Motion Pictures: Skipping the highlights reel

An anniversary can often be a time for looking back, which Terry Fox realized when assembling the program for the 10th annual “Motion Pictures” mini-fest of dance on film and video.

“This is our 10th year, so we could have just looked at the great stuff that we’ve shown already,” says Fox, executive director of Philadelphia Dance Projects. “But there’s a lot out there that just doesn’t get visibility. It’s not a genre that gets shown a lot.”

So to ring in its second decade, the festival, co-curated by Fox and PhillyCAM executive director Gretjen Clausing, will offer four diverse, new works over two nights. These include a program of short pieces, a documentary on dance pioneer Anna Halprin and Philly institution Group Motion, and a discussion with filmmaker Nadine Patterson, composer Lenny Seidman and choreographer Zane Booker about Patterson’s new mock-umentary, “Tango Macbeth.”

The final program, Charles Atlas’ documentary “Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime in Dance,” reflects on the groundbreaking company on the eve of its dissolution. “He’s an icon for us in modern dance,” Fox says of Cunningham, who died in 2009. “I’m hoping that people will come see it, lest we forget.”