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 these arguments, the chapters demonstrate how dance on the popular screen might be read and considered through the different bodies and choreographies being shown.
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 cultural meaning making?
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 a powerful corrective to the lack of accessible 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 Garcia ; 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. Defining 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
