Behind the Scenes and Across Screens: Michael Jackson, His Dancing Chorus, and the Commercial Dance Industry

Abstract

Behind the Scenes and Across Screens: Michael Jackson, His Dancing Chorus, and the Commercial Dance Industry examines the history, ideologies, and production culture of the Los Angeles commercial dance industry. Michael Jackson was the best-selling crossover pop star of the 1980s, and a recognized vanguard of music video dance who worked with many dancers and choreographers from both “studio” and “street” dance backgrounds. My focus on Jackson, his choreographic and dancing collaborators, the different styles of dance incorporated into their works, and the dynamics and aims of the conglomerate entertainment/advertising industry in which these works were produced contributes to a critical examination of commercial dance more broadly. I argue that during the critical juncture of the 1980s, the works of Jackson and his dancing chorus illuminate both the enduring paradigms and shifting dynamics of the commercial dance industry regarding practices of attribution and recognition, commodity culture and commercialism, and racial politics and ideology. My dual analytic framework of behind the scenes and across screens recognizes commercial dance works as both creative processes and commercial products. Behind the scenes examines creative labor and production practices, shedding light on how the industry functions in social, political, and economic terms. The original intention of the producers frequently differs from how consumers interpret the mass-produced artifacts. Therefore, across screens explores how divergent dance aesthetics, cultural trends, and semiotic tropes circulate via various screen technology, are re-circulated as cultural commodities, and might be received by different audiences. Together, both analytic perspectives reveal commercial dance’s complicated, sometimes contradictory, multivalence, especially regarding race. Methodologically, Behind the Scenes and Across Screens is rooted in dance studies, but draws upon the disciplinary lenses of historiography, production studies, African American cultural studies, racial theory, media studies, and screendance studies. Through archival research, interviews, and screendance analyses, I examine the entangled themes of attribution, commercialism, and race as they manifest in some of Jackson’s most iconic commercial dance works from the 1980s. The focus on Jackson and his chorus illuminates the historically vexed status of dance as labor and divergent practices of credit-giving, how commodity culture and crossover marketing shape the dancing, and how commercial dance variously redresses or reifies past racial politics and contemporary racial ideologies. While I highlight the ways in which commercial dance workers assert their agency and attempt to make dances that offer positive social messages, ultimately the paradigms regarding labor, commercialism, and race in which the commercial dance industry is imbricated curtails progressive political critique.