Ballet... On the big screen it can be utterly compelling.
Think of dance on film, and maybe the faintly sinister, if compelling, Power and Pressburger film, The Red Shoes comes to mind, projecting Moira Shearer to prominence at a time when most young girls wanted to be ballerinas.
Or maybe the filmed performance of Romeo and Juliet, starring Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev which I remember seeing as a child. It was shown at the cinema as mainstream film, and even if the veiled eroticism of Fonteyn's draped costume was lost on this six-year-old, seeing ballet on the big screen fairly blew me away.
In truth, I haven't seen much filmed dance since then. But I'm wowed to see how it has been quietly evolving as a new art form which blends visual art and physical theatre.
One of the most successful in this emerging field is choreographer and film-maker, Isabel Rocamora. Her dance film Horizon of Exile has just picked up a best film award at the Dance theatre festival in Rotterdam.
Horizon to Exile got its UK premiere at the Watershed in Bristol this week, then moves on to Brighton on December 1.
Rocamora positions the dancers against a desert backdrop, their movements creating a series of sculptures. The film is essentially about cultural identity and exile - but, as in ballet, the forms and the movement convey the narrative.
Rocamora has a background as an anti-gravity artist, and this strong physical sense of circus-like tension runs through her work. The fluidity of the choreography also brings to mind snippets of early images of the free dancing pioneer, Isadora Duncan.
But outside the specialist dance circuit what chance has dance film of reaching a wider audience? Even on the small screen dance seems dependent on well-known names - and again, these tend to be from ballet.
After many years in the UK, Rocamora now lives in Barcelona. I asked her whether continental audiences have a better appreciation for dance on screen: "If you get your statistics from TV broadcast, then unfortunately even countries like France and Germany, who have benefited from an extraordinary cultural boom (in the 80s and up to the mid 90s) - and have channels like Arte TV who educate and nourish audiences and artists in one sweep! - are evidence that only ballet really gets the figures... "
On UK television, one of the successes was a programme featuring the physical dance company, DV8, whose 30-minute film The Cost of Living was garlanded with awards, and broadcast at prime time attracting respectable audience figures.
The film-makers who took such a risk (or so it possibly seems today) to bring a whole ballet performance to the big screen at least showed an appreciation for the appeal of figures projected large. In the way that the relationship between Fonteyn and Nureyev could be scrutinised in tenderness several feel high, the muscular and emotional tensions of Rocamora's dancers give the sense of gazing on vast public sculpture in a stark natural space.
The held positions of Horizon affords a quite different sensation of viewing the body in motion than, say, parkour - or free running which draws on expressive volition of a figure through an urbanscape. The New York-based Openended Group brought this extreme form to the UK recently (to the Jerwood Space and the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.
But do the parkour movers and their audience see this as an extreme sport - or a form of physical dance? Is it such a breathtaking leap?
