009; 4 minutes. An ode to Canadian animator Norman McLaren's “Pas de Deux.” The New York-based choreographers Rosanne Chamecki and Andrea Lerner choreographed and performed their silhouettes which become multiplied by their momentum.

"Little Ease [outside the box]" - Nominated for Jury Prize for Best Short. Ami Ipapo and Matt Tarr, USA, 2008, 6:53 minutes. A new take on a classic piece of choreography conceived in 1985 by extreme action pioneer Elizabeth Streb. Through the use of the camera, we remove obstacles to the conversation between performer, environment and witness, taking this inspiring and athletic movement out of its typical context. "Little Ease" trailer "Sunscreen Serenade" - Nominated for Jury Prize for Best Short. Kriota Willberg, USA, 2009, 5:30 minutes. This innovative homage to Busby Berkeley celebrates the merits of skin protection.

"Cinetica" - Nominated for Jury Prize for Best Short. Ana Cembrero, Spain, 2008; 25 minutes. In this emotional journey, this film shows through the body the ambiguity of a real and imaginary world where a woman searches, dances, fights or plays, without separating what is lived and what is dreamed.

"Chamame" - Silvina Szperling, Argentina, 2008; 9 minutes. A delirious, chameleon woman gets carried away by the Paraná River stream. She becomes one with the plants or the fish, and is at times a heroine and at times a victim, until she is rescued by a fisherman.

"Rapture" - Noemie Lafrance, USA, 2008; 6 minutes. Celebrating the opening of Frank Gehry’s Fisher Center at Bard College in 2008, dancers defy gravity and scale, rush up and down the hills of a metallic desert against the empty sky.

"Chloes" - Lea Fulton and Greg King, USA, 2009; 5 minutes. Two women negotiate the confines of a sleek, modern bus stop shelter on a gritty urban street at night.

"Three’s a Crowd" - Andy Wood, UK, 2007; 4:48 minutes. Shot in 1 continuous take, this film has the rough and ready hand-held camera improvising within the dance, an active participant in a carefree duet.

"Slip Cadence" - Corrie Befort USA, 2009. A dance film about Alzheimer's Disease featuring an extraordinarily duet embodying the erasure of memory — commissioned by the the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM).

Susan Isaacs Nisbett is a free-lance writer who covers classical music and dance for AnnArbor.com.