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Dance on film has never been more relevant or compelling. From Saturday Night Fever, to Black Swan and the Step Up series of street dance movies, mainstream cinema has engaged, entertained and instructed generations of audiences, young and old, in the power of dance to shape bodies and desires. Music and sound are an indelible part of this phenomenon. Music not only motivates dance, it provides the affect that engages issues of sexuality, gender, ethnicity, power and pleasure, present in the dance. Cinematic dance inhabits a particular set of sound worlds, from the intimate to the epic, that place movement and music in a complex frame of engagement for all the senses.
This volume explores the relationships between movement, music and sound as they appear in a variety of screen dance genres. From a historical foundation, Movies, Moves & Music takes a multidisciplinary approach to the consideration of teen dance films, screen dance, pastiches and parodies of historic dance genres, and Bollywood musicals, ending with a phenomenological account of the interaction of the moving body with the world. Films considered include Centre Stage, Flashdance, Across The Universe, 1941, Honey, the Step Up films, and many more. This volume gets to the heart of the impact of screen dance on contemporary culture.
About the author
Mark Evans is Head of the School of Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is Series Editor for Genre, Music and Sound (Equinox Publishing) and is currently Editor for The International Encyclopedia of Film Music and Sound. He Co-Edits the international journal, Perfect Beat, and holds an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant to design an artistic and environmental map of the Shoalhaven basin in New South Wales. His upcoming books include Sounding Funny: Comedy, Cinema and Music (with Phillip Hayward) and Moves, Movies and Music: The Sound of Dance Films (with Mary Fogarty). Mary Fogarty is an Assistant Professor of Dance at York University, Canada. Her work about hip hop dance, film and video appears in the following anthologies: The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music (2015), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (2014), and Ageing and Youth Cultures (2012). She is the lead facilitator/lecturer for the Toronto B-Girl Movement, a community program that mentors girls and women in hip hop culture (www.keeprockinyou.com).
Summary
This volume investigates the relationship between movement and sound as it is revealed, manipulated and crafted in the dance film genre.
