Dance on Screen: The Lure of the American Film Musical

Catalog description

The American film musical is one of the primary vehicles for the development and transmission of popular dance. “Dance on Screen” will explore the ways in which these films responded to major cultural and political events and social movements of the day including the Depression and New Deal; World War II and race relations; the Civil Rights movement; the rise of teenage culture, and the emergence of second-wave feminism. It will also consider how popular dance reflects and influences our perceptions of gender, age, ethnicity, and economic status. Although the emphasis of the course will be on the so-called “classic age” of Hollywood musicals (from the early 1930s through the 1950s), we will also discuss landmark dance musicals from the 1960s through the present concluding with Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016), which reprised and resurrected some of the “classic” formats and structures of the golden-age musical. At the same time, the course will identify and trace the development of key dance artists, styles, and genres in American popular dance from tap to the Lindy Hop to disco dancing and consider the formal ways that these dances served the narrative structure of the films and how they lured audiences into a state of “kinesthetic empathy.” Films and artists we will view and discuss include Gold Diggers of 1933; Top Hat (1935); Stormy Weather (1943); Oklahoma (1955); Dirty Dancing (1987); Hairspray (2007), and West Side Story (1961; 2021).