This anthology explores a neglected area of popular music studies – popular dance practices – and does so from a fresh perspective. The volume introduces some of the key popular dance scholars, and their latest thinking, to the field of popular music studies. From pioneering dance scholars such as Theresa Buckland to up-and-coming dance theorists such as Clare Parfitt-Brown, the array of perspectives addressed is always reliably grounded in rigorous research.
Part 1 establishes a historical approach to popular dance. From the cancan to ballroom dance to the pogoing of a folk band, the authors reveal how traditions are reinvented in a ‘post-popular’ context (Parfitt-Brown 2013). Dance is envisioned as a key cultural practice where the past is recycled to embody the politics of the present context. In ‘The Problem of Popularity: The Cancan Between the French and Digital Revolutions’, Clare Parfitt-Brown takes key historical moments, beginning in the 1830s and ending with the release of the film Moulin Rouge! to demonstrate how popular practices are linked to the body politic in France. Sherril Dodds’ exploration of Bellowhead addresses the tensions between folk and pop aesthetics found in a band's gestures and movements on stage, as much as in the music itself. By analysing the pogo movements in Bellowhead's performance, Dodds shows how the boundaries between different genre conventions engage and inform the reception of folk music by new audiences. Joanna Bosse's ethnographic project asks how ‘music compels movement’, in a community of ballroom dancers who are constantly judging the ability of their peers to ‘hear music’. Bosse unpacks this value judgement to demonstrate the underpinning values of a community centred on creating ‘meaningful human connection’ simultaneously through both dance practice and musical judgements.
The second part of the anthology addresses national discourses, including questions of English identity, from Edwardian England to the English Folk Revival, alongside the Norwegian folk dance, Halling. Theresa Buckland's historical research unearths a ballroom dance called the Boston that was popular right before WWI. She situates this work in a body of historical writing by dance scholars that has engaged with popular music and dance practices of the past. The Boston has a ‘chameleon-like nature’ that led writers in the early 20th century to argue over its identity as a dance style. Buckland suggests that these confusions can be attributed to both contextual and choreomusical reasons. Her analysis suggests that class position of social groups able to access the dance, alongside the complicated musical rhythms of the dance that remained indistinct, were both important factors in this confusion. Likewise, the dancer of the Boston was often organised in discourses as ‘simply a bad dancer’. This particular chapter surveys a broad range of considerations for the study of popular dance practices. The types of venues adopted for social dance practices, the competition over space on the dance floor, embodied value judgements, musical considerations and movement analysis are all carefully considered.
Simon Featherstone's chapter explores the 1950s–1960s English folk revival, concentrating mainly on the vocal techniques and performances that were reviving older traditions. This chapter stands out for its focus on the vocal techniques and cultural values of folk music, set alongside the context of folk dance practices. This article has its counterpoint in Anne Margrete Fiskvik's analysis of a Norwegian folk dance, Halling, set up to enhance a national agenda. She carefully analyses the rhythmic and melodic structures of folk dances to show the distinctive qualities of ‘folk music light’. What her argument makes clear is the significance of dance practices for national agendas and politics of ‘the people’. If academic scholarship has been slow to recognise the importance of dance practices, this agenda has not gone unnoticed by political parties with nationalist objectives. These goals, Fiskvik argues, include attempts to negotiate and/or control class conflicts.
Part 3 of the anthology covers UK drum ‘n’ bass club culture (Joanna Hall), Bahian Samba in Brazil (Danielle Robinson and Jeff Packman), West Side Story (Rachel Duerden and Bonnie Rowell), and recording technology before WWI (Susan C. Cook). This cohort of authors contributes compelling and innovative subjects for the study of popular music and dance practices. Hall's chapter will provide one of the most comfortable entries to thinking about popular dance for popular music scholars, as her work certainly demonstrates a familiarity with the rapidly expanding body of literature about club cultures. However, she approaches the subject matter from a distinctive position as dance scholar. Her detailed portrait of race politics in club cultures suggests a radicalised ‘othering’ that is performed through white drum ‘n’ bass dance practitioners.
Danielle Robinson and Jeff Packman challenge a body of writing about samba that neglects the Bahian samba tradition. Like Hall, they draw attention to the race and class politics involved, and they redirect attention through an ethnographic depiction that is cognizant of the politics of cultural policy that inform dance values. Their work suggests that notions such as ‘proper’ dancing and ‘good’ music, ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’, are all bound up in race and class politics. The authors’ collaboration across ethnomusicology and dance ethnography proves inventive and their detailed analysis of both popular music and dance is an exemplary model of what can be attained through such collaborations.
Duerden and Rowell continue the theme of collaboration with their inventive chapter on the Broadway musical, West Side Story. They demonstrate the relationship between music and dance practices in one of the main theatrical genres where these forms are intentionally integrated, the musical. Their encyclopaedic knowledge of dance vocabulary provides the basis for a cultural critique for a musical production where, they argue, high and low dance forms are inverted and challenged. However, they are quick to point out that even with 1950s white youth adopting ‘black dance’, the ‘status quo in terms of radicalised power structures’ is maintained (p. 146).
Readers interested in the history of Irene and Vernon Castle, or sound studies more broadly, should read the chapter, ‘Talking Machines, Dancing Bodies: Marketing Recorded Dance Music before World War I’. Susan Cook's examination of the development of recording technology links this practice with race politics from minstrelsy to ragtime. Her research is extensive and addresses music amplification and dance practices in crucial ways.
The final section of the anthology is titled, ‘Politics of the Popular’, although the themes addressed by all of the authors so far could easily fit under this heading. These last essays cover Taiwanese popular culture, UK's Northern Soul, and Black British Identities. The authors engage with theories familiarly invoked in popular music studies. Any of these articles could have appeared in, say, Popular Music. Each chapter engages fundamentally with theories and themes central to current popular music studies, from questions of ‘originality’ and ‘performativity’ to archival research involving the journal, Melody Maker, and key writers on jazz such as Robert Crease (one of the forerunners for thinking about the impact dance scholarship can have for music studies). What is interesting about these articles is how they contribute details about dance on topics that have been addressed mainly from music (only) perspectives. They not only engage with the approaches to ‘popular music’ that have been laid out before them, but also update these approaches with the added analysis of dance and movement.
If there is any weakness in the volume, it is in the Introduction and Epilogue, which focus on the slipperiness of the notion of ‘the popular’. The editors seem troubled by their inability to pin down the meaning of the term, and they note that the authors all use different versions of ‘the popular’. In response, the editors celebrate how ‘the popular’ is ‘always in the process of making itself and being made’ (p. 209). For me, the problem of defining ‘the popular’ is a red herring – an idiom that does not adequately address the contributions of this volume. The impact of this collection of essays is in the originality of its topics and in its engagement with popular dance practices. The volume's value is in its empirical rigour, where theorising tends to emerge from the practices themselves. Most notably, these projects provide a model for seeing what hasn't been noticed before. It's commendable that dance scholars are leading the way here at the intersections of popular music and cultural studies.
