During the next two weekends, there’s an easy way to learn about the art of dance without coughing up the dough for a live performance: the Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th Street, 212-875-5600), taking place on January 14, 15, 21, and 22. If you don’t know a lot about dance, don’t be put off. You don’t have to – that’s the beauty of a film festival like this. For $10, you can see anything from a documentary about a famous couple who were leaders in modern dance to a series of short films in which dance was designed specifically for the camera (not the stage). The Dance on Camera Festival – now in its 33rd year – is run by the Dance Films Association, which was founded in 1956 with an eye toward keeping alive an illusory art form. “Preservation was on everyone’s mind because there was no footage of Isadora Duncan,” said the association’s artistic director, Deirdre Towers.

But nowadays, the festival is designed to offer a balance between the past and present. “The experimental films attract the people who are fascinated by photography,” she said. “Last year, we had a weekend of ballet films. So that was a ballet-specific audience. And at the end of the festival, we had film about how the Cuban rumba is alive and well in New Jersey. That attracted a Latino crowd.”

This year, the offerings are equally diverse. A program devoted to short films sponsored by Bravo! FACT, a Canadian group that gives grants to artists and filmmakers, is programmed for January 14 and 15. One film on the program, “Man’Dalas,” is devoted to the plight of a man trapped in a revolving door. Another, “Pretty Big Dig,” features tractors moving to a graceful, choreographed sequence. There are traditional shorts, too: “Dying Swan” is a performance of the short ballet by Michael Fokine, performed by Evelyn Hart.

Also showing this weekend (January 14) is the documentary “Carmen and Geoffery,” which is a tribute to modern dance pioneers Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffery Holder. Though the film is devoted to their lives, it becomes a sort of social history of blacks gaining acceptance in modern dance; these two extraordinary artists worked with everybody, African-American and otherwise.

Filmmaker Linda Atkinson, who studied drama at Yale with Ms. De Lavallade, found herself compelled to make the film. “They’re part of history,” she said.

The film traces Mr. Holder’s life from Trinadad (coincidentally, he was in the same elementary school as V.S. Naipaul) to Manhattan and Ms. De Lavallade’s passage from Hollywood to the New York stage, but there’s also quite a lot of dance footage included.

“We tried to stay in the dances a little bit, so you didn’t just get flashes of dances. They have enormous amounts of footage and we didn’t have time for it all,” Ms. Atkinson said, giving credit to her husband, Nicholas Doob, who served as the film’s editor. “Because they never stop doing stuff, we could just keep making the film forever. He [Mr. Doob] worked and worked so that it doesn’t seem like a list.”

In addition to these newer films, the festival programmers have also added classics like Michael Powell’s 1948 ballet tale “The Red Shoes.”

“We always have a retrospective to make sure the young filmmakers don’t think they’ve invented the form,” said Ms. Towers.

Older films, such as “The Red Shoes,” are peppered in according to external events; this film is being shown in honor of Powell’s 100th birthday. But the new films by up-and-coming artists are subject to a jury’s selection process. And when the final selections have been made, the entire festival travels around the country (often to colleges) and internationally, with some tailoring to the audience.

“The colleges and universities just want the experimental shorts,” said Ms. Towers. “They want to see what’s brewing in terms of how to choreograph for the camera and doing what you can’t do on stage.”

While the festival offers a way for film or artsy audiences to engage with dance in a familiar medium, sometimes it offers a way for dance audiences to learn more about the art of filmmaking. That’s especially true in the case of a fascinating movie that will be presented this weekend. “Late Premiere” describes the early film efforts of the Russian ballet dancer and teacher Alexander Shirayev (1867-1941). A teacher at the Mariinsky Theater and an assistant to Marius Petipa, Shirayev started recording choreography by drawing figures, then capturing them on film frame by frame. If his innovation had been accepted by the theater’s leadership, hours of original choreography from ballet’s heyday in Russia would have been preserved. The film is a fascinating look at one man’s very early, inventive uses of the camera to capture movement and create animation.

The whole idea of capturing movement on film is a tricky one. If you’ve ever watched a videotape of a stage dance performance, you know its like a shot of NyQuil. The dancers look tiny, the stage is a cavern, and no one seems to be doing very much. To make it look good, dances have to be put in a different setting and rearranged slightly, without losing their integrity.

One man who has worked long and hard to do so is Eliot Caplan, the resident filmmaker for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from the late 1970s and into the 1990s. He’s had films presented in Dance on Camera, most recently “Utango,” and is an advocate for the growth of the genre.

“Dance mostly exists for younger audiences on MTV. It only works on some kinetic level because there’s a cut every few seconds,” he told me in an interview.

Though the typical MTV choreography leaves much to be desired, all that cutting makes it look good. But still, there’s something worth exploring: “Dance needs to be taken into new areas.”

Mr. Caplan’s belief in that necessity is based on an insightful observation. “People will go to a bad movie on Monday night, and they’ll go to another movie on Wednesday,” he said. “But if people go to the theater and don’t like it, they won’t go back for two or three years.”

If film is such a forgiving medium, then indeed, let’s get more dance on film.

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While most charitable acts these days are headed toward the tsunami victims, there is still plenty of room for acts of generosity in other areas of the world. The Royal Ballet’s principal dancer Alina Cojocaru has provided a sterling example.

When the Romanian-born dancer recently visited her homeland, she went to see her dancer friends at the Opera Nationala din Bucuresti. She realized that the economic and political situation is so bad that the dancers don’t have the money to buy pointe shoes.

So she struck up an endorsement deal with Gaynor Minden, the ballet outfitting company that produces revolutionary pointe shoes. Though they’re all pink and satin on the outside, they’re constructed from the same materials as running shoes.

“She has been wearing our shoes for two or three years,” said company president Eliza Minden. “We had asked her if she was willing to do a spokesmodel deal. One day the phone rang.”

Ms. Cojocaru suggested that she would become the company’s model and appear in the ads, but instead of payment, would the company outfit the Romanian company with ballet shoes? Ms. Minden enthusiastically agreed and this month is sending over about 50 pairs of shoes. The exchange is also a charitable act on the party of Gaynor Minden, which is contributing “more than a little bit” to this effort.

If only professional athletes behaved this way.