Melissa Blanco-Borelli:

‘Choreographing the Spasm: Men Dancing in Music Videos’

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH SEMINAR:

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

16:oo- 17:30 (GMT):

Dancing in music videos is nothing new. What happens when a white male body dances? Why is it often viewed with such novelty (e.g., Thom Yorke dancing in Radiohead's Lotus Flower has more than 20m views on YouTube)? What parts of the body are allowed to move and which ones should stay still? How does this comment on notions of hegemonic masculinity and the culture of neoliberal capitalism? How do the various dance performances enact new ways of thinking about 21st century white male first world masculinity? This paper uses Franco "Bifo" Berardi's concept of the spasm to trace a genealogy of white men dancing in music video to argue how they physically manifest the rise, fall and instability of neoliberal capitalism.

Melissa Blanco Borelli is a Senior Lecturer in Dance in the Drama and Theatre Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, and author of the forthcoming monograph She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body (Oxford University Press). Other publications include chapters in Black Performance Theory (Duke 2014), Žižek and Performance (Palgrave 2014) and journal articles in Women in Performance, International Journal of Screendance and International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media.

All welcome

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