Movies, Moves and Music

Dance on film has never been more relevant or compelling. From Saturday Night Fever, to Black Swan and the Step Up series of street dance movies, mainstream cinema has engaged, entertained and instructed generations of audiences, young and old, in the power of dance to shape bodies and desires. Music and sound are an indelible part of this phenomenon. Music not only motivates dance, it provides the affect that engages issues of sexuality, gender, ethnicity, power and pleasure, present in the dance. Cinematic dance inhabits a particular set of sound worlds, from the intimate to the epic, that place movement and music in a complex frame of engagement for all the senses.This volume explores the relationships between movement, music and sound as they appear in a variety of screen dance genres. From a historical foundation, Movies, Moves & Music takes a multidisciplinary approach to the consideration of teen dance films, screen dance, pastiches and parodies of historic dance genres, and Bollywood musicals, ending with a phenomenological account of the interaction of the moving body with the world. Films considered include Centre Stage, Flashdance, Across The Universe, 1941, Honey, the Step Up films, and many more. This volume gets to the heart of the impact of screen dance on contemporary culture.