Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films eds. by Mark Evans and Mary Fogarty (review)

As a recent installment of Equinox's Genre, Music and Sound series, edited by Mark Evans, Movies, Moves and Music contributes to the growing field of music and screen media studies. Like most other titles in the series, including Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Cinema (Philip Hayward, ed. [Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2009]) and The Music of Fantasy Cinema (Janet K. Halfyard, ed. [Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2012]), the individual chapters of Movies, Moves and Music are united in their study of a popular genre of film. This volume, edited by Evans and Mary Fogarty, concentrates on dance film, a genre that has only recently garnered attention in dance and film studies. Evans and Fogarty introduce the genre through the words of Erin Brannigan, a dance and film scholar, who defines "Dancefilm … as a modality that appears across various types of films including the musical and experimental shorts and is characterized by a filmic performance dominated by choreographic strategies or effects" (Erin Brannigan, Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image [New York: Oxford University Press, 2011], vii). Movies, Moves and Music offers a unique exploration of "idiosyncratic" dance films, outside the oft-analyzed film musical, that "showcase the art of dance" and the "significant role of music and sound" in these films (p. 1).

Following two introductory chapters, the bipartite division of the anthology examines dance films from the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of the twenty-first century, whose musical soundscapes were often informed by the culture of hip-hop (chap. 2–8), and a variety of films "broadly concerned with history, whether historical representations of dance, historical moments or historical contexts that have informed the sonic world of dance films" (chap. 9–13) (p. 9). Although multiple chapters call on the same film titles for analysis, especially in the first half of the book, these separate examinations link thematically in interesting ways to probe the role of technology and production, hierarchies of lowbrow and highbrow culture, the oppression and fiction of revisionist narratives, and the intertextuality and genre-blurring in dance films.

In the first section, Fogarty's "From Beat Street to Step Up 3D: The Sound of Street Dance Films" and Diane Hughes's "The Essence and Momentum of Honey: An Interplay of Sound and Movement" both underline the importance of sound technologies in delineating a sense of space for embodied and edited movements in dance film. Fogarty argues that sound design in dance films provides a different perspective of live street dance, despite the frequent employment of b-boys and b-girls. This, in turn, influences notions of authenticity and critical reception of dance films like Step Up 3D (2010) by the real street-dance community as well as by the general public. Similarly, Hughes highlights how an audiovisual design contributes to the credibility of representations of hip-hop in Honey (2002). Hughes's methodology demonstrates the interplay of the sound channel with movement that is embodied not only in the choreography of the film but also through cinematographic editing, especially the variation of film speeds. Hughes and Fogarty illuminate how the production of a dance film informs cultural meaning.

A second theme that emerges in the first section of Movies, Moves and Music is a questioning of the highbrow and lowbrow cultural categories of dance enacted in teen dance films. Although both Hughes and Fogarty mention a dichotomy of space in these films, Faye Woods, in "Space, Authenticity and Utopia in the Hip Hop Teen Dance Film," explicitly analyzes the consequences of such spatial divisions and their reinforcement by a "sonically un-integrated" soundtrack (p. 75). As Woods states, "While the hip hop teen dance film celebrates hip hop in its narrative, the cycle tends to limit hip hop soundscapes to dance moments and the...