"Dance With Camera" at the Institute of Contemporary Art offers a number of possibilities, most of them imaginative, fascinating, and thoroughly engaging, even if you don't watch every presentation all the way through.

This combination exhibition and screening program investigates the influence of recording processes on the way dances are conceived, performed, and understood.

The camera not only modifies the spatial parameters of dance, but also creates new possibilities for expression through close-ups, quick-cutting, montage, and either stretching or compressing time.

As we see in the exhibition, the camera can even generate dance from ordinary movements by people who aren't trained dancers. Oliver Heering, one of 36 artists who contribute, does this with three short pieces in which video-editing produces the desired illusion.

Likewise, Flora Wiegmann, in her brief film Adaptive Lines, presents a prime example of dancing for the camera, her only audience for a series of movements executed outdoors.

Bruce Connor's 1966 film BREAKAWAY depicts singer-choreographer Antonia Christina Basilotta in a frenzied whirl of rapid, mesmerizing metamorphoses that could only be achieved through meticulous cutting and splicing.

There's a great deal to see and consider, some of it experimental and boundary-crossing, some of it more or less conventional.

In the first category, for instance, is a 20-minute video projection by Uri Tzaig that you can't miss because it's the size of a small billboard. This depicts a group of 10 dancers, all dressed in red jumpsuits, running within a defined area as they repeatedly toss and hand off a ball to one another.

This could either be a game inflected with dance movements or a dance choreographed to resemble a children's game of keep-away.

Among the more traditional offerings is Fractions I, a 1977 collaboration between filmmaker Charles Atlas and the late Merce Cunningham. This 33-minute video was made specifically to be recorded, but it's also an affecting performance, perhaps the most interesting specimen of modern dance in the exhibition.

Cunningham also appears in an ironic film by Tacita Dean in which he sits in a dance studio, nearly immobile, and reflected in a wall mirror with the artist who's filming him.

I say nearly immobile because, according to the gallery notes, he's actually "performing" John Cage's controversial composition 4'33. He moves slightly only at the transitions between the three parts of this noteless classic.

This is dancing? Well, it's not Busby Berkeley or Gene Kelly, that's for sure. Most people first experienced recorded dance at the movies, and "Dance With Camera" offers an extended schedule of film screenings at International House, 3701 Chestnut St., from October through March (full schedule at www.icaphila.org).

These screenings include such terpsichorean classics as Singin' in the Rain, All That Jazz and The Red Shoes.

Video cornucopia. Art films and videos are playing a major role at the ICA this season. Besides "Dance With Camera," a series called "Video Art: Replay" has opened with the first of three thematic installments that will run through next Aug. 1.

The first segment of 14 titles, just under way and called "Asking Not Telling," addresses the ambiguities of the documentary format. The second cluster of 10 projected works deals with animation, while the third will be concerned with comedy.

The inaugural video, Interkosmos by Jim Finn, establishes the agenda for the documentary portion. Mixing archival footage with dramatic interludes, Finn has concocted a narrative about a fictional East German space program.

It's sufficiently clever and piquantly satiric to capture your interest no matter where in the 71-minute running time you begin.

If you expect to see all or most everything in "Replay," you'll need to do some fancy dancing. Generally, each video will have a relatively short run, five days on average. Interkosmos, which opened Sept. 11, closes today. I only had time to sample it, but I would recommend it.

Kids of Survival. The story of how artist-teacher Tim Rollins and a group of South Bronx youngsters called K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) gained national and international acclaim is one of the art world's warmest and fuzziest.

In 1981, Rollins was commissioned by the principal of an intermediate school to devise a curriculum for students considered to be academically and emotionally "at risk" that would incorporate reading, writing, and art-making.

His solution was a hybrid form of painting based, literally, on literature. The students would draw or paint responses to their reading and discussing classic works such as The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick and Animal Farm. Then their images were superimposed on a grid of printed pages from these novels pasted to a canvas support.

During the program's 28-year history, three dozen students, mostly minorities, have participated. Rollins and K.O.S. have exhibited in just about every major international art venue of any significance, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta.

The ICA's exhibition of about 20 works can be viewed as a condensed retrospective. It concentrates on the 1980s and early '90s, when the group enjoyed its peak popularity and exposure.

It includes the quintessential K.O.S. work: a large conglomeration of golden trumpets alluding to Franz Kafka's incomplete novel Amerika, as well as another iconic work, The Scarlet Letter.

The most recent (2000) and most lyrical work is A Midsummer Night's Dream VI, executed in watercolor and fruit juices on pages from the Shakespeare comedy. The most poignant is Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, with its vertical cascade of colorful ribbons.

For K.O.S. partisans, the most interesting works might be two huge unstretched paintings from 1983, one based on Mary Shelley's Gothic novel Frankenstein, the other on Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Both are painted in a robust, cartoony style somewhat at odds with the elegance and emotional reserve, especially of "white paintings" such as Whiteness of the Whale II, that were created soon afterward.

Art: Camera Dancing

"Dance With Camera" and "Tim Rollins and K.O.S.: A History" continue at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 36th and Sansom Streets, through March 21. Part I of "Video Art: Replay" continues through Dec. 6. (Part II runs Jan. 15 to March 21 and Part III April 23 to Aug. 1.) Hours are noon to 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays and 11 a.m.

to 5 p.m. Saturdays

and Sundays. Free admission. Information, 215-898-7108 or www.icaphila.org.