A Century of Life in the City, at the Movies

The Australian singer-songwriter Hatchie has steadily built a little dream-pop world suspended between the synth music of Kylie Minogue and the washed-out guitars of the Cocteau Twins. Following stints in a few Brisbane indie bands, in 2017, Harriette Pilbeam uploaded the song “Try” to the website of the radio station Triple J under her family nickname, and then settled into a woozy shoegaze sound, working with her partner, Joe Agius, and the producer Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan). Her new album, “Liquorice,” is her most sensational; co-produced by Agius and Melina Duterte (who performs as Jay Som), the LP is feverish and intimate. Alongside Agius and the Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, Hatchie blows up her dazed songs of dysphoric romance to magnificent proportions.—Sheldon Pearce (Music Hall of Williamsburg; Feb. 7.)

Dance

This year’s Dance on Camera Festival showcases thirty-three films from twelve countries. “Rojo Clavel,” one of seven features, is a moving portrait of Manuel Liñan, a dancer who has reshaped the rigid gender tropes ingrained in flamenco in order to express his experience as a gay man. The first of three programs of shorts includes an extraordinary film by Grigory Dobrygin of Natalia Osipova dancing Frederick Ashton’s “Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan” in an empty studio. Shot closeup, with every muscle visible, Osipova is freedom and impulse personified. “Risa,” on a program entitled “Portraits,” offers a stylish and unsentimental glimpse into the inner world of the modern dancer and lifelong teacher Risa Steinberg.—Marina Harss (Symphony Space; Feb. 6-9.)

Art

Marcia Marcus’s paintings are strange, in the best way. She rendered people in muted tones and gray scale, so that they appear stuck in the past, and her subjects—often herself—look out with deadpan expressions, giving them an air of confrontation. She compressed space, too, making distances dissolve and physical relationships seem out of proportion. Marcus started painting in the nineteen-fifties. Over the decades, her work—including the twelve pieces in the show “Mirror Image”—fell in and out of fashion, but gained momentum again before she died, last year. Rightfully so. Works such as the exhibition’s titular self-portrait give figurative painting, whose recent dominance has begun to wear thin, a refresh: they treat the medium not as a form of testimonial but as an inventive conceptual project.—Jillian Steinhauer (Olney Gleason; through Feb. 14.)

Movies