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Although a great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to representations of women in music videos, very little work has been done on how television-dancing creates gendered images and how women are represented through dancing for the TV camera on music videos. For example, Ann Kaplan (1987), and the articles in Cathy Schwichtenberg (1993) discuss representations of women in video but with scant attention to how choreography for the TV camera contributes to those representations . But perhaps this is not surprising, since there is a paucity of in-depth general analysis of dancing in music videos—what might be called “camera-choreography” (in terms of structure) and “videodancing ” (in terms of performance)—because in cinema and television, dancing is never autonomous, but always functions together with (and cannot be separated from) camerawork and editing. Theresa J. Buckland with Elizabeth Stewart (1993, 51–79) offers a welcome examination of the dance element of music videos. While providing useful observations 325 k TV-Dancing Women Music Videos, Camera-Choreography, and Feminist Theory : In Ruth Lorand, ed., Television: Aesthetic Reflections (New York: Peter Lang, 2002) on women, their work does not specifically focus on gender, because it takes a broader view of the phenomenon of MTV-dancing. Analyzing “videos that explore the possibilities of a female gaze,” Dan Rubey often mentions the expressive potential of dancing as a symbol of pleasure. But usually he simply mentions the fact that people dance in this or that video clip, rather than describing the video-dancing or analyzing in detail how the camera-choreography creates gendered or sexual meaning. The few times Rubey turns his attention to choreographic description and interpretation he renders only a single phrase. For example , “they move precisely in unison,” he writes of Janet Jackson’s RHYTHM NATION, “with robotic, stiffly angular arm movements” (Rubey 1991, 895). (In this chapter, I follow Andrew Goodwin’s orthographic style, putting the titles of music videos entirely in capital letters to distinguish them from the artist’s song with the same title, which would appear in quotation marks. Italics are thus reserved for album, film, and television program titles [see Goodwin 1992, xiii].) Similarly, in looking at representations of masculinity, Gareth Palmer notes that Bruce Springsteen dances in the music video DANCIN’ IN THE DARK, but never describes or analyzes the camera-choreography (Palmer 1997, 111). While, again discussing masculinity, Paul McDonald vividly describes the more casual social-dancing and acrobatic “party dancing” moves in Take That videos, when it comes to discussing more formal camera-choreography in the section of his analysis devoted to what he calls “dance mode,” oddly enough there is no description or analysis whatsoever of concrete instances of video-dancing. Lisa Lewis’s (1990) otherwise thorough analysis of female gender and MTV barely touches on dance. Finally, Andrew Goodwin, whose book on music video is metaphorically entitled Dancing in the Distraction Factory, surprisingly devotes only two pages to the videos’ camera-choreography. Goodwin, however, tantalizingly acknowledges that it is dancing that often provides the crucial “link between sound and image” in MTV, and his brief suggestions for possible movement analysis are quite discriminating, providing categories and guidelines for future analysis of the kind he himself does not undertake (Goodwin, 68). Goodwin, Simon Frith, Susan McClary, Sheila Whiteley, and others have pointed out that commentators on music videos often forget that they are forms of music, treating the clips merely as visual works (Goodwin 1992, 3–7; Frith 1988, 205–25; McClary 1991, 148; Whiteley 326    1997, 259). Since popular music is very often made expressly to dance to, it also seems particularly appropriate to pay attention to the camerachoreography in many video clips, especially those made in the early days of MTV in the 1980s, when dance-pop emerged as a dominant form of popular music. Goodwin, following Frith, argues that part of the pleasure of music video is that, rather than supplying a “sound track” supporting a series of visual images (as in cinema), music video actually does the opposite, making television musical (Goodwin 1992, 70). It seems to me that in many music video clips, through the conjunction of choreography with camerawork and editing—that is, through camera-choreography— music video also makes television dance. The paucity of kinetic analysis in the literature on music videos is a particularly striking gap during a period of intellectual obsession with the body. Thus I hope that my brief examination of gendered meaning in the camera-choreography of music...

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