As a new DOXA program of shorts demonstrates, dance filmmakers have moved a long way from just shooting a performer moving on-stage. Their movies have become a separate art form, contrasting and complementing the original work and taking it to a new level.

The trio of shorts Everything Is Performative acts like a kind of mini showcase of just how different a dance film can look these days. One, called “Voices of Finance”, uses a Guardian business blog for text and sets its dancers spinning and jumping amid London’s corporate highrises. “Sarah Winchester, Ghost Opera” imagines an opera-ballet that never happened—cutting between a historical tale, a tutu’d dancer in tormented solo, and a director working with a choir.

And “Ovis Aries”? Well, at first it might not even look like a dance film. Close your eyes, and just listen to Canadian director Harry Cepka’s new documentary and you might think you’re hearing the soothing bleating of lambs, their neck bells echoing over a field. Open them and you’ll realize you’re watching Montreal’s Corpus dance company, a troupe known in Vancouver from Dancing on the Edge’s Dusk Dances. In Sylvie Bouchard and David Danzon’s surreal, carefully studied Les Moutons, the performers become sheep, intricately mimicking their every move—even believably re-creating milking and shearing—in front of an outdoor crowd.

Cepka shoots them not in the long takes and wide shots of traditional dance movies but often in fascinating closeup.

“Unlike a lot of theatre and dance shows, it was so detailed,” he tells the Straight from New York City, where he is finishing up an MFA. “It was the face and the effort that goes into every minute moment. You have to be up close to see the rigour of the performance. And with film you can zoom in and see them blink or masticate their food.”

For Cepka, his film also crosses into other genres. “I thought it was very funny, too, because there’s a bit of a nature documentary to it as well. And then there is the deadpan comedy. I cut out as much of the laughter [from the audience] as possible to get that.”

The lush, verdant Norwegian setting was just a bonus, Cepka admits. “I didn’t know it would be at the top of a mountain, where it had just rained,” he says of the shows at the Bergen International Festival.

The added benefit of “Ovis Aries” is that it reveals to local audiences just how global our Canadian dance artists’ reach is these days—and with work that’s thrillingly inviting to nondance crowds.

One of Cepka’s biggest kicks has been watching audiences’ varied reactions to the bizarre but mindblowingly naturalistic sheep show on view. The Norwegian children in the audience buzz with melodious pleasure throughout his film. And the adults? “It’s either, ‘Wow, this is amazing’ or they’re questioning what I’ve been doing with my time,” Cepka says with a laugh. “It’s one of those things: you either get it or your don’t.”

His deadpan outdoor show could not run in bigger contrast to the other two works on the program—in form or content. Dutch director Clara von Gool’s “Voices of Finance” speaks to the inhuman pressure cooker of world banking, drawing from a real newspaper blog and using intertitles to announce dancers’ “occupations”—from a “broker” getting dressed in the morning (between grand jêtés in his ultramodern condo) to an “investment banker” banging and spiralling around a rising glass elevator. In another cool local connection, the latter dancer is Medhi Walerski, a Nederlands Dans Theater artist who’s a favourite guest choreographer at Ballet BC and who has also created a couple of other vignettes for the film.

Its spoken text, zippy editing, and urban sheen feel a world away from the dreamy, experimental Ghost Opera, set in Paris’s Palais Garnier and Opera Bastille and mixing dance, historical intertitles, drawings, and “rehearsal” scenes.

Together, the three stylistically different works show the untapped potential of celluloid to capture dance in new ways.

“I think dance and film are complementary forms and I think the film can, if not elevate the art, give it a new perspective,” Cepka says. “Because dance is live and it disappears, it’s great to have a record for it—and it would be great for more choreographers to get into it.”