Notes
Introduction
Passe-Partout, iPad app, concept and design by Abbott Miller, choreography by Justin Peck, performance by Justin Peck and Daniel Ulbricht, video direction by Ben Louis Nicholas, music by Aaron Severini, produced by 2wice Arts Foundation.
Gia Kourlas, “You’re the Choreographer, an iPad’s Your Stage,” New York Times, June 25, 2014.
Kourlas.
Kourlas.
See esp. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Ramsay Burt, Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre Dance and the Commons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 19.
See, e.g., Judith Hamera, Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City (Houndsmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2011), 250.
Hardt and Negri, xviii.
Hardt and Negri, ix.
Hardt and Negri note, “One primary effect of globalization, however, is the creation of a common world, a world that, for better or worse, we all share, a world that has no ‘outside’” (vii).
Kimberly Christen, “Gone Digital: Aboriginal Remix and the Cultural Commons,” International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (2005): 315.
Christen, 336.
Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 20.
Martin, 141.
Kimberly Christen, “Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness,” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 2874. Her emphasis.
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998). Jacqueline Shea Murphy, The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Jane Desmond, “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s ‘Radha’ of 1906,” Signs 17, no. 1 (1991): 28–49. Priya Srinivasan, “The Bodies beneath the Smoke or What’s Behind the Cigarette Poster: Unearthing Kinesthetic Connections in American Dance History,” Discourses in Dance 4, no. 1 (2007): 7–48.
Susan Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
For a critical account of this phenomenon in the realm of popular dance, see Thomas F. DeFrantz, “Unchecked Popularity: Neoliberal Circulations of Black Dance,” in Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, ed. Lara Nielson and Patricia Ybarra, 128–40 (New York: Palgrave, 2012), which I take up in chapter 4.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 4.
Dillon, 7.
These include Biped (1999) choreographed by Merce Cunningham, Ghostcatching (1999) choreographed by Bill T. Jones, and How Long Does the Subject Linger on the Edge of the Volume (2005) choreographed by Trisha Brown. Marc Downie joined Kaiser and Eshkar for How Long.
Deirdre LaCarte’s Hampster Dance was a popular 1990s website featuring rows of hamsters dancing to “Whistle Stop” from Disney’s 1973 animated film Robin Hood. For more information, see the “Hampster Dance” entry on Know Your Meme, accessed August 1, 2017, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hampster-dance.
See esp. Peggy Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction,” in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 146–166, and Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Mark Franko and Annette Richards, “Actualizing Absence: The Pastness of Performance,” in Acting on the Past: Historical Performance across the Disciplines (Hanover, Penn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 2.
See, e.g., Paul Grainge, ed., Ephemeral Media: Transitory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group, “‘Link Rot’ and Legal Resources on the Web: A 2014 Analysis by the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group,” accessed August 1, 2017, http://cdm16064.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/linkrot2014.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2008): 153, 160.
For a further consideration of ephemerality in the contexts of dance and digital media, see my chapter “‘Complex Temporalities’: Digitality and the Ephemeral Tense in Adam H. Weinert’s ‘The Reaccession of Ted Shawn’” in The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Jens Richard Giersdorf and Yutian Wong, 364–73 (London: Routledge, 2019).
See Gay Morris and Jens Richard Giersdorf’s excellent overview of choreography as a methodological approach in the introduction to their coedited book Choreographies of 21st Century Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–24.
1. Interactivity and Agency
The twelve scenes are (1) “Ouverture,” (2) “Ghost,” (3) “Pluie,” (4) “Machination,” (5) “Slow Down,” (6) “Frontal,” (7) “Docks,” (8) “Fragile,” (9) “Melting,” (10) “High,” (11) “Nuages,” and (12) “Coda.”
Somnambules, web, art conception, libretto, camera, and programming by Nicolas Clauss; music, libretto, camera, and executive production by Jean-Jacques-Birgé; dance by Didier Silhol (2003), accessed July 13, 2016, http://www.somnambules.net/.
Somnambules.
Works of comparable scale were created for CD-ROM, but few were created specifically for the web.
See Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
See Harmony Bench, “Screendance 2.0: Dance and Social Media,” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 7, no. 2 (2010), http://www.participations.org/Volume%207/Issue%202/special/bench.htm.
Trilogy, choreography and performance by Carolien Hermans (2003), accessed June 29, 2006, http://www.du.ahk.nl/mijnsite/trilogy/trilogy.htm. Site now defunct.
Invisible, choreography and artistic direction by Magali and Didier Mulleras; stage/light design and multimedia/video by Nicolas Grimal; music/sound design by Magali and Didier Mulleras; dance by Magali and Didier Mulleras, Elisabeth Nicol, and Severine Prunera (2003), accessed March 25, 2018, https://vimeo.com/5436189.
5th Wall, iPad app, concept and design by Abbott Miller, choreography and performance by Jonah Bokaer, video direction by Ben Louis Nicholas, music by So Percussion (2013).
Windowsninetyeight: lo-fi kitchen sink dancing, CD-ROM, dance and visual art by Ruth Gibson, art by Bruno Martelli (Igloo, 1996–98).
Move-Me, web, created by Simon Fildes and Katrina McPherson (Ricochet Dance and Goat Media, 2004), accessed July 13, 2016, http://move-me.com/.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (1983; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 13.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2008): 148.
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 55.
Jens F. Jensen, “‘Interactivity’: Tracking a New Concept in Media and Communication Studies,” Nordicom Review: Nordic Research on Media and Communication 19, no. 1 (1998): 185.
Jon Katz, “Birth of a Digital Nation,” Wired, April 1, 1997, accessed March 25, 2018, https://www.wired.com/1997/04/netizen-3/.
George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Landow quoting Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (1970; New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux/Hill and Wang, 1974), 5.
Margaret Morse, “The Poetics of Interactivity,” in Women, Art, and Technology, ed. Judy Malloy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 18. Original emphasis.
Morse, 19.
Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 24.
David Z. Saltz, “The Art of Interaction: Interactivity, Performativity, and Computers,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 2 (1997): 118.
As a vector-based animation program, Flash was especially popular for creating noninteractive web-based cartoons circa 1999. For a time, Flash was the software of choice for online game developers.
Though Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 seem to indicate a linear progression, the emergence of social media has introduced an additional layer of web experience but has not replaced previous modes of information distribution.
Progressive 2, web, Richard Lord, director and choreographer (1996), accessed October 15, 2004, http://www.bigroom.co.uk/consumers/webdances.php. Site now defunct.
Waterfall, CD-ROM, directed and choreographed by Richard Lord, performance by Emma Diamond, music by Kate Heath (Big Room Ventures, 2002).
Big, web, camera by Katrina McPherson, editing by Simon Fildes, choreography by Crystal Pite (2002), accessed July 13, 2016, http://hyperchoreography.org/big.html.
The Truth: The Truth, web, directed by Katrina McPherson, choreography by Fin Walker and Paolo Ribeiro (2004), accessed July 13, 2016, http://hyperchoreography.org/thetruth.html.
Triad HyperDance is a web-based, interactive documentation of the 1998 telematic performance Triad NetDance directed by Marikki Hakola. Modern dancer Molissa Fenley in New York and butoh performer Akeno in Tokyo were joined by video transmitted over the internet and projected into the Kiasma museum in Helsinki, the primary performance venue, where the video feeds were mixed with digital media and music. Triad HyperDance, web, concept and direction by Marikki Hakola, choreography and performance by Akeno and Molissa Fenley, music by Otna Eahket (1999), accessed July 13, 2016, http://www.kroma.fi/triad/info/triadhyper.html.
Drift, web, directed by Koert van Mensvoort, dance by Nancy Mauro-Flude (Music Artefact, 2003), accessed July 13, 2016, http://www.mensvoort.com/work/drift-dancer-without-a-body.
Following Deleuze’s typology of cinematic signs or images, Galloway delineates a number of “acts” unique to gameplay. He describes the ambience act as a state of equilibrium wherein environmental “micromovements” let the player know the game is in play mode but in which points are neither gained nor lost. Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 10–11.
In addition to Morse, “The Poetics of Interactivity,” see Sokë Dinkla, “From Participation to Interaction: Toward the Origins of Interactive Art,” in Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture, ed. Lynn Hershman Leeson, 279–90 (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1996), as well as Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).
For a more thorough treatment of the performativity of code in hyperdance, see my essay “Computational Choreographies: Performance in Dance Online” in International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 5 (2014): 155–69.
Rita Raley, “Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance,” Postmodern Culture 12 (2000), para. 9, accessed March 25, 2018, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.901/12.1raley.txt.
Raley, para. 10.
Hans Dieter Huber, “Only!4!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!4-for your private eyes. A structural analysis of http://www.jodi.org” (2002), accessed April 1, 2009, http://www.hgbleipzig.de/artnine/huber/writings/jodie/indexe.html.
Carolien Hermans, “Trilogy,” accessed July 13, 2016, http://www.du.ahk.nl/people/carolien/papers/TrilogyPaper.htm.
Hermans.
See Umberto Eco, The Poetics of the Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Hermans, “Trilogy,” n.p.
Susan Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 182.
Kozel, 189.
Morse, “Poetics of Interactivity,” 21.
Hal Foster, “Chat Rooms,” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 193.
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 124.
Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 24.
Latitudes, web, choreography by Molissa Fenley (November 1996), accessed May 3, 2009, http://www.diacenter.org/fenley/title.html. Site now defunct.
Yearbody, web, choreography by Dawn Stoppiello, web design by Mark Coniglio (November 1996–October 1997), accessed October 15, 2005, http://www.troikaranch.org/yearbody.html. Site now defunct.
Be to Want I, web, choreography by Marianne Goldberg, performed by Christianne Brown (1996), accessed July 13, 2016, http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/3.2/response/Kendall/goldberg/Be_to_want_I.html. Site semifunctional.
Tree, web, part 2 of Before and After Geography, choreography by Ralph Lemon (2000). This was part of his Geography Trilogy (1995–2005), with digital artists Vivian Selbo and Carl Skelton (May 3, 2009), accessed July 13, 2016, http://www.cavil.com/tree/. Site semifunctional.
For commentary on some of these and other early hyperdances, particularly works prior to 1998, see Sita Popat, Invisible Connections: Dance, Choreography, and Internet Communities (London: Routledge, 2006).
Rita Raley, “The Digital Loop: Feedback and Recurrence,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 10, no. 7 (2002).
André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Routledge, 2006), 16.
Lepecki, 13.
Following anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis, Lepecki calls these “still-acts.” See Seremetakis, “The Memory of the Senses (parts I–III),” in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. N. Seremetakis, 1–43 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
See, e.g., Simon Ellis and David Corbet’s work for iPod, Microflicks (2006–7), accessed July 17, 2016, http://slightly.net/microflicks/.
Raley, “Digital Loop.”
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (1985; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 2.
Deleuze, 62.
Deleuze, 67.
Deleuze, 128.
Trilogy. Hermans takes this passage from Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory.
Trilogy.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 4.
Videos of these other instantiations are available online. For links, see http://www.mulleras.com/invisible/accueilinv.html, accessed July 5, 2016.
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 59.
Manovich, Language of New Media, xxxiii.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xvi.
Deleuze, 29.
Deleuze, 222.
Deleuze, 65–66.
Deleuze, 15.
Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 24.
See Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy of time in The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 55.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 14.
Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli, “Read-Me File,” windowsninetyeight, n.p.
Windowsninetyeight.
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 200–203.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 132.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 41. My emphasis.
Qtd. in Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (1969; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 280. Original emphasis.
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 133.
Deleuze, 132.
Deleuze, 131.
Deleuze, 132.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (1962; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 45.
See esp. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011).
See Mark Franko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
André Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2010): 31. Lepecki is using the term virtual here in the Bergsonian/Deleuzian sense as that which can be actualized and not in reference to a digital representation or simulation.
Mark Franko, “Introduction: The Power of Recall in a Post-ephemeral Era,” in Franko, Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, 1. Original emphasis. Here Franko is reflecting on choreographer Susanne Linke’s 1988 engagement with Dore Hoyer’s 1962 dance work Affectos Humanos.
Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006), 12.
DeLanda, 50.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 98.
Eco, Poetics of the Open Work, 6.
Kenny Mathieson, “Simon Fildes and Katrina McPherson, Part 1,” Northings, March 1, 2006, accessed July 13, 2016, http://northings.com/2006/03/01/simon-fildes-and-katrina-mcpherson-part-1/.
2. Dance in Public
Peter Gabriel, “In Your Eyes” (Geffen Records, 1986), CD single.
Girl Walk//All Day, web, directed by Jacob Krupnick; performance by Anne Marsen, Daisuke Omiya, and John Doyle; music by Girl Talk (2011–12), accessed December 31, 2013, http://www.girlwalkallday.com/.
For an excellent visualization of all music samples used as well as the timing and duration, see “Girl Talk: ‘All Day’ Visualized,” accessed December 31, 2013, http://www.fastcompany.com/1707948/infographic-girl-talks-latest-mashup-masterpiece-deconstructed#self.
See esp. Beth Genné, “‘Dancin’ in the Street’: Street Dancing on Film and Video from Fred Astaire to Michael Jackson,” in Rethinking Dance History: A Reader, ed. Alexandra Carter, 132–42 (London: Routledge, 2004).
Melanie Kloetzel and Carolyn Pavlik, eds., Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 1.
Stephen Koplowitz, lecture, February 15, 2013, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio.
Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, September 2011, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en.
Butler.
Oberwetter v. Hilliard, 639 F.3d 545 (D.C. Cir. 2011). The charges were not pursued after the district court found the requisite paperwork incomplete.
The ruling continues: “As the Supreme Court has observed, an area ‘is not transformed into “public forum” property merely because the public is permitted to freely enter and leave the grounds at practically all times.’ United States v. Grace, 461 U.S. 171, 178 (1983),” Oberwetter v. Hilliard (11).
See esp. TURF FEINZ RIP RichD Dancing in the Rain Oakland Street | YAK FILMS (October 27, 2009), accessed July 16, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRRnAhmB58&list=PLC98CB20C4167995C&index=4, and TURF FEINZ ‘RIP Oscar Grant’ Fruitvale BART Oakland | YAK FILMS (December 31, 2010), accessed July 16, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atyTZ8prhCg&list=PLC98CB20C4167995C&index=8.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 3.
Naomi Bragin, “From Oakland Turfs to Harlem’s Shake: Hood Dance on YouTube and Viral Antiblackness,” in The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, ed. Douglas Rosenberg (New York: Oxford, 2016), 542.
Randy Martin, Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 217–18.
Denice Szafran has made the important argument that not all flash mobs are perceived as playful by longtime inhabitants of specific sites in which a flash mob might occur. See Denice Szafran, “Scenes of Chaos and Joy: Playing and Performing Selves in Digitally Virtu/Real Places” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 2011). Her examples do not include dancing flash mobs, however, and I find that the presence of dance, whether informal or professionally choreographed, offers viewers a different frame of reference that diffuses threat.
Girl Walk//All Day.
Take, for example, the group choreographies developed by Rudolf Laban and his students, their ideological parity with German National Socialism, and the eventual use of their principles for the spectacularization of Hitler’s power. As another example, see Rachmi Diyah Larasati’s work on the state’s appropriation and reinvention of regional court dance practices to promote a unified anticommunist Indonesia under the Surharto regime. Larasati, The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-genocide Indonesia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (1992; London: Verso, 1995).
See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
See esp. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (2000; London: Continuum, 2004).
See, e.g., Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (Houndsmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 14.
Indeed, the original name for the military operation in response to the attacks of 9/11, Operation Infinite Justice, pointed to the very interminability of the War on Terror.
Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 20.
Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 255.
Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (2005; London: Verso, 2006), 74.
Butler, “Bodies in Alliance.” For an excellent reading of the physical rhetoric of Black Lives Matter protests, see Anusha Kedhar, “‘Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!’: Gesture, Choreography, and Protest in Ferguson,” Feminist Wire, October 6, 2014, accessed July 16, 2016, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/protest-in-ferguson/.
See esp. Kazys Varnelis, ed., Networked Publics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).
Presciently, Raymond Williams described the latter phenomenon as “mobile privatization” in his 1974 analysis of television. Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fortuna, 1974).
Kathrin Peters and Andrea Seier give the name “home dances” to videos of privately performed dances publicly posted to YouTube or other video-sharing sites. See “Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube,” in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, 187–203 (Lithuania: Logotipas, 2009).
Planking is the phenomenon of standing or lying flat (like a plank) in various comical, unexpected, or dangerous circumstances. A photograph documenting the event is generally then posted to the internet. In horsemanning, two or more people combine efforts to stage a trick photograph in which it appears that the subject of the photograph is missing his or her head, which appears somewhere else in the frame. The reference is to the tale of the Headless Horseman. Tebowing is the practice of prayerfully kneeling on one knee like the quarterback Tim Tebow. Hadoukening is a staged photograph named for a Street Fighter video game attack, which features a central figure that appears to be releasing a massive surge of energy that causes the people and/or objects surrounding him or her to be blown back. The photograph is timed to catch participants midair.
See Angela Trimbur, Dance Like Nobody’s Watching: Laundromat (December 11, 2011), accessed July 16, 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVVXtknZVf0; Dance Like Nobody’s Watching: Airport (December 31, 2012), accessed July 16, 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S32bgx36G-0&list=SPBF2BA5E35CD0B8B8; and Dance Like Nobody’s Watching: Mall (April 13, 2012), accessed April 20, 2013, http://www.wimp.com/dancewatching/.
See, e.g., wheresmymarbles, Official Hello Video Dance Like Nobody’s Watching “Walmart” (December 8, 2011), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVD6jqtGHOM; Betan, Dance Like Nobody’s Watching: Icelandic Mall (April 22, 2012), accessed July 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6rr9Ze3Zqk; Kristín Rut Eysteinsdóttir, Dance Like Nobody’s Watching-stina stud (May 12, 2012), accessed July 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6B-fvdrm7A; Joseph Deiana, Dance Like Nobody’s Watching—Rue de Béthune, Lille (JdenVrai) (May 6, 2012), accessed July 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0sTSTdbcs; Kanal von PrinzessinTeodora, Dance Like Nobody’s Watching—Munich (September 12, 2012), accessed July 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFc5BKOqeL0; toxismokie ferreira, Dance Like Nobody’s Watching: Coffee Shop (September 13, 2012), accessed July 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc1IpRnqz9Y.
See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (1980; New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
See Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ 84 (2006): 1–10.
Julie Bloom, “‘Girl Walk//All Day’: A Conversation with the Director,” New York Times, December 6, 2011, accessed December 31, 2013, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/girl-walkall-day-a-q-and-a-with-the-director/.
Bloom.
That dance in public is often working in the service of capital is not something I can explore deeply in this chapter.
Mark Franko, “Dance and the Political: States of Exception,” in Dance Discourses: Key Words in Dance Research, ed. Marina Nordera and Suzanna Franco (London: Routledge, 2007), 15.
Jan Cohen-Cruz, ed., Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology (New York: Routledge, 1998), 6.
Performance theorist Shannon Jackson critiques the outsourcing of precisely this type of social labor to the artist class as the neoliberal state withdraws from the public and the collective well-being of the persons therein. See Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Butler, “Bodies in Alliance.”
Adbusters is a magazine whose mission is described thus: “We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.” Accessed April 19, 2013, http://www.adbusters.org/.
Martin, Critical Moves, 182.
Jeffrey Hou, Insurgent Public Space: Guerilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (London: Routledge, 2010), 3.
Judith Nicholson, “Flash! Mobs in the Age of Mobile Connectivity,” Fibreculture Journal 6 (2005), http://six.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-030-flash-mobs-in-the-age-of-mobile-connectivity/.
Jeffery Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, “Introduction: A Book of Crowds,” in Crowds, ed. Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Tiews (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), xvi.
Life’s for Sharing, The T-Mobile Dance (January 16, 2009), accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ3d3KigPQM.
Elsewhere, I have used the term flash choreography to mark the increased professionalization of dancing flash mobs, which are expertly choreographed and managed by production companies like Flash Mob America rather than being grassroots efforts. Though I would argue that flash choreography is a more accurate term than dance mob, which implies little to no difference from flash mobs except for the inclusion of styled bodily motion, I defer to popular parlance in my use of the terms dance mob and dancing flash mob in this book. See Harmony Bench, “Screendance 2.0: Social Dance-Media,” Participations 7, no. 2 (2010): 183–214.
The YouTube video The T-Mobile Dance has far outlived the original television commercial, reaching new and repeat viewers—more than 38 million on the official video alone by October 2013. It is common for YouTube users to re-post popular content, which is sometimes removed after copyright complaints. The number of views reported here, then, is limited to the count given on the T-Mobile Life’s for Sharing YouTube channel.
Georgiana Gore, “Flash Mob Dance and the Territorialisation of Urban Movement,” Anthropological Notebooks 16, no. 3 (2010): 126.
Gore, 130.
Flash Mob America, a flash mob production company started in 2009 and still going strong in 2016, states that its mission is to “create joy through surprise.” Flash Mob America, accessed July 7, 2014, http://www.flashmobamerica.com/.
“‘Harlem Shake’ on a Plane Has FAA Investigating; See the Video,” National Public Radio, March 1, 2013, accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/03/01/173226781/harlem-shake-on-a-plane-has-faa-investigating-see-the-video.
Susan Leigh Foster, “Why Not ‘Improv Everywhere’?,” in The Oxford Handbook to Dance and Theater, ed. Nadine George-Graves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 199.
The T-Mobile Dance.
FOX TV, Glee—Il FlashMob (December 23, 2009), accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhbK2bMTRbI; yes glee flash mob Tel Aviv (January 12, 2010), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB22aIYHLII; SonyMusicIrelandLtd, Glee Flash Mob—Grafton Street—Dublin, Ireland (February 1, 2010), accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1zVigP_T9k&p=C7724D0671B57B0B&playnext=1&index=31.
PercyGreen17, Beyonce 100 Single Ladies Flash-Dance Piccadilly Circus, London for Trident Unwrapped (April 20, 2009), accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OLj5zphusLw.
DellAust, Dell Streak Flash Mob Sydney—Full Version (September 23, 2010), accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkvW2he2loc&feature=player_embedded.
Flash Mob America, Official Suave Professional Hairography Flash Mob w/ Sofia Vergara—Times Square (May 13, 2010), accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhPbBfxCvk.
U.S. President George W. Bush urged Americans to travel—“get on the airlines, get about the business of America”—while New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said his city was in need of “the best shoppers in the world.” British prime minister Tony Blair encouraged U.K. residents to “go about their daily lives: to work, to live, to travel and to shop,” and Canadian president Jean Chrétien said that late 2001 was an excellent time to “go out and get a mortgage, to buy a home, to buy a car.” See Elisabeth Bumiller, “A Nation Challenged: The President,” New York Times, September 28, 2001; “America’s New War: Giuliani on Local Radio Show,” CNN, September 21, 2001, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/21/se.20.html; George Jones and Michael Smith, “Britain Needs You to Shop, Says Blair,” September 28, 2001; Peter O’Neil, “‘Get a Mortgage, Buy a Car,’ PM Urges,” Vancouver Sun, September 28, 2001.
“Amazon Posts a Profit,” CNN Money, January 22, 2002, accessed July 17, 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2002/01/22/technology/amazon/.
Rachel Signer, “Girl Walk: Jacob Krupnick Talks the Talk,” Bomb—Artists in Conversation, June 4, 2012, original emphasis, accessed December 31, 2013, http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/6602.
Signer.
Arendt, Human Condition, 206.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963; repr., New York: Penguin, 1990), 30–31.
Augé, Non-places, 77–78.
Augé, 78.
Augé, 79.
Augé, 95.
Augé notes that non-places can become places if they foster social ties for those who spend time there: “For me, place has never been an empirical notion. Anything can become a place, every space can become one, if in one manner or another encounters take place there that create social ties.” “Places and Non-places—a Conversation with Marc Augé,” On the Move, January 26, 2009, http://onthemove.autogrill.com/gen/lieux-non-lieux/news/2009-01-26/places-and-non-places-a-conversation-with-marc-auge. Site now defunct.
Augé, Non-places, 103.
Augé, 103.
Augé, 103.
Bars are a notable exception in a U.S. context, where zoning restrictions may require businesses that sell alcohol but that are not categorized as dance clubs to prohibit dancing on their premises.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; New York: Random House, 1995), 201.
Foucault, 202–3.
Foucault, 200.
Arendt, Human Condition, 200.
“Equality is not a goal to be attained but a point of departure, a supposition to be maintained in all circumstances.” Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (1987; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 138.
Mark Colonomos, Dance Walking Fitness Ben Aaron. Time to Dance Walk Baby (April 21, 2012), accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib3Duz_6a9M.
Choreographer Merce Cunningham famously offered, “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” Cunningham, “You Have to Love Dancing to Stick to It,” in Changes: Notes on Choreography, n.p. (New York: Something Else, 1968).
Arendt, Human Condition, 207.
Arendt, 220.
Arendt, 177.
See Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, and Interesting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
John Lennon, “Imagine” (Apple Records, 1971), LP vinyl.
Tom McCormack, “Dance Dance Revolution: The Political Dimensions of Girl Walk’s Modern City Symphony,” Museum of the Moving Image (June 14, 2012), accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/dance-dance-revolution-20120614.
See “Terrorist Plots Targeting New York City” for a listing of known terrorist plots since September 11, 2001, accessed May 15, 2014, http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/pr/plots_targeting_nyc.shtml.
McCormack, “Dance Dance Revolution.”
Bloom, “Girl Walk//All Day.”
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (2008; London: Verso, 2009), 54.
Rancière, 56.
Rancière, 72.
Rancière, 75.
José Esteban Muñoz, “‘Gimme Gimme This . . . Gimme Gimme That’: Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons,” Social Text 31, no. 3 (2013): 96.
See Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (1995; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
Jacques Rancière, “The Paradoxes of Political Art,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 139.
Rancière, 140.
Rancière distinguishes among ethical, representative, and aesthetic regimes of art. For a fuller explanation, see especially The Politics of Aesthetics. For an extended meditation on the aesthetic regime, see Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (2011; London: Verso, 2013).
Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 72.
Jill Bennett, Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 6.
Rancière, “Paradoxes of Political Art,” 139.
Tim Groves has compiled an extensive list of rallies, Round Dances, and other events from 2012 on a Google Map, January 19, 2013, accessed July 17, 2016, https://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?msid=204534403836525039663.0004d13bdc1d5b9ad39cf&msa=0&ll=42.032974,-62.929687&spn=126.64569,246.445313&dg=feature.
Paul Kuttner, “Case Study: Idle No More and the Round Dance Flash Mob,” Beautiful Trouble, accessed July 25, 2014, http://beautifultrouble.org/case/idle-dance-flash-mob/.
Kuttner.
Reyna Crow, “Mall of America Threatens Arrest of Idle No More,” Popular Resistance: Daily Movement News and Resources, December 25, 2013, accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.popularresistance.org/mall-of-america-threatens-arrest-of-idle-no-more/.
Sheila Regan and Bill Sorem, “Two Arrested in Idle No More Round Dance Attempt at Mall of Americas,” Popular Resistance: Daily Movement News and Resources, January 2, 2014, accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.popularresistance.org/two-arrested-in-idle-no-more-round-dance-attempt-at-mall-of-americas/.
José Muñoz, “The Brown Commons: The Sense of Wildness,” Journal of Native Theory Dialogue, March 20, 2013, accessed July 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-YInUlXgO4.
Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 39.
For an analysis of how Native American performance troupes have historically negotiated a similar false dichotomy between dance as entertainment and as spiritual practice, see Shea Murphy, The People Have Never Stopped Dancing.
Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 58–59.
Rancière, 53.
Jacques Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 40.
Rancière, 48.
Rancière, 47–48.
Rancière, 41.
“Flo6x8,” accessed July 29, 2014, http://flo6x8.com/flo6x8.
“Somos un grupo de gente de a pie que tenemos una serie de inquietudes comunes y que compartimos nuestra afición por el arte flamenco y nuestra crítica al sistema financiero. Entre las inquietudes que nos mueven destaca el hartazgo no sólo del expolio de la vida en el planeta a cargo de los bancos, sino también del silencio generalizado con que se responde a este expolio, su naturalización y la impunidad con que se perpetra.” “Flo6x8.” Thanks to Jeannine Murray-Román for the translation.
The video from which these translated lyrics were taken is no longer available online. For the original Spanish language video, see flo6x8: Bankia, pulmones y branquias (bulerías) (uploaded May 24, 2012), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iop2b3oq1O0.
“No nos creemos muy importantes para plantarles cara a los bancos. Entre nuestros delirios no destaca la megalomanía. Más bien nos vemos como liliputienses escarbando en sus géĺidas fisuras con piolets de cartón piedra. Pero por algún sitio hay que empezar.” “Flo6x8.” Thanks to Jeannine Murray-Román for the translation.
“Flo6x8.”
Qtd. in Jason Webster, “How Flash Mob Flamenco Took on the Banks,” BBC News Magazine, April 17, 2013, accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22110887.
Qtd. in Andy Robinson, “The Deeping Spanish Debt Crisis,” The Nation, July 3, 2012, accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/168716/deepening-spanish-debt-crisis#.
See Danielle Goldman’s I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010) for an excellent Foucauldian analysis of improvisatory social and theatrical dance forms of the mid- to late twentieth-century United States as practices of freedom.
Rancière, “Paradoxes of Political Art,” 141.
“A New Law Limits NYC Street Musicians,” Buzzkers: Sounds of the Street, April 23, 2013, accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.buzzkers.com/a-new-law-limits-nyc-street-musicians/.
Matt Flegenheimer and J. David Goodman, “On Subway, Flying Feet Can Lead to Handcuffs,” New York Times, July 28, 2014, accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/nyregion/29acrobats.html?_r=1.
Veronica Carchedi, “‘Park Performers’ to Lose Stage in Washington Square,” Washington Square News, May 1, 2013, accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.nyunews.com/2013/05/01/performer/.
“Musician or Performer Permit,” NYC, accessed July 30, 2014, http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/3003/musician-or-performer-permit.
3. A World from a Crowd
See Latika Linn Young, “Dorky Dance.Com: Dorky Dancing, Vlogging and the Rise of Self Produced Dance on the Internet” (master’s thesis, Florida State University, 2007).
“About Matt,” accessed May 3, 2009, http://www.wherethehellismatt.com:80/about.shtml. Site now defunct.
“Meet Matt,” accessed January 13, 2007, http://www.stridegum.com/whereismatt_textOnly.asp. Site now defunct.
The title with which each video opens is “Dancing,” but I use the title as it is listed on YouTube. Matt Harding, Where the Hell Is Matt? 2005 (June 24, 2006), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WmMcqp670s. Harding, Where the Hell Is Matt? 2006 (June 20, 2006), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNF_P281Uu4. Harding, Where the Hell Is Matt? 2008 (June 20, 2008), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY. Harding, Where the Hell Is Matt? 2012 (June 20, 2012), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwe-pA6TaZk.
For additional perspectives on dance and world/world-making, see esp. Gabriele Klein and Sandra Noeth, eds., Emerging Bodies: The Performance of Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography (Bielefeld, Germany: transcript, 2011), and Susan Leigh Foster, ed., Worlding Dance (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2009).
Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude, trans. Ed Emery (2009; Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), xii.
Negri.
Globe Trot, directed and edited by Mitchell Rose and choreographed by Bebe Miller (2014), accessed July 7, 2016, http://www.mitchellrose.com/globetrot/.
Mass Ornament, by Natalie Bookchin (2009), accessed June 30, 2016, https://bookchin.net/projects/mass-ornament/.
One Day on Earth the Music Video, directed by Kyle Ruddick, edited by Cari Ann Shim Sham*, music by Cut Chemist (2012), accessed July 27, 2016, https://vimeo.com/39875998.
All Is Not Lost, directed by OK Go, Pilobolus, and Trish Sie, produced by Paracadute and Google (2011), accessed July 27, 2016, http://www.allisnotlo.st/index_en.html.
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles, Calif.: semiotext(e)), 38.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. and introduction by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press), 47.
Nancy, 109.
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Anchor Books, 2004).
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, France: Les Presses Du Reel, 1998), 13.
Bourriaud, 13.
Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 14.
See Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79.
Jen Harvie, Fair Play—Art, Performance, and Neoliberalism (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan), 36.
Harvie, 37.
Harvie, 42.
See Hal Foster, “Chat Rooms,” in Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Claire Bishop, 190–95 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).
See Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude.
Sarah Elgart, “Globe Trotting with Mitchell Rose,” Cultural Weekly, June 11, 2014, accessed July 13, 2016, http://www.culturalweekly.com/globe-trotting-mitchell-rose/.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (1996; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 83.
Matt Harding, “Athens, Greece, No Dancing at the Parthenon,” May 10, 2006, accessed July13, 2016, http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/journal/2006/05/athens_greece_n.html.
See Matt Harding, Where the Hell Are Matt’s 2006 Outtakes (March 12, 2007), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT8jA_pps3o, and Harding, Where the Hell Are Matt’s 2012 Outtakes (July 11, 2012), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_40189&feature=iv&src_vid=Pwe-pA6TaZk&v=l4quCAG4eCc.
Harding, “Athens, Greece.” Original emphasis.
Nancy, Creation of the World, 40.
Gabriella Giannachi, Virtual Theater: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2004), 17.
See Samuel Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 108.
Giannachi, Virtual Theater, 17. Original emphasis.
Giannachi.
Harding’s parodists draw attention to this point by dancing in the comparatively mundane spaces available to them: bedrooms, kitchens, bus stops, parks, and so on. A search for “Where the Hell Is Matt parody” on YouTube results in hundreds of such videos.
It should come as no surprise that Harding and his team were hired to produce (but not dance in) the video celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the song “It’s a Small World after All.” See “it’s a small world” 50th Anniversary Global Chorus | Disney Parks (March 21, 2014), accessed July 16, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weZrqrN9Jp0&list=LL__TABIHzr7fUz5pQL2GU4w.
Nancy, Creation of the World, 40.
Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (1938; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 67–68. Original emphasis.
Charles McGrath, “A Private Dance? Four Million Web Fans Say No,” New York Times, July 8, 2008, accessed July 13, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/arts/television/08dancer.html?pagewanted=all.
“The Guy Who Danced around the Globe,” Washington Post, October 22, 2006, accessed July 13, 2016, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/20/AR2006102000373.html.
As of August 11, 2014, the 2006 video had 18.8 million views and the 2008 video had 47.6 million.
McGrath, “A Private Dance?”
McGrath.
Celene, “Seattle, Washington: Dancer Comments,” June 20, 2008, accessed July 13, 2009, http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/2008/06/seattle-washi-5.html#comment-119562366.
Roemarie, “Seattle, Washington: Dancer Comments,” June 20, 2008, accessed July 13, 2009, http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/2008/06/seattle-washi-5.html#comment-119577564.
Devin Weiss, “Seattle, Washington: Dancer Comments,” June 20, 2008, accessed July 13, 2009, http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/2008/06/seattle-washi-5.html#comment-119581358.
Rose provides a list of all the filmmakers and film sites on his website. See the “Globe Trot Shot Locations and Filmmakers” list, accessed July 27, 2016, http://www.mitchellrose.com/globetrot/shot-list/.
See Rose’s website, accessed July 18, 2016, http://www.mitchellrose.com/globetrot/.
Mitchell Rose, “Crowd-Sourced Filmmaking: Despair Is Your Friend,” International Journal of Screendance 5 (2015): 64.
Rose calls this style of editing “hyper-matchcutting.”
Rose, 64.
Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (1927; repr., 1963; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 79.
Participating in a history of “appropriation art,” Bookchin’s crowdsourced content has different ethical implications as well. Like other visual artists of recent years who turn to social media content for both inspiration and material, Bookchin collected videos from YouTube as “found objects” for Mass Ornament. Although these videos were made publicly available and accessible on the internet, works like Mass Ornament raise the question of ownership and privacy rights that individuals forfeit when they participate in social media. For an analysis of Mass Ornament in terms of privacy and publicity, see Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016), 172–74.
Burt, Ungoverning Dance, 87.
Burt, 87.
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common,” in Community at Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective, trans. James Creech (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 4.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 29.
Nancy, 43.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (1993; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 14.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 65.
Nancy, Creation of the World, 41–42.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 9.
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 16.
Austin remarks, for example, that a wedding ceremony performed within the context of a theatrical play is “infelicitous,” as the circumstances of the utterance invalidate its performative power. Scholars have argued that theatrical representation may yet be performative in another way, not by bringing about the specific change indicated by the words spoken, for example, legally binding two people in a marriage, but by bringing about social change. This position does not recognize the law or “authority” as such as the arbiter of language’s transformative capacities.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 2011), 232.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 173.
Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 189.
This formulation recalls Hannah Arendt’s understanding of politics and the political sphere, with its emphasis on action (praxis) and rejection of fabrication (poiesis). See esp. Arendt, Human Condition.
Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 52.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 41.
Nancy, Creation of the World, 9
As we see in immersive or participatory artwork, however, contemporary artistic practice is not limited to representation, and therefore neither is it limited to poiesis. As Rancière has observed in his analysis of politics and aesthetics, artistic practices share with politics an ability to disrupt a perceptual field and alter the distribution of the sensible, incorporating and making intelligible the part that has no part. In this way, artistic practices not only represent the world but enact new possibilities of the world by activating new senses of the world. It is the dissensual aspect of artistic practice that Rancière links to politics. See Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 58.
Maurizio Lazzarato, “Struggle, Media, Event,” May 2003, accessed July 18, 2016, http://www.republicart.net/disc/representations/lazzarato01_en.htm.
Lazzarato.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 23.
Lauren Berlant, “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3 (2016): 393. Berlant further cautions that “resilience and repair don’t necessarily neutralize the problem that generated the need for them, but might reproduce them” (393–94).
See Nancy, Inoperative Community.
Nancy, Creation of the World, 109.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 60.
Nancy, Creation of the World, 42.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 61.
This uprootedness is a result of the choreography being situated in what I have elsewhere called “no-place,” a fundamental site that accompanies dance within the Western concert tradition, enabling, for example, dance to appear in the blank space of an emptied proscenium theater. No-place is a site that performs its own emptiness prior to the arrival of dance within its architectural frame. See Harmony Bench, “Media and the No-place of Dance,” Forum Modernes Theater 23, no. 1 (2008): 37–47.
See How the Hell Did Matt Get People to Dance with Him? (September 12, 2008), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue1GZ4IUFiU.
Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 195.
Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 27.
C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Senses Still (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 6. Original emphasis.
Nancy, Creation of the World, 34.
World-forming, for Nancy, succeeds world-becoming, though not in a chronological way. World-becoming accompanies the retreat of God as subject or master of the world, which requires that the world be thought in itself and not as an object of God’s contemplation or love.
Nancy, Creation of the World, 53.
David Pogue, “Behind the Dancing Matt Videos,” New York Times, July 12, 2012, accessed July 13, 2016, http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/behind-the-dancing-matt-videos/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0.
Pogue.
Pogue.
African masks encompass not only the carved face covering but also the ceremonial attire as well as the music and dance that work collectively with the dancer to enliven a mask. Harding wore only some of the garments in this scene.
The experiment in collaborative filmmaking was supported by international organizations such as Oxfam, UNESCO, and the United Nations and was awarded the 2012 Vimeo Social Change Award.
See Carol Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
Nancy, Creation of the World, 110.
Nancy, Sense of the World, 15.
Nancy, Creation of the World, 62.
Nancy, Sense of the World, 88.
For an explication of schools of thought regarding the relationship of affect and emotion, see Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 6–8.
Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 119.
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press), 24.
OK Go frequently incorporates dance into their music videos and repeatedly engages with old and emerging technologies in crafting quirky, one-of-a-kind music videos. Two examples include the video for Here It Goes Again, performed on treadmills—arguably the video that made OK Go famous beyond its musical fan base—and I Won’t Let You Down, performed on Honda UNI-CUB “personal mobility devices” (http://world.honda.com/UNI-CUB/), shot with drone-mounted video cameras, and accompanied online by an interactive tool that allows viewers to create their own animated choreographies. Emimusic, OK Go—Here It Goes Again (February 26, 2009), accessed July 18, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTAAsCNK7RA. I Won’t Let You Down (October 7, 2014), accessed July 18, 2016, http://iwontletyoudown.com/#.
OK Go, OK Go—a Message for Japan (with Subtitles) (July 27, 2011), accessed July 18, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akyxuKZgy7Q#t=45.
OK Go.
The Hollywood films featuring Esther Williams’s synchronized swimming are perhaps a better point of comparison than Berkeley, particularly since the aqua unitards seem to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the aquatic musical form that Williams pioneered.
Despite the piece being a Google Chrome Experiment, in 2016, I was only able to play it properly in the Safari web browser.
OK Go, All Is Not Lost (July 25, 2011), accessed July 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur-y7oOto14.
See Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in Logics of Television: Essays on Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp, 222–39 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). See also Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), on the problems of empathic identification.
Nancy, Creation of the World, 61.
See chapter 4 for further consideration of choreography as quasi-object able to organize bodies in relation to itself.
Susan Leigh Foster, Dances That Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 108.
Nancy, Creation of the World, 53.
Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 25.
Matt Harding, “Where the Heck Is Matt,” https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wheretheheckismatt/where-the-heck-is-matt.
Kickstarter campaigns are structured like other fund drives, offering rewards in return for monetary support. Products and services on offer vary widely from campaign to campaign.
Harding stands outside of typical arts communities, but as an internet celebrity engaged in practices of production similar to those of contemporary artists, many of whom are also making work for internet audiences, Harding’s turn toward a pay-to-play structure is both a model for and a cautionary tale of artrepreneurialism in the new economy.
4. Screen Sharing
24 Hours of Happy, web, directed by We Are from LA, produced by Iconoclast Interactive, performed by Pharrell Williams (November 2013), accessed July 8, 2016, http://www.24hoursofhappy.com/.
Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, and Sam Ford, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 83.
Jenkins et al., 83.
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 93.
Russell Belk, “Sharing versus Pseudo-Sharing in Web 2.0,” Anthropologist 18, no. 1 (2014): 13.
Martin, Financialization of Daily Life, 16.
Anthea Kraut, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 7.
See “How Pharrell’s ‘Happy’ Video Owes a Lot to an Uncredited Indie Film,” Spin, April 17, 2014, accessed July 8, 2016, http://www.spin.com/2014/04/pharrell-happy-looks-like-girl-walk-all-day-video-interview/. See also Anne Marsen, “Pharrell Loves My Work,” Vimeo, April 17, 2014, accessed July 8, 2016, https://vimeo.com/92226001.
Interestingly, I have not uncovered any accusations that 24 Hours of Happy drew its concept from Uniqlock, an advertising campaign by the Japanese clothing company Uniqlo, where Pharrell has his “I am other” clothing line. Uniqlock, which ran from 2007 to 2010, is a twenty-four-hour time-telling, music-playing, dancing advertisement for the company’s season. Uniqlock was created by the production company Projector under the direction of Koichiro Tanaka, with music by Fantastic Plastic Machine and featuring the Japanese dance crew U-Min. Like 24 Hours of Happy, Uniqlock marks the top of each hour with special video clips. Accessed May 3, 2009, http://www.uniqlo.jp/uniqlock/. Site now defunct.
Alva Noë, “Imitation or Celebration? The Joy of Dancing in the Streets,” NPR 13.7 Cosmos and Culture, April 25, 2014, accessed July 17, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/04/25/306747324/imitation-or-celebration-the-joy-of-dancing-in-the-streets.
Lyndy Stout, “Searchlight: We Are from LA,” Young Director Award, December 6, 2013, accessed July 8, 2016, http://youngdirectoraward.com/searchlight-we-are-from-la/.
Priya Srinivasan, Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 167.
Ben Spatz, What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (London: Routledge, 2015), 31.
Kraut, Choreographing Copyright, 140.
Kiri Miller, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 133.
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 53.
This series of operations is easily seen in the fitness industry, for example, with Pure Barre, Bikram Yoga, and Zumba, all of which are registered trademarks that rely on the availability of commonly available gestures and inherited movement sequences that can then be arranged, branded, and sold.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690; repr., London: Whitmore and Fenn, 1821), accessed July 15, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=K5UIAAAAQAAJ.
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998).
Kraut, Choreographing Copyright.
Srinivasan, Sweating Saris.
Caroline Picart, Critical Race Theory and Copyright in American Dance: Whiteness as Status Property (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Murphy, People Have Never Stopped Dancing.
Eric Lott, “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy,” Representations 39 (1992): 25.
Lott, 39.
Lisa Nakamura, “The Unwanted Labour of Social Media: Women of Color Call Out Culture as Venture Community Management,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory, Politics 86 (2015): 109.
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 104.
For a consideration of how African American musicians rework inherited archives of sound, see esp. Trisha Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Joseph Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2014); and Mark Anthony Neal, “Now I Ain’t Saying He’s a Crate Digger: Kanye West, ‘Community Theaters’ and the Soul Archive,” in The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, ed. Julius Bailey, 3–12 (New York: Palgrave, 2014).
Srinivasan, Sweating Saris, 84.
Dillon, New World Drama, 7.
Radical Faggot, “Vogue Is Not for You: Deciding Whom We Give Our Art To,” May 31, 2015, accessed July 8, 2016, http://radfag.com/2015/05/31/vogue-is-not-for-you-deciding-whom-we-give-our-art-to/.
Nakamura, “Unwanted Labour,” 111.
Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 95–96.
This is not to deny the pernicious effects and residual affects of the colonial era, which for many has not ended.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.
Taylor, 10.
Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 183. Original emphasis.
Gottschild, Black Dancing Body, 104.
See karenxcheng, Girl Learns to Dance in a Year (TIME LAPSE) (July 9, 2013), accessed July 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w.
Karen X. Cheng, “Hi, I’m Karen. I Learned to Dance in a Year,” accessed July 15, 2015, http://www.danceinayear.com/. Site now defunct; snapshot available at https://web.archive.org/web/20130709205654/http://www.danceinayear.com/.
Fusion, This Amazing Girl Mastered Dubstep Dancing by Just Using YouTube (January 25, 2016), accessed July 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgzdDp5qfdI&nohtml5=False.
Fusion.
Dubstep more accurately refers to a type of electronic dance music to which these dance movements are performed. Thanks to Alexandra Harlig for breaking this down for me.
Fusion, This Amazing Girl.
Fusion.
Alexandra Harlig, “DO Read the Comments, and Watch the Videos: The Discursive Negotiation of Genre, Ethics, and Sociality for Popular Dance Audiences on YouTube,” paper presented at Popular Dance: Curating, Collecting, Reflecting, PoP Moves Annual Conference, University of Roehampton, U.K., October 24, 2015.
Adilyn Malcolm, Audacious Adi—Don’t Let Me Down (HD) (March 27, 2016), accessed July 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnE6oZmKJwM.
William Given, “Lindy Hop, Community, and the Isolation of Appropriation,” in George-Graves, Oxford Handbook to Dance and Theater, 740.
The current practice of learning dances from YouTube and video games was preceded historically by dancers picking up steps from movies, television shows, and variety acts.
See Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
DeFrantz, “Unchecked Popularity,” 128.
DeFrantz, 128.
DeFrantz, 130.
DeFrantz, 139.
Kraut, Choreographing Copyright, 175.
Some communities take measures to protect sacred or ritual dances, for example, by expressly prohibiting circulation beyond their membership.
Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 153–54.
Cynthia Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 69.
Kraut, Choreographing Copyright, 180.
Oprah Prime, “Pharrell Williams,” episode 81, Oprah Winfrey Network, first aired April 13, 2014.
Rohân Houssein, Happy We Are from Paris (December 3, 2013), accessed July 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ5rR0WlEkQ. The racial and ethnic diversity represented in the video has prompted some comments from viewers regarding the demographic makeup of Paris and who should be able to represent the city.
KetothPL, Pharrell Williams—Happy (WARSAW IS ALSO HAPPY) (January 5, 2014), accessed July 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8JaqpHdBuI.
Baraba Bilonic, Pharrell Williams—Happy (Split, Croatia) (March 14, 2014), accessed July 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=144&v=GcccM2BAshE.
Ah T, Happy We Are from Tehran (May 19, 2014), accessed July 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=58&v=RYnLRf-SNxY. According to an article in the Guardian, the performers in the video were sentenced with deferred punishments of lashings and prison time for their involvement. “Iranian Pharrell Williams Fans behind Happy Video Sentenced,” Guardian, September 19, 2014, accessed October 10, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/19/iranian-pharrell-williams-fans-happy-video-sentenced.
Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 250.
Hardt and Negri, ix.
Martin, Financialization of Daily Life, 141.
See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, New Series 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243. See also Elinor Ostrom’s work for further analysis of how communities manage shared physical or natural resources, including Governing the Commons.
See, e.g., Miller, Playing Along.
Rosalyn Diprose, “Performing Body-Identity,” Writings on Dance 11–12 (1994): 15. The social relation may, however, be maintained through exclusion. Gestures reflect training and skill regarding their execution that may not be immediately available to everybody, and some may not be available even after spending a good deal of time and energy toward their mastery.
Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Techniques, Technology, Civilization (1935; repr., New York: Durkheim Press, 2006), 77.
Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 225.
See Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Michael Jackson’s Thriller, directed by John Landis, choreography by Michael Peters, performance by Michael Jackson and Ola Ray, narrated by Vincent Price (Epic, 1983), uploaded October 2, 2009, accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOnqjkJTMaA.
rockwoodcomic, The Wedding Dance (August 30, 2006), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPmYbP0F4Zw; Drew, Wedding Thriller (August 7, 2007), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT6InvLJUzA; Zozo7024, Persian Wedding in Tehran via Michael Jackson’s Thriller (January 9, 2011), accessed July13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q37y17NAwhg; Wedding Thriller Dance Japan (January 18, 2010), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRLvcPsWaRE; Karen Geisler, Michael Jackson Thriller Indian Wedding Dance (September 8, 2015), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VF2mvm2C38.
byronfgarcia, Thriller (July 17, 2007), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnk7lh9M3o. See J. Lorenzo Perillo, “‘If I Was Not in Prison, I Would Not Be Famous’: Discipline, Choreography, and Mimicry in the Philippines,” Theatre Journal 63, no. 4 (2011): 607–21, for an analysis of this video’s penal and neocolonial politics.
Ida Red, “Thriller” Flash Mob in Tulsa (November 5, 2010), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tai8wuLcNLg.
Jeff Smith, Flint Zombie Walk Presents Michael Jackson’s Thriller (August 11, 2011), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9i0YPOY1Ac.
Thrill Calgary, Dancing Zombie Cowboys: Stampede Parade 2013 Highlights (July 19, 2013), accessed July 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2rX0oGTyI.
See Harmony Bench, “Screendance 2.0: Social Dance-Media,” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 7, no. 2 (2010), accessed July 16, 2016, http://www.participations.org/Volume%207/Issue%202/special/bench.htm.
For a consideration of “Thriller” in the context of Occupy Wall Street’s political protest, see Tavia Nyong’o, “The Scene of Occupation,” The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 136–49. For an analysis of the use of “Thriller” in Chilean student protests, see Camila González Ortiz, “Choreographic Meanings: Performance and Student Movement in Chile,” Hemispheric Institute Encuentro, 2014.
Serres, Parasite, 226.
Diprose, Corporeal Generosity, 54.
Mark Franko, “Given Movement: Dance and the Event,” in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, ed. André Lepecki (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 113.
Franko, 132.
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage, 1983), 20.
Hyde, 20.
Franko, “Given Movement,” 120.
Franko, 121.
Franko, 132.
Miller, Playable Bodies, 32. I question the extent to which dance games promote “mastery” of a choreography or movement repertoire as compared to mastery of a point system for scoring dance performance, but I do not question the extent to which gestural transmission does occur through dance video games.
Miller, 65.
Kiri Miller, “Multisensory Musicality in Dance Central,” in The Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio, ed. Karen Collins, Bill Kapralos, and Holly Tessler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 294.
Miller, Playable Bodies, 172–73.
Miller, 173.
Miller, 173.
Miller, 174.
Miller, 174.
Robert Stebbins, Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992).
Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 99.
Alexandra Harlig, “Social Texts, Social Audiences, Social Worlds: The Circulation of Popular Dance on YouTube 2010–2015” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2019).
Srinivasan, Sweating Saris, 167.
Julie Fersing and Loïc Fontaine, We Are Happy From, Facebook, January 20, 2014, accessed June 4, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/wearehappyfrom/.
Julie Fersing and Loïc Fontaine, We Are Happy From, accessed June 4, 2016, http://www.wearehappyfrom.com/.
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (1950; 1990 repr., London: Routledge, 2002), 50.
Mary Douglas, “Foreword: No Free Gifts,” in Mauss, Gift, ix–xxiii.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (1972; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 6.
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (1991; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 7.
Olli Pyyhtinen, The Gift and Its Paradoxes: Beyond Mauss (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2014), 36–37.
Diprose, Corporeal Generosity, 15.
Diprose.
Serres, Parasite, 45.
Mauss, Gift, 46.
Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (2011; Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2012), 45.
Richard Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing against the Common Good (London: Verso Press, 2011), 30.
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2011), 13, turns on this equation: “what does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts?”
Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813, accessed July 6, 2016, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html.
Russell Belk, “Sharing,” Journal of Consumer Research 37 (2010): 715–34.
Jame Meese, “‘It Belongs to the Internet’: Animal Images, Attribution Norms, and the Politics of Amateur Media,” M/C Journal 17, no. 2 (2014), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/782Not/0.
Erin Bomboy, “A Day with Alexandra Beller Discussing Her Latest Work ‘milkdreams,’” The Dance Enthusiast, June 8, 2015, accessed June 4, 2016, https://www.dance-enthusiast.com/features/view/milk-dreams.
Alexandra Beller, “Milkdreams (Baby Modern Dance),” performed by Ivo, Lea Fulton, Christina Robson, and Simon Thomas-Train (May 26, 2015), accessed June 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYA3TBwarwE. Note that in this upload, Beller incorporates the title of the viral version, Baby Modern Dance, into her own title.
Many thanks to Benny Simon for his help in identifying Robson.
Alexandra Beller, “A Cautionary Tale: What Can Happen When Your Personal Video Goes Viral,” From the Green Room: Dance/USA’s eJournal, May 14, 2016, accessed July 17, 2016, https://www.danceusa.org/ejournal/2016/05/02/cautionary-tale-when-your-personal-video-goes-viral.
Beller.
Beller.
David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2001), 220.
Indeed, as Beller details, her attempts to monetize her own content by contracting with a licensing company backfired. The video has since been removed from many websites, and there is no longer a record of the millions of views Beller’s video received as it traveled across platforms. See “A Cautionary Tale.”
Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man, 75.
Graeber, Theory of Value, 219.
Lazzarato does not explore the differential consequences for the production of subjectivity, which are profound.
Dienst, Bonds of Debt, 151.
Graeber, Theory of Value, 225.
Dienst, Bonds of Debt, 30.
Beyoncé Knowles, Terius Nash, Shea Taylor, Ester Dean, Cainon Lamb, Julie Frost, Michael Bivins, Nathan Morris, and Wanya Morris, Countdown, performed by Beyoncé Knowles, produced by Beyoncé Knowles, Shea Taylor, and Cainon Lamb (Columbia, 2011), accessed July 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XY3AvVgDns.
Rosas danst Rosas, choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, music by Thierry De Mey, premiered at the Kaaitheater Festival in Brussels, Belgium (1983). De Mey created a film of Rosas danst Rosas in 1997.
Achterland, choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, music by György Ligeti and Eugène Ysaÿe, premiered in Brussels, Belgium, 1990. De Keersmaeker created a film of Achterland in 1994.
“Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker Responds to Beyoncé Video,” The Performance Club, October 10, 2011, accessed July 17, 2016, http://theperformanceclub.org/2011/10/anne-teresa-de-keersmaeker-responds-to-beyonce-video/.
Dance scholar Ramsay Burt interprets De Keersmaeker’s gesture differently. He contends that her release of the choreography demonstrated “an acknowledgement that contemporary dance knowledge is a shared resource—a commons—rather than a commodity from which to generate financial profit.” Burt, Ungoverning Dance, 71. While I agree with Burt that dance knowledge is a shared resource, I disagree with his assertion that choreographies built from this shared resource are not commodities. By and large, professional choreographers have financial interests in their work, even if profits may be meager or they receive government support, and thus have vested interest in controlling how their work circulates.
This choreography repurposed Broadway choreographer Bob Fosse’s work, which, in turn, sampled African American social and jazz dance vocabularies.
“Beyoncé Announces Official ‘Single Ladies’ Dance Video Contest,” accessed July 17, 2016, Beyonceonline, http://www.beyonceonline.com/us/news/beyonc%C3%A9-announces-official-single-ladies-dance-video-contest.
Rosas VZW, Re: Rosas, the Trailer (Extended Version) (October 8, 2013), accessed July 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=winhUJUgSMg.
Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence.
Randy Martin, “A Precarious Dance, a Derivative Sociality,” The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 70.
Janet Schroeder, “Ethnic and Racial Formation on the Concert Stage: A Comparative Analysis of Tap Dance and Appalachian Step Dance” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2018).
Derrida, Given Time, 12.
Derrida, 16.
Derrida, 16.
Serres, Parasite.
Jefferson to McPherson.
Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, ix.