Full Description
The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen sets the agenda for the study of dance in popular moving images - films, television shows, commercials, music videos, and YouTube - and offers new ways to understand the multi-layered meanings of the dancing body by engaging with methodologies from critical dance studies, performance studies, and film/media analysis. Through thorough engagement with these approaches, the chapters demonstrate how dance on the popular screen might be read and considered through bodies and choreographies in moving media.
Questions the contributors consider include: How do dance and choreography function within the filmic apparatus? What types of bodies are associated with specific dances and how does this affect how dance(s) is/are perceived in the everyday? How do the dancing bodies on screen negotiate power, access, and agency? How are multiple choreographies of identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation) set in motion through the narrative, dancing bodies, and/or dance style? What types of corporeal labors (dance training, choreographic skill, rehearsal, the constructed notion of "natural talent") are represented or ignored? What role does a specific film have in the genealogy of Hollywood dance film? How does the Hollywood dance film inform how dance operates in making cultural meanings?
Whether looking at Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's tap steps in Stormy Weather, or Baby's leap into Johnny Castle's arms in Dirty Dancing, or even Neo's backwards bend in The Matrix, the book's arguments offer powerful new scholarship on dance in the popular screen.
Contents
Introduction: Dance on Screen
Melissa Blanco Borelli
Screened Histories
1. An Australian in Paris: techno-choreographic bohemianism in Moulin Rouge!
Clare Parfitt-Brown
2. A Different Kind of Ballet: Rereading Dorothy Arzner's Dance Girl Dance
Mary Simonson
3. Communities of Practice: Active and Affective Viewing of Ballroom, the Charleston and the Twist on the Popular Screen
Alexandra Harlig
4. Disciplining Black Swan, Animalizing Ambition
Ariel Osterweis
5. Gene Kelly: The Original, Updated
Mary Fogarty
6. Appreciation - Appropriation - Assimilation: Stormy Weather and the Hollywood History of Black Dance
Susie Trenka
7. Impossible Moves: Early Hip Hop, B-Boying and Hollywood Production
Thomas DeFrantz
The Commercial Big Screen
8. Dirty Dancing: Dance, Class, and Race in the Pursuit of Womanhood
Colleen Dunagan and Roxane Fenton
9. Displace and Be Queen: Gender and Interculturalism in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004)
Cindy García
10. "It's Sort of 'Members Only'": Transgression and Body Politics in Save the Last Dance
Inna Arzumanova
11. "The White Girl in the Middle:" The Performativity of Race, Class, and Gender in Step Up 2: The Streets
Raquel Monroe
12. Affect-ive Moves: Violence, Space, and the Body in RIZE's krump dancing
Stephanie L. Batiste
13. A Taste of Honey: Choreographing Mulatta in the Hollywood Dance Film
Melissa Blanco Borelli
14. "He's doing his Superman thing again": Moving Bodies in The Matrix
Derek A. Burrill
The Music Video and Televisual Bodies
15. Girl Power, Real Politics: Dis/Respectability, Post-Raciality and the Politics of Inclusion
Takiyah Nur Amin
16. 'Sexiness' in disguise: Dancing 'Chinese-American' in Coco Lee's Hip Hop Tonight (2006)
Chih-Chieh Liu
17. Single Ladies, Plural: Racism, Scandal and Authenticity within the Multiplication of Online Discourses
Philippa Thomas
18. The Dance Factor: Hip Hop, Spectacle and Reality Television
Laura Robinson
19. Dance, Creating Commodity: The Rhetoric of So You Think You Can Dance
Alexis A. Weisbrod
Screening Nationhood
20. Hatchets and Hairbrushes: Dance, Gender, and Improvisational Ingenuity in Cold War Western Musicals
Kathaleen Boche
21. Cuba: Understanding the Revolution through Dance(d) Scenes
Victor Fowler (translated by Tom Phillips)
22. Shine Your Light on the World: The Utopian Bodies of Dave Chappelle's Block Party
Rosemary Candelario
3. Snake Dances and Marriageable Daughters: Defining Self and Nation in Bride and Prejudice
Amita Nijhawan
Cyber Screens
24. Monstrous Belonging: Performing 'Thriller' After 9/11
Harmony Bench
25. 'Dancing between the break beats': contemporary urban Indigenous thought and cultural expression through hip-hop
Karyn Recollet
26. Dancing With Myself: Dance Central, Choreography and Embodiment
Derek Burrill and Melissa Blanco Borelli
Conclusion
27. Values in Motion: Reflections on Popular Screen Dance
Sherril Dodds
