This innovative textbook applies basic dance history and theory to contemporary popular culture examples in order to examine our own ways of moving in—and through—culture.
By drawing on material relevant to students, Dance in US Popular Culture successfully introduces students to critical thinking around the most personal of terrain: our bodies and our identities. The book asks readers to think about:
- what embodied knowledge we carry with us and how we can understand history and society through that lens
- what stereotypes and accompanying expectations are embedded in performance, related to gender and/or race, for instance
- how such expectations are reinforced, negotiated, challenged, embraced, or rescripted by performers and audiences
- how readers articulate their own sense of complex identity within the constantly shifting landscape of popular culture, how this shapes an active sense of their everyday lives, and how this can act as a springboard towards dismantling systems of oppression
Through readings, questions, movement analyses, and assignment prompts that take students from computer to nightclub and beyond, Dance in US Popular Culture readers develop their own cultural sense of dance and the moving body’s sociopolitical importance while also determining how dance is fundamentally applicable to their own identity.
This is the ideal textbook for high school and undergraduate students of dance and dance studies in BA and BfA courses, as well as those studying popular culture from interdisciplinary perspectives including cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, theater and performance studies.
Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 license.
Introduction
Jennifer Atkins and Carlee Sachs-Krook
PART I: Popular Dance as Primary Source
1. Locating Popular Dance and Dance in Popular Culture
Jessica Ray Herzogenrath and Bhumi B. Patel
Chapter 1 Case Studies:
The Invented Choreographies of the Tomahawk Chop
Kellen Hoxworth
Popular Dance Cultural Masters
Ariyan Johnson
Do the Hustle: A Saturday Night Reclamation
Abdiel Jacobsen
Bestowing Blessings and Cultivating Community: Lion Dancing in Boston’s Chinatown
Casey Avaunt
~POP CULTURE CONVERSATION~
Watching from Another Place: Outside Perceptions of American Popular Culture
Elena Benthaus and Dara Milovanović
Chapter 1: Next Steps and Your Move!
2. Describing Dance, Writing Moving Worlds
Dahlia Li
Chapter 2 Case Studies:
In the Interest of Health and Cooperation: Women Dancing "The Most Important College Interests"
Jessica Ray Herzogenrath
Dammn Baby! Janet Jackson Dances Pop Feminism
Elizabeth Bergman
Resistance in Rhythm: The Shim Sham Shimmy
Kat Echevarría Richter
Queerness, Closure, and the Finale Dance in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Miya Shaffer
Chapter 2: Next Steps and Your Move!
PART II: Stereotypes and Spectatorship
3. Interpreting (Multi)racial Movements in Popular Dance
Miya Shaffer
Chapter 3 Case Studies:
From a Black Cinderella and Filipino Prince to a Career in Commercial Dance
Beverly Bautista
Plasticity in Lexus’s Black Panther Commercial: Choreographing Blackness as Other through Visual Echoing
Kelly Bowker
Riverdance: Remaking Race Natasha Casey
~POP CULTURE CONVERSATION~
The Law of the Jungle: A Conversation with Philip Ancheta about Performing for Walt Disney World
Chapter 3: Next Steps and Your Move!
4. Male Bodies and Masculinity in Popular Dance
Brandon Calleja Shaw
Chapter 4 Case Studies:
Macho Sensibilities: A Dancer’s Autoethnographic Journey
Yebel Gallegos
The Nicholas Brothers: Dancing Masculinity in Down Argentine Way (1940)
Pamela Krayenbuhl
Manning the Pit: Techniques of White Masculinity in Hardcore Punk Moshing
Emily Kaniuka
Bey-Boy: Channing Tatum, Mimesis, and a Test of Masculinity
Nicholas Richardson
Chapter 4: Next Steps and Your Move!
5. Femininity and Female Empowerment in Commercial Dance: Shakira and J. Lo at Super Bowl LIV
Juliet McMains
Chapter 5 Case Studies:
Subverting Body Ideals: Abject, Tactile Film Style in John Waters’s Hairspray
Roxanne Hearn
Dancing Girls and Dance Moms: Performing Femininity on the Dance Competition Stage
Karen Schupp
#Burberry and the Utility of Black Femininity
Ronya-Lee Anderson
Toying with Chauvinism: Parody in Anna Nikki’s Pole Classique Routine
Carlee Sachs-Krook
Chapter 5: Next Steps and Your Move!
6. Spectacle, the Gaze, and Agency in Popular Dance
Colleen T. Dunagan
Chapter 6 Case Studies:
"Fosse Meets Fetish": When Fosse Goes (Really) Kinky
Dara Milovanović
Spectacular Choreographies of Epic Proportions: Ricki Starr the Ballet-Dancing Wrestler
Laura Katz Rizzo
Sparkling Subversion
Catherine Cabeen
Belly Dance as Restaurant Entertainment
Somya Jatwani
~POP CULTURE CONVERSATION~
"Far Across the Distance": A Competition Judge’s Perspective from behind the Table
Madeline Kurtz
Chapter 6: Next Steps and Your Move!
PART III: Recognitions and Revisions
7. Popular Dance and Intersectionality
Jeremy Guyton and Celeste Landeros
Chapter 7 Case Studies:
Naomi Osaka’s Hafuness and Polycultural Dance Moves
Maïko Le Lay
"Como La Flor": Selena’s Animation of Intersectional Identity
Anabel Bordelon
Gender Is a Drag: Performing Hybridity on RuPaul’s Drag Race’s Maxi Challenge "Prancing with the Queens"
Bhumi B. Patel
~POP CULTURE CONVERSATION~
Resistance, Resilience, Overcoming a Lot: Talking with NaTonia Monét about Performing in the Broadway Musical Tina
Chapter 7: Next Steps and Your Move!
8. Mass Media and Social Circulations of Popular Dance
Laura H. C. Robinson
Chapter 8 Case Studies:
"They’re the Same Picture": Repetition as Political Critique in Instagram Dance Memes
Miya Shaffer
Legitimization and Circulation of Hip-Hop Dance in "Real Talk: Hip-Hop Education for Social Justice"
Maïko Le Lay
"Just Stick to the Flamenco": Flamenco on NBC’s World of Dance
Amy Schofield
Dancing Doctors and TikTok Meme-ography: Pointing Toward Female Health Access
Amanda Gabaldon
~POP CULTURE CONVERSATION~
Everybody has a Dream: Talking with Taz Loft about Filming In the Heights (2021).
Chapter 8: Next Steps and Your Move!
9. Close Up: Step-Touch in New Orleans Popular Dance
Rachel Carrico and Latanya D. Tigner
Chapter 9 Case Studies:
Is He… You Know…
Aaron C. Thomas
Meghan Trainor’s "All About That Bass": A White Girl’s Booty Anthem
Colleen T. Dunagan
B-Girl Sunny and the Performativity of the Gaze
Sherril Dodds
Varsity Spirit’s Propertied, White Settler Femininity
Sammy Roth
Chapter 9: Next Steps and Your Move!
10. The Politics of Popular Movements
Irvin Manuel Gonzalez
Chapter 10 Case Studies:
: Hollywood Chorus Girls Get PoliticalNew Deal Rhythm
Anna Waller
"To Exist is to Survive Unfair Choices": The OA and Queer Acts of Protest
Bhumi B. Patel
Orderly Chaos: Moshing in SLC Punk!
Adrian S. A. ManningAsserting Indigenous Agency Beyond Colonial Spatialities through RainbowGlitz’s Burlesque Love Medicine
Evangelina Macias
Chapter 10: Next Steps and Your Move!
11. Popularizing "American-ness"
Tria Blu Wakpa
Chapter 11 Case Studies:
Ballet at the Movies or Dancing on the Limits of American-ness: Thalia Zanou
Anna Leon
Romanticizing the Old South in the Confederate Pageant
Teresa Simone
Experimenting with Lady J: A Trans Take on Drag
J. Davenport, PhD
Welcome to America: Reassigning Appropriation through Choreography in Soft Power
Laura London Waringer
~POP CULTURE CONVERSATION~
closet disco: a meditation
Jeremy Guyton
Chapter 11: Next Steps and Your Move!
Biography
Jennifer Atkins is an associate professor of dance at Florida State University.
