The Frame and The Swerve: Music Video's Relationship to Dance

THE FRAME AND THE SWERVE: MUSIC VIDEO’S RELATIONSHIP TO DANCE BRAD OSBORN I. FRAME AND SWERVE RAWING FROM THINKERS as diverse as Parmenides, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, and Hegel, John Rahn draws a distinction between two modes of framing the world: Being and Becoming. Being is “the tendency to identify an unchanging essence of things and to sort out the cosmos in terms of such essences,”1 while a philosophy of Becoming focuses on “existence rather than essence; change, flux, fire, plasma. . . .”2 For Rahn, this Being/Becoming binary maps neatly onto Lucretius’s model of the universe: a frame, in which each unchanging essence falls in neat parallel lines as a stream of atoms, represents the Being strand. What makes the universe interesting for Lucretius—what makes change occur or transforms Being into Becoming—is its propensity for swerve, for one stream of falling atoms to interact spontaneously with another stream. The Being of Lucretius’s neat parallel atomic movements represents “the frame of structural (or divine) order” whereas Becoming is engendered by the swerve of “free and artistic will.”3 D 212 Perspectives of New Music Rahn uses this binary opposition to describe some innovative ways that music theorists have used mathematics to talk about music. Theorists of Being focus on “nailing down simple invariant structures such as scales, chords, and pitch class sets, making taxonomies, natural histories,”4 while theorists of Becoming (often composer-theorists) focus on “what might be useful theory for their compositional activity.”5 In true Rahnian fashion, he sets up this binary opposition only to problematize the binary itself: “Turbulence is not free will, laminar flow is not determinism or slavery or totalitarianism (or even bad art).”6 I will use this opposition between Being/frame and Becoming/ swerve (and its eventual destruction) to model what I see as two different ways in which music videos relate to the dance(r)s they depict. The first I’ll call choreographed. In choreographed videos, several dancers perform (nearly) identical dances, each body falling in parallel lines within a Lucretian frame. The sounding music, usually played in real time during the video’s filming session, could also be described as one of these parallel lines. As Rahn says of Being, “entities do not have to influence each other on the fly and nothing really changes.”7 But if we look closely, we can observe slight swerves in which the spontaneous actions cued by that sounding music influence one or more dancers’ bodies to fall out of sync, to fall with free will. Contrast the choreographed dance with the improvised. In this type of music video, several bodies (often playing instruments) interact spontaneously with the sounding music as they trace the audible lines of their recorded artifact. The improvised video is full of flux and swerve. Each dancer is spontaneously influenced not only by the dynamics of the sounding music, but also the other dancers’ spontaneous bodily interpretations. Like Becoming, improvised dancing constitutes a complex system of “interacting agents which evolves irreversibly and almost capriciously to a complex organization of its own.”8 Chaos is held together only by the framing music; the musicians must convincingly approximate the bodily movements associated with the heard instrumental music. The music and the dancers are therefore entangled, interweaving a series of horizontal threads. II. A TALE OF TWO VIDEOS Like some music theorists, multimedia scholars like typologies.9 Music videos have been classified into various types by a number of scholars. Martina Elicker offers a four-part typology: 1) Videos that illustrate the lyrics; 2) Videos that add new meanings that amplify, but do not The Frame and The Swerve: Music Video’s Relationship to Dance 213 contradict the lyrics; 3) Videos that have no apparent relationship with the lyrics and/or contradict them; and 4) Performance video.10 Relative degrees of narrative structure underpin the first three types, proceeding from a video’s tightest possible relationship with the lyrics to the loosest. Elicker, Carol Vernallis, and others have developed sophisticated tools and theories to address the difference between the first three types of video.11 However, the fourth type, the performance video, remains under-theorized. Scholars have often cast...