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Popular Dance as Archive: Re-imagining Keeps the Fosse Aesthetic Preserved
Abstract
Bob Fosse's instantly recognisable iconographic style and visual aesthetic has often been quoted in music videos, TV shows, and films featuring dance, such as videos by Paula Abdul, Michael Jackson, and Beyoncé. Using Fosse's screendance as a focal point for analysis, this essay seeks to illustrate the dynamics with which subsequent cultural capital of examples of screendance creates a multivocal archive that blends choreographic and screen histories. The idea that popular dance on screen creates an alternative form of archival records challenges the traditional notion of archive as a collection of artefacts by concentrating on works by various artists that quote, borrow and recycle previously available works of popular dance on screen. Quoting and referencing previous dance works, although problematic in terms of copyright and authorship, creates an active process for historical archiving that brings choreographic style and aesthetic to contemporary audiences adjusted to the current socio-political needs of the audience and technological possibilities. Artists reclaim and reformulate the existing repertory to their own political and economic needs therefore creating a regenerative ideology of the way popular dance re-interprets the dances for the given time, space, and context. The examples of dance videos discussed in this essay act as an interpretation of numerous references found in popular culture and therefore challenge the rigid tropes of dance creators as sole producers of dance material and the meanings communicated. Directing attention on to the dance and the corporealities of dancers further questions ideas of authorship as it recognises the bodily history as a fundamental part of web of meanings presented in dance.
... You, Y. H deeply analyzed dance teaching based on the flipped classroom teaching model, which promotes the students' motivation and independent learning ability cultivation and, at the same time, increases the communication and interaction between the teachers and students [13]. Milovanovi, D discussed the artistic expression of dance in movies and concluded that it is a positive way to record the art of dance by using film and video animation as a carrier, which is conducive to the dance aesthetics' dissemination and preservation [14]. Sparling, H. describes the current status of square dancing in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, as part of a traditional folk dance culture characterized by non-standardized movements, with a focus on performance concentration, musical features, and communication between dancers [15]. ...
In this paper, we use motion capture technology to collect typical movements of Chinese folk dances and establish three-dimensional character models with the characteristics of human motion continuity and bone length invariance to discriminate the trajectory of skeletal movements. Video is used to export the data of Chinese folk dance. Design methods for extracting folk music and dance features to form a model for creating dances. Suppressing the noise of the original dance music, improving the accuracy of the fundamental frequency extraction of the music signal, and manually scoring the dance creation generation program are all benefits of using the Chebyshev filter. We propose the teaching method of Chinese folk dance in online broadcasting mode and carry out teaching experiments to compare the cooperative learning effect and dance technique evaluation effect between traditional dance teaching method and online broadcasting video lecture teaching method. The dance creation and generation program proposed in this paper is able to achieve a dance movement similarity of 0.92, which is able to preserve the original dance posture of Chinese folk dances to a greater extent. The results of the technical evaluation show that the teaching effects of the two teaching methods present significant differences in the four methods of basic technique, pair cooperation, dance expression, and total score, i.e., P<0.05, which shows that the online live video explanation method is more suitable for the teaching of ethnic folk dance in the information age.
... Every excellent dance work requires dancers to have a solid dance foundation. Every dancer needs to improve their body coordination, flexibility, suppleness, and control of body strength through continuous training and efforts in skillful movement practice [13], and only by continuously optimizing the performance effect of dance movements can the charm of dance be fully demonstrated [14][15]. ...
In recent years, the expansive utilization of data mining techniques has revolutionized various fields, including the analysis of dance videos. This study leverages data mining to meticulously capture and analyze dance movements, thereby facilitating the enhancement and correction of dancers’ techniques. Within the scope of this research, images of dance movements extracted from videos are subjected to preprocessing, which involves grayscaling and thresholding, to prepare them for further analysis. Building on these processed images, this paper introduces a novel multi-feature dance action recognition approach. This method integrates several distinct features—directional gradient histogram features, optical flow directional histogram features, and audio features—employing a linear weighting scheme within a multi-core learning framework. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated through its performance on the FolkDance dance dataset, where it achieves a 3.5% increase in fusion accuracy over the traditional Dance Style Identification (DSI) method. Additionally, when compared with the Multi-Feature Learning-Combined (MFL-C) method, our approach shows an improvement of 0.6% in fusion accuracy. This research establishes a viable method for the recognition and classification of dance movements, laying a robust foundation for further inquiry and practical applications in this domain.
... Using a thematic analysis approach to examine the attitudes of boys and girls involved in dance learning in a dance studio, literature [10] challenges the traditional view of the feminization of dance, identifying reflections on the concept of dance under different genders. Literature [11] attempts to describe the representation of cultural capital in hybrid dance and screen histories, pointing out that dance on the screen creates an alternative form of archival record, bringing the possibility of dance aesthetics to contemporary audiences. Literature [12] examines Katherine Dunham's dance history and its digitization methods, using feminism and anti-racism in the digital humanities to unfold a critical hybrid approach and explore digital methods for dance archives. ...
Clarifying the aesthetic differences between Guangxi folk dance and ASEAN dance can promote the in-depth exchange of dance art and culture between the two. In this paper, the aesthetic characteristics of Guangxi folk dance and ASEAN dance are discussed, and the HRNet network is used as the basis, combined with the sequence multi-scale feature fusion and the PCA action gesture segmentation model for the action gesture estimation. The dataset was constructed according to different kinds of Guangxi folk dance and ASEAN dance, and the aesthetic differences between Guangxi folk dance and ASEAN dance in terms of intrinsic culture and extrinsic performance were analyzed using the dataset. The results show that on the inner culture, Guangxi folk dance is mainly based on traditional culture and folk customs. ASEAN dance is more influenced by religious culture, although it has differences, but the correlation coefficients of emotional expression and national custom are 0.963 and 0.954, respectively. On the outer manifestation, Guangxi folk dance has as many as 11 kinds of action dance forms, while ASEAN dance emphasizes more on The ASEAN dance emphasizes more on the “flat, taut, straight and standing” forms. The aesthetic differences between Guangxi folk dance and ASEAN dance can promote the exchange and integration of dance art and culture between the two and provide a good artistic foundation for the in-depth promotion of the Belt and Road.
This introductory chapter begins with a series of personal memories of dancing salsa, before exploring definitions of popular dance and the intimate entanglement of popular dance practices with both personal and collective dimensions of memory. The chapter then traces the role of popular dancing bodies in the development of ideas about cultural memory from the turn of the twentieth century to today. It argues that approaches to embodied memory have experienced several important shifts, including a turn towards performances as key sites of memory transmission, and the consideration of memory practices that emerged under the dehumanising conditions of colonisation, slavery and racial prejudice in the Atlantic world. The four clusters of research that structure the book are then outlined, positioning the contributors’ chapters in relation to each theme. The chapter concludes by putting the collection’s essays into dialogue with the history of theories of embodied cultural memory. Whereas Pierre Nora (Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Volume I: Conflict and Divisions. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) argued that embodied memory is depleted in modernity, the contributors to this collection make a strong case for popular dance as a key embodied site of cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, with the capacity to challenge hegemonic pasts and imagine new collective futures.
This concluding chapter begins with an account of American writer Deanne Stillman’s experience of watching televised coverage of the fall of Baghdad. Stillman remembered witnessing a line of Iraqi men singing and dancing to the song ‘Hotel California’ by the Eagles, the lyrics of which inspired the subtitle of this book. Stillman’s narrative of elusive memory throws into relief many of the themes this collection raises. Firstly, the essays demonstrate that popular dances can be co-opted to embody powerful visions of the past, but can also, sometimes simultaneously, offer practices of resistance to these dominant historiographic forces. Secondly, the apparent ease with which popular dance can be transmitted from body to body emerges as a source of intense pleasure and anxiety, both for popular dance practitioners and for nation-states. Thirdly, many of the contributors address the complex relationships between alternative memory practices, such as the archive and the repertoire (Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), a binary that they are keen to complicate. The chapter closes by considering what use will be made of the thoughts, feelings, desires and dances archived in this book, particularly in the contemporary contexts of populist nationalism, Black Lives Matter, Brexit and the global COVID-19 pandemic.
No abstract available.
This article was originally published by Parallel Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, as part of The International Journal of Screendance, Volume 1 (2010), Parallel Press. It is made available here with the kind permission of Parallel Press.
At first glance, the ease with which individuals can access and contribute to YouTube sets it in direct opposition to large corporate media outlets with their top-down mode of dissemination. However, in this paper, I argue that despite these seemingly democratic features, YouTube is better understood not as opposed to traditional corporate media but in the same genealogy as previous archival technologies and techniques. In archives, all content is flattened and has equal weight, so it is up to a curatorial authority to present content to audiences. While YouTube promises to democratize media, its lack of a centralized “curator” actually sets the stage for large media corporations to step into the curatorial role and decide how each object in YouTube’s archives will be presented to users. As these new “curators” step in, the competition for the time and attention of an audience – and therefore advertising revenue – will inevitably lessen as internet media becomes more and more oligarchical. This paper thus draws on political economic and historical critiques of museums, collections, and archives in order to connect the emergent technologies in YouTube with earlier attempts to organize and present information, objects, and images.
Starting from differences between reenactment and the more established practice of historical reconstruction, leading practitioners and theorists ask how the notion of preservation and representation associated with reconstruction is transformed by reenactment into historical experience and affective relation to the past in the present. In other terms: How does dance convey historical meaning through sensuous form? Danced reenactment poses the problem of history and historicity in relation to the troubled temporality inherent to dance itself. Ephemerality as the central trope of dance is hence displaced in favor of dance as a reiterative practice that confounds categories of chronological time and opens up a theoretical space of history that is often invisibilized by ideologies of immediacy traditionally attributed to dancing. The preponderance of the re- in contemporary choreographic creativity points to the operational value of reenactment in dance as synonymous with cultural production itself inasmuch as culture is engaged with the re-appropriation of signs, citationality, and intertextuality. Collectively, these chapters theorize choreographic reenactments' potential not only to re-arrange the relationship between past, present, and future, but also to destabilize singular authorship, to unleash choreographies' multiple meanings, to challenge the linearity of dance history, to rewrite and re-inscribe dance canons, and to the highlight the dancing body's agentive status as archive.
Choreographers have begun experimenting with artist-driven archives using digital technologies, exhibitions and installations, and live performance as a way to generate new work from their own archival materials and increase access to their body of work for audiences. This article focuses on three recent artist-driven archive projects by notable American choreographers Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Jennifer Monson. Drawing on interviews with the choreographers as well as on analyses of the three projects, I suggest that these projects' most important contribution is the idea that archives are not separate from a choreographer's body of work, but are indeed a part of his or her creative process and artistic production.
This book uses ethnographic research to examine the role of dance in the construction of identity in the distinctly British electronic dance music club culture of drum ’n’ bass. Dancing is revealed as the central way in which drum ’n’ bass clubbers construct and perform their identities, which are informed, although not defined, by the club culture’s histories. The intertextual and intercultural development of drum ’n’ bass musical and clubbing culture is shown to be represented in the dancing body, prompting a challenge to the discourse of cultural appropriation. Popular representations of identities are embodied by drum ’n’ bass clubbers through affective transmission via the popular screen, and in this process are re-valued in their embodiment. Using a socially orientated understanding of intertextuality, the popular dancing body is shown to be heterocorporeal: containing traces of prior meaning and logic yet replete with new meaning and significance.
Dance is one of the most public art forms; outside of improvisation, private practice and rehearsal, dance usually requires an audience. The creation and performance of dance takes place in liminal space, in the passage of time, within performers’ bodies, within the experiential exchange between the audience and the performers. The time-based phenomenology of dance is a challenge for dance archivists. It is also a challenge for the potential users of a dance archive to understand how or what from the experience of performed dance can be saved or preserved. In this article, I look at the ongoing debates in ballet and contemporary dance communities about the value of attempting to archive dance, resistance to attempts to essentialize their art-form into archivable formats and whether what the dance world recognizes as an archive is what the archive world would recognize as such.
Laurence Louppe once advanced the intriguing notion that the dancer is “the veritable avatar of Orpheus: he has no right to turn back on his course, lest he be denied the object of his quest” (Louppe 1994, 32). However, looking across the contemporary dance scene in Europe and the United States, one cannot escape the fact that dancers—contrary to Orpheus, contrary to Louppe's assertion—are increasingly turning back on their and dance history's tracks in order to find the “object of their quest.” Indeed, contemporary dancers and choreographers in the United States and Europe have in recent years been actively engaged in creating re-enactments of sometimes well-known, sometimes obscure, dance works of the twentieth century. Examples abound: we can think of Fabian Barba's Schwingende Landschaft (2008), an evening-length piece where the Ecuadorian choreographer returns to Mary Wigman's seven solo pieces created in 1929 and performed during Wigman's first U.S. tour in 1930; of Elliot Mercer returning in 2009 and 2010 to several of Simone Forti's Construction Pieces (1961/62), performing them at Washington Square Park in New York City; or Anne Collod's 2008 return to Anna Halprin's Parades and Changes (1965), among many other examples.
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