Archive for December, 2007
Unexpected Virtuosity and the Dancing Cockatiel
Jane Desmond, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Professor of Anthropology and of Gender and Women's Studies — December 6th, 2007|
Looking at videos listed under “dance contests” on YouTube, I expected to find a lot of teenagers showing off their moves in local contests. And I did--with lots of different types of dancing and different communities of audiences. In these settings, I imagined that technical virtuosity would take a back seat to style, panache, and plain old chutzpah. But, every once in a while, one of the contestants somewhere would make my jaw drop not just with their overall performance, but with [...]
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Slick Moves: Queer Fight Choreography in The Transporter
Zachary Dorsey, University of Texas at Austin — December 5th, 2007|
There’s something queer about Corey Yuen’s fight choreography in this scene from The Transporter (2002). By “queer,” I primarily refer to this choreography’s counternormativity – its imaginative, unusual, and critical approaches to the action genre’s same-sex brawl – and the political readings that such slick moves make possible.
Yuen’s inventive choice to add oil to the proceedings literally destabilizes this fight, and in so doing, upends conventional masculinity. Hard [...]
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You Can’t Stop the Beat – Dance: The Gen X Addiction
Kelli Kilgore, City of Virginia Beach — December 4th, 2007|
Dance has for years played second fiddle to other art forms on television. Until recently, dance was the background to musicians and singers. It was the filler on award shows and sketch comedy programs. Dance was not at the forefront and beamed into homes during primetime. It didn’t dominate the ratings wars because there weren’t programs that dared to approach it as the focus. That is until Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance grabbed hold of unsuspecting audiences and hasn [...]
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National Dance Styles and Global Television Formats
Dana Heller, Old Dominion University — December 3rd, 2007|
My clip, a feature performance from Dans Eder Misin, (Turkey’s adaptation of the popular franchise known in the U.S. as So You Think You Can Dance) signals the ways in which dance formats contribute to global television’s negotiations between national particulars and transnational media flows. Here, a demonstration of Flamenco technique climaxes with the appearance of a lone female Sufi dancer, whose entrance onto the stage is set against the fusion sounds of ambient trance. The performanc [...]
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Infinite Auditions: Dance as Data Set and Habit
Anna Beatrice Scott, University of California, Riverside; dancer performing in and around LA — December 7th, 2007