The Circulation of Popular Dance on Youtube

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Social Texts, Social Audiences, Social Worlds: The Circulation of Popular Dance on YouTube

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the

Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Alexandra Harlig

Graduate Program in Dance

The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee

Harmony Bench, Advisor

Katherine Borland

Karen Eliot

Ryan Skinner

Copyrighted by

Alexandra Harlig

2019

Abstract

Since its premiere, YouTube has rapidly emerged as the most important venue shaping popular dance practitioners and consumers, introducing paradigm shifts in the ways dances are learned, practiced, and shared. YouTube is a technological platform, an economic system, and a means of social affiliation and expression. In this dissertation, I contribute to ongoing debates on the social, political, and economic effects of technological change by focusing on the bodily and emotional labor performed and archived on the site in videos, comments sections, and advertisements. In particular I look at comments and fan video as social paratexts which shape dance reception and production through policing genre, citationality, and legitimacy; position studio dance class videos as an Internet screendance genre which entextualizes the pedagogical context through creative documentation; and analyze the use of dance in online advertisements to promote identity-based consumption. Taken together, these inquiries show that YouTube perpetuates and reshapes established modes and genres of production, distribution, and consumption. These phenomena require an analysis that accounts for their multivalence and the ways the texts circulating on YouTube subvert existing categories, binaries, and hierarchies. A cyclical exchange—between perpetuation and innovation, subculture and pop culture, amateur and professional, the subversive and the neoliberal—is what defines YouTube and the investigation I undertake in this dissertation.

Dedication

With respect to all the young people of color creating dances, whose names we’ll never know; and in memory of those whose names we know too well: Oscar Grant, Aiyana Jones, Rakia

Boyd, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Laquan MacDonald, Tamir Rice, Stephon Clark…

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Acknowledgments

This dissertation would not have been possible without a global network of clever, generous, and open-hearted people who have honored me with their support and enabled me to reach the end of that jewel-toned marker timeline.

I am indebted to Amy Schmidt, Academic Program Coordinator for the Department of

Dance, who helped me enroll, fill out forms, and perhaps most importantly, sent back encouragements each time I said ‘this is hopefully the last semester;’ it really was this time.

Thank you to my committee for their guidance shaping my research in the exam stage, and for their willingness to jump back in to action at the end. And particularly to Dr. Bench, thank you for the big questions and the small edits and for seeing this through. Thanks to Dana Plank for final editing assistance!

To the other graduates of the department who paved the way, and particularly to my advisee cohort: Kelly and Janet, Benny, Lyndsey, and Archer; I entered the program as a solitary

PhD student, and it was wonderful to finish supported by you all. I am excited to keep growing and learning with you. To the dear MFAs I started at OSU with, Ellie, Sofie, and Brian, thank you for giving me a place to belong.

Thank you to all the dance studies PhDs making moves and making waves in and outside of our field, especially Elena and Laura; I can’t wait to meet you at conferences in various global cities to eat good food and think big thoughts. To the committee members of PoP Moves

iv especially Sherril Dodds, Clare Parfitt, and Melissa Blanco Borelli, for making a space for popular dance, for their mentorship, for believing in my work, and for publishing it.

My work and my life have been enriched by my friendships and interactions with people in many different areas. Thank you to my friends and colleagues in Fan Studies, Folklore,

Ethnomusicology, English, and Gender Studies who have welcomed me and valued my expertise while sharing theirs. I thank my friends who despite the increasing precarity of the neoliberal university have modeled perseverance, ingenuity, and self-knowledge in making the necessary decisions about where they will make a place for themselves, and have still been able to encourage me in my process.

In this and so many other topics I have relied heavily on my Facebook family and my

Instagram community for advice, good gifs, and important news and criticism. Thank you to the nebulous ‘you’ of direct address and to those who responded in times of need and times of joy.

To all the people who were honest with me about their process, and who thanked me for my honesty in the face of a graduate student mental health crisis.1 All the activists, organizers, and teachers who did the hardest work of all in a time when it is so desperately needed; I have learned so much from you and hope to rejoin you soon in the struggle for our mutual liberation.

To Columbus in the way it exists in my imaginary, a cloud of greenery, creativity, edification, and activism, and to the people working to keep it close to that ideal in the face of the same corruption, greed, and racism that plague all American cities. My fellow Sartorial

Scholars: Cindy, Colleen, Sonnet, and Taneem, have buoyed me with their feminist friendship,

1 Flaherty, Colleen. “A Very Mixed Record on Grad Student Mental Health.” Inside Higher Ed. 6 Dec 2018. www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/06/new-research-graduate-student-mental-well-being-says-departments- have-important v wicked humor, wonderful postcards, and general excellence. Ann Glaviano, still-dancing-as-an- adult role model, thank you for creating Heatwave and for your investment in the creation of safe and creative spaces for all bodies to move in. To Allison Davis for sharing my love of dolmas, the Midwest and for the poetry that makes me think about all of it. To Tiffany for partner dancing at Ace of Cups, your constant encouragement, and your advice. To Brendan and Jacinta, your pedagogy inspires me and your gif games sustained me.

To my elementary school squad Allison, Roxanne, and Cait, I am glad I can finally join your ranks as advanced degree holders, thank you for your affirmations and support and for sharing all 25 years of my in-school life with me. And my college group, Virginia, Emma, and

Morgan; one of these days we’ll all be in the same place again, but thank goodness for technology in the meantime. To Haddie, for your calm patience and persistent support for all my creative and intellectual endeavors since high school. And to the old friends who welcomed me to New York and into your established lives so warmly, and helped me make a life here too. Ezra and Rona, Adam and Dara; Virginia, Claire, Siobhan, and Stephanie—learning the city, crafting, eating dimsum and dry pot and curry fries, attending dance shows and musicals, and playing games with you these last three years made it possible to work (on working) all the other times.

To my family: to my mom, thank you for the tuition which made it possible to finish this semester, for learning a new style sheet to review my references and endnotes, and for encouraging me to go walk around the block. To Reg and Meg for being excellent sister and sister-in-loves and for understanding that Bitmoji are my love language. To my dad for the late night phone calls and for knowing I could do this. To Ann, Stan, Eli, Ariella, Rose, and Daniela

vi for being my family, too. And to all my other family for the encouragement, for understanding my absences from family gatherings, and for not asking when I would finish.

To Esther for keeping me healthy with weekly gym and poke meetings, and the best conversations about the worst things. Your care kept me afloat. To Janet for texting and calling and co-working with me almost every day this last year as we both finished, I truly could not have done this without you. And finally to Zach, whose hard work enabled me to finish with financial support and health insurance; this is a privilege many do not have. And thank you for your patience—I’m excited for all the things that are possible for us now that this is done.

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Vita

2010………………………. B.A. Dance and Linguistics, Cornell University, Magna Cum Laude

2010-2011………………………………………… University Fellow, The Ohio State University

2011-2016………Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University Department of Dance

Publications

Harlig, Alexandra. “‘Fresher Than You:’ Commercial Use of YouTube-Native Dance and Videographic Techniques.” International Journal of Screendance. 9 (2018): 50-71.

Harlig, Alexandra. “Communities of Practice: Active and Affective Viewing of Early Social Dance on the Popular Screen.” Oxford Handbook of Dance on the Popular Screen. Ed. Melissa Blanco Borelli. Oxford UP, 2014. 57-67.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Dance Studies

Minor Field: Comparative Cultural Studies

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iii

Acknowledgments...... iv

Vita ...... viii

List of Figures ...... x

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: The Social World of Popular Dance: Reception and Response on YouTube ...... 30

Chapter 2: Class Videos as an Emergent Internet Screendance Genre ...... 110

Chapter 3: Rhetorics of Representation and Consumption in Online Dance Advertising ...... 185

Conclusion ...... 254

Notes ...... 259

References ...... 282

List of Figures

Figure 1.1 YouTube paratexts...... 52

Figure 1.2 Video-embedded paratexts ...... 53

Figure 1.3 Debating Balanchine ...... 59

Figure 1.4 Hyperlinked timestamp as commentary ...... 67

Figure 1.5 Establishing position to police participation ...... 69

Figure 1.6 Intergeneric debate ...... 80

Figure 1.7 Three-way side-by-side video ...... 89

Figure 1.8 Diagonally positioned video comparison ...... 90

Figure 1.9 Promotional side-by-side with a twist ...... 95

Figure 1.10 Continued display of de Keersmaeker ...... 99

Figure 1.11 Well-labeled accusatory side-by-side ...... 102

Figure 1.12 Inclusion of original work as a preventative paratext ...... 106

Figure 2.1 Inclusion of mistakes in class videos ...... 126

Figure 2.2 Hit them folks in the commercial studio ...... 129

Figure 2.3 Choreographed and participatory versions of the milly rock...... 130

Figure 2.4 Individual performance in a classroom combination ...... 132

Figure 2.5 Combination and freestyle facial expressions in “OG Bobby Johnson” ...... 134

Figure 2.6 Referential but novel lyric-based choreography ...... 138

Figure 2.7 Abstracting literal lyrics ...... 139

Figure 2.8 Dancer Darrion Gallegos approaches videographer Tim Milgram ...... 152

Figure 2.9 The use of typography in class video thumbnails ...... 153

Figure 2.10 Documentation of the live audience in situ ...... 163

Figure 2.11 WilldaBeast Adams telling students to back up ...... 175

Figure 2.12 Studio branding through backdrop ...... 178

Figure 2.13 Stylized studio lighting decreases documentary force of class videos ...... 180

Figure 2.14 Class video genre approximated in advertisement ...... 181

Figure 3.1 Collage of sequential scenes and individuals in “Make Moves” ...... 187

Figure 3.2 Savion Glover leads the camera into the kitchen ...... 197

Figure 3.3 Commercial replication of self-mediatization ...... 211

Figure 3.4 Kaycee Rice promotes Nike products ...... 216

Figure 3.5 Virtuosic individuality in context ...... 219

Figure 3.6 Balancing spectacle and the impression of the real ...... 221

Figure 3.7 Individualized group performance in a music video ...... 226

Figure 3.8 Dancing continues after product use ...... 235

Figure 3.9 Halima Aden and Fenty’s multicultural cast ...... 237

Figure 3.10 A single model demonstrates the sartorial range of ASOS ...... 238

Figure 3.11 Unison magnifies a selling point ...... 245

Figure 3.12 Solos leading to group dancing and the use of graphics ...... 246

Figure 3.13 The group in collaboration ...... 248

Figure 3.14 Salsa Rueda as culminating group dance ...... 250

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Introduction

In November 2014, almost ten years after the founding of the video-sharing platform

YouTube, global popstar Beyoncé released the music video “7/11” on the site. Seemingly shot on a whim with an iPhone at a hotel, the video combines the visual hallmarks of amateur

YouTube video with the star power, strategy, and sound of a studio-produced music video.

Beyoncé’s friends are better looking, her lodgings nicer, and her view count—almost 300 million—higher than most dance videos on YouTube, but the cinematography, choreography, and costume come directly from aesthetics developed in YouTube-native videos since 2005.

Reflecting a process commonly observed in other realms of popular culture, popular dance forms begin in specific, usually subcultural communities, but as they circulate, corporate brands and media outlets adopt and monetize them. Dance forms with local histories and identities thus inevitably become part of the mainstream. In turn, new popular forms emerge, building off of and pushing back against widely circulating images. This cyclical exchange—between perpetuation and innovation, subculture and pop culture, amateur and professional, the subversive and the neoliberal—is what defines YouTube, its dance content, and the analysis I undertake in this dissertation.

Through analysis of these tensions as manifest in popular dance videos on YouTube, this dissertation attends to the sociality, creativity, and economics of our current moment, and to how new media platforms perpetuate or change established modes and genres of production, 1 distribution, and consumption. Since its premiere, YouTube has emerged as the most important venue shaping popular dance practitioners and consumers; yet, dance scholarship has been slow to account for the paradigm shift YouTube has introduced pedagogically, in its role in dancers’ careers, or as a venue for screendance. On the other hand, scholarship on the Internet more broadly now includes YouTube, but ignores dance, despite its market share. YouTube is a technological platform, an economic system, and a means of social affiliation and expression. In this dissertation, I contribute to ongoing debates on the social, political, and economic effects of technological change by focusing on the bodily and emotional labor archived on the site in comments sections, videos, and advertisements. This dissertation focuses on video and discourse made for YouTube by viewers and practitioners—dancers, choreographers, and videographers— who center YouTube in their own lives, practices, and careers, while always keeping in mind their continued engagement with copresent contexts, intersecting platforms, extra-generic influences, and economic exigencies. I particularly analyze videos featuring Hip-Hop and adjacent dance genres during the period of roughly 2010-2019, which in the United States includes: Breaking, New Jack Swing, Krumping, Trap, Jerking, Jookin, Turfing, Chicago

Footwork, Dancehall, House, Voguing, Waacking, Popping, Locking, Twerking,

Flexing/Bonebreaking, and their subsets, as well as combinations of the above which appear in battle contexts as New Style and in choreographic ones as Choreo. My focus on these genres stems from my own expertise as a viewer and former practitioner, because of the importance of videos containing these styles to Internet culture writ large, and because of the interrelation of these dance forms with popular and emergent media genres.

Dance forms have been transmitted over time and space for centuries through a variety of technologies including written manuals, sound recordings, newsreels, television, and film.

However, YouTube is unique historically for the scale and speed of circulating video content online, as well as for the range of content producers and audiences. There has been much discussion of the ways YouTube and other social media platforms supposedly democratize texts through easy access and quick circulation, leading to politically or artistically forward-thinking production, and to economic support frequently unavailable to subcultural groups.1 However, while anyone with a video-capable camera and an Internet connection can be a content producer,

YouTube, the content producers it hosts, and the videos they make continue to be in a complex relationship to the market and capitalism. While advertising dollars and legacy media adoption of the platform complicate the use and analysis of YouTube, as a social medium it is nonetheless the site of emotional labor, a way to affiliate with producers and viewers, and a way to define oneself through viewership, conversation, and creativity.

Throughout the dissertation I focus on the ways in which YouTube as a platform and the discourses, screen genres, and videos which circulate on it are genuinely new, and in what ways is it just the most recent in a long history of mediation and circulation. The question ‘what would have happened without YouTube’ is both interesting to explore and impossible to answer. The popularity and centrality of YouTube as a platform is somewhat recursive—because of its popularity, it becomes the most likely place to distribute content for creators who are interested in reaching large audiences, which in turn cements its place. It is difficult to say precisely why

YouTube has been so successful as a mid-to-long form video-sharing platform, though the capabilities afforded by being owned by Google is certainly a component. DailyMotion (an early

3 video streaming competitor) still exists, although it functions mostly as a place where content which would be removed on YouTube continues to be available. DanceJam, conceived of as exclusively a dance video and tutorial site, only lasted 2007-2011. Vimeo continues to be an important video platform but mostly for higher-budget documentary and narrative films.2

Platforms which also have other functions have also developed video hosting and streaming capabilities, including Facebook and its video-specific production branch Facebook Watch;

Twitter and Instagram can each host videos under a minute in their main feeds, and Instagram has also developed IGTV, a still-nascent vertical video hosting platform. Facebook and

Instagram also each have Stories functions, developed in analogy to Snapchat’s brief, personal direct-address videos with filter and sticker capability. The now-defunct Vine, which featured looped seven second videos, remains important as it was the platform through which a great deal of comedic and dance content was developed (largely by Black teenagers) before circulating more broadly on the Internet.3 Additionally, there are platforms specifically for live-streaming, like Livestream and Periscope. All of these platforms have their own affordances, aesthetics, conventions, and economics, while still existing in the larger sphere of Internet culture, and videos from each site find their ways to others. YouTube remains the main platform for

(relatively) stable, embeddable, marketable, and monetizeable videos.

YouTube is inherently a multivalent and multi-disciplinary space, functioning simultaneously as “a high volume website, a broadcast platform, a media archive, and a social network” (Burgess and Green 5), and my modes of analysis reflect that. Throughout this dissertation I combine the frameworks and expertise of the literature of dance on the popular screen with robust analyses of the processes that intersect in YouTube and social media,

4 including “the unevenness of participation and voice; the apparent tensions between commercial interests and the public good; and the contestation of ethics and social norms that occurs as belief systems, interests, and cultural differences collide” (Burgess viii). Engaging with scholars working in Dance Studies, Critical Race Theory, Fan Studies, Game Studies, Folklore, Media

Studies, and Popular Culture Studies, among others, I utilize multiple ways to look at YouTube and the processes and people that interact through it.

The dissertation is heavily influenced by media scholar Thomas Simonsen’s work on how

YouTube is used by creators and viewers at the intersection of genre and platform; game studies scholar Kiri Miller’s interest in entrainment in her work on video games and music learning; and popular dance scholar Sherril Dodds’s investment in the excavation of the value systems of practitioners and consumers of popular dance. Scholars whose projects include both YouTube and popular dance include Naomi Bragin, who focuses on the racial and political contexts of the circulating dance forms in situ; Melissa Blanco Borelli, who is concerned with the political structures and ideologies enacted through movement; and Harmony Bench, whose work on dance on the Internet looks at the meanings made in sourced, cumulative, and social movement.

While I am also concerned with representation and the embodied reality of offline movement contexts, my analysis considers YouTube videos as media objects. Material object analysis considers media objects and pursues the questions “how are things made/maintained/negotiated, what do they afford, what are the built-in assumptions about usage, how do they influence, create, change actions and interactions, how do they innovate, transform, and maintain built-in control” (Boomen and Lehmann 10). My thinking has also been framed by the field of platform studies, growing now as social media platforms continue to encourage their

5 own particular modes of creation while also adapting to changes in each other. Media scholar

Audrey Anable summarizes that a feminist platform studies must “look to where the perceived boundaries of platforms break down or blur: between code and interface, between object and subject, between the materiality of the platform and the materiality of the raced and gendered bodies that create and use them” (137). YouTube has particular affordances and customs, while also hosting and being hosted by media created for other platforms, and most users are active on multiple sites. To turn these concepts towards dance, I follow visual sociologist Phillipa Thomas, who in her work on online dance discourse lays out a theory of YouTube as a deeply-layered archive containing not just videos or user data, but also complex information about affiliations, literacies, circulations, and ideologies.

In order to attend to the technological and the bodily, which are always already wrapped up in each other, I use a range of methods. These include: (1) choreographic and textual analysis of the content including the movement itself, camera work, costuming, and interaction with music to draw conclusions about meaning, reception, and understandings of race and sexuality;

(2) historiographies of the mediated space and its audiences and communities; (3) discursive and rhetorical analyses of communications between parties on YouTube, including content creators and viewers; and (4) attention to the economic and technological functioning of the platform which supports it all.

While focusing on the particular arguments of each chapter, as outlined at the end of this

Introduction, this dissertation intersects with larger areas of interest. Throughout the chapters I consider four crucial areas of investigation: (1) How YouTube and social media in general impacts representation, identity, and sociality in our current moment; (2) the cycle of innovation

6 within the popular domain, and its absorption into large scale systems of capital; (3) how the creation of new genres also creates new statuses for and categorizations of people involved with them; and (4) the continued rhetorical power of categories like amateur and professional, commercial and participatory–binaries that the reality of social media production in fact undermine. I contribute to these larger areas of inquiry and to the fields interested in them by focusing on where they intersect with my expertise—at the point of people engaging with, producing, and learning from dance on the popular screen, connecting not only to a practice but to the other people similarly engaged.

As a backdrop to the specific dance videos and theoretical concerns I tackle in each chapter, I now introduce the complications YouTube and dance specifically bring to ideas of amateurism and professionalism, and what terms may be better suited for appropriate analysis, before turning to a description of dance video genres broadly in the YouTube ecosystem.

Subsequently I introduce the framework of forces—intents and effects—to explain the multivalence of these Internet screendance genres. I conclude with a note about data collection and citation in this dissertation, and a summary of the objects of analysis, argument, and theoretical contribution of each chapter.

Complicating Classifications

The circulation of many varied genres together requires frameworks in line with the complexity of popular dance on the Internet, with terminology that reflects the reality of the many levels of production and engagement with YouTube content. In the preface to the 2013

7 volume Amateur Media, the editors note “our frameworks for understanding contemporary amateur media and their consequences remain far less well developed than the objects of our interest” (Hunter et al., xiii). Part of the difficulty is the wide range of modes, platforms, and relations to capital within which such media exists. Given the always already commercial nature of these platforms, Burgess and Green propose a shift in “concern away from the false opposition between market and non-market culture, toward a concern with the tensions that arise when corporate logics have to contend with the unruly and emergent characteristics of participatory culture” (76). In this section I define the terms commercial, amateur, professional, and YouTube- native specifically within the social media context, though the terms and the content they describe are always in tension with the larger media landscape and economy.

With the term “commercial,” I refer to videos made by legacy media companies and/or videos that promote a good or service. Dance is having a prolonged moment in the public imaginary in legacy media forms like television and movies as well as online. Because of this, it features frequently in advertising, especially for wearable items and products targeted at teens and young adults. However, not all commercial content is identifiable as advertising. Other examples include music videos. While there have been innovations and changes in music video production and content since the advent of YouTube, I consider the music video a legacy media genre.4 Not only were the content and formal properties of music video established before social media, but their contemporary production and funding structures remain tied to record company standards and budgets.

The terms “professional” and “amateur” are more complicated; the perceived ‘quality’ or

‘professionalism’ of a video is both visual as well as structural. For viewers on the YouTube

8 platform, the professionalism of a video might be communicated through verified accounts, sponsorships, pre-roll advertisements, or the creator being on brands’ PR lists for products or travel. Live tours and channel-branded merchandise, high view counts, well-known subscribers, and interaction with the official YouTube Spaces all help to build the appearance of legitimacy for a content creator. Aesthetically, professionalism also manifests in the ‘production values’ of newer and constantly-improving cameras, lights, sets, costumes, and rigs; the use of drones or helicopters in travel vlogs or concept videos; collaborations with other popular YouTubers, and scripted material. However, these videos and their creators may still not be considered

‘professional’ in the larger sphere of legacy media and its viewers, and many seek further opportunities there while maintaining their YouTube presence.

By contrast, amateurism within social media delineates a group distinct from those for whom content creation is a career or for whom it is an active pursuit regardless of money. This distinction moves beyond the description offered by Hunter et. al: “non-salaried, non-specialist and untrained in media production” (i), as those attributes also hold for many of the top earners of social media video. Rather, I use it to refer to video that might be taken off the cuff, posted outside of a schedule, made as a practice of fandom, or disseminated without remuneration.

Media scholar James Meese points to the condition of amateur video’s circulation as a defining feature, noting that “[i]n contrast to professional content creators, amateurs often have fewer resources on hand to protect their copyrighted work and are also challenged by a pervasive online rhetoric that suggests that popular content essentially ‘belongs to the Internet’” (np).

Notably, the division between professional and amateur dovetails with distinctions between dance forms as art forms or as vernacular practices, distinctions that, as dance scholars Brenda

Dixon-Gottschild, Susan Manning, and Anthea Kraut (Choreographing) have shown, historically rendered black cultural production as though it belongs to the larger cultural sphere. However, the particularities of funding and content creation online challenges the divisions and implicit hierarchies between amateurism and professionalism.

Because there are stratifications within social media video production that remain opaque to many outside of it, “web-native” or even “YouTube-native” videos and genres may be more useful categories than amateur and professional to understand the complexity of the ways genre and commercial use intersect for popular dance. The term “web-native” encompasses all those

“user generated” videos by “content creators,” or people who focus on making Internet content, predominately on YouTube—but also on social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook—regardless of their level of quality or economic support. Creators of web-native content frequently perform many tasks that would be specialized in larger projects: choreographing, directing, and video editing, in addition to dancing, for example. The term also refers to forms of cultural production that simply did not exist prior to the current video hosting platforms. Web-native content can be produced by amateurs, as implied in the designation of

“user-generated content” as that which differentiates social media from broadcast media, but established companies also use YouTube and other platforms to market their products to different consumers than legacy media. YouTube thus brings commercially and professionally produced content in direct contact with amateur content, blurring the boundaries between these categories, as well as blurring distinctions between web-native and legacy content.

Dance in the YouTube Ecosystem

It is difficult to give accurate numbers about dance’s proportionate presence on YouTube; data has been increasingly less available to the public over YouTube’s existence, including now a lack of numbers on returned search results. It is impossible therefore to even give a number of videos that use the word ‘dance’ in their title or description. Subscriber numbers for popular dance-related channels do not give an accurate assessment of the impact dance has on YouTube or on the wider viewing public; viral videos do not lead to subscribers but do have a large ripple effect on the culture and other dancers. In an anonymous browser window, the recommended topics on YouTube’s front page do not include dance; they are mostly music video, comedy, sports, food, and movie trailers. Music videos are still extremely popular and important—larger artists easily get hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of views. Many of these include dance of some kind, and play a big role in the larger popular dance cultural sphere, though they are distinct from ‘dance videos’ per se. There are some lists curated by industry websites of the biggest or most profitable YouTube sectors, but dance does not feature on them; despite high view counts, dance video remains largely unprofitable for its uploaders.

Given these constraints, the best way to approximate the role and impact of dance on

YouTube as a cultural entity, a platform, and as a business, is to take their content, programming, and reporting into account. First is through YouTube’s Auto-generated topic channels, which exist for both ‘dance’ and ‘choreography’ separately. These channels collate videos, other channels, and even other topics, and are created through YouTube’s programming when they

“identify a topic to have a significant presence on the site” (“Auto-generated”). This indicates

11 that dance is numerically significant to the platform. A second source of information is the content YouTube created in celebration of its tenth anniversary in 2015. In the A-Z of YouTube alphabet, four were dance related: Dance, Gangnam Style, How-to Harlem Shake, and Weird, which was also about dance videos. In this coverage of important moments and statistics from the first ten years of the site, they provide some numbers which help to approximate dance’s share of the platform. These are “24 million dance-related clips” “tens of millions of vlogging videos” “135 million how-to’s” (number ten in the list of top ten how-to searches was how to dance), and “approximately 10 million cat videos” (“#10YearsofYouTube”). YouTube Rewind, which has been a year-in-review large scale video production since 2013, typically involves over one hundred prominent YouTube creators and often features dance heavily, though rarely involving dance creators themselves. It brings together the biggest trends on YouTube from that year—generally things that were featured in a lot of different videos, or that appeared in a single video which went extremely viral. Rewind is accompanied by brief explanations of the major trends featured; in 2018, three of eleven Top Trends discussed in this material were dance related: the music and dance genre K-Pop; the video game Fortnite, which features animated popular dances; and “Dance Like Everyone is Watching,” a section which covered viral dancing.

Finally, the use of dance in advertising (as discussed more in Chapter 3) shows its market share online, as does the use of amateur and YouTube-native video and dance aesthetics in music video, sponsored videos, and other commercial content, which I have written about elsewhere

(Harlig “Fresher Than You”).

In Sherril Dodds’s conclusion to the Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, she argues that each screen genre constructs meaning through dance in different ways based on

12 formal characteristics and modes and avenues of circulation. At the same time, given that both historical and contemporary television and film clips circulate alongside YouTube-native content, and commercial content developed for social media, YouTube allows a large range of screendance genres to exist together not only through their technological similarities but as intertexts that constantly reference, challenge, and rework the conventions of other screen genres and particular works. In this section I provide brief descriptions of the wide variety of video genres through which dance circulates on YouTube, and then situate them in the larger trends and tendencies of YouTube-native genres. Such genres include vlogging, unboxing videos, video game play-throughs, and cooking, makeup, and DIY tutorials, among many others.

The screen genres in which dance appears on YouTube exist on a spectrum between presentational genres and purely documentary or educational footage. They also encompass amateur, YouTube-native, and commercial forms. Documentary and instructional forms include tutorials for both specific movements and pieces of choreography, magazine-style channels like

Dance On, battle footage or event documentation such as the World of Dance competition series, and amateur recordings of social dance occasions like weddings. Other amateur videos are often entries into dance challenges or competitions, for example the Running Man Challenge.5 Fan production includes ‘react’ videos,6 mashups, and recreations.7 Commercial content includes uploaded excerpts of TV shows, movies, and live performances, both by their copyright holders and by fans, as well as music videos, advertising campaigns that also run on legacy media, as well as more conceptual YouTube-exclusive advertisements like Puma’s “Dance Dictionary,” or

Diesel Jean’s “A to Z of Dance.”8

Unique to YouTube are new, presentational popular screendance genres promulgated by specific collectives or production companies, and by many individual dancers who are specifically oriented towards YouTube and upload with consistency. These include concept videos: non-music video popular dance-centric videos that have a theme, narrative, or strong visual aesthetic; class videos, rendering presentational end-of class combinations shot at popular dance studios; street-based freestyle videos, pioneered by YAKfilms, which frame a dancer of any improvisational popular form freestyling in an aesthetically-interesting public place;9 and comedy or sketch dance videos like the ‘Now Add a Dancer’ series on TheDOMINICShow, where mundane tasks are transformed into dance prompts. These new screendance genres exist in a lineage that includes dance for camera, Hollywood musicals and dance films, and music video, but they have developed specific aesthetics and conventions, partly defined by the dance forms featured, but also by a range of improvisational and choreographed practices, particular settings, videography, editing, Internet-era humor and aesthetics, and their use of the YouTube platform.

In addition to their multivalence, mix of amateur and professional attributes, and mode of circulation, dance videos have particular inheritances and shared qualities because of their development alongside other genres on YouTube and specificities of the YouTube platform. This includes a diversification in length and style, the use of single or quotidian filming locations, and citational practices. Dance videos have followed the general trend towards diversification of what YouTube content looks like aesthetically, generically, and in length—it is not all jump cuts and vlogs. Whereas early scholarship and media industry recommendations defined successful

YouTube videos as remixable, brief, and unitopical, videos in many YouTube genres currently

14 average twenty minutes, as users turn to YouTube as a supplement and even alternative to television.10 Dance videos on YouTube now range from one minute freestyle videos to a nineteen minute class video (WilldaBeast Adams “Halsey”); the longer length is purported to be favored by the algorithm which recommends videos and sorts search results (Peterson).11

In addition to adapting to viewer and algorithmic preferences, another YouTube-native genre element seen in dance video is the use of a single, familiar space for filming. This tendency is most well-known from the use of bedrooms or studies as recording sets of first- person YouTubers. “First-person” videos refer to those featuring one person in direct address to the camera, including cooking, beauty, and personality-based videos, and they were the first kinds of channels that gained popularity and status as consistent content creators. Some of the elements which characterized amateur and web-native video in the early days of YouTube— particularly informality, intimacy, and a make-do mode of creativity—continue, but have also been codified and made more presentational as these genres and their creators professionalized.

In dance videos, this YouTube-video strategy translates to finding the best-looking free place to shoot that has light and enough space. This is frequently the studio, both for class and presentational studio videos; urban outdoor spaces (as seen in YAKFilms’ street-freestyle videos, concept videos, and amateur freestyle or challenge videos); and bedrooms, kitchens, and classrooms for fan videos and memes. Broadly speaking, social media has made public and performative that which was once private and routine. Similarly, spaces that were not traditionally presentational—bedrooms, closets, woodworking workshops, makeup vanities, kitchens, and the quotidian pedagogical space of the dance studio or the parking lot outside of it are all now filmed, presented, and watched by millions of people.

YouTube-native dance videos also mirror and enhance the citational practices of

YouTube and other platforms, giving extensive credits to the song, musical artist, choreographer, videographer, editor (if separate from the creator), location, and often at least a portion of the dancers. There is consistently more information available, whether onscreen or in the title or description box, about the cast and crew of class videos, concept videos, and street freestyle videos than any commercial screen genre with dance in it. Some music videos and advertisements have adopted the practice, I believe through proximity to YouTube-native crediting practices.

Multivalent Genre and the Constellation of Forces

Alongside convergence culture (Jenkins Convergence), multiple cycles of circulation, and an impossibility of knowing who and how people are watching videos, the multivalence of intent and reception of a YouTube dance video is contained in a constellation of forces enacted through the video’s context, production, and circulation. The reasons for watching dance videos depend on spectators’ needs and literacies: do they want to learn how to dance? Are they seeking entertainment? Do they recognize the dancers, choreographers, songs, or locations? How much do they know about dance contexts? On the production side, videographers and choreographers have both conscious and implicit reasons for creating videos and utilizing the YouTube platform to distribute them. Music Video and Media scholar Carol Vernallis asserts that the varied and multidirectional circulation of video at this moment in time requires an analysis that can

“understand a media object differently,” not necessarily within the context of its initial

16 production but through a combination of its formal characteristics and those which reflect its circulation, such as “its length, level of gloss, platform, viewing audience, or budget” (Unruly 4).

In order to account for the multiple reasons for YouTube dance video creation and their varied impacts and receptions, and the multivalence that characterizes most web-native content, I call these potential investments and engagements forces.

My development of a framework of forces relevant to YouTube dance video follows the model created by Ken S. McAllister to account for the multiple interests and impacts of computer game play, and is inspired by Kiri Miller’s work reading YouTube and video game practices together. Encapsulating both intended and potential effects, the idea of a force accounts for the range of possible readings and outcomes a video enables, depending on the needs, desires, and literacies of the individual viewer. In this section, I will enumerate the forces in YouTube videos, give examples of the screendance genre where each force is primary, and explain briefly how they are produced and function in other videos.

In his book GameWork, McAllister accounts for the impacts of games and gameplay through rhetorical forces and modes of computer games, which he identifies as: (1) Mass culture;

(2) Mass media; (3) Psychophysiological force; (4) Economic Force; and (5) Instructional Force.

McAllister positions his theory by arguing that “although recognizing this complexity makes it impossible to responsibly ascribe intentionality to one developer or even to the computer game industry as a whole, it also makes it impossible not to recognize that the influence of all of these forces through computer games does real work in the world” (McAllister 25). I assert the work that YouTube videos do in the world, their generic particularity, and their successful circulation

17 can be accounted for through an adapted theory of forces—in particular by refining the concept of forces to those particular to dance videos.

These forces are at play in many other screen genres in various strengths and combinations. I argue the following five forces work in constellation and cooperation with each other, characterizing a genre and its reception. They are: (1) Instructional Force, which notes the pedagogical setting of a video as well as the movement, music, and life values transmitted; (2)

Documentary Force, which accounts for the informational value of a historical record; (3)

Promotional Force, which encapsulates economically-driven decisions, as well as the effects of self-promotion and advertising; (4) Presentational Force, which explicates the intense performance of dancers, and the circulation of the videos as if they were made with only this in mind; and (5) Representational Force, through which I propose that despite their largely non- narrative nature, dance videos on YouTube assert values about race, gender, sexuality, body size, and individuality.

Additionally, there are three sites where these forces are enacted: (1) in situ, that is, in the copresent location of filming, whether the studio, stage, street, or set; (2) in production, that is, in the intents and decisions of the choreographer, videographer, and other production creatives; and

(3) in circulation, that is, through the distribution and reception of the video as such. In each site, the forces might act on or on behalf of what McAllister calls different agents. In this context, the agents are: (1) the studio, venue, or event; (2) choreographers; (3) the videographers and editors;

(4) performers; and (5) the at-home viewers who process the video in its circulating form. I now explicate the forces as they are enacted in the sites in various YouTube screendance genres.

Many YouTube-native genres have strong instructional force for the viewer even outside of explicitly educational programming, as in makeup tutorials, play-with-me videos, video essays, reviews, unboxings, and cooking shows. There are also purposefully instructional dance videos and channels, some of which are dedicated to teaching individual moves or styles, like

Jardy Santiago’s House Dance movement vocabulary series, as well as full combination tutorials like those teacher-choreographer Matt Steffanina posts on his channel Dance Tutorials Live corresponding to the class videos on his main channel. But instructional force comes through in other genres as well.

In Miller’s book Playing Along, she uses instructional force to argue that the radio playlists on Grand Theft Auto are “teaching millions of players how to recognize and value certain artists, songs, and musical characteristics within a given genre” (55). When describing the ways in which computer games teach people things, McAllister notes that “regardless of the intentions of developers and teachers, the instructive force in games is always at work, transforming some kind of ignorance into some kind of knowledge” (25). Dance on the popular screen has a history of de facto pedagogical effect or instructional force even when this is not the primary intended effect.12 McAllister comments that “understanding instructional force as one influence among others and as a component of meaning-making events that are situated within larger dialectical struggles can again help scholars understand what interests are at stake in those struggles, since instruction necessarily reveals the values of both teacher and student” (55). Class videos, for example, show movement combinations which could be learned, but also teach movement and ethical values, just as co-present classes, sessions, or performances might. This includes how to perform with concentration, a mobile face, going hard, and to do unison

19 movement as well as improvisation; how to choreograph or dance with musicality, particularly privileging mainstream popular music, lyric-based movement and beat kills; and how to be an audience member in a Hip-Hop dance environment: throwing shoes, cheering each other on, or hand-propping, whether in a class, cypher, or battle. For budding filmmakers there is information through the site of production about useful shots or successful angles, and how to interact with dancers. Depending on the literacies, needs, and desires of the viewer, a great deal of information can be gleaned from even casual viewing, let alone the kind of repeated watching that fans and aspirational practitioners engage in.

Documentary force is enacted through the site of production, that is, through the capture of a class, social event, competition, or performance on video. There is of course a long history of dancers, choreographers, and institutions filming class or rehearsal, whether as a memory aid for performing or teaching at a later date or location, to review for changes or corrections, or to preserve for posterity. Additionally there are both home videos and professional dance documentation of live performances. In the past, videos with strong documentary force were not made for wide consumption, and would likely not have been shared broadly. There continue to be videos which are primarily documentary; for example, private videos taken in the back of class or at a party by friends with their phones, but there are also highly-produced genres where the documentary force remains primary, as delineated in the description of screendance genres.

Documentary force is also carried in other genres. This mirrors the function of a great deal of photo and video which circulates on social media; it creates and curates self and institution—a promotional, presentational concern—but through the documentation of events worth going to and who else is present. Social media itself, with the tendency for users to post

20 updates and information about recent life events, and for platforms to maintain these in timelines, has a strong documentary component. In many ways, the documentary force of social media is aggregative; trends and movements are captured both within a single individual or account as well as across users. Even presentational dance videos act as records of changes in skill, taste, music, movement vocabulary, and fashion. They also serve, when uploaded, to show viewers scattered around the world what is popular in a particular place at that particular moment, who are the important and talented dancers, and when new dancers emerge.

Scholars who read YouTube as an archive account for the impact of historic footage circulating simultaneously with new content. In Kristen Pullen’s article on “Single Ladies” circulating in the public sphere, she reads the music video as part of the YouTube archive, which preserves moments and trends in representation as well as the dancing itself, capturing “how different groups negotiate dance at different historical moments” (147). Unlike documentaries with voiceover or an argumentative edit, Pullen notes “this digital archive concentrates on bodies and images rather than text, inviting debate over dance technique, aesthetics and history that visually reference real-world examples of how people dance” (146). These debates are discussed in detail in Chapter 1. As with the debates, additional information is added in the user-generated paratexts that are the comments, in addition to that in the title and description box; part of the documentary force of the videos is in fact in the knowledgeable naming and critiquing which takes place in comments, itself possible because of longer-term viewing experiences with the genre, dancers, and choreographers.

Promotional force is enacted almost exclusively through circulation, and can act on behalf of a venue, studio, or event; choreographers and videographers; and performers.

All of these agents generally produce or circulate videos whose primary purpose is their promotional force; these include demo reels, which display the skill of the dancing, choreography, and videography/editing for their respective agent, as well as ads and announcements for tour dates or workshops. Primarily promotional videos are always posted on the channel of the entity whom they promote.

The promotional aspects of the music tutorial videos Miller discusses point to other

YouTube—or at least for the most part other online resources, services, and products that the video creator offers or sells, like more detailed videos, or sheet music. What can be purchased from the dancers or choreographers seen in dance videos is a little more abstract. Dodds argues,

“although the body in video dance is not tied to a discernible commodity […] video dance undoubtedly exposes and promotes the work of individual directors, choreographers and itself as a genre” (136). The promotional force of presentational dance videos works for all agents. For videographers, their consumable product is the video, in addition to their services, which the popularity of dance video has put in high demand. For choreographers, while some do sell tutorials and merchandise, their main product is the opportunity to take classes from them, which also promotes the institutions where they teach. For the teacher-choreographers, these videos to varying degrees assist in achieving their interlocking goals in the industry: to create work; to succeed on YouTube (as defined by likes, views, and subscribers); to be professional dancer- choreographers (that is, to make a livelihood through teaching and the workshop circuit); and, hopefully to be paid to choreograph for live and screen mainstream projects and performing artists 13. Additionally, videos promote the dancing and performing skills of the performers

22 which might lead to what was previously seen as ‘a real performance’ whether in a more formal or staged video, commercials, or for live industry work.

Videos that primarily exert presentational force include concept videos, especially narrative or pseudo-narrative on-site videos, such as Scott Forsyth’s “Lazarus” (2015), a James

Bond-themed video that opens with a helicopter flight and situates the choreography in a hangar with Lamborghinis (Scott Forsyth). But they also include videos shot in and around dance studios using more common screendance or music video filming and editing techniques, like multiple spaces, groups, cannons, formations, more editing, and so on. For example, in “I <3

Cali Boys” (2013) choreographed by Parris Goebel, the camera explores the NappyTabs studio space to discover new groups of dancers and to allow for travelling, site-specific movement, and changes in lighting as dancers go out as far as the parking lot, walk through doors, and support themselves on counters (Parris Goebel). In these concept videos, both set in studios and on location, the presentational force is primary; there is no context other than the performative.

Despite showing ‘only’ a class combination, class videos circulate alongside concept videos and are watched and received similarly. As I discuss in-depth in Chapter 2, class videos take the instructional in situ context and render it presentational through videography, making it public and (most importantly, perhaps) a product. The capture and circulation through video also enact the representational force of dance videos.

Because dance videos circulate presentationally, they also enact a representational force for viewers. Works with primarily representational force might be those with strong narratives or explicit political messages, though the politics of representation are always in play whenever bodies are involved. The final chapter of the dissertation takes an in-depth look at the

23 representational rhetorics of dance on the Internet, where changing economies and access to production has led to an increased representation of people of color and other marginalized people and the circulation of their labor.

This model of forces is expansive enough to account for the range of genres circulating together on YouTube. The confluence of forces, a genre’s formal characteristics, and generic inheritances are all separate but interconnected; many genres share constellations of forces

(though likely in different degrees), and the content is what makes the text have those forces, alongside conditions of production and circulation. While there are Internet screen genres that have one primary force, as is illustrated in the explication of the forces, I find Internet genres are more likely to have a constellation of fairly equal forces than other screen genres, and that this is part of the larger fact of multiplicity and in-betweenness that comes from hybridity, open access and open source platforms, and new economies of production. In each chapter I consider particular facets of the way this environment has coalesced on YouTube, and the insights carefully considering dance video can bring to this discussion.

Chapter Summaries

While each chapter focuses on a particular set of texts and the questions they raise, there are some overarching issues about YouTube as a site for research. Like all scholarship on the quickly-evolving social and new media platforms, and on popular forms which value novelty, this work became out of date as I wrote it. I have endeavored to update or historicize changes that unfolded during research, and have included dates for quoted statistics where necessary.

However, by framing the scope of the project and focusing on major dancers, choreographers, and videographers, and their contributions over a prolific ten years of dance on YouTube, I hope the work will be of use in tracking future developments. More importantly, I hope to continue the work of media scholars who are developing categories and theorizations about creativity and sociality that remain applicable going forward even after the platforms, memes, and individuals through which they were developed fade from popularity.

As a new area of research, methods of Internet data gathering and citational practices are still being negotiated. In this dissertation, all comments quoted from YouTube retain their original orthography, grammar, and formatting without further note unless clarification of meaning seems necessary. For individual comments or exchanges where platform-specific visuals are meaningful for my analysis, such as hyperlinks, profile pictures, or threading structure, I use screen shots in lieu of text quotation. Comment authors are not anonymized because, as I will argue in Chapter 1, they are experts whose knowledge and labor change the reception of the video through their authorship. They are therefore due the same citation as another such contributor. Commenters are attributed in-text through their user names and the videos on which they commented, which are cited in the references by uploader username.

Because different versions of videos exist on YouTube, and because whose channel these videos are published on is an important part of differentiating authorship, agency, and advertising strategy, the videos are referenced with the channel name as the author. For the same reason, video titles retain their original formatting. When a YouTube channel name is the user’s first and last name, it nonetheless appears in in-text citations and the references in the order of the full username, for example videos posted by videographer Tim Milgram are alphabetized

25 under ‘T.’ When I begin to describe a video in the text, the parenthetical citation will include the necessary information to find the video in the references. Historical comparisons like films and television shows can also be found in the references. Additionally, for ease of reading and especially because they often use common words or phrases, the names of dance genres are capitalized, while the names of dance moves are italicized. My contributions are also italicized when they are first introduced, as are words in languages other than English. Further information about data collection appears as necessary in each chapter or in the chapter’s endnotes, which can be found at the end of this document.

The first chapter, “The Social World of Popular Dance Audiences: Reception and

Response on YouTube” positions viewer knowledge and values of movement and genre within the literature of audience studies and fan theory, proposing the framework of the social paratext to account for fan production like comments and side-by-side videos which circulate simultaneously with texts and shape viewers’ understanding of uploaded content, what gets produced, and how it is discussed going forward. I show that viewer comments and response videos are sites for genre policing, the negotiation, re-imagination, and expression of generic, aesthetic, and ethical values for popular dance audiences and practitioners, drawing from responses to YouTube videos from 2008-2015 such as YAKfilms’s documentation of Flockey’s

2011 SDK judges’ demo, Ian Eastwood’s concept video “Good Ass Intro,” Beyoncé’s music video “Countdown,” and footage of duo D*Day allegedly stealing from Les Twins. Through rhetorical analysis I delineate how YouTube viewers mutually construct a social world through these social paratexts, generating discourse which provides evidence, provokes debate, and shapes the reception of circulating texts. Looking at motivations of fan production, the

26 deployment of visual rhetoric, and the centrality of scandal to YouTube discourse, I show how

YouTube is always simultaneously a site of reception and production, a truly social world despite what many consider anti-social behavior.

The second chapter, “Studio Class Videos as an Emergent Internet Screendance Genre” traces the development and features of studio-combination videos from roughly 2012 to 2019 as they destabilize ideas of performance and presentational screendance through their instructional and documentary forces, demonstrating the complex motivations and effects of creators and texts on YouTube. Through videographic entextualization, class videos constitute a genre doubly defined, chronicling the codification of the movement genre Choreo while developing a set of videographic, editing, and distribution conventions as a screendance genre. I develop my analysis through videographic description and genealogy, close reading of choreography, and my own knowledge of the studio space, in conversation with Screendance and Internet genre literature. I particularly focus on those class videos choreographed by Tricia Miranda and

WilldaBeast Adams, and those with videography by Tim Milgram, all foundational figures for both the movement and screen genres. I argue that the development of this popular screendance genre illuminates the processes of genrefication happening elsewhere on YouTube, where emergent genres are belated to established ones but constantly innovating in both form and content. Further, it represents the tendency of social media to entextualize and circulate moments previously outside the scope of performance, and the subsequent economic effects of Internet genrefication for the people, venues, and platforms involved.

The third chapter, “Rhetorics of Representation and Consumption in Online Dance

Advertising” updates and complicates theories of multiculturalism to include the role of social

27 media identity formation and product consumption in managing and understanding difference by individuals and organizations. The analysis of millennial multiculturalism echoes the social media and online cultural criticism claim that #RepresentationMatters in promoting mutual understanding and equity, while the actual representation of difference remains complicated and defined by capitalist impulses. Looking at a wide variety of YouTube and Instagram advertisements for clothing and wearables companies like American Eagle, Android, and ASOS from 2015 through 2018, I perform rhetorical analysis of promotional materials and setting, close readings of participants and groupings, and choreographic analysis of the use of group performance and individual improvisation. I focus on these advertisements’ use of freestyle and individualized unison to assert their deployment of virtuosic individuality—personality and identity-based presentation of self. Together with a compositional tendency to highlight solos or individuals before or instead of group performance, these ads portray an ideal of affirmational consumption. In bringing these elements together I consider what role these media representations could play in presenting a polymorphous body politic despite and within the confines of the market.

The texts and theoretical lenses of each chapter are particular to their own arguments, but there are also connecting themes. Whereas in Chapter 1, I consider genrefication and the solidification of genre boundaries on the part of viewers, who serve as critics and police, in

Chapter 2 I consider the role of creators in genrefication, particularly as choreography and videography intersect and inform each other the space of dance on YouTube. In Chapter 2 I also consider how individualized performance of unison and freestyle has contributed to the success of class videos; in Chapter 3, I analyze how the use of those compositional strategies play into

28 the performance of identity as used in affirmational consumption messaging by companies advertising with dance on YouTube and other social and new media platforms. In structure, the dissertation moves from amateur though expert fan-produced texts and paratexts to a uniquely

YouTube-native genre before closing with the commercial production of advertisements.

As YouTube grows in legitimacy in the eyes of mainstream media, other screen genres, such as advertising and music video are rapidly adopting some of web video’s aesthetics, including editing and cinematographic techniques, as well as dance forms that have developed through the platform. The conclusion will re-state and summarize the constant and continuing tension between popular dance forms and the market, where regardless of the platform, content producers balance concerns for money and mainstream success with those for respect, community, and innovation.

Chapter 1: The Social World of Popular Dance: Reception and Response on YouTube

From the moment Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” begins and German locker Flockey suavely walks down the center of the stage, lip-syncing, the crowd reacts with audible glee. They love him when, perfectly timed to the music, he pumps his elbows back and his pelvis forward, one metaphorical step away from the lyrics, whose pusherman moves drugs, not muscles. The audience members praise the crispness of his locking foundation, but they react most loudly when, sandwiched between two wrist-roll phrases, he does the 1-2, 1-2-3 lean and arm swipe of the Dougie. The crowd erupts in cheers, hoots, laughs, and hand props, marking their recognition of, surprise at, and appreciation for this addition (YAKBattles “Flockey (BNMP)”).

The Dougie, a Down-South/West Coast movement that coalesced around 2010, has had lasting impact on the social forms of Hip-Hop-related movement genres. The move would have been particularly salient to Flockey’s audience less than ten months after the beginning of a huge craze precipitated by the release of Cali Swag District’s single and video “Teach Me How to

Dougie.” While the crowd present at the event reacted very positively to Flockey’s turn on stage, on YouTube the inclusion of a move with a very different style, musicality, and movement vocabulary from Locking was exactly what sparked a multi-user multi-year discussion of the move’s acceptability in this context.

One viewer took issue with the inclusion of the Dougie, which he perceived to be a move which did not belong. Kevin Kallon’s comment “that fact that I saw him do the dougie in there

30 ruined the whole thing. You cant mix locking with dougie” evoked a strong, varied response from other commenters, who used a variety of strategies to refute his claim. Kallon’s legitimacy is checked by user TheJULYdancer, who replied “who says you can’t mix it ? you ?? sorry but you don’t seem to have a clue about trthe whole thing at all ! it’s ALWAYS about creating something new !! the mix out of locking and dougie is making him a true original ! and that’s why everybody love it ! you really need to think about your opinion once again …” while viewer

Andrew Hong questions Kallon’s reasoning skills “lolol if him doin dougie ruins this dance u might as well say that starting from 0:16 when he begins to lip sing the song ruined it as well cuz hey thats not part of locking D:” and cerul3an4 bypasses direct engagement altogether to offer a very different assessment: “Anyway, that was probably the dopest Dougie I’ve ever seen.” This small sampling of the 80 comments responding to Flockey’s performance demonstrate how practitioners and observers bring in various literacies and registers of communication to actively create and then police the boundaries of continually-changing genres, and in doing so shape the environment for future dancers as well as the subsequent reception of the video at hand.1

Drawing from responses to videos such as Flockey’s demo, Ian Eastwood’s “Good Ass

Intro,” and Beyoncé’s “Countdown,” I show in this chapter how viewers mutually construct a social world through comments and response videos, generating paratexts which shape the reception of circulating texts, provide evidence, and provoke debate. First, I explore comments as audience-created paratexts which fulfill the historical functions of criticism and help regulate notions of genre. Next, I turn to video responses—in particular the side-by-side version of the mashup—to look at motivations of fan production, the deployment of visual rhetoric, and the centrality of scandal to YouTube discourse. I argue that viewer comments and response videos

31 on YouTube provide evidence for a complex and varied set of popular dance viewers that converge on the site, forming the social audience.

YouTube data provide audience studies with both individual records of reception and negotiations of community standards, and my analysis carries forward recent interest in value in popular dance as discussed in Sherril Dodds’s Dancing on the Canon. In it, Dodds argues that

“popular dance exists within a system of values and […] those engaged in popular dance practice are not only produced by a framework of value, but also have the capacity to negotiate and re- imagine the values they encounter through their dancing bodies. This value is both an external measurement of worth constructed by ‘outsiders’ and an internal system of judgment created by the ‘insiders’ of a popular dance scene” (4). In this chapter, I argue that in addition to co-present spaces for embodied practice, YouTube functions as a site for the negotiation, re-imagination, and expression of value for popular dance audiences and practitioners, as seen through the social circulation of paratextual viewer response and fan production.

On YouTube, viewers respond to videos in two main ways: by posting in the comments section, and by producing response videos. Although there is a long history of response to dance on the popular screen,2 including criticism and fan production, social media platforms like

YouTube offer a rare proximity of text and commentary,3 and enable contributions from a range of viewers. Audience Reception theory has established that meaning-making happens in the interaction between a text and its audience, based on the literacies of the readers. Following reader response and paratextual theory, I argue that the circulation of audience responses with original texts on YouTube creates a new frame for the reception of and meaning-making about popular dance videos. Comments and side-by-side comparison videos reveal the composition of

32 popular dance video audiences, what they know, and the issues about which they care. Their reactions, alongside the original videos, reflect and shape popular dance genres, ethics, aesthetics, and sociality for both practitioners and audiences on and off YouTube.

There are many modes of response to and participation with popular dance videos. While many exist entirely within the YouTube site, response commentary and videos do circulate on other new and social media, like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. This is particularly true of meme production or the replication of viral choreographies (Bench “Screendance 2.0”). These may circulate on or between a number of platforms that host social video, including Facebook,

Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine, in addition to YouTube. YouTube hosts video recaps on dance performances, where a YouTube user will film commentary on a recent mediated performance, whether originally broadcast on YouTube or television. Related to recap videos are reaction videos, which capture the real-time reaction of people as they view media content. Finally, one of the main types of participatory video production is the uploading of archival footage, with or without commentary and in a range of edited forms. This chapter focuses on two of these modes of response (comments and side-by-side videos), which each perform the functions of genrefication, criticism, and offering evidence of a breach in personal or community standards.

Much of the existing scholarship on YouTube response sits at the intersection of communication studies and linguistics,4 in an area on human text-based discourse known as computer-mediated communication (CMC).5 The focus of CMC studies and most of the literature is on the form of YouTube comments, a defining feature of YouTube discourse. In this chapter, I am predominately interested in the function and impact of response on producers and viewers, on which there is little scholarly work, and even less that engages with videos of

33 popular dance.6 YouTube comments are much disdained in daily conversation among Internet users; such comments (along with the comments sections of other media platforms) are often full of exchanges that are rude at best and racist, sexist, or violent at worst. Because of the negative reputation of the comments section, “don’t read the comments” is a common saying on social media. It appears as a preemptive warning about a link someone is sharing where the comments section is particularly bad, or in the form of “never read the comments,” which rebukes another reader’s shock at what they found in the comments. While this warning is often warranted, comments sections house many types of discussion and offer important data for popular dance,

Internet culture, and audience studies. Attention to the content of comments and response videos enables a more complex understanding of how viewers interact with videos, content producers, and each other, as well as the way the YouTube platform shapes these exchanges.

Although comments are the most common mode of response on YouTube, they are not the only way viewers interact with or express ideas about existing videos and content producers.

Another is video responses, including vlog-style commentary, parodies, attempts to replicate something modeled or suggested in a previous video, and reviews or critiques of traditional or online entertainment. In a previous iteration of the site, response videos were displayed on the same page as the video to which they responded, making them highly visible to both the original content producer and other viewers. YouTube no longer supports this feature, but users continue to make response videos broadly speaking, indicating their video’s connection to the “original” through the title of the video or within its tags.7 Until about 2010, the category Most Responded was one of four—including Most Discussed, Most Favorited, and Most Viewed, used as metrics

34 of popular videos on the site, clearly demonstrating the emphasis on social viewing and participation on the site by both the platform and the participants (Burgess and Green 40).

Within the larger category of response videos are long-standing fan video production styles such as vidding and mashups, practices that arrange existing footage to continue to engage with the content.8 In the last part of this chapter, I consider side-by-side videos, a type of mashup that uses simultaneous visual comparison of two videos to comment on their relation to each other. I argue that side-by-side videos function as a mode of response and production that plays alongside comments to educate and engage other YouTube viewers.

The modes of viewer response which circulate on YouTube can be understood through analysis of their function, form, and rhetoric. In addition to analysis grounded in the literature on

Internet-based communities, YouTube responses can also be analyzed through analogy to historical modes of response to dance on the popular screen, including journalism, criticism, and fan practices. These comparisons open ways to understand YouTube from 2010-2015 as a historically-situated site of practice with a particular mode of sociality.

In order to discuss both of these discursive modes, I follow Philippa Thomas’s adoption of paratextual analysis to popular dance studies. In her article “Single Ladies, Plural: Racism,

Scandal, and ‘Authenticity’ within the Multiplication and Circulation of Online Dance

Discourses,” Thomas borrows the concept of the paratext from literary theory, where it refers to elements like reviews, prefaces, and dust jacket texts that accompany the main work under evaluation, extending it to comments, likes, and shares on social media sites. According to media scholar Thomas Simonsen, paratexts on YouTube “provide the video with a level of interpretation as well as verification” (“Functionality” 222). He asserts that viewers are

35 dependent on paratexts to identify and understand the video, a concept I apply and particularize to popular dance videos.

I then explore the relevance of historical modes of response as analytic tools for current communicative forms, turning first to comments as they carry out functions of written criticism and display traits of genre- and community-policing, and secondly to side-by-side comparison videos as paratextual commentary and productive fan expression. I draw my examples in this chapter from a variety of movement genres including B-boying (Breaking), Choreo, Chicago

Footwork, and Locking, and a few different screen genres, including the presentational studio- based combination, documentary footage, and the side-by-side response video. Many studies of

YouTube as a platform and a social media network focus on large video sample sizes determined by the most popular or most discussed lists generated by YouTube. The videos discussed in this chapter were selected specifically for their content and responses produced, and come from some of the most important channels and content creators in Hip-Hop-related dance, or are part of conflicts which were much discussed among practitioners and dedicated viewers, myself included. The examples considered are particular, but their rhetoric, form, and function are representative of the general discourse concerning popular dance on YouTube as it appears in what users say about video content and how they position themselves in relation to it, to content producers, and to other viewers.

In his book Film/Genre, Rick Altman argues “instead of seeing some critics as right and others as wrong, we must interpret both approaches as attempts to capture jurisdiction over the right to redefine the texts in question” (82). Historically, criticism, fan production, and paratexts have been important to scholars for understanding how material is consumed within a given time

36 period. Comments section discussions and side-by-side videos serve the same function for the current period, for users and scholars alike. While these responses are created by individuals, they circulate on a social platform, and as media scholar Jonathan Gray asserts, “a close study of viewer-paratexts can reveal ways in which communities of audiences interact with and thereby create texts, not just ways in which individuals fashion them” (146).9 Looked at in this way,

YouTube, with its commenter-critics and fan producers, functions as a layered archive that contains not just videos or user data but complex information about affiliations, literacies, and ideologies about the social world of popular dance audiences.

Theories of the Audience and Social Reception

The contemporary field of reception theory has been shaped by the work of Stuart Hall in cultural and media studies, and Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish in literary studies, among others.

Reception theory, also called Reader Response in literary studies, and related to audience studies in visual media, is the turn to studying not only a text but the context of its consumption and the subsequent responses produced. The field has evolved since the 1970s when it began developing, both in response to critiques that the field ignored the text itself, as well as a desire for a more refined sense of the ‘reader.’ Reception theory is particularly relevant to the concerns of this chapter, given the responses made clear through direct engagement and fan production, and I argue that the kinds of data considered in this chapter offer an important way to expand and conceptualize the audience, the viewer, and their relationship to the text, through an extension of the idea of the social audience. 10

37 Wolfgang Iser’s work represents a portion of reader response theory that uses an ideal or abstract reader to focus on the relationship between the text and the reader, particularly, in his terminology, how the text controls the reader’s activity. In his conception, there is change and interpretation in two directions, enacted by the reader and upon the reader. He argues, “if a literary text does something to its readers, it also simultaneously reveals something about them.

Thus [the text] turns into a divining rod, locating our dispositions, desires, inclinations, and eventually our overall makeup” (Iser vii). These revelations may be made to the reader, or the scholar; on YouTube they are clear within responses on the platform, which supports an articulation of individual reception through immediate social response not readily available at the time of Iser’s theorization. Later strands of reception theory reject the abstract reader posited in literary scholarship or the mass audience that was the focus of early television research, in favor of studying the individual. This in turn was criticized, as the experience of an individual reader or viewer was seen to be insufficient data for theorization (Ross).

In the second decade of the 21st century, most media reception theorists understand the active audience multiply; they are individuals, but their responses are conditioned by their demographics, cultural background, and life experience, including previous media exposure.

While each audience member is unique, and so their reception will always be at least slightly different from that of others, it is recognized there are common understandings of words, images, and acts that enable communication as well as interpretation. The beginning of television audience research was institutionally driven by trying to assess the tastes and behaviors of television audiences for commercial reasons. Cultural theorist Ien Ang, among others, criticizes the generalized categorizations that emerged from this intention, and moves towards a theory

38 based in particularization, with “the social world of actual audiences” as its object. Ang introduces the social world of actual audiences “as a provisional shorthand for the infinite, contradictory, dispersed and dynamic practices and experiences of television audience-hood enacted by people in their everyday lives—practices and experiences that are conventionally conceived as ‘watching,’ ‘using,’ ‘receiving,’ ‘consuming,’ [and] ‘decoding’” (13).

On YouTube, the experience of audiencehood also includes commenting, making video responses, engaging in conflict, and communicating directly with other users. Not all users participate in every mode, or do so for every kind of content they consume. But even those who do not contribute to these discourses encounter them as part of being even a silent audience member. The particularities of the YouTube platform and its social nature renders many of the critiques against reception theory moot, as there is an overwhelming amount of data about the

‘actual audience’: about how viewers are processing the content hosted there—data which both offers particular evidence of individual reception and sufficient trends from which to theorize about the audience writ large. The focus on the relationship between the text and its audience so central to Iser’s work is nonetheless important. As can be seen in the opening example of

Flockey’s deployment of the Dougie, the text does shape the reactions and actions of the viewer, but different individuals in the audience process it differently, as exemplified by Kevin Kallon’s rejection of the move, and the subsequent debate.

This rejection, a confrontational approach to the text, falls under the category of oppositional decoding, one of three ways through which individuals process media input and messages, according to Stuart Hall. While many responses on YouTube are evidence of an oppositional reading of a video, other responses fall in the other two types of decoding:

39 dominant, which is according to the intended meaning from the media creator; and negotiated, where the audience member weighs the input, and may agree or disagree. These kinds of processing may take place on any kind of text, and have historically produced a range of responses from audience members, in turn often influencing others.

As with other aspects of YouTube, the videos discussed in this chapter and the responses to them are particular to their mode and era of circulation. While there are differences, there are also useful similarities to the reception of historical forms of dance on the popular screen, including television, Hollywood musicals, music videos, and dance films. Ien Ang argues that in order to move away from the fallacy of an abstract and stable audience towards understanding the social world of actual audiences, it is necessary to “find new ways of making the unfamiliar familiar, or more precisely, to make something that is so familiar in our everyday lives but has retained an ‘exotic’ quality nevertheless, also familiar at the level of understanding, knowledge, discourse” (14). While her object of study is television, in 2015 YouTube very much fits into the quotidian but still not entirely understood position that she describes. As such, I now turn to three familiar types of audience reactions to dance on the popular screen: criticism, fan practices, and filmed audiences. Using existing categories of response to dance on the popular screen to analyze current forms provides a historical comparison sometimes lacking in discussions of new and social media. Existing categories also offer a useful typology for parsing out the different functions and meanings of comments and response videos, while points of slippage point to the particularities of the YouTube platform, the texts circulated there, and the sociality of the site.

Fan practices are a longstanding type of response to dance on the popular screen, including fan letters, fanzines, fan clubs, and fan video production. While audience members

40 certainly idolized Hollywood stars in the movie-musical era, television shows like American

Bandstand (1957-1989) and Soul Train (1971-2006) elicited particular fan involvement. These shows featured in-studio dancing to popular records. The dancers danced not as characters but as themselves, and regulars were known by name, developing large fan followings as individuals or as couples—whether the pairings were real, imagined, amorous, or merely dance-based. By some estimates, at the height of its popularity, American Bandstand received around 45,000 fan letters a week (“Tall”). In addition, there were nation-wide fan clubs for the show and individual dancers, as well as fan-produced magazines known now as fanzines. These were dominant modes of decoding that were often in collaboration with the show or performers.

Many YouTube comments, particularly those on channels managed by a single performing entity, closely resemble these longstanding fan responses, generally a record of a dominant decoding of the text. Laudatory comments without specific mention of the given performance (or in combination with video-specific commentary), such as ‘I love you

[performer!]’ are most comparable to fan letters. Although communication that is more direct is possible through other social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, fans do use YouTube comments section to express fandom. Topics addressed in comments mirror those in fan letters and fanzines, including the performers’ desirability, their connections to other performers, and their impact on clothing trends. In addition to discussion of the music used, the dancers’ clothing is a frequent topic in comments. Although the sartorial choices are quite different, this provides an interesting direct comparison to American Bandstand; accounts of the show often tell how it influenced fashion, in particular, by popularizing the Peter Pan collar that peeked out over the sweaters girls wore over their school uniforms (Delmont; J. Jackson). Like expressions of

41 admiration and speculation about romantic involvements, comments on the fashion of favorite

YouTube dancers show the thematic through-line of fan engagement by popular dance audience, despite the shifts in delivery of texts and responses.

In his article on digital fandom, Matt Hills works to bring foundational fan studies scholar John Fiske’s model of fan production forward from 1992 into the Web 2.0 era. In addition to utilizing the terminology, he carries out his analyses in what he sees as the spirit of that model: to suggest ways to analyze fan production, rather than to police or reify distinctions through that analysis. Instead, Hills suggests, fan activities are multiple and mutable, “potentially spanning all categories and refusing clear distinctions” (134-5). In Fiske’s model, most fan production is an example of enunciative productivity (meaning shared in face-to-face culture), or of textual productivity (the creation and distribution of texts as an expression of fandom). To carry forward the previous examples, the donning of Peter Pan collars in response to American

Bandstand is enunciative, as an embodied display of fandom shared with other co-present fans, while the production of American Bandstand fanzines is textual. In the current era, Hills calls

Internet commentary a “textual-enunciative productivity,” one that is both social and creative

(135-6). Both writing comments and responding via video are forms of textual-enunciative productivity, and a crucial part of the social world of popular dance audiences.

Fan video production is a much more recent fan practice. While there are many kinds, the most typical consists of vidding, mashups, or remixes, where fans produce video by juxtaposing or recontextualizing existing media clips, often with the addition of music. Fan video may express the fan’s adoration for the productions(s), introduce a counter narrative through editing, or complicate readings of the original text(s) in a variety of ways. With the exception of written

42 commentary about written texts, most textual response has historically used a different medium from its subject. Fan video preceded YouTube by about thirty years (Jenkins “Fan Vidding,”

“What Happened”), and carries forward the textual and enunciative functions of longstanding fan practices, but its presence on the platform is also somewhat unique. Through circulation on the same site, on YouTube fan video takes not only the same medium but also the same mode of circulation as its source material. This, like the comments section, which displays directly beneath the video frame, highlights YouTube responses’ proximity to their subject matter, allowing responses—whether according to a dominant, negotiated, or confrontational reading— to be part of the experience of the social audience.

Responses to texts can help viewers read that text and put it within a frame of what other people think about it; this can include filmed audience reaction. As already noted, comments offer further information and a variety of opinions about the video, while fan practices like vidding or side-by-sides use juxtaposition to elicit a different reading of the source material.

Reaction shots within a filmed product are a text-internal precedent for encountering audience response visually. Reaction shots, which stage people or characters reacting to a performance happening within the movie or television show, have a strong instructional force. Through watching them, home viewers can learn how to evaluate the dance, how to feel about it, and even how to do it. Across screen genres, two main versions of this exist: (1) filmed audiences; and (2) filmed judges. The first, filmed audiences, is particularly present in dance party TV formats like

American Bandstand and Soul Train, as well as their subsequent fictional portrayals like

Hairspray (1987, 2007) and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (1985), but audiences are also shown in battle or performance scenes in dance films. As I discuss in my Oxford Handbook chapter

43 “Communities of Practice: Active and Affective Viewing of Early Social Dance on the Popular

Screen,” the in-studio dancers watching live performers on American Bandstand provided a template for behavior for the viewers at home, who often danced along in their living rooms. The rhetorical power of the filmed audience is their relatability. They appear to be just like the viewer, but their abilities and reactions are elevated, encouraging imitation.

On the other end, the convention of filmed judges appeals to the rhetoric of supposed experts to shape the home viewer’s opinion of the dance. The most iconic example of this convention is the judges’ panel in the audition scene of Flashdance (1983), replicated almost shot for shot in Save the Last Dance (2001). In each, an establishing shot shows variously occupied judges; they smoke, blow their noses, and look off into the distance. By establishing their boredom first, subsequent camera glances demonstrate the judges’ approval: they push up their glasses; smoke, blow, and tap in time to the music; and sit up straight, their hands clasped in glee. Along with a swell in the music, these signs indicate the audition’s success. In fictional representations, filmmakers design such responses to instruct the audience and further the narrative. Non-fictional television shows or documentary films also use the same visual rhetoric to much the same effect. While not staged in the same way as in a film, reality talent competitions like America’s Best Dance Crew, So You Think You Can Dance, and Dancing with the Stars use such reaction shots, showing at-home audiences the reactions of the judges and the studio audience.

On YouTube, videos of live events often capture the reaction of the physical audience, which then becomes part of the text for those watching the video. Battle footage, judges’ demos, stage-based competitions, and studio-based combinations all frequently include audience

44 reactions. From my experience, the inclusion of audience reaction heightens my viewing experience, much like the energy of fellow attendees does when I am physically co-present at an event. I find responses from those present—often other practitioners—particularly informative when watching movement genres with which I have less familiarity; exposure to the judgments and reactions of competent observers makes me more literate. However, as I will discuss further, the comments of at-home audience members do not always line up with the filmed audience, raising interesting questions of where the discord lies between different audiences. Are those watching in situ fundamentally different from those watching at home? Do they have different values, or is the type of response governed more by the venue than by taste or literacy?

Preexisting formats of response such as criticism, fan production, and filmed reactions shape current reception to dance on the popular screen, and the way viewers interpret and engage with it. An analysis would not be complete without reference to these older models. However,

YouTube’s unique features as a distribution platform and a medium of sociality re-shape these existing categories and require that new ones be posited.

The Social YouTube Audience

One of the unique characteristics of YouTube is its hybridity as both a social and content network. The ability to respond immediately and connect with other members of the social audience is an important component distinguishing YouTube from other distribution platforms.

At the same time, it also differs from some other social media, given its distribution of original content. YouTube shares attributes with both broadcast and social media networks; as Patricia

45 Lange and others have argued, YouTube functions as its own social network while also integrating into others through embedding (“Publicly”).11

Reception of YouTube texts reflect the characteristics of the platform itself, and responses on the platform are similarly both multi-directionally communicative as well as content-focused. In her article on the participatory framework of YouTube interaction, Marta

Dynel remarks that “traditional media communication is known to be primarily one-way communication, with audience’s participation being restricted to active recipiency, i.e. gleaning meanings […] shown on the screen” (45). As previously mentioned, media fans have always been productive, but the platform and sociality of YouTube enables onsite multi-directional communication, which in turn impacts the reception of the text by other viewers, as well as the production of additional responses and paratexts. As Dynel asserts, “although both a video and a comment cannot change previous videos and comments (which is also the case of turns in face- to-face interaction), they can affect the nature of online interaction, inviting new videos or comments” (49).

The viewers who make the new videos and leave new comments are part of a video or channel’s social audience. Revising Annette Kuhn’s idea of the social audience to reflect 21st century television trends, media scholar Shanon Marie Ross explains that the “social audience can be thought of as a collective; people ‘come together’ (sometimes literally) to watch a show, guided in part by the work of the television industry” (7). This idea of the social audience member is distinct from ‘spectators’ who fit into the passive mode of audienceship stipulated in early audience studies–”individuals who engage with a TV show but who may or may not do so with any sense of belonging to a larger collective of viewers” (7). On YouTube, the social

46 audience comes together on the page of a given video, where even if they do not produce a response, their sense of belonging to a larger set of viewers is formed through the presence of comments, view counts, and likes.

Writing for Google, computer scientists Wattenhofer et al. note there are some direct social connections made on YouTube, they argue YouTube is a “content-driven online social network” (356); that is, a network that “facilitates indirect socialization via a gluing content layer” (354) with communication that is video centered.12 They observed that communication on the site works largely through “a user-content-user relationship” rather than the user-user connection found in many social networks (354-6). They suggest that given the content-driven nature of YouTube as a platform, it is not surprising that viewer responses and interactions are also largely content-based.13 In the case of popular dance on YouTube, the temporality of this interaction can be asynchronous, cyclical, and determined by modality, resulting in multiple audiences addressed by a single dance genre or performer.

While a network forms through attention to the video and inter- and para-textual discourse about it, the multiple value judgments within the comments reveal viewers belonging to multiple audiences and communities (of practice). When differing interpretations of the text remove or shift the gluing layer of communication, user-to-user friction may occur, resulting in the kinds of conflicts which give YouTube interactions their bad reputation. The concept of the social audience does not stipulate total agreement, or even friendly discussion, as Ross points out, content producers and scholars “need to accept the paradox of social audiences existing to a degree in the formation of concentric circles: […] within these initial social audiences, smaller, constantly shifting social audiences emerge—sometimes clashing and sometimes coalescing with

47 each other—all while remaining part of the broader social audience associated with the originating text” (Ross 56). Ross cautions that while “individual spectators could have widely varying interpretations,” they are still part of the social audience, engaging with and committed to the content (56). By articulating their interpretations, members of actual social audiences change the conditions of a text’s subsequent reception. I argue that through the creation of both written and visual responses, audience members create paratexts, what French literary theorist

Gérard Genette described as the threshold between world and text (261), and in fact author social paratexts, through which meaning making is multidirectional and aggregative: influenced by the values of others engaged with the text.

Paratexts and Social Paratexts in YouTube Dance Videos

The paratext, originally theorized by Genette in the 1980s, is an analysis for those elements outside of the manuscript that made a book a book, including title, preface, illustrations, author’s notes, and the like. In the years since, scholars have expanded the idea to other tangible media, like video and DVD, and more recently to various digital media. These elements do not merely make a text legible as an instance of its type, but also help the audience member to understand that text in particular. Broadly rendered, Genette describes the paratext as “an action on the public in the service, well or badly understood and accomplished, of a better reception of the text and a more pertinent reading [of it]—more pertinent, naturally, in the eyes of the author and his allies” (261-2). As may be clear from his explanation, Genette understood paratexts to be made or authorized by the author of the main text. However, recent utilizations of this theory

48 have extended the paradigm to other sources of paratext, including readers, viewers, and consumers. At its most basic, Jonathan Gray notes, “audience paratextuality occurs anytime two or more people discuss a film or television program, but audience paratextuality also includes criticism and reviews, fan fiction, fan film and video (vids), ‘filk’ (fan song), fan art, spoilers, fan sites, and many other forms” (143).

Through analogy to the social audience and the social text, I posit that viewer response on

YouTube acts as a social paratext, one that creates a ‘better reception of the text’ according to the values and decoding of that particular viewer, and in turn influences the readings and responses by others.14 In the terms of fan production discussed earlier, I argue that social paratexts are both enunciative and textual; that is both a text and a communicative gesture. Jonathan Gray in his discussion of what he classifies as viewer-end paratexts, notes that fan responses to television

“simultaneously provide evidence about how any given community or individual watches the show in question, and […] will serve as a paratext that encourages others to watch in a similar manner” (162). As Steven Jones glosses it, the idea of the social text accounts for the “dynamic discourse fields of production and reception composed of interacting forces: verbal, graphical (or bibliographical), cultural, ideological, and always social” which surround and make all texts

(“Dickens” 75). He argues in today’s culture of remediation and re-mix, “Genette’s limited paratext, which serves as a threshold or transactional space between the text and the world, has moved into the foreground; the paratext has become the essence of the social text itself

(“Dickens” 76). The circulation and reception of YouTube videos are to a certain extent defined by their paratexts, and paratextual production like side-by-side videos can in turn become a social text onto which new responses and interpretations are laid. All texts are social texts, so it

49 may be that all paratexts are social paratexts—but I argue the category is particularly useful for those responses discussed in this chapter, authored as they are by audience members for public viewing in close proximity to the text, on a site where other viewers are clearly attending.

In “The Functionality of Paratexts on YouTube,” Thomas Simonsen lays out a typology of YouTube features within a paratextual framework. He uses Genette’s framework to characterize content on YouTube while modifying where the book-derived analysis does not fit.

On YouTube, paratexts include titles, uploader, upload date, view count, annotations, content in the description box, links to additional videos, and other elements elaborated further going forward. Many of the features of a YouTube page which Simonsen characterizes as paratexts could also be classified as metadata. Commonly glossed as “data about data,” Gene Smith labels it “documentation for your data” (66), while Tony Gill prefers “a structured description of the essential attributes of an information object” (3). As defined by the Dublin Core Meta Data

Initiative, there are fifteen basic elements of metadata, which include contributor, coverage, creator, date, description, format, identifier, language, publisher, relation, rights, source, subject, title, and type (“Metadata Basics”). Used in analog and digital information retrieval systems, this information helps to identify and manage collections of all kinds. While metadata helps sort and recall resources within a system of storage or display, paratexts enable users to contextualize and understand the accessed texts. Many components of a YouTube video page, like the title, could be described as either metadata or paratext depending on the analytical relevance to researcher, and depending on who is using the information and to what end. Because in this chapter I am interested in the reception and response to YouTube videos, the label paratext is more productive.15

50 While the analytical categories of metadata and paratext intersect, they do not describe all the same components. Comments and side-by-side videos, for example, fall well outside of metadata as defined and used within information science and related fields. Equally, not all metadata are paratexts, crucially not if the metadata is inaccessible to users. Tagging, for example, one of the defining elements of metadata on the social web generally, was stripped of its paratextual function on YouTube starting in 2012 when tags were no longer visible to users.

Since about 2017, one to three tags can once again be displayed. This is in opposition to sites like

Instagram and Tumblr where tags have multiple, highly paratextual and social meanings in addition to aiding in recall (Smith).

Simonsen’s typology of YouTube paratexts has three main categories, defined by their location in relation to an uploaded video when viewed on the YouTube website: (1) Video- embedded paratexts; (2) peripheral on-site paratexts; and (3) off-site paratexts (“Functionality”).

As can be seen in figure 1.1, a viewer encounters many official paratexts when looking at a

YouTube video, both provided by the uploader and by the platform.

Figure 1.1 YouTube paratexts. Labeled screenshot showing paratexts on the YouTube site using Simonsen’s typology and noting metadata. Screenshot from Ian Eastwood, “Ian Eastwood | “Good Ass Intro” - Chance The Rapper,” YouTube, 24 Feb 2014 www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2c_LDZsfE0 Accessed 14 Aug 2015.

Video-embedded paratexts include anything that share the same URL as the video and are within the video frame, for example annotations, links to other videos or channel subscription, opening or closing credits or titles, and others, as seen in figure 1.2. Video- embedded paratexts travel when the video is itself embedded on other platforms, while those in the next category do not.

Figure 1.2 Video-embedded paratexts. This end screen provides details about the content-makers, including social media profiles and hyperlinked videos from the collaborators, leading to off-site paratexts. On the bottom left is a pop-up ad from YouTube, controlled by the platform’s algorithm. Screenshot of Tricia Miranda, “F*** The Summer Up - Leikeli - Choreography by @_TriciaMiranda | Filmed by @TimMilgram” YouTube, 8 Aug 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIshlpqpG3s Accessed 14 Aug 2015.

Peripheral on-site paratexts share the same URL as the video but appear outside of the video frame on the page. These include those added automatically by YouTube: a title, a linked channel name, the view and like counts, as well as those chosen by the uploader: the general category of the video and any information included in the description box. In addition, Simonsen categorizes comments as peripheral on-site paratexts authored by a third party; they exist just on the periphery of the framed video which they discuss.

Off-site paratexts, on the other hand, are at a certain remove. They do not share the same

URL as the video, although they may be linked in the description box or on-screen annotations.

Where in Genette’s analysis this category would include an author interview in a separate

53 publication, Simonsen mentions Wikipedia entries, social media pages, and thumbnails for other videos, all which fall within his interest in the promotional and connective functions of these paratexts. Additionally, he points to other audio-visual media that bring attention to a YouTube video, particularly mentioning The Ellen DeGeneres Show in relation to the popularity of Psy’s

“Gangnam Style” (“Functionality” 224). Off-site paratexts like publicity, blog posts, and television shows are outside the scope this chapter, although Ellen’s attention does increase traffic for dance videos. While popular dance-centered long form writing is rare, there are many other off-site paratexts. Most of the discourse about dance is happening on or centered around

YouTube, whether on-site in comments or off-site on Facebook and Twitter posts with links to

YouTube (or, increasingly, Instagram, and until its demise, Vine) videos.

While by definition paratexts bring attention to the original text, Simonsen remarks that paratexts may also distract attention, especially on YouTube where many of the paratexts beckon the viewer to a different video, viewer, channel, or even website. Simonsen suggests an expanded understanding of paratexts is necessary because while paratexts still function to frame texts, “the consumption of audiovisual content on digital media platforms is no longer solely about the content, but equally about the communication and socialization taking place around the content” (“Functionality” 227). In addition, Gray argues, through what I want to call social paratext, viewers “can challenge a text’s industry-preferred meanings by posing their own alternate readings and interpretive strategies” (145). In the moments of conflict referred to earlier and elaborated in greater detail later, this is precisely what written and video responses do.

In the case of what Philippa Thomas calls ‘editions’—various reedits, mashups, parodies, or spinoffs of an original video or piece of choreography—paratexts work through addition. For

54 example, the side-by-side video acts as both paratext—as a commentary on either or both the original video and the edition, and text—a new video presenting the edition placed alongside the original, with its own URL, rhetoric, aesthetic, and circulation.

As such, side-by-side videos seem to fall somewhere between the categories stipulated by

Simonsen. They do not share a URL with the original video(s) as a comment does, but their commentary does happen within and peripheral to another video. The social paratextual commentary instructing the reading of not one but two texts happens through rendering those two videos to share a URL. As such, a side-by-side video is an embedded peripheral offsite paratext that becomes a text in its own right.

In his book Genre, John Frow states: “neither the authors nor readers act as autonomous agents in relation to the structures of genre, since these structures are the shared property of a community. Readers and writers negotiate the generic status of particular texts but do not have the power to make their ascriptions an inherent property of the text” (109). On YouTube, this negotiation goes on in the comments section and in response videos, where due to their proximate visual display and to viewers’ habits, social paratexts do in fact become part of the text. The frames of paratext and criticism taken together can help account for the presence of fan and viewer labor—comments or videos—that work to create “better reception” “and a more pertinent reading,” not necessarily in the eyes of the author or even the author’s allies, but for the larger viewing and practicing community. Despite YouTube discourse’s reputation for confrontation, altering the environment for the reception of the work—even through negative commentary—is a highly social act.

55 Whether they function precisely as paratext, more like criticism, or fall better within fan production paradigms, I argue that both comments and video responses—particularly comparison or side-by-side videos—work to recontextualize texts circulating on YouTube.

Unlike book paratexts authorized by the author or the publisher, these responses are multi-vocal, perhaps even explicitly critiquing the validity or ethics of a circulating text. Like criticism, these forms of response offer lenses through which to assess or process texts. In addition, in the longstanding vein of fan practices, both of these modes of argumentation and representation express affiliations to communities formed through and outside of the texts.

YouTube Comments as a Multivalent Mode of Textual Response

Both the modes of response considered in this chapter—the written comment and the video-that-comments—are multivalent.16 They offer feedback, make comparisons, provoke debate, accuse, inform, and promote. While these modes of response have important similarities to existing modes of discourse and production, broader social media conventions and the

YouTube platform make them particular to this moment and site. YouTube communication on and off-screen is characterized by the following traits: the tendency to highlight conflict and demand or offer evidence, a focus on legitimacy, and the flattening of different screen genres through the smooth circulation of video clips and commentary upon them.

While written and visual communication on YouTube has multiple valences, the particularities of the platform and uniqueness of discourse are especially apparent around moments of conflict, which highlight viewers’ values, through “enunciations of significance,

56 judgement and worth” (Dodds 5). Many conflicts form around issues of appropriation or ‘biting.’

Among Hip-Hop dance practitioners, biting denotes the unauthorized use of a move originated by a particular innovator, which has not yet entered the shared vocabulary.17 Accusations of biting are articulated in comments but are particularly present in side-by-side videos that are demonstrative proof of the accusations. Conflict is also present in exchanges focused on comments that police generic boundaries at moments of their breach. Side-by-side videos are also used for laudatory comparison, and comments do more than just police genre, but moments of friction, where the content at the center of user interaction is called into question, display

YouTube communication at its most particular.

Especially in moments of conflict, commenters must establish their legitimacy in order to be taken seriously, and as part of negotiated decoding. Anyone with Internet access can post a comment on YouTube. As such, there is a certain degree of democratization of the discourse.

Nonetheless, if a point of contention arises, commenters may have to provide their qualifications for offering an opinion, whether voluntarily or after another user demands they do so. This can take the shape of explicit citations, references to other facts that only people “in the know” are aware of, delineating their pedigree, or through self-identification in their avatar or username.

Additionally, text and commentary circulate smoothly together. In what Henry Jenkins calls media convergence, because users can upload clips from any source, all the framings that went along with each screen genre in their original mode of circulation collapse (Convergence).18

While musicals and dance films were the subjects of film criticism when they showed in theatres, their scenes now circulate as YouTube clips, and as such are the center of much the same commentary present on YouTube-native dance video. For example, a fan-edited collection of

57 Balanchine-choreographed scenes from Hollywood musicals prompted disbelieving viewer

Christine Angel to exclaim, “This SURELY CAN’T be the Mr. B we all know and love. It’s SO untypical” (Dancnlyte01).

Despite having over 40,000 views in 2015, there are only eight comments on this video, far fewer than an equivalent YouTube-native video would have. Nonetheless, even those eight comments present the same categories of response and modes of argumentation that take place on YouTube native Hip-Hop dance videos. As shown in figure 1.3, commenters establish legitimacy, produce evidence, and belittle the precipitating commenter. These and other tendencies will be detailed in full later in the chapter.

Figure 1.3 Debating Balanchine. This exchange is typical of YouTube discourse despite being held over a concert dance choreographer’s Hollywood oeuvre. Screenshot of comments on Dancnlyte01, “Balanchine’s Musical Theater Choreography,” YouTube, 4 Feb 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=oipj0X_7lEg, Accessed 30 June 2015.

Screens have long been a part of social practice and the nexus for learning and discussion of popular dance, and I suggest the comments section is an additional component of this tradition, and one that itself allows dance to continue to be a social practice, not despite but because of digital technologies. While both video responses and written commentary share social, paratextual, and regulatory functions, the form, rhetoric, and types of content necessitate separate consideration. The comments section serves as the soda shop after watching American

Bandstand, or the living room after Soul Train. The conversation is asynchronous, not always substantive, and admittedly sometimes hostile. However, it offers a place for viewers to

59 immediately share their excitement, read responses against which to check their own impressions, and seek additional information from more knowledgeable viewers. Like much communication on current social media platforms, comments can be addressed to a given party but are open to all to read. Comments may address the uploader, the star or subject of the video, the audience broadly construed, other fans, or one or more viewers directly.

Viewers leave three broad types of comments on dance videos. First, those that primarily express fandom of the uploader rather than or in addition to the particular video on which they appear. These are often comments about a dancer or choreographer’s attractiveness, skill, or broad declarations of admiration, and closely resemble historical fan letters. As is the case with many forms of fan production, Patricia Lange argues that viewers “use YouTube’s video sharing and commenting features to project identities that affiliate with particular social groups”

(“Publicly” 361), while “posting comments also enabled people to express feelings of affinity for the video or the video makers” (“Publicly” 376). The social audience here responds both to the particular text while also being aware of its own existence, constituting itself through these multi-directional utterances. Second are comments that seek or provide information. Most often, these pertain to clothing items worn or music used in the video. These comments often provide information not available in the uploader-authored paratexts, like the names and affiliations of dancers. On the other hand, many questions that users post elicit additional information—often about the music—regardless of whether that information exists elsewhere. This is a source of much frustration for viewers that are more observant. Finally, I posit some comments align most closely with the standard functions of criticism: they offer education about the style or

60 choreographer featured, give advice to the uploader, and assess the video. The next section explores this analysis in depth.

In addition to the content-centric sociality noted earlier, another defining characteristic of

YouTube sociality and reception discussed by Wattenhofer et al. is the lack of reciprocity; that is, while on Facebook users are mutually linked, on other networks like YouTube, Twitter, and

Instagram, content producers with high subscription rates or followers often do not follow their fans. Given this relationship, subscription or view counts act paratextually as part of “a new dynamic [that] emerges as users can now perceive the reception of subscription as a symbol of authority or interest from others” (357). This becomes a way to ‘review’ or recommend an uploader to others, in addition to liking, sharing, and leaving comments. Given the content-user- content relationship asserted by Wattenhofer et al., commenters may forgo user-to-user interaction they practice on other social networks and instead voice their reaction or assessment of the video in question, in comments to which the framework of art criticism applies.

YouTube Comments as a Form of Art Criticism

According to Raymond Williams in his examination of the historical use of the word

‘criticism,’ at its heart criticism is reviewing, that is, telling the reader whether they should or should not read the given book, or, in the case of a dance critic, see the given performance. In the case of YouTube videos, a previous viewer’s expression of whether other people should see the video is a ‘review’ more frequently exercised through sharing, while general support is given through ‘likes,’ and particular discourse is expressed through the comments section. By the time

61 most people read the comments, they have already seen the video or are in the middle of watching it. However, while the recommendation portion of criticism is fulfilled outside of a video’s comments, its many other functions are at work within them.

Television and music criticism has flourished in the expanded journalistic terrain that now includes blogging, podcast, and entertainment branches of major media companies.

Criticism of a certain kind has flourished on YouTube. As an analytical framework illustrates the complex processes taking place in comments, the way comments fit into a larger historical scope of response to dance on the popular screen, and the role of discourse in cementing or opening generic and community boundaries.

While there are many types of criticism, most of which have undergone various changes over time, a survey of texts on dance, literary, and fine art criticism shows most scholars agree on criticism’s basic functions. In his book What Happened to Art Criticism?, James Elkins identifies four functions, which may occur in different combinations or strengths depending on the genre, critic, and era. Criticism: (1) describes and (2) assesses the work; (3) educates the reader; and (4) advises the artist. These functions also all exist in YouTube comments. However, like all comparisons, the analogy is useful in part to identify the ways in which YouTube commentary works differently than many other forms of written criticism.

In order to demonstrate how the critical functions of description, assessment, education, and advice occur particularly in YouTube comments, the following examples all come from a single video. These same kinds of comments happen on many different channels across screen genres, but focusing on a single video exemplifies the variety of responses that co-occur.

62 The video in question, “Ian Eastwood | “Good Ass Intro” - Chance The Rapper” from

February of 2014, is a concept video shot in a studio featuring choreography by Eastwood and dancing by members of his crew. It has four dancing parts: (1) a freestyle section shot in a black box, in which Eastwood does not participate; (2) a combination in his signature Choreo style followed by (3) a brief coda of choreographed Chicago Footwork, both in a studio; and (4) a final freestyle section back in the black box, in which Eastwood does take a turn. Chicago

Footwork emerged out of the Chicago House music and dance scene in the early 2000s and is generally a freestyle or battle form performed to music known either as Footwork or Juke music.

The music is known for its fast pace—about 160 BPM in contrast to most rap music, which is about 80-120 BPM, and other House styles, which are in between. Chicago Footwork’s movement is characterized by a relatively-stable torso and arms, with energy directed towards intricate footwork. Footwork’s codified moves are distinguished by direction—whether legs move in the sagittal plane or the coronal plane—weight shifts—whether and in what rhythm weight is transferred between feet—and isolation of the ball and heel of the foot.

In the Choreo section, Ian Eastwood, Brian Puspos, Vinh Nguyen and a fourth dancer I cannot identify perform a minute of choreography in Eastwood’s signature style. The dancers’ gestures closely follow and illustrate the song’s lyrics with buoyant feet, bouncy knees, and evocative arm and head gestures. The syncopation of these rap lyrics also influences the timing of the choreography. The Footwork section is delineated by a change in music, which fades in as the dancers reset following the Choreo. Unlike “Good Ass Intro,” which is lyrically dense over a jazz-influenced arrangement, in “Good Ass Outro” Chance the Rapper mostly sings words functioning as vocables: “bang bang skeet skeet skeet” over a faster, electronic bass line and the

63 distinct snare of the 808 Roland drum machine. Throughout, the word “juke,” another word for footwork and its music, is repeatedly sung, elongated with enthusiasm. The footwork section is much faster, its movement densely packed into twenty-five seconds. The movement is mostly codified Footwork steps strung together into what practitioners call “combos” (Tyron Canady).19

Following the convention in Footwork, the arms move purposefully but in coordination with and accenting the movement of the lower body. Unlike in Eastwood’s usual work, the arms do not move separately from the body, and there is no additional head choreography. In fact, the dancers seem to be concentrating on the intricate actions of their feet. They collapse at the end and stay on the floor, gasping and making snow angels. This section could easily have been excluded but is kept in as a feature, even choreographed to a certain extent, making clear the dancers’ effort. The footwork section is clearly demarcated through these features: change in music, movement, and a distinct ending, which in addition to the description box author’s note makes it obvious and readily remarkable—as a novelty, as particular effort, and as Footwork.

I chose this video because Eastwood is a well-known dancer-choreographer with a large and active fan base with multiple literacies made clear in the comments section. Additionally, the video features both characteristic and new work from Eastwood, and the comments section has diverse examples of the categories of criticism laid out above. In particular, the comments section debates Eastwood’s use of Footwork, a movement genre in which he does not specialize.

The discussion largely disregards a disclaimer Eastwood included in the video description box, demonstrating that readers can and do read against authorial intent as expressed in authorized paratexts, even on a platform in which they are in close proximity to the author. Beginning with

64 description, the following sections use comments from “Good Ass Intro” to illustrate how the four functions of criticism look on YouTube.

Part of the dance critic’s job historically has been to describe the event—essentially, to provide a record for those who will never see it. Lynne Conner, in her history of newspaper dance criticism from the late 19th to early 20th century uses the term descriptive criticism to refer to “dance writing which attempts to describe the events of a dance performance through a detailed word study or verbal picture” (6). This is only one element of most critics’ writings, but it is an important one. As Edwin Denby stated in an essay on criticism in 1949, “unlike criticism of other arts, that of dancing cannot casually refer the student to a rich variety of well-known great effects and it cannot quote passages as illustrations” (411), suggesting that well-written description had to stand as evidence for the other components of criticism, including assessment and education. In some cases, description became the whole review.

James Elkins observes that in the last decades of the 20th and first decades of the 21st century, “critics have begun to avoid judgments altogether, preferring to describe or evoke the art rather than say what they think of it” (12). This may be the point at which the comments on

YouTube diverge most fully from contemporary criticism, as this trend is not present on

YouTube, where people are quick to offer their assessment, regardless of their experience or previous knowledge, but very rarely engage in any description. Due to the specificity of the platform, the readers of YouTube comment-criticism have access to just the sorts of passages that Denby’s newspaper audiences lacked; commenters do not need to describe what has happened in the video because everybody has just watched it, and have access to re-watch.

Certain features may still be cited as the reason for an assessment, but the moment in question is

65 usually indexed by either a short name or a timestamp in the video, rather than a description, as can be seen in the following examples. The following comments are just a few among dozens that refer favorably to Eastwood’s foray into Chicago Footwork, pointing very briefly to the whole section before offering the positive assessment.

1. Foot work was legit! –Luu Brown

2. That Chicago footwork tho –Sione Latu

3. That second half was crazy dope!!! –Sonny Delight

These representative comments refer to the whole section briefly, offering quick positive assessment not encumbered by description. In addition, the syntax and diction are common to

YouTube discourse, and are distinct from criticism’s highly descriptive, situated assessments.

Even more particular to the technology of the platform, if people want to point to a specific moment, they often link to the timestamp in the video. In these cases, an inquisitive comment reader can click directly on the timestamp to revisit that moment in the video. These comments often take the form of ‘that [move the commenter liked] at [timestamp]!’ or sometimes the timestamp constitutes the entire comment. In the comment in figure 1.4, the timestamp at which the Chicago Footwork section begins accompanies an orthographically elongated expression of admiration. In this screen shot of the comment, the numbers 2:53 are blue, indicating they are hyperlinked to that moment in the video above.

Figure 1.4 Hyperlinked timestamp as commentary. Screenshot of Cheyanne Warner, comment on “Ian Eastwood | “Good Ass Intro” - Chance The Rapper,” YouTube, 24 Feb 2014 www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2c_LDZsfE0, Accessed 14 Aug 2015.

Where in another context description of the moment of interest and perhaps an explanation of the critic’s positive reaction might be necessary, on YouTube the function of description has been superseded by technology that renders it mostly unnecessary for establishing a common ground.

While video quotation has eclipsed textual description in the foundation of a common understanding, the assessment founded upon the common ground remains a comment function.

In addition to the short positive assessments on “Good Ass Intro” included above, there are also more involved positive assessments. For example, user SS8styles demonstrates familiarity with

Eastwood’s oeuvre by referencing a past video, “Do My Dance” (2012) in this comment: “It’s a trip how you made this flow out of your do my dance choreo….I’ve watched that vid so many times haha, still my favorite to date but this a dope extension and cool direction.” Viewer

Matthew Morales commented:

Best piece in a long time. For a while, I admit I felt as if Ian’s touch had been lost. I was definitely proved wrong now. I’m pretty sure i’ve never even commented on a single one of the videos on this channel even though i’ve been a viewer for years. Not just his freestyle, but the choreo itself. Damn. I even have to put it in there that it was a long ass piece on its own, let alone difficult. I think people forget that dancers are going at it for over a minute. Dancing for that long is like sprinting for that long. Shit gets rough, yet it’s so overlooked. Huge props for yet another great video. Definitely a good ass intro to 2014.

67 Both of these reviews assess the work while also demonstrating fan affiliation. The authors reference their familiarity with Eastwood’s work to establish a legitimacy of opinion; citing an awareness of Eastwood’s choreography helps establish a place from which to assess it.

The comments section is famously open to all commenters whether they are well versed in the topic on which they are engaging or not. However, many commenters are as the two cited above, basing their assessments on a deep literacy of the platform, the channel, and popular dance.

Legitimacy is especially important to establish for commenters who take on the critical function of educating viewers. Lady Sol, a prominent member of the Chicago Footwork community, issues the main critique of the video, accusing Eastwood of mis-appropriating

Chicago Footwork. Using legitimacy markers in her initial and follow up comments, she positions herself to assess “Good Ass Intro” and attempts to educate both Eastwood and comment readers. While she directly addresses Eastwood, by nature of the platform she is also addressing a larger audience and presumably a larger grievance. She established her legitimacy to perform these functions through her avatar, use of her professional name, and the formality with which she wrote her comment, including signing off with her title in FootworKINGz, the crew she manages, the most well-known Chicago Footwork crew. She assesses his skill as poor and demonstrating his lack of connection to the community, which in turn in her mind disqualifies him from engaging with Chicago Footwork. Her position does give her space from which to level her critique and offer corrective instruction. However, Lady Sol’s formal linguistic register marks her very strongly as from an older, less YouTube-native generation and therefore possibly less relatable to many of Ian’s viewers who are mostly under 30. Nonetheless,

Eastwood does respond with care, acknowledging her position in his response (see figure 1.5).20

Figure 1.5 Establishing position to police participation. In this exchange Lady Sol sets up her position of legitimacy in the community, and critiques Eastwood‘s use of Chicago Footwork; he offers a respectful rebuttal. Screenshot of comments from Ian Eastwood, “Ian Eastwood | “Good Ass Intro“ – Chance The Rapper,” YouTube, 24 Feb 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2c_LDZsfE0, Accessed 14 Aug 2015.

In his response comment, Eastwood points Lady Sol to his original peripheral paratext, a long explanatory note in the description box which discusses the connection of his hometown pride and his use of a Chicago-based musician and a Chicago dance style. As the part he excerpted shows, Eastwood demonstrates he knows about Chicago Footwork, not claiming expertise but rather pointing to important footworkers, including Lady Sol’s crew. Lady Sol makes a rebuttal to Eastwood, and to one of Ian’s fans, but not to any of the many other fans who dismiss her opinion. Several fans attack the very legitimacy Lady Sol attempted to cultivate, a common rhetorical move in YouTube arguments discussed further in the next section. As is often

69 the case, a single critique or instance of policing sparks many more comments that debate the validity of the critique, as well as meta-commentary on the discussion including distaste for this kind of genre and participation policing. While critics may be attacked for their criticism, their voices and critiques remain part of the discussion, and the instructional force of these exchanges can in fact reach more people as comments with high level of response are displayed more prominently in the comments section. These critiques and the responses to them bring to the surface implicit values viewers and practitioners hold that might otherwise have gone unsaid.

Finally, the last function of criticism in YouTube comments is giving advice. In addition to many appeals for ‘more of this!,’ a few comments offer specific pieces of advice on “Good

Ass Intro.” Jasmine Haefner’s admonition “I feel like I haven’t seen anything new style wise from this crew in a while.. Bring it back yo. You’re all phenomenal artists, so challenge yourselves” demonstrates familiarity and respect while revealing she values innovation. User anthony williams, perhaps a Footworker himself given his advice, recommends “Just remember keep your head up while footworkin make it look easy” advice that both marks Eastwood’s novice status but also encourages a future Footwork endeavor. Whether content producers take the advice in comments or not, the cycle of critique and new production is much faster than before, allowing the opinion of the audience to shape future work as criticism has always done.

As can be seen in the above examples, the four functions of criticism: description, assessment, education, and advice, are present throughout YouTube comments, although through different registers, diction, and modes of technology than traditional criticism. Comments also fulfill another of criticism’s functions; while not considered as central to criticism’s purpose as those discussed above, criticism has long had an important impact on genrefication.

70 Not Grammar Police but Genre Police

As Harris and Hiltunen explore extensively, it is often the form of the YouTube comment rather than its content that elicits engagement, often through correction. This is another oft- referred to characteristic of YouTube as well as Twitter, where hyper-vigilant users are labeled grammar nazis or grammar police. They remark, “genuine spelling errors—mistakes that are not considered to be a typographic error or innovation—often incite strong emotional reactions from other users […] with the corrector’s intention ranging from polite correction to hostile ridicule” (Sec. 2.1). I coin the term genre police as a parallel to this phenomenon. Popular dance videos where generic boundaries are being pushed also elicit strong and varied reactions.

Returning to Wattenhofer et al.’s recognition of user-content-user communication, it is notable that grammar policing by and large happens between commenters while genre policing happens within the comments addressed to the video, uploader, or dancer, where other commenters may engage with it.

Genrefication as a theory asserts that the constellation of features that allow a genre to be recognized as such is necessarily unstable, cyclical, constantly emerging, and always historical.

This emphasis on the processual nature of genre disrupts the static categories of older forms, allowing scholars to see the ways they emerged through complex discursive, aggregative, complex, and cyclical processes that continue into the present and shape current forms, as with

YouTube comments. YouTube is an important site for understanding emerging movement and screen genres, as well as shifts in long-standing ones. I turn now to debates carried out through comments on YouTube videos as a part of the genrefication process once filled by art critics as

71 well as fans. In addition to the discourses already explored, YouTube videos and their comments are spaces where the popular dance community both polices and subverts genre, expressing individual opinions while representing genre conventions and community ideals.

Contemporary scholarship understands that creators, critics, and viewers alike utilize genre discourse, whose judgments on cultural products are a way to accrue social power and position oneself in a community. While genre is processual, those processes do solidify—if only momentarily and always contextually—in the production, circulation, and reception of texts. As

John Frow says, “Genre classifications are real. They have an organizing force in everyday life.

They are embedded in material infrastructures and in the recurrent practices of classifying and differentiating kinds of symbolic action” (13). The classification of popular dance happens in the commentary on YouTube videos that elicit judgments about correct practice, as evidenced by

Lady Sol’s policing of the boundaries and practitioners of Chicago Footwork; her admonishment of Eastwood takes as its premise that imperfect Footwork is not Footwork at all.

The shift to theories of genrefication as a process allows for an analysis of the forces behind the process, and the stakes held in policing of a genre. While recent genre theorists come at the topic from different disciplines, they all assert the power of categorization. As stated by

Frow, categorization is a concern with “how generically shaped knowledges are bound up with the exercise of power, where power is understood as being exercised in discourse” (2). The emphasis on discourse leads to an analysis of the classification process itself; studying that role speaking about genre plays in genre formation is a reflexive move away from static understandings of categories and their texts.

72 While Briggs and Bauman argue that all judgments on cultural products are a way to accrue social power through categorization (“Genre”), throughout his book Film/Genre, Altman reports that film critics believe their work to be objective, and therefore outside of the process of genrefication. He asserts that, on the contrary, producers, viewers, and critics alike utilize genre for personal as well as institutional goals. Altman, discussing film, and Fabian Holt, writing about popular music, both position discourse alongside the institutions and technologies that influence not only the final product but also its genrefication. These include production companies, record companies, funding agencies, exhibition practices, and advertising, as well as critics and scholars. The inclusion of these contributors in a larger theory of genre enables an understanding that genres are subject to redefinition through the interactions between the interests of a range of individuals and institutions.

Historically, criticism has been one of the modes that defined and defended genres. As

Frow states, critics are “that part of the audience that writes about its reading, exercise a certain institutional power in this often conflictual dialectic of reading positions which shapes the movement and the mutation of genres. Genre takes place in the interplay of reading and of the social force [critics] carry” (139). Given the lack of coverage by traditional criticism, or its relevance to a popular form, for popular dance the public discursive component of the process of genrefication is largely taking place in YouTube comments. When one or more viewers perceive a breach of genre convention, they voice this complaint in the comments, often starting a heated discussion. These comment threads clearly reveal the edges of individual as well as communal standards about genres, as well as what is required to be considered a competent commenter. The social audience is constituted in the comments section, bringing together viewers around a given

73 video or uploader. However, a closer look at the range of comments, argumentation, and values shows that commenters bring in complex affiliations with multiple offline communities as well as online fandoms. The plurality stipulated in Ien Ang’s actual audiences is in part evidenced on

YouTube by commenter’s varying conceptions of genre.

“That’s not ___!:” Rhetorical Moves in Policing Generic Boundaries

The question “what is dance?” is very much alive among popular dance viewers, who argue about particular dances as well as dance itself, using YouTube as the main site for this conversation. In the comments section, a ruling that something is ‘not dance’ often seems to stem from a commenter who simply does not like the element in question. However, a closer look at these comments shows that the distaste is more likely an indication that the element does not fit the individual’s definition of that particular dance or of dance at all. Complex aesthetic and generic judgments such as these are frequent in comments, offering insight into the literacies and opinions viewers have about popular dance, and how discourse factors in the policing or expansion of their values.

The phenomenon of genre policing and defining through YouTube comments came to my attention through reading the comments on the YAKfilms video from 2011 that opened this chapter, a close reading of which forms the core of this section. The video is a documentation of

German locker Flockey performing a judge’s demo to the song “Pusherman” before a Locking battle at the annual popular dance intensive Summer Dance Kemp in 2011.21

74 Regardless of the size or level of a battle event with Hip-Hop related genres, it is conventional for one or more judges of a particular style to do a brief performance, known as a demo. Through these turns on the floor, judges demonstrate their competency to the audience and competitors, proving they are qualified to judge. At the same time, demos give clues to perceptive competitors about what movements, ideas, or approaches they might choose in order to please that judge. In addition, because judges excel in their area, demos serve to enliven the atmosphere at the event through their expertise and entertainment. While the crowd present at the event reacted very positively to Flockey’s turn on stage, video commenter Kevin Kallon took issue with the inclusion of what he perceived to be a move that did not belong. This statement of displeasure in turn evoked a strong response by other commenters, who used a variety of strategies to refute the claim. The argumentation of these responses reveals different genre sensibilities and literacies.

For his judge’s demo, Flockey chose Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman,” a beloved 1972 soul/funk track that might have played at the clubs and house parties in Los Angeles where

Locking took shape as a movement genre. While competitors in any Hip-Hop battle are expected to demonstrate musical as well as movement literacy, they rarely know which songs they will compete to. A judge, however, often requests a particular song, as seems to be the case here given the precision with which Flockey highlights or works against the musical and lyrical components of Mayfield’s song.

Perhaps modeling the behavior he wishes to see in the upcoming battle, Flockey works the crowd from the elevated stage where they surround him on three sides. Throughout the minute and a half performance—likely a highly-structured improvisation often seen within the

75 battle context as well as many staged versions of Hip-Hop-related movement genres—Flockey demonstrates his qualifications through his expert execution of locking foundation. Although

Flockey’s style has a specific coolness that differentiates it from the megawatt exaggeration of

Locking’s originators, throughout the performance he emphasizes some of the hallmarks of

Locking’s compositional strategies, including mimesis, humor, juxtaposition, facial choreography, traveling through space, and utilizing vertical space through reaching and bending. Peppered throughout the display of well-executed foundation moves are ones proximate to Locking’s genesis. Twice Flockey embodies soul music legend James Brown’s famous lifted knee posture, holding onto the cuff of one sleeve while gliding on one foot across the stage. In another moment he contrasts an intricate Locking arm sequence with a more relaxed phrase of footwork, taken from Breaking’s toprock.

Flockey’s personal style and innovations—also important within the battle context— come through in his composition, his approach to time, and his integration of non-Locking movement vocabulary into a Locking performance style and movement quality. In fact, while the audience appreciates the sharpness on his Uncle Sam points, the fast rotations of his wrist rolls, the nuance of his locks, and the smoothness of his splits, they react most loudly when he inserts a non-standard move.22 About two-thirds of the way through his performance Flockey turns to the side with the most audience members and performs the Dougie.

It was this single movement integrated into a larger performance which overall adhered to Locking genre conventions which spurred the genre policing that is so common to videos like this one, or almost any video which portrays popular dance, whether a tutorial, choreography, or documentation of a battle. Often, as with Lady Sol’s comment on Ian Eastwood’s video, there

76 are only a few dissenters or genre police on a single video, but their comments elicit many rebuttals. Through analyzing both the initial policing as well as the responses to it, I propose a typology of comment types according to the rhetoric they use to combat the dissenter. In addition, the overall discussion, here particularly focusing on Locking as a coherent genre—one which Kallon perceives to have strict, tight boundaries—gives insight into the way viewers and practitioners conceptualize genre, discuss it, and the elements they hold to be definitive.

While the following typology of argumentation and rhetoric derives from the comments used to defend Flockey, they stand across dance videos, and in fact across most YouTube videos, although the specific logic may be slightly different. I explain them here in ascending order of rhetorical complexity and illustrate them with selected comments. When relevant, I explain the generic valuations revealed in the comment.

First, there is the accusation or statement of displeasure. In the case of the Flockey

Demo, the accusation is straightforward. User Kevin Kallon states “that fact that I saw him do the dougie in there ruined the whole thing, you cant mix locking with dougie” clearly delineating his displeasure (YAKBattles). The values are clear: the Dougie is unacceptable (as it is at least one boundary that exists in Kallon’s mind); an instance of Locking cannot accommodate any occurrence of the Dougie. Responses to Kallon fell into the following categories and rhetorical moves: Insults, Swag Summary, Intra-generic, Inter-generic, and Meta. The delineation of these categories includes a brief gloss and an explanation of an exemplar, only one of many of its type.23 As with criticism, it is common for comments to combine rhetorical strategies.

The insult response asserts that the dissenter is not equipped to make the judgment in the statement of displeasure but offers no alternative judgment or rebuttal. For example, user

77 skunkus mukuss addresses Kallon directly, starting with Kallon’s username, “@realkef apparently you can.. who are you to say what a man can or cannot do? he’s a awesome locker and a dancer.. cockroaches like u ruin the dance..” As can be seen in this example, there is a rebuttal to the initial statement “you can’t…” but only through stating that it has in fact been done. While skunkus mukuss does comment on Flockey’s skills, the final portion of the rebuttal is to insult Kallon and turn his own accusation—ruining Locking—back onto him.

In the swag summary, the commenter makes a positive assessment—for Flockey, many commenters used variations of the word ‘swag,’ a common slang term that indicates style and self-confidence, certainly applicable to his performance persona. That assessment is then leveled against the original accusation to render it invalid. For example, someguynamednik responded

“So you ignored everything good about his performance (beat murder, clean and unique locking) and get on him for doing the dougie? Haters gonna hate, I tell you whattt.” This response shows what someguynamednik values in popular dance and Locking—beat killing, the term for movement matching components of the music exactly—as well as precision and innovation.

This response does not make a judgment about the Dougie explicitly, but does call

Kallon’s critique into question. SpringSauce23, on the other hand, uses a swag summary to advocate for both the Dougie and Flockey’s overall performance, stating “all that tiny amount of

Dougie did was add a tiny portion of swag to his ridiculous amount of swaghe had in this solo anyway… a little Dougie goes a loooong way. I thought it was great” This is a good example of the way swag summary comments do not necessarily make clear the boundaries or characteristics of the genre(s) in question, but rather indicate that excellence can override convention, whether only in the particular instance or perhaps more broadly speaking.

78 Intra-generic comments are made by people invested in a genre and its boundaries, but are willing for them to be expansive. Their comments often lay out the user’s working understanding of the given genre, and how the video does in fact align with that definition. For example, Lex van Lammeren states, “lockin is funk, funk is fun, lockin attitude is fun in dance, thats why the doggie and everything is in it. so its still lockin,” laying out an explanation for the acceptability of the movement. User chris dub uses a similar explanation, “One of four basics in locking is character Dougie and such was his character good locking” or, to draw out the mathematical proof-like form intra-generic comments often take:

Locking foundational components = character work→ Flockey’s character = use of the Dougie→ Use of the Dougie can = Locking

Embedded within this comment is an implied transitive property that allows the Dougie to function as an instance of foundation. Both viewers have clear parameters for Locking—it has to be fun, performative, and often includes character play. They are invested, as Kallon seems to be, in Locking’s preservation, but Flockey’s performance still falls within their genre boundaries.

In inter-generic comments, commenters offer examples of when the type of things that offended the genre police happen in other genres. They often ask, whether explicitly or implicitly, if this is happening in many areas, why police it here? Figure 1.6 shows a portion of an inter-generic exchange between Kallon and three other viewers, who particularly focus on the moves included in current b-boying battles. This may appeal to Kallon’s sensibility as a b-boy, indicated in his profile picture. B-boying is also a long-established form whose outside influences are well known. Takeno Miho extends Kallon’s anti-borrowing logic ad absurdum—a common Internet tactic—to the point where practicing b-boying is no longer tenable.

Figure 1.6 Intergeneric debate. This exchange shows responses to the statement of displeasure which rely on examples from a separate genre than the one in question, here Breaking. Screenshot of comments on YAKBattles, “Flockey (BNMP) Judge Demo at SDK 2011 | LOCKING | Czech Republic,” YouTube, 10 July 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLDGc9IMEZY, Accessed 27 Mar 2015.

80 This extended exchange demonstrates the richness of the arguments made in generic discussions. Additionally, in this exchange, commenters establish legitimacy by demonstrating they are literate practitioners or fans, including in their arguments, citations of famous practitioners, specific battles, and movement vocabulary. These comments also show the multivalence and multi-functionality of comments; the above comments address Kallon directly, insulting him as well as making inter-generic arguments. In addition, when read by others, they also serve as education and demonstrate a multi-generic viewership of the YAKfilms channel that produced and hosted the video.

Meta commentary, as mentioned briefly in reference to comments on “Good Ass Intro,” include comments that are in some way self-referential. They can be references to the larger context, the particular discussion, or the functioning of the platform, or in some combination. On videos where a large argument has developed over policing genre, it is common for several meta commentary pieces to lament the existence of these conflicts. By analogy with the preceding two rhetorical moves, these might be called extra-generic, as they often assert a category only at the level of dance, and generally do not support the conversation. An example of this meta/extra- generic commentary on Flockey’s demo follows a common format. In fact, one of the interesting characteristics of this kind of comment is that unlike others discussed before, it does not mention anything specific to the particular video, but instead refers broadly to what dance and music can do. ClAcKeRz W offers this reflection:

Always some argument going on… In my philosophy dance and music are very similar. Music used to be big based genres with no sub genres and now it’s hard to categorize what genre a track is. But it’s a good thing! It’s called progression. Same with dance, if we didn’t progress in a general sense then how are we here now? stop trying to limit the dance by maintaining “tradition” and applaud this new age of creativity. If the underground and old ski heads appreciate it then why can’t you?

81 Unlike some of the other response types, the meta/extra-generic comment often address no one in particular and so everyone who might be interested. Unlike the particular literacies made evident in the intra- and inter-generic comments, extra-generic comments are often vague and even counterfactual, as above—music has always had sub-genres, and music institutions continue to categorize music tracks.24 Nonetheless, extra-generic comments demonstrate one way that a portion of YouTube popular dance viewers negotiate genre.

The other kinds of meta-comments refer to the particular discussion—specifically how it turned out for the complainer—mentioning aspects of the YouTube platform itself, and using

Internet lexicon to do so. For example, a previously uninvolved viewer, TheOfficialOne00, jumped in at the end of the discussion to remark “Realkef got destroyed xD” while Takeno

Miho, who had been directly arguing with Realkef (Kallon), makes the remark directly to

Kallon: “@realkef you got destroyed by everyone.” Kallon’s response is to back out, using another common comment rhetorical device—feigning disinterest, he says to Takeno Miho “ok what ever cant be bothered to argue with you dude.” Considering both the forcefulness of his original statement, as well as his previous engagement with Miho, this is an about-face. On the other hand, his disengagement is perhaps not surprising given how forcefully other commenters rebutted. When posting what he held to be a truthful generic statement according to his values— the Dougie and Locking do not go together—he might not have expected the volume and vigor with which that statement would be refused.

The last comment in this exchange is an example of the most self-referential of the meta- commentary, those that refer to the function of the platform specifically. To close the argument

Miho says, “@realkef you can try arguing with my toprated comment buddy. gtfo!” In this

82 statement, Miho points to the fact that his comment is ‘toprated’ which is to say supported by many other viewers.25 This final strike in the argument telling him to “gtfo” or ‘get the fuck out’ not only dismisses Kallon’s opinion but his presence within the discussion. The exchange in the comments sections on Flockey’s performance demonstrates the particularity of the register and diction of Internet speech, and how quickly commenters appeal to the rhetoric of the insult.

Close analysis of the content reveals the complexity of viewer position, and evidence for the conception and utilization of the idea of genre by viewers.

Between their similarities to and replications of the functions of fan practices, criticism, and genrefication, these categories seem to work well on comments across dance videos and even other YouTube videos, with adjustments in the particularities. For the individual, asserting an opinion—particularly one that pertains to a larger discourse—demonstrates competency and interest. For the group, genre is at stake because the dance form as such—that is to say, recognizable as itself—must be in place in order for practitioners to affiliate with it. So, an individual’s identity can be predicated to a certain extent in the preservation of an established form. On the other hand, an individual may privilege innovation, and want to support wider ranges of practice through their social paratexts.

In their role as criticism, fan production, and despite their penchant for conflict, YouTube comments shape the reception of the videos they are posted on as social paratexts circulating together with their texts. They have their own rhetorical strategies and discourse forms, but nonetheless perform many of the functions around genrefication and affiliation that previous types of response and audience engagement have done, both of which are processes that members of the social audience use to delineate boundaries and establish their positionality in

83 relation to those boundaries. Alongside written commentary, many YouTube viewers use video production as a way to assert their values about popular dance videos or practitioners.

Response Videos as Off-Site Social Paratexts

In addition to the response videos mentioned at the beginning of the chapter like viral choreographies, memes, vlog-style commentary, and reaction videos, both physical and digital recreations of existing content circulate with reposted or repurposed existing content. While technological abilities to recreate or remix through digital editing, video game play, and animation have become an important part of fan production and response, the physical embodiment of popular dance remains an important component of the social audience and how it affiliates and connects with dance on the popular screen.

As with comments, there are embodied and audio-visual precedents for how previous generations of fans and practitioners engaged with dance on the popular screen. In an example of how a particular screen work exceeded the bounds of its mediation, Screendance scholar Melissa

Blanco-Borelli talks not only about Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” video as a text, but as an object whose circulation enabled and required connections between people, specifically her and her friends. Borelli asserts that even if initially done alone, engagement with mediated popular dance is an interpersonal activity because it indexes other social modes of being, including music consumption, dancing in ‘real life’ situations, and expectations of literacy.

Blanco-Borelli’s analysis reports how screen images stay, fade, and literally sit in the body, where they are available for physical recall, as described in dance scholar Harmony

84 Bench’s concept of viral choreographies. Bench notes, “Reproduced in the bodies of viewers, viral choreographies, […] are not limited to the screen—they implicate and rely upon the bodily engagement of fans and other online viewers. […] At its heart, a viral choreography is one that inspires faithful, if sometimes imprecise and/or satirical, remakes or covers of itself”

(“Screendance 2.0” 201). Blanco-Borelli discusses this physical remembering in part as a way to push back against those who bemoan dance’s ephemerality, evidencing instead the ways the dance persists in its mediated form as well as between and within its spectators.

Through watching “Rhythm Nation” Blanco-Borelli felt connected both to Jackson and to her friends who also knew the dance, remembering, “for us, all that mattered was that in our reproduction of the choreography we were asserting its value—physically, choreographically, and personally—and our connection to Janet” (53). Carol Vernallis suggests that the viewer understands or connects to the performer through knowing what the music feels like in their own body, such that “a link forms between [the spectator’s] body, the performer’s body, and the music coursing through both” (Unruly 159). In light of these analyses of viral choreographies and other fan embodiment and production practices, side-by-side videos uploaded by the performer or producer of the edition can be considered more than a demonstration of skill— whether observational, performance, editing, or all of the above. Not only do they exert promotional force, seeking to provoke appreciation of the replication, but they are also a tribute to the original and a way to make public the fandom of the cover artist. Posting a video of yourself replicating a dance is the YouTube equivalent of the moment Blanco-Borelli describes of meeting in the hallway. Posting it next to the original video is one step further than was available to the public of “Rhythm Nation;” it is now possible to capture and repurpose the

85 original video, making a new product that then itself enters the market. Response has always been productive—Fiske’s asserts this in his model of fan production—but not always in the same medium. Aufderheide and Jaszi note that “online video making is part of a much larger process in which the people formerly known as audiences of mass media or consumers of popular culture are asserting themselves as participants in culture-making” (4). One of the forms this participation is asserted through remixing both official and unofficial web videos as well as excerpts from television and movies.

One of the main ways that members of social audiences are engaging in culture-making is through mashups, broadly defined as a recontextualization of existing material which provides it with new meaning.26 Mashups are a particular kind of video response that use collage and remix aesthetics to incorporate different types of content, generally already existing and often copyrighted. As a social paratext, mashups are both enunciative and textual, as Simonsen asserts,

“the Mashup genre [i]s a specific mode of audiovisual communication that relies on connectivity in a shared community of popular culture that vacillates between a participatory culture and individual artistic expression” (“Mashups” 48). Mashups are a form that falls in a long history of intertextual video and collage aesthetics, but now operate specifically on YouTube and through digital video editing. They have a few unique characteristics that separate them from other fan responses, operating within a space of juxtaposition not only onscreen but in their production.

Mashups recontextualize video while keeping the source material identifiable, often requiring a high degree of literacy from their audiences. Mashups are social in that they are asynchronously collaborative, they evoke their own responses, and they share a new product, often a reflection or articulation on a fandom which the creator belongs to. On the other hand, a mashup is also the

86 work of an individual and has self-promotional properties, like annotations to other work by the same uploader. Simonsen points out however that not all mashups promote or connect to the same degree or in the same ways, stating that they are “a medium-specific mode of communication that illustrates how the flow and accessibility of remixed content has enabled a culture based on audiovisual recontextualization, and how the diversity of digital audiovisual communication constantly changes according to the dynamic coexistence between social and structural connectivity on YouTube” (“Mashups” 62).

Uploading video that is not original content, whether remixed or not, already changes its context, sometimes expressly through paratext, like a description box that may express nostalgia, anger, or admiration for the content. Aufderheide and Jaszi argue that even without written explanation “a posting [of existing material] expresses its own judgment on the material it offers for comment by others” (11). Following Genette, Simonsen points out that these videos lose authorization but gain communicative purpose and meaning (“Functionality” 218). Side-by-Side videos take this to a further extent.

As a subset of mashup videos, side-by-side videos make an argument through visual rhetoric, which may be additionally supported by written text explanations in the video, in the description box, or the title. Whether framed as paratexts, videos-that-comment, or fan production, side-by-side videos serve multiple purposes: they reveal a similarity between two works, show how well something has been replicated, or make an interesting point through putting two things together not normally juxtaposed.27

I have not found any scholarly literature particularly concerned with the side-by-side video type, although scholars in fan studies, media studies, and more recently dance studies,

87 often write about many other types of fan video production. Hills does not refer to the form but does hypothesize its function, speculating,

Some fan videos or fanvids may work in this way, seeming to combine the commentary of enunciative productivity with emulation and re-editing characteristic of textual productivity. […] Hence, regardless of whether or not digital fandom’s user-generated paratexts – e.g. fanvids – constitute forms of commentary, in Fiske’s terms if they are uploaded and made available to a communal audience then they become clear instances of (mediated) textual productivity” (135).

Side-by-side videos which comment are difficult to encounter on YouTube unless the person searching is aware of the particular comparison and is trying to locate the evidence. They are sometimes labeled in their titles or descriptions as ‘split-screen’ ‘comparison’ or side-by- sides, some combination of those terms, or sometimes not at all.28 For example “Split Screen:

Beyonce “Countdown” vs Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker” (Fundifferent1). The juxtaposition is sometimes made clear in the title through the use of “vs.” as in a video titled “Gangnam Style vs.

Minecraft Style vs. Nintendo Style,” a rare three-way split screen that compares the performance of the “Gangnam Style” dance from the original music video, a video game remake, and a

Nintendo-themed parody, as shown in figure 1.7 (EmpoweredNeko63).

Figure 1.7 Three-way side-by-side video. This video compares two different fan remakes of Psy’s music video with the original; it is itself an instance of fan production. The distortion comes from the editing necessary to show three images. Screenshot from EmpoweredNeko63, “Gangnam Style vs. Minecraft Style vs. Nintendo Style,” YouTube, 26 Dec 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1PdBGu2plk, Accessed 30 June 2015.

I prefer side-by-side as a label for its explicit reference to the technology and visual rhetoric through which this screen genre functions and comments. The way the screen is actually divided changes from version to version, as splitting the rectangular screen precisely in half means that one or both videos must be cut or distorted considerably. Many uploaders avoid the distortion through creative positioning of the original videos within the frame. “Countdown

(Snuggie Version) [Comparison],” for example, displays the videos in their entirety in their original aspect ratios as rectangles positioned in opposite corners of the YouTube player (see figure 1.8). Fundifferent1’s comparison of “Countdown” with its various influences positions them centrally as small rectangles. These formats and others leave half to a fourth of the area of

89 the player black, which is frowned upon in videos with strong presentational force; the need to display a whole video and the instructional force of side-by-side videos seems to mostly override this platform-specific aesthetic preference. Some other format options include a vertical layering and a format with four quadrants, with each video being shown twice to avoid black space.

Figure 1.8 Diagonally positioned video comparison. Through the position of the video within the frame in this side- by-side, Ton Do-Nguyen ensures his faithful recreation is seen in its entirety, as is the original Beyoncé music video. Screenshot from Ton Do-Nguyen, “Countdown (Snuggie Version) [Comparison],” 9 July 2012, YouTube, Re- uploaded by Fabian Matos, 24 July 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwDbx3Lqppg, Accessed 30 June 2015.

Production of these videos requires technological skill, resources, and usually a considerable amount of time. Side-by-side makers must capture the original videos, edit or pace them so the comparison is exact, assemble them, and upload them. Video makers would not undertake this process if they did not have a point to make, or a wish to engage with the pleasure of fan production. As Bench notes, given the significantly reduced time needed to procure footage from which to learn, viral choreographies are particular to the current period and

90 available technology (“Screendance 2.0”). The subsequent uploading and in some cases juxtaposition or pairing with the source material is also unique to this moment and the availability of editable footage, access to filming and editing technology, and easy uploading. As previously stated, fan video practices long precede YouTube or even digital editing. However, the particular format of two different footage sources in the same frame would have been very complicated before digital editing. In March of 2019, fifteen of the twenty top YouTube search results for “split screen video” are in fact editing tutorials for how to produce the effect.

Replicating Scenes, Accusing Performers, Beyoncé in a Snuggie: Rhetoric of the Side-by-Side

The fan videos under consideration in this section feature the side-by-side video structure to argue visually for a strong similarity or equivalence between the images on either side.

Depending on the intentions of the uploader and the videos in question, this similarity is either a positive or a negative—positive if the second video was made expressly to replicate, as with viral choreographies or remakes (either for praise or for parody) and negative if the similarity is somehow considered to be illicit or unfounded.

While in many ways the farthest from existing ideas about paratext, in other ways the side-by-side video is the most explicit re-framing of a text. Gray remarks, “to highlight or to underline is to annotate, to choose a specific route through a text. To produce a paratext of any sort is similarly to engage in such route-making” (154). Side-by-side videos dictate the route of reception by putting two texts together, arguing they cannot—or should not—be read separately.

In this way, and given that they exist in separate URLs, Steven Jones says about productive fan

91 response that it “is less paratextual in Genette’s more limited, literal sense, and more a way of allowing the very idea of the paratexts, the threshold as a grid of different possible receptions, to take over the primary functions of the text itself” (“Video Games” 80). Side-by-sides reframe the texts upon which they comment to such an extent they also function as texts themselves.

Like the written YouTube comments, I argue all side-by-side videos offer commentary, act as social paratext, and are concerned with offering information. In contrast, while legitimacy is still crucial, it is embedded in the presentation of visual proof, and so they often appear as evidence in articles or blogs about the videos they address. In addition, they may have one or more of the following main purposes:

1. Promotional. Promotional side-by-sides may be edited and uploaded by the creator of

the secondary edition or by a third person. They present the remake in a laudatory

manner for appreciation they are garnering either for themselves or for the maker of

the edition. Examples include Ton Do-Nguyen’s re-upload of his remake

“Countdown (Snuggie Version)” as a side-by-side with the original music video.

“Countdown (Snuggie Version) [Comparison]” in 2016, had more than three times as

many views of the edition on its own, at over 2.5 million views).29

2. Accusatory. Examples of this include accusations of biting or lack of attribution by

the group D*Day regarding choreography by Les Twins, “Single Ladies” connections

to Bob Fosse, and the use of the work of Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker and Thierry

de May in “Countdown.” These are explored in depth towards the end of this section.

All of these announce their accusations in embedded or peripheral written paratexts, a

characteristic of “negative or critical commentary” videos observed by Aufderheide

92 and Jaszi. They also note of this category that “critique need not be overt, however.

Reframing or juxtaposing content can make a powerful point by implication” (9). One

example of a side-by-side that presents two texts without overt comment is “Bob

Fosse vs Michael Jackson” (umerazhar001). This side-by-side highlights the

similarity between a live solo Michael Jackson performance and Fosse’s “Snake in

the Grass” solo from The Little Prince (1971).30 Other than the “vs.” in the title, the

video does not have any additional paratext guiding the interpretation.

3. Preventative side-by-sides. This category is mostly hypothetical, but the side-by-side

format could be used to refute claims of wrongdoing as well as insinuate them, by

purposefully or accidentally showing difference rather than similarity, or as a mode of

citation.

Promotional side-by-sides promote the skill of the person who remade an existing video, and are usually produced by that person, though they may be re-uploaded by others. The music video for Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” (2008) was at the center of one of the first large-scale scandals that erupted early in YouTube’s ubiquity, but also at one of its largest moments of fan production, including many side-by-side videos. The controversy surrounding “Single Ladies” regarded the use of choreography from two pieces by Bob Fosse: “Mexican Breakfast” (Debut

Ed Sullivan Show 1969) and “There’s Gotta Be Something Better than This” from the film version of Sweet Charity (1969). About sixty-five seconds of the three minutes and nineteen seconds of “Single Ladies” is from these two pieces. By changing the context, order, and dynamics of the original movement, and by requiring interesting transitions between the moves inspired by J-Setting, choreographers Frank Gaston and JaQuel Knight brought new movement

93 vocabulary to play with Fosse’s. By giving the whole piece the style of J-Setting, the choreographers nearly transformed the movement, but keen observers spotted the Fosse- originated movement and brought it—and the lack of overt attribution—to mainstream attention.

While the controversy sparked many articles, and accusatory videos, including side-by- sides, “Single Ladies” is probably best known for spawning large amounts of what Philippa

Thomas calls editions—recapitulations, reedits, parodies, or spinoffs of the original video, all of which circulate at the same time and in similar ways to the text on which they comment. In turn, these fan videos lead to almost as many analyses, including those by Harmony Bench (“Single

Ladies is Gay”) and Kirsten Pullen, notably. One of the most famous of the fan videos, featuring

Shane Mercado doing the choreography in his bedroom, has over three million views on just his original upload as of summer 2015. There are many theories as to why “Single Ladies” inspired so many editions. At least one possible explanation for this follows from a reading of the description box text; Mercado denotes his fandom in the author-generated peripheral paratext, noting that he is doing the exact choreography as the video and declaring his love for Beyoncé.

This sentiment is echoed in the description box of damian2dc’s side-by-side of “Single Ladies” and Mercado’s edition, which itself has almost two million views. Commenting on both

Mercado’s and his own motivation for their fan labor, he says, “People just LOVE Beyonce, me too haha.” Perhaps because the Fosse movement used is so interspersed, while there are hundreds of fan editions, as of summer 2015, there are only two side-by-sides that directly compare

“Single Ladies” to Fosse’s choreography, and each only to “Mexican Breakfast.” Made in the fall of 2008, FLYERVideos’s video is a three-way comparison of the inspiration, the text, and

94 Mercado’s edition (see figure 1.9). The other side-by-side only runs thirty-five seconds and was uploaded in 2014, although tempers still flare in the comments (Seldulce).

Figure 1.9 Promotional side-by-side with a twist. This video showed a three-way comparison of Mercado’s fan remake, superimposed over Beyoncé in the video for “Single Ladies,” with an inset showing Fosse’s “Mexican Breakfast” as performed on the Ed Sullivan Show, one of the sources for the “Single Ladies” choreography. Screenshot of FLYERVideos, “Single Ladies + Single Man + Fosse,” YouTube, 28 Oct 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pygi7RLPu0g, Accessed 30 June 2015.

Many of the comments on both versions of Nguyen’s Snuggie “Countdown” reference how well he replicated Beyoncé’s video. These included his performance of the choreography, but also mentioned his editing ability. In her article identifying viral choreographies as one of social dance media’s main genres, Bench comments that viral choreographies were made possible by

95 the technological affordances that allow easy and quick access to popular performances which fans want to learn, and in turn the ease with which they can record and circulate their recreations.

But, she argues, “[c]ostuming and formation are secondary concerns for a viral choreography. It is the bodily reproduction of the choreography—the steps, gestures, and timing of movements— upon which a viral choreography hinges” (“Screendance 2.0” 203). However, as technology has further developed since Bench’s analysis, increasing value is in fact being put on the technical aspects of fan recreation, and this is one of the aspects side-by-sides are particular suited to promote. One of the most frequent requests for information in the comments of Nguyen’s video was what software he used to edit the video, a question also asked in his interview with

Tomorrow magazine. He used Sony Vegas, which is available free from Sony Creative Software for Microsoft operating systems (Hess “Queer Icon”). The replication of camera angles, types of shots, and their arrangement is precise. Other than the star, the main differences are material— costumes, sets, and the presence of more than two backup dancers. There are no differences in terms of editing and special effects like coloring, split screen, stop motion, and so on, once the exclusive realm of well-equipped and -financed production studios.

In addition to the many other interesting questions that side-by-side videos provoke, the replication of technical elements once again pushes the understanding of the interaction between professional and amateur production. Do side-by-sides like “Countdown (Snuggie Version)

[Comparison]” demonstrate the widespread availability of the technology and editing software that professionals use? Alternatively, is the very possibility of replication enabled by the particularities of editing of the original video part of the trend of ‘professional’ videos approximating amateur and web video, whether for business or creative reasons? The

96 promotional force of a side-by-side is for the uploader who wants their remake to be appreciated to the fullest degree possible, but always also for the text which inspired the recreation.31

Accusatory side-by-sides videos, in contrast, find the similarities in two works to be illicit, if not illegal, and are made to highlight similarities in order to back this claim. In particular, I will analyze the responses and conflict around the use of Anne Teresa de

Keersmaeker’s choreography in Beyoncé’s “Countdown” and of Les Twins’s choreography on

So You Think You Can Dance. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker originally choreographed her most well-known work, “Rosas Danst Rosas” for the concert stage in 1983. The dance for camera version directed by Thierry de Mey, also the composer of the original score, was released in

1997 and features dancers from the second generation of de Keersmaeker’s company, Rosas. The movement vocabulary of the stage and film version is almost identical, and some of this movement has been decontextualized and combined with the filmed stage work “Achterland” and fit in to various parts of Beyoncé’s “Countdown.” The last minute of “Countdown” uses not just the choreography but also the cinematic aspects of de Mey’s film. The setting, use of the camera, light, and other aspects are recreated in Beyoncé’s video, directed by Adria Petty, who also directed Beyoncé’s “Sweet Dreams.” Unlike a fan remake however, no credits or citations appear in any official onsite paratexts.32 There are also other influences in “Countdown.” The colorful backgrounds and use of split screens index Richard Avedon’s famous portrait of the

Beatles, Andy Warhol portraits, and the opening credits of the Brady Bunch. The all-black ensemble with cropped pants and exposed socks reads as a reference to Audrey Hepburn or

Michael Jackson. However, the majority of the choreography, much of the setting, and the costume draws directly from de Keersmaeker’s oeuvre.

97 The side-by-side made by fundifferent1 titled “Split Screen: Beyonce “Countdown” vs

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker” is particularly interesting because though the title still posits a two-part comparison, the video highlights all the references the creator could ascertain, using both still and video footage at relevant parts of “Countdown.” This includes Eugene Loring’s choreography for Funny Face as performed by Hepburn, and comparable 1960s makeup looks for those used in “Countdown.” Interestingly, even at moments where the movement does not match exactly, or something other than dancing is occurring in the music video, the de

Keersmaeker footage is left running, despite the fact that in other moments where there was no direct referent to compare, fundifferent1 leaves a black half of the screen. Figure 1.10 shows this contrast.

Figure 1.10 Continued display of de Keersmaeker. In this side-by-side “Countdown” is on the left and the references on the right. funDifferent1 does not keep the stills up for the duration of their relevance or repeat them, leaving black space which in this screenshot (top) will next show a makeup look from a 60s fashion magazine. In contrast the de Keersmaeker choreography is kept running even when it does not match the action of the music video (bottom). Screenshots from fundifferent1, “Split Screen: Beyonce “Countdown“ vs Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker,” 12 Oct 2011, YouTube, Reuploaded by Copyright Infringement Awareness, 21 Oct 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj5Kp38Oz04, Accessed 30 June 2015.

This seems like a rhetorical move about education on the part of fundifferent1, who utilizes the interest that the scandal generated as a way to show people de Keersmaeker’s work.

One of the main arguments put forward by YouTube defenders of Beyoncé excusing the

99 unauthorized use of de Keersmaeker’s work was that a much greater audience was now aware of her, a ‘formerly unknown’ artist; essentially arguing that the music video exerted instructional and promotional force on behalf of de Keersmaeker. Before making the side-by-side, fundifferent1made a video that consisted only of reference footage, with “Countdown” as the audio track. However, this did not have the same impact as the side-by-side, which fulfills the role of social paratext in its reframing and refocusing the viewer. The video with just the references is still a social paratext, but the proximity seems to be important in addition to the role it plays in establishing legitimacy or offering proof, which the comments analyzed in this chapter show is an important part of online discourse. Fundifferent1’s educational move to keep de

Keersmaeker’s choreography playing as a component of the side-by-side critique is interesting as it continues but subverts the rhetoric of the opposing position by actually exposing the viewer to de Keersmaeker, while still using a format which makes the similarities clear.

The comments on fundifferent1’s side-by-side continue to debate the use of de

Keersmaeker’s movement even as recently as June 30, 2015, around three and a half years later.

They are full of vitriol, despite or perhaps as a result of the clear visual evidence provided about the similarities. Taken together with Ton Do-Nguyen’s Snuggie side-by-side there is an interesting game of telephone, where the original is further obscured in Ton Do-Nguyen’s approximation, which emulates the production, cinematography, and physicality of Beyoncé’s performance, itself both referencing and obscuring multiple sources.

Another example of accusatory side-by-sides involves less well-known copiers. In 2010,

New Style dancers Les Twins performed an innovative duet highlighting their particular style at

World of Dance. After another duo of dancers, D*Day, were seen performing much of the same

100 choreography for their So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) season eight audition, a scandal broke out in the Hip-Hop dance community accusing D*Day of biting, one of the worst sins imaginable. It seemed particularly audacious given the explosion of the WOD clip, which helped rocket Les Twins to fame and boosted YAKfilms’s credentials. It was later revealed that D*Day had given credit to Les Twins in an interview that FOX did not air.33

User ForeignerFilms created and uploaded the video through which most of those who did not see the auditions on air learned of the incident. It is rich in its own paratexts, both peripheral and embedded, with explanation of the incident and the video format in the description box, and explanatory text onscreen before and after the footage rolls. In addition, the clips are headlined “The Original” and “The Thieves” (see figure 1.11) while at the end a song with the lyric “copycat, copycat/copying everyone else” plays as ForeignerFilms uses onscreen text to rally viewers to publicly complain by sharing the video. Thomas Simonsen discusses the promotional aspects of paratexts; this side-by-side promotes its own success as a video while levying its critique through as many rhetorical and formal aspects as possible, including modeling proper attribution by linking to videos that inspired or enabled the Les Twins/D*Day side-by-side.

101

Figure 1.11 Well-labeled accusatory side-by-side. The uploader ForeignerFilms makes clear through onscreen text their opinion about the similarity between D*Day’s audition and Les Twins’s performance. Because it’s embedded in the video, this judgment cannot be separated from the video’s circulation. Screenshot from ForeignerFilms, “Les Twins choreography being ripped off on ‘SYTYCD’” YouTube, 27 May 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1doSilyQc, Accessed 30 June 2015.

While serving to trigger discussions and as evidence for accusations, the proof offered in side-by-side videos is rarely sufficient to persuade all viewers of the validity of the claim. While the visual similarities between two texts juxtaposed in side-by-side videos may be undeniable, definitions of larger concepts like homage, inspiration, or plagiarism, and debates about off-site paratexts like interviews and attributions remain points of contention. This is especially true in the case of Beyoncé videos where there are high investments in both her defense and demise.34

Were attribution given in on-site paratext, preferably video-embedded, the debates would likely not be raised, or argued so furiously.

102 However, the stand-alone nature of embeddable video as it circulates free from other paratexts or context means that many people consider only what is in the frame. This affects the impact of side-by-side videos as well, as later evidence or information is often discounted or left out of viewer calculation if not immediately present. Different users may upload additional footage, and later statements or events may come to light, but the initial accusatory video, and often its reception, goes unchanged.

Jonathan Gray focuses on the idea of paratextual privilege, that is, who has access to circulate their interpretations and influence reception. Of audience paratexts, he states that some:

will be louder and more readily accessible than others, some directed at small communities of like-minded audiences, some emanating out to the public sphere more generally. The latter may even in due course come to determine the public understanding of a text. Others allow viable alternatives to the public script to emerge, thereby multiplying the text into various versions. All, though, underline the considerable power of viewer-end paratexts to set or change the terms by which we make sense of film and television, and, hence, to add or subtract depth and breadth to a text. (Gray 174)

In the case of the D*Day/Les Twins scandal, the power of the accusatory side-by-side video as a paratext was so strong that its assertion of wrongdoing remains, five years later, the dominant interpretation of the situation. In a reversal of the usual order of paratextual privilege,

In a reversal of the usual order of paratextual privilege, a video D*Day made explaining their intentions and what happened between the filming and airing of their SYTYCD audition only has about 25,000 views, where the original accusation has 300,000 (Damon Bellmon). While those numbers are not on the scale of other videos discussed in this chapter, this incident was extremely important to popular dance practitioners and aficionados, and remains hotly debated on YouTube on both the side-by-side video and D*Day’s own explanation. Few people in those

103 discussions side with D*Day, showing it is not the authors’ statements defending themselves that are accepted, but rather the side-by-side as social paratext is the dominant reading of the event.

A new video uploaded after the season nine auditions in the summer of 2012 may have offered D*Day some relief from the hate mail and Twitter campaigns even though their own explanation could not. In the description box of their explanation video, D*Day includes a link to this video, asking that viewers watch it before their own explanation. This video has since been deleted from YouTube and with it any comments or evidence of its effectiveness. The clip excerpted D*Day’s ten minute appearance from SYTYCD season nine, where FOX aired their second audition. It included discussion of the outrage and its impact, an interview with them explaining their thought process, and archival tape of their original interview where they do state they were “inspired by these French dancers Les Twins.” This footage later existed within a thirty-minute upload of season nine auditions (Atlanta GA), which itself no longer exists.

Showing the primacy of visual proof online, despite spending ten minutes in their defense video talking about their intent and their actions, D*Day offers footage as evidence, now no longer available for viewers to assess themselves.

In addition to the importance of evidence and legitimacy in YouTube discourse, this is a reminder of the possibility for failure of the off-site paratext, in addition to the gap in citational practices between legacy media and Internet-native content producers. In most popular dance related scandals, were attribution given with the original videos as content or in on-site paratext, preferably video-embedded, these debates would likely not arise, or be argued so furiously.

Popular dance practitioners in charge of their own mediation are by and large fastidious with mentions of use of music and dance, as well as the contributors to a project such as

104 videographers and even venue. Some of this is for monetary, legal, or promotional reasons, but also because of values of citationality in Hip-Hop and other popular dance forms. Side-by-side videos, as embedded social paratexts within their own frame, offer one way to practice citation, but it is usually after the fact of the original text, and itself extractable and circulatable without whatever context or arguments may be given by the uploader in official paratexts like the title or description box, or social paratexts like the comments which may have been made on the video.

The issue of embedded rhetoric and evidence leads to an example of what might be a model for preventative side-by-sides.

An April 2015 cover and remix of Michael and Janet Jackson’s “Scream” video danced by and with additional choreography by WilldaBeast Adams and Janelle Ginestra makes a preemptive citation by including the original in a small square in the lower left hand corner, about 5% of the total screen for the duration of the replicated movement, as shown in figure 1.12.

105

Figure 1.12 Inclusion of original work as a preventative paratext. The inset video in the lower left corner of Adams and Ginestra’s dance cover of the “Scream” music video shows they are aware of their source material and respect it, while also exerting promotional force by highlighting their successful recreation. Screenshot from WilldaBeast Adams, “Michael and Janet Jackson - “SCREAM” Remake – Willdabeast Adams and Janelle Ginestra” YouTube, 14 Apr 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXUP42Dao8c. Accessed 28 Mar 2018.

The video also opens with a quote from Adams saying “Michael Jackson inspired me to inspire others. This project is made out of respect and love for him and Janet. Show love not hate.

Enjoy”( WilldaBeast Adams “Michael and Janet Jackson”). Additionally, at the end of the choreography, credits run on screen, listing Ginestra and Adams as the choreographers of the remake, the videographer-editor, co-editor, director of photography, producer, production designer, hair and makeup artist, and stylist, as well as the three original choreographers for

“Scream.” They are all listed additionally in the description box, along with another quote from

Adams about his connection to Michael Jackson’s work.

106 This video also has promotional force for Ginestra and Adams. Like the other side-by- sides, the inclusion of the original for the duration of the cover serves as evidence for their faithful and excellent reproduction and their skill in performance. Their own new choreography promotes their compositional skills, additionally. Finally, they used this highly-produced video, posted following the death of Michael Jackson and therefore quite likely to turn up in people’s search results, to promote another one of their projects. Following the credit sequence, an ad for their summer training camp runs as its own embedded paratext. While they promote themselves and their business, the overall tone of the video is an homage. Through the inclusion of the original video and other peripheral and onscreen paratexts, they declare reverence and cite original creators, both promoting themselves as ethical practitioners and preventing accusations.

Side-by-side videos are social paratexts particularly concerned with homage, citation, and circulation. Given the sheer volume and frequency of fan and all video in circulation, a high degree of literacy is required to gauge the rhetoric, influences, and labor presented in a new video. Even if an uploader expressly labels a remake as such, an audience member needs to either have a perfect memory of the original or be able to watch both texts at the same time in order to really understand the care taken by the creator, or to critique similarities. The side-by- side comparison works equally well when presenting new information. In the case of the

“Countdown” controversy, because De Keersmaeker’s work, while well respected in the concert dance world, is not known outside of it, visual evidence was required to persuade even those people open to the critique and to new information. The paratextual video educates the audience so the viewers can better enjoy the remake, which the uploader enjoyed. In addition to this instructional force, present in all side-by-sides, promotional force is exerted, as in the case of the

107 maker of the Snuggie “Countdown” video. The side-by-side is both for his benefit and that of the audience, allowing them to appreciate the lengths that he went to in order to recreate the video.

Like other forms of response on YouTube, side-by-side videos are multivalent and multi-vocal.

Whether side-by-side videos are primarily promotional, accusatory, or preventative in addition to their instructional force, they are all also expressions of fandom for one or both the juxtaposed videos, as well as for the artists. As Aufderheide and Jaszi state, video makers using existing content “are sampling in order to comment, critique, illustrate, express. They are salvaging, rescuing, celebrating, heralding, bonding. They are expressing vital connections both to popular cultural expressions and also to others who share their passions and the meanings that they have created around those expressions” (6). Side-by-side videos are an encapsulation of the values their creators and uploader advocate for video production and reception, of respect for one or both the juxtaposed videos, as well as appreciation for others who demonstrate their attention through appropriate fan response.

Conclusion

As the examples throughout this chapter show, in form and tone the discourse on

YouTube is very particular to the age of social media and to YouTube’s technological platform.

At the same time, the discourse continues previous modes of response to dance on the popular screen, from paratexts to fan practices, as well as the policing of generic boundaries, assessment, and education, previously done in part through criticism. In addition, just as has always been the case, identity formation and community values continue to be negotiated and formed through the

108 embodiment and exchange of mediated dance in addition to co-present events like battles, sessions (practices), and workshops. This multiple belonging is evident in the ways in which people demonstrate their literacies and assert their legitimacy online. While in many ways a viewership is a social audience, formed through common attention to and content-driven discourse about a particular text, the range of opinions on a single video demonstrates that the individuals within it are part of multiple communities and possess varying levels of knowledge and varying values. Despite the admonition “don’t read the comments!” the comments section and discursive visual forms like side-by-side videos are social paratexts, sites where multiple communities come together, shaping reception, sociality, future production, and practice through discourse. This discourse negotiates and impacts genrefication of established as well as new forms; in the following chapter, I turn to an analysis of the videographic and choreographic aspects of emergent genre formation on YouTube.

109 Chapter 2: Class Videos as an Emergent Internet Screendance Genre

Choreographer WilldaBeast Adams’s shirt is dip-dyed neck-first in sweat. Only when the camera pulls back from its opening torso shot does it become clear the T is beige, not brown.

Sweat marks the wooden floor as the group—six young men arrayed in a pyramid behind

Adams—begin the choreography learned in that day’s dance class, taking smooth steps backward as the lyrics to “Bad and Boujee” come up in the audio, and the title comes on the screen. Two more groups perform the end of class combination, interacting with each other and videographer Tim Milgram as they move through the space together. The last group to dance, all children, takes the built-in four eight-counts at the conclusion of the combination to improvise.

One of the girls slowly leans back, as if pushed slowly by the dancers next to her, before a kip up, coming back from the floor to standing at just the right moment for all five dancers to return to a unison coda, double tapping the left toe behind the right with arms stretched out and torsos tilted towards the back leg. Adams rushes forward in excitement as this last group finishes, coming right up to the camera, mouth wide open with teeth and pride, and pushes his sleeve up to bare his company’s claw slash emblem tattooed on his shoulder. The rest of the students, previously crouched and standing in a wide semi-circle behind the group, similarly erupt and bounce around the room, clap, and throw off their hats (Tim Milgram, “Bad and Boujee”).

In her chapter “A Rhizomatic Revolution?: Popular Dancing, YouTubing, and Exchange in Screendance,” dance scholar Naomi Jackson considers some specific examples of how the

110 Internet, and YouTube particularly, has affected the evolution of screendance in relation to popular dance. Jackson’s focus is primarily on YouTube’s rhizomatic nature in relation to the success of the platform. While the rhizome points in part to the outward connection of a video to other things, in this chapter I turn to the internal multivalence of YouTube dance videos—studio class combination videos in particular— as part of their genrefication, their successful circulation, and how the difficulty in classifying them complicates screendance analysis.

In order to distinguish itself as a practice and a discipline, screendance distanced itself from the live, proscenium dancing body and its merely documentary capture by a still camera.

Now established, though like all things in constant negotiation of borders, arguments about its breadth persist. Some interpretations of the category might not include class videos, which might be considered boring or too close to documentation of forward-facing dance; they do not utilize what Sherril Dodds calls the superbody (“Values in Motion” 448), or Douglas Rosenberg’s recorporealization (Screendance 55), both of which account for the ways editing can create bodies and actions that cannot happen in the real world. Nor are they abstracted away from the full form of the dancing body, as Erin Brannigan focuses on in her conception of micro- choreographies (44). However, class videos are clearly a screendance genre under a broad definition of screendance such as that of Rosenberg, who argues “screendance implies that the end point of the endeavor is a mediated image of dance on a screen, any dance on any screen”

(Screendance 117), or Harmony Bench, who takes the mode of viewing as a baseline and further stipulates that “first, diegetic movement is identifiable to a viewer as dance movement; or second, the work is in conversation with the histories, aesthetics and practices of dance; or third, approaches to composition demonstrate a choreographic sensibility, for example in the camera

111 motion, editing and/or the sequencing of movement content” (“Screendance” 223). Class videos are highly circulated and recirculated on screen, are filmed through a mobile camera held by hand by a copresent moving videographer, and feature repetition and proximity made possible through editing.

In addition to their interest for screendance studies, I argue these videos demonstrate the processes and economic exigencies of emerging Internet and screen genres. This chapter looks at the pedagogical and production contexts of filmed Hip-Hop classroom combinations, analyzes the motivation and forces of these videos, and their impact on the reception, circulation, and production of dance video online more broadly. I argue that the studio combination video is a screen genre that has developed alongside the also-evolving movement it captures. The particularity of this genre as a kind of screendance that is at once instructional, documentary, and presentational has ramifications for theorizing dance onscreen, but also offers insight into how genres emerge on and through the Internet more broadly.

The studio-based combination video began as documentary footage. These videos were often shot in dark studios by a student in the corner with their phone, but they have since developed into a fully-fledged screen genre with its own style, rhetorics, impacts, and economics. The duration, songs, and choreography vary, but the videos have a clear structure: an opening with the videographer or choreographer’s logo, quick edits of the dancers in the middle of the combination or posturing beforehand in a dance studio, a flash of the performing artist’s name, title of the song, and choreographer’s name, and then the first group of dancers. Groups of one to ten dancers follow, each performing a 30-45 second combination, often capped by an improvised coda. Dancers awaiting their turn crouch, sit, and stand on the sides of the studio in a

112 large half circle that opens to the camera and a mirrored wall. They watch those on the floor intently, sometimes directly and sometimes looking past the camera at their fellow students’ reflection in another mirror. Some practice the choreography in preparation for their turn, marking the choreographic trajectory and timing from their place in the crowd. Others bounce along to the music, grimace, hand prop, clap, hoot, and exclaim, expressing their appreciation for the execution of the choreography and freestyle. The videos often end with an extended and virtuosic (sometimes solo) turn, and fade out with the assembled audience’s positive reaction.

The song continues to parts that have not yet been heard, while the end screen displays hyperlinked videos to both other works by the choreographer and to other videos the videographer has filmed and directed.

The choreographed movement featured in the videos is predominately a single style— known as Choreo, a term currently used within the Hip-Hop dance community to describe a presentational choreographic style where the movement vocabulary is derived from participatory dance forms. In addition to appearing on YouTube, it is taught at workshops and conventions, and performed at competitions. While the term began as a catch-all, Choreo has coalesced into a recognizable movement genre with compositional tendencies and a particular movement quality, a set of important choreographers and performers, and a strong participatory fandom, all of which is interwoven through a network of online and physical interactions.

Crucially, it is the videography and editing which sets class videos apart as a screen genre. They feature minimal editing—usually only a jump cut between groups—but a highly- mobile camera during the actual filming. During the unison performance, the camera approaches and backs away from the performing group, creating a constant change in depth. During freestyle

113 sections, more lateral movement and close-ups occur, including changes in height to capture floorwork, all done by an ambulatory videographer themselves working between the choreographed and the improvisational, creating interest and intimacy in the repetitions between and within videos, which last anywhere from four to twenty minutes (averaging eight to ten).

There is a multiplicity of movement and videographic modes contained within these videos. They capture unison choreography and simultaneous as well as separate improvisation modeled after the Hip-Hop cypher. The videos also capture the dual positionality of the kind of celebrity and renown the choreographers and dancers in the videos have, where their labor is simultaneously directed towards the performing artists whose music they choreograph to, and an attempt at gaining a large audience’s attention for themselves. Finally, these videos simultaneously entextualize—make into a circulatable work—the learning, rehearsing, and performing of movement in a previously unseen way. Developed by Charles Briggs and Richard

Bauman to account for oral performance, entextualization is the “Process of rendering discourse extractable” such that it “can be lifted out of its interactional setting” (“Poetics” 73). That is, a process that makes a product—a text—from a specific context. This text can then be recontextualized, whether through circulation or reuse, though Briggs and Bauman note that the vestiges of the original context always remain (“Poetics” 75).

Class videos emerged out of a documentary function—whether for the choreographer’s memory aide or in order to send choreographic samples for applications—that likely would not have been shared (or shared broadly). And yet the class video genre emerges as such through what I propose calling videographic entextualization, when the process of the studio becomes a circulatable product through the work of videographers, attention to lighting, and planned

114 groups. The result is not only shareable on social media, but often even goes viral. These videos demand that we expand our notion of screendance and dance performance through the interaction with documentary and instructional force so common in web-native content.

Unlike mashup videos, or many other popular video styles and Internet production modes that engage multiple creators or audience members in their making—taking video topic requests from fans, doing Q&A videos, and so on—combination videos are fairly traditional in terms of who is involved in their production and circulation: a choreographer, a videographer-editor, and a distributor. Instead, the plurality of contribution that often defines Internet production happens in situ, in the form of students who function as costume designers in their heightened sartorial choices, and who dazzle in unison performance as well as in increasingly lengthy and stunning freestyle segments. These dancers straddle the line between amateur (they are actually paying to take the class in most cases) and professional (many of the dancers also appear in advertisements, music videos, stadium tours, or on their own social media channels). The productive tension between amateur and professional is also one between fandom and self- promotion, between repetition and innovation; this is the multivalent creativity of the age of social media and convergence culture (Jenkins Convergence).

Class combination videos highlight the multiple roles, purposes, and forces of videos on

YouTube, and the unique position of YouTube as a platform that hosts established, new, and emerging screen genres and audiences. As explicated in the introduction to this dissertation, the idea of a force accounts for the range of possible readings and outcomes a video enables, depending on the needs, desires, and literacies of the individual viewer, encapsulating both intended and potential effects on behalf of the creators.

115 These are: (1) Instructional force, which notes the pedagogical setting of a video as well as the movement, music, and life values transmitted; (2) Documentary force, which accounts for the informational value of a historical record; (3) Promotional force, which encapsulates economically-driven decisions, as well as the effects of self-promotion and advertising; (4)

Presentational force, which explicates the intense performance of dancers, and the circulation of the videos as if they were made with only this in mind; and (5) Representational force, through which I propose that despite their largely non-narrative nature, dance videos on YouTube assert values about race, gender, sexuality, body size, and individuality. More so even than most

YouTube dance videos, the multiplicity of influences on class videos means the genre illuminates the network of these forces, demonstrating how the implicit and explicit goals of creators and audiences are multiple and varied.

It is my contention that the multivalence of studio-based combination videos is in part what makes them so popular with such a large potential audience. It also defines them, alongside their formal characteristics, as a screen genre. Modern genre theory asserts that genre is aggregative, routinized, social, and discursive, not static or comprehensive. As Briggs and

Bauman note, “all of us know intuitively that generic classifications never quite work: an empirical residue that does not fit any clearly defined category—or, even worse, that falls into too many—is always left over” (“Genre” 132). I argue that studio-based class combination videos are defined generically not only by their formal qualities and circulation (which they share with many proximate genres), but by the very fact they seem to ‘fall into too many’—the multiple reasons for their creation and their varied impacts and receptions. One of the ways the

116 class combination videos are clearly distinct is that there are many separate web-native screendance genres that fulfill its cumulative roles, as outlined in this dissertation’s introduction.

Because the platform is so heterogeneous, the creation of screen genres sometimes happens in advance of conditions for reception; emergent forms are belated to more established ones which dictate their circulation and reception. In the case of studio-based combination videos, at the beginning of their emergence they were often discussed as if they were music videos or documented competition routines (the closest widely-known genres), except for by a highly-dedicated audience who had the literacies necessary to read them exactly. As they have proliferated and gained greater circulation, their formal aspects as well as the context for their reception has coalesced. Looking at the constellation of purpose in the creation and reception of studio-based combination videos reveals the role of YouTube in the economics, training, and distribution of choreographed Hip-Hop dance. More broadly, it points to how new Internet and screendance genres emerge, the performance of individuality, and the particularity of the

YouTube platform as one of multivalence and multiple interests.

In this chapter I first lay out how Hip-Hop, originally a participatory form, came to be practiced within the pedagogical frame of the commercial dance studio, and what the choreography taught therein looks like in the late 2010s. Subsequently, I delineate the development of class combination videos as an emergent screen genre with attention to the generic inheritances encapsulated in it and the innovations made by important contributors. I then turn to an analysis of how these videos help argue for an expanded theory of Internet and screendance genre. Finally, I explore some of the changes and developments in and around the making of class videos in the years since they became a codified genre.

117 In their production and circulation, class combination videos help to complicate ideas of performance, documentation, and pedagogy, and how their entextualization through video and circulation creates a new context for all three. These videos offer a unique opportunity to see a genre emerge and solidify, from the poorly-lit stationary cell phone videos of a single group shot into the mirror accompanied by crackling sounds in the early days of YouTube, to the bright, multi-group videos shot with Steadicams and mobile cinematography emerging around 2014, and the careers, studios, and production companies that have risen since the genre cohered around 2017 to produce screendance works with the most talented dancers in LA; this final example has its own recommended category on the front page of YouTube.1 Tracing this development helps to understand how established content producers shape genre depending on their own needs and competencies, and how new artists—here videographers, choreographer- teachers, and dancers—adopt and adapt to a circulating form with currency in the forms of contemporary relevance and economic value.

Combinations in the Hip-Hop Classroom

Stringing together movements learned separately during a training session has a long history in western concert dance forms; enchaînement, or ‘chaining together’ is a principle in ballet pedagogy, and made its way into jazz and modern dance technical training too, which support dance as a presentational form.2 Many dance forms, such as those in the African diaspora, prize improvisation and are often taught with a focus on movement building blocks and the skills to change and recombine them. So, how did a popular form developed from

118 improvisatory usage of collectively-developed vocabulary adopt lengthy choreographed sequences as part of its pedagogical structure? Hip-Hop choreography in the classroom runs parallel to its use in performance, as might be expected. A full history or critique of the development of Hip-Hop as a choreographic form is outside the scope of this chapter; rather this section focuses on the way this history has influenced classroom combinations and in turn the circulation of them as class videos and with them their forces.3

This section briefly discusses the formal and historical traits of the compositional content of these videos—choreographed Hip-Hop taught in the classroom—and considers how an activity with a limited, mostly pedagogical scope gains currency and legitimacy as performance.

The filming and prominence of this classroom exercise indexes both the history of the incorporation of vernacular and improvisatory movement into choreography and the way in which social media like YouTube serves to entextualize and circulate so many kinds of moments which were previously outside the scope of performance. Additionally, it is also part of the history of Hollywood, legacy media, and the particular movement economies of Los Angeles.

Choreography and Combinations in Hip-Hop

According to Danielle Robinson, “dance instructor” became a career in the U.S. in the

1920s when studios opened to cater to aspiring Broadway performers. White professional jazz dancers were the primary clientele in these studios, where African-American teachers began teaching black vernacular and social dances to both black and white communities (135). In the

1950s and 1960s, led by teacher-choreographers like Luigi, Gus Giordano, and Matt Mattox,

119 Jazz Dance solidified into a presentational form influenced by and taught alongside Ballet and

Modern dance, with classes culminating in combinations of skills and style taught in the class

(Straus). Furthermore, the parallels between Jazz and Hip-Hop’s incorporation of vernacular dance practices into a combination-based studio form, framed within a commercial arena, is not only historical but institutional. Moro Landis Studio, which became the famed Millennium

Dance Complex, was Luigi’s home base in Los Angeles and the informal dance training extension of the Hollywood Studio System during the height of the movie musical (“The

Millennium Story”), which often incorporated participatory dance styles into its choreography.

In the 1980s when early Hip-Hop films like Wild Style (1983), Breakin’(1984), and Beat

Street (1984) filled the role of the musical at movie theaters (Monteyne), they almost exclusively showed participatory sequences of breaking or funk styles.4 The second wave of dance— particularly Hip-Hop dance—film in the early 2000s, including Save the Last Dance (2001), and

You Got Served (2004)—put a heavy emphasis on choreographed scenes and contexts, reflecting one of the off-screen evolutions of Hip-Hop over the intervening years. As in other historic moments, the excitement around the movement displayed in the early Hip-Hop films, music videos, and television advertisements sparked a desire to learn among people outside of the communities and structures in which the movements had developed.

These media created a need for dancers trained in Hip-Hop choreography, and this demand led to the development of institutions of instruction. Dance scholar Thomas DeFrantz notes: “Throughout the 1990s, a rise in hip-hop dance classes and studio-based training practices led to the codification of hip-hop as a form of pyramidal structure—something that could be learned from a teacher, rather than developed by the artists involved, as had been the standard of

120 transmission until that time” (129). In other words, Hip-Hop was made to fit in the existing pedagogical studio model. When Millennium Dance Complex (MDC) founders Robert Baker and AnnMarie Hudson acquired the Moro Landis building and name in 1992, they followed the lead of other Los Angeles studios and offered Hip-Hop classes, which were not yet popular in

New York (“The Millennium Story”).5 They felt that it was an easy move from ‘jazz funk’—the already-hybrid jazz classes influenced by the movement innovations of the 70s-80s including disco, aerobics, breaking, and the funk styles—to studio-based Hip-Hop. “It was mostly jazz and contemporary, so when hip-hop music started having lots of dancers in their videos, it was like,

‘Eh, where do you go to get them?’” Hudson recalled in an interview on how they initially decided to offer Hip-Hop classes (Phillips).

The proximity to Hollywood is not only historical or geographic but also conceptual; influence from the rhetoric of Hollywood film, and showcasing dancers, choreographers, and videographers who are readily available to the industry are clearly visible in class combination videos. As dance ethnographer Cindy García notes about salsa dancers in Los Angeles, the centrality of Los Angeles to the salsa scene was “a stereotype perpetuated not only by

Hollywood film and television productions but also by local dancers hoping to join the casts”

(24). This relationship is part of the promotional force as well as the representational force of these videos. Choreo as the movement style of class videos exists in other locations, but it is fundamentally a Los Angeles style, and one defined by its composition and the studio as its specific location of performance.

In fact, some studios specializing in popular styles have classes labeled to reflect the growing importance of combinations in Hip-Hop classes. The studio Movement Lifestyle, also in

121 LA, has a class called ”Beginner/Intermediate Choreography,” and the description shows the way the term Choreography has, in this context, become synonymous with Hip-Hop: “Learn this popular style, also known as ‘commercial’ or ‘new style’ hip hop, geared towards beginner/intermediate level movers! Practice the basics of learning, retaining & mastering choreographed phrases to improve rhythm, execution & body awareness” (“The Schedule”).6

This description frames some of the larger pedagogical uses of chained-together movement. For

Millennium Dance Complex, inheritor of jazz choreography for film, these Hip-Hop classes, with their focus on final combinations, are the core of their business and fame, and combinations filmed in their studios shaped class combination videos for the first three to four years of the genre’s emergence.

Class Combinations in situ

In an end-of-class dance combination, a student practices learning movement phrases, demonstrates skills, builds stamina, and performs for the in-studio audience of students and teachers. The way the choreography of Choreo combines existing movement vocabulary that may be assumed to be common knowledge means that what is primarily being learned is the sequence, how to combine movements, and their relation to the music. Doing the culminating combination allows the student to exemplify these skills in a way that is akin to performance, taking it from merely an exercise to an opportunity for artistry and interpretation—performing the technique but also offering an opportunity for personalization within the technique.7

Traditionally, combinations are a practice for rehearsal, which is learning and repeating and

122 correcting a work that is for something. For teachers, the combination is a choreographic opportunity without the weight of a formalized performance and the need for compositional elements like cannons, spacing, or changing numbers of dancers. Through combinations, teachers can assess their students for promotion and future projects, as students can do with each other. Hip-Hop studio combinations also offer a way for teacher-choreographers to quickly integrate new songs, moves, and references into their repertoire, to the delight of the students in class and at-home viewers. This multiplicity of purposes is all entextualized in the process of filming; in circulation, these concerns and pedagogical reasons remain, but they are additionally embedded in and inform the forces that the production and screen-viewing produce. These videos represent class and carry the instructional force of the setting through the video’s documentary force. But there are also changes.

In a typical dance class, groups are formed for the final class combination predominately for space reasons; fewer people on the floor at once allows for more travelling, larger movements, and lowers the need to be aware of your surroundings. Additionally, it enables the teacher to see each student more clearly, and perhaps to offer feedback. In the context of auditions, which these commercial dancers and choreographers would be very familiar with, groups are often used to assess the auditionees. The groups in class videos have developed into more complicated divisions. How the groups are chosen, and by whom—videographer or choreographer—is unclear.8 But many trends appear. First, there are often much smaller groups than are necessitated by space constraints, including frequent groupings of trios, duets, and often at least one solo. Second, the dancers featured in these smaller groups, or at the front of larger ones, are those dancers with more celebrity. Third, larger groups often seem to be formed by age,

123 gender, and sometimes even race. More innocuous reasons for this are concerns about height for framing reasons, especially for the kids and teens; a use of pre-formed groupings, whether friendly or professional; and about performance style based on choices the dancer makes about historically gendered movement qualities.9 I discuss the representational force of these kinds of groupings in the following chapter.10

In her discussion of pedagogical modes used in dance classes and their relation to performance, Melanie Bales asserts that dance training “shapes or is shaped by choreographic and theatrical intent. Therefore, noting differences in aesthetic and theatrical approaches across certain eras in dance will point to distinctions between the training practices that support those differences” (29). In the case of class videos, one could argue that training practices point to choreographic differences, or perhaps even that class and performance have come to be almost synonymous. Bales is particularly interested in the spectrum between training modes that utilize improvisational or quotidian processes, and those where a choreographer gives fully, pre-made phrases, and what these different modes lead to in the performance context. Class videos illustrate that multiple points on this pedagogical spectrum can be exemplified even within one regimen or classroom.

Skills are also aggregative, which dancers negotiate by taking multiple classes and doing the kind of eclectic training Bales notes is quite frequent among dancers looking for work. These

“entrepreneurial dancers” (36) “craft their training from what suits them” (40), and then take their personal skill set and their body shaped by that training into the marketplace, hoping they have accumulated the requisite skill set. The documentary force of the class videos captures a partial record of the fact that many dancers are training with a large number of teachers at several

124 different studios.11 Yet, despite the pedagogical context of the videos, most of the dancers shown in the videos seem to emerge fully-formed with a range of skills, styles, flexibility, and performance training—even many of the quite young dancers who begin appearing in class videos as young as five. Individual dancers do gain more mastery over the years in which they have appeared in the class videos, but much of the actual training seems to precede the learning and performance of the combination captured in the class videos.

Nonetheless there are many elements of the studio context that are captured—and, crucially, not edited out—in the class combination videos that are typically not shown in primarily presentational genres. At the beginning of Tricia Miranda’s video for the song “Trini

Dem Girls,” for example, the mirror is completely opaque with moisture, and the opening montage even shows someone wiping down one of the panes (“Nicki Minaj – Trini Dem Girls”).

In many videos, pants clearly show sweat at the crux of butt and thigh, hair is shiny and plastered to foreheads or sticking up through the tenacity of perspiration, and footprints rendered in sweat mark dancers’ use of the space.

Another part of the movement context of the class are moments of mistakes, which are to be expected while carrying out a freshly learned movement sequence, and particularly given the incredible pace of most Choreo combinations. There are surprisingly few fumbles in the performance of the combinations, a testament to the skill of those dancers whose groups are included. However, it does happen, and those groups are still included. One memorable instance is a middle group in Miranda’s “Dessert” combination. About sixteen seconds into the twenty- five second phrase, the dancer on screen right misses the spine and pelvis contract and release in deep wide knee bend of his group-mate and comes into an unintentional canon with him, going

125 right into a snow angel-like small step movement, creating a mix of levels usually only seen in the freestyle section. Where for the first part both dancers have concentrated and intense faces, upon realizing his mistake, the dancer’s face splits into a wide smile as he finishes up as best as he can, as shown in figure 2.1 (Tricia Miranda “Dawin ft Silento”).

Figure 2.1 Inclusion of mistakes in class videos. The dancer on the right has gotten out of unison with his group partner after skipping a movement. Here, he has mostly given up trying to get back in sync and is grinning at his mistake while waiting to catch the other dancer on the last move of the combination. Moments like this would be cut out of most screen genres, but are part of class video’s documentary force. Screenshot from Tricia Miranda, “Dawin ft Silento - Dessert - @_TriciaMiranda Choreography | Filmed by @TimMilgram #DessertDance,” YouTube, 25 Sep 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe6ACKMyF7I, Accessed 2 Apr 2019.

Marks of effort, mistakes, students marking and watching on the side, and brief clips of the teacher or larger groups learning the movement show how the pedagogic space is held through documentation despite the overall presentational effect of the video, demonstrating the multiplicity this genre is able to contain. Having elaborated the process through which Hip-Hop

126 entered the studio classroom and the pedagogical models encapsulated in the class videos, I now examine Choreo as the movement genre developed in tandem with and circulated by class videos as a screen genre.

Choreo as a Movement Genre

The choreography featured in most studio class combinations, widely known as Choreo, is a composite style that easily integrates new social dance movement and has an extremely close relation to music, both in rhythm and lyrical content. While different choreographers have slight variations in their work, and a single choreographer will tailor the movement vocabulary to the style of the music they have chosen to teach with, Choreo combinations generally contain the following movement characteristics: heel-toe quick shifts from House as well as the quick weight changes of Memphis Jookin’ and Chicago footwork; the digging and carving qualities as well as figure eight movement trajectory and shoulder-hip connection of Dancehall; controlled but high intensity torso contractions from Krumping; hand precision and floor movements from Voguing; hair flips, floor poses and leg positions from exotic dancing and

‘heels dancing’; quick pelvic contractions up and back with loose thigh and glute muscles that characterize Twerking; the mobile spine in a deep wide-spread knee bend from J-setting, and an undercurrent of the loose jointed and large kinesphere movement of New Jack Swing that was one of the first components of choreographed Hip-Hop.

Additionally, the choreography is constituted by moves originating since 2014 or so as a result of Trap-inflected Hip-Hop music and the accompanying dance scenes coming out of

127 Atlanta and other Southern cities, hosted and spread to the national and international level via

Instagram and YouTube video. These dances come about and spread as local popular movements always have, although with different technologies. Currently, movement from individuals and groups created at the level of house parties, freestyle sessions, and inside jokes, appear in the lyrics of a song, become challenges, memes, or fad dances, get widely broadcast, and then make their way into studio videos—first in freestyle sessions, then in choreography, then concept videos, and are subsequently seen in music videos, tours, Hollywood movies, and ads.

Fad dances become standard movement vocabulary in class videos over time through this process, though there are peaks in their use when they are the most popular in the zeitgeist, and some stick longer than others. For example, class videos now routinely include the whip, nae nae, dab, milly rock, and hit them folks in various forms following their respective introductions to popular culture between 2014 and 2016. Not only are the movements themselves incorporated, but the distinctive movement qualities and timings with which they were performed in their originary movement and music contexts also get integrated into the larger choreographic context that may use different kinds of music. What sets Trap-inflected Southern dances apart is a mix of more fluid, almost casual movement accentuated by a hard-hitting finish of movement trajectory that can best be described as hitting a wall with a slight bounce back (see figure 2.2).

128

Figure 2.2 Hit them folks in the commercial studio. In its originary freestyle context, hit them folks is used to punctuate the ends of musical phrases, and can follow almost any other movement. In the most common version as it has been codified and spread, the dancer moves an arm down and across the body towards the opposite thigh then repeats on the other side before hitting the position shown above, hard. This moment comes at the end of WilldaBeast Adams’s turn in the post-combination cypher; the other dancers who were on the floor with him were able to join in and match his improvisational choice because they recognized the preceding arm movement and are highly musically competent. Screenshot from Tim Milgram, “Bad and Boujee - Migos (William Singe Cover) Choreography by Willdabeast - Filmed by @TimMilgram,” YouTube, 27 Mar 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBnGRbdtrjw, Accessed 2 Apr 2019.

The challenge dances are of course choreographic projects themselves in advance of their use by Choreo practitioners. For example, the whip consists of a stomp into a wide bent-knee stance with the correlating arm extended forward making a fist. The cross-bodied swing of the leg that often precedes the stomp in its use in amateur and freestyle performance is already a beginning of its incorporation into the choreographic, as is the popularity of songs which accompany challenges which often list more than one dance in a row. In the further presentational and choreographic context of the class combination, movements’ contexts get

129 abstracted, smoothed, or sped up, and they acquire different internal rhythms or relative bodily positions. For example, figure 2.3 shows how the small circle and swipe of alternating forearms of the milly rock in JoJo Gomez’s choreography for “Sorry Not Sorry” is performed above the shoulder instead of at chest level, as is typical in its participatory or casual dance contexts

(Tim Milgram “Demi Lovato”).

Figure 2.3 Choreographed and participatory versions of the milly rock. Performing her combination in the studio, JoJo Gomez circles the forearm above the shoulder before crossing down over the stomach, while the move’s originator, Milly Rock, holds his arm much lower. Screenshots from (left) Tim Milgram, “Demi Lovato - Sorry Not Sorry - Choreography by Jojo Gomez - #TMillyTV #Dance,” YouTube, 11 Aug 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTdjNbiNVmc, accessed 2 Apr 2019. (right) Born2WinProductions. “Milly Rock x 2 Milly,” YouTube, 31 Aug 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMzDoFuVgRg, accessed 2 Apr 2019.

The combination videos also show that dancers are trained to improvise.12 While the combination is repeated, I contend that what promotes the choreographer, and what draws in viewers to a certain extent, is the performance by individual dancers—including or perhaps primarily in their individual style carrying out both the choreographed movement and the freestyle sets. This is where the crux of excitement, affect, and affiliation is for viewers. As a

130 dancer for hire, you need to be able to learn choreography as it is given; as a dancer persona and a kind of celebrity, you must be individual.13 Within the unison choreography, dancers make choices about levels, whether in the depth of their knee bends or even transposing a move to the floor; arm movements where none have been specified, often touching themselves, their hair, or hats (see figure 2.4). There is also the movement of and related to the dancers’ clothing: sweatshirts flare, flannels tied around waists highlight hip isolations, hats fly off. The students additionally make choices about how they distribute a movement over an extended period allotted to it, choosing how they interact with each other and the camera.

131

Figure 2.4 Individual performance in a classroom combination. Tricia Miranda’s choreography in this section calls for the dancer to take several steps backward while the knees came together and spread apart repeatedly. The dancer on the left is following the choreography closely, though with his own style, while Kaelynn “KK” Harris, center, uses the relative calm of the moment to get her hair out of her face, having fun with it by making it a dramatic gesture. Darrion Gallegos, right, who has worked frequently with Miranda, takes a more extreme liberty and moves backward at floor level. Screenshot from Tricia Miranda, “F*** The Summer Up - Leikeli - Choreography by @_TriciaMiranda | Filmed by @TimMilgram,” YouTube, 8 Aug 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIshlpqpG3s, Accessed on 2 Apr 2019.

The individuality and the personas of the dancers is one of the main reasons that it is plausible and pleasurable to view the same thirty to sixty-second combination for up to twenty minutes. Individual dancers show their personalities, tastes, and training from outside the class in their performance of the choreography, but they do so especially in the improvisational sections, sometimes given space in the middle of the combination, but usually at the end of the phrase.

The emphasis on individuality is partly what distinguishes this screen genre from most music videos, or in live performances with pop or rap stars where Choreo is often used but the dancers,

132 however talented, are there to support the singer or group. Here, and in many dance genres on

YouTube, the movement and its performance is the entire point.

In addition to the full body movements, the videography and performance style of class videos yields hard working individualized faces, too. Expressions range depending on song, dancer, and movement, and often change quickly. They are sexual, angry, concentrated, gritty, intense, knowing, challenging, teasing, teeth-sucking, lip-biting, lip snarling, duck face, eyebrows lifted. A range of facial expressions from a single video are shown in figure 2.5.

133

Figure 2.5 Combination and freestyle facial expressions in “OG Bobby Johnson.” The top row is from freestyle turns while the bottom is during the combination. Clockwise from top left; Sean Lew smiles cheekily as he includes a very minute version of the dab; Trevontae Leggins stares down the camera haughtily upon finishing a remarkable and lauded turn in the cypher; Josh Price heightens the impact of his precarious balance with a cautious expression; Gabe de Guzman sneers with exhertion and performatively matching the Krumping influence of the combination; Kaycee Rice has the camera in her sights during a mimetic gun movement. Screenshots from Tricia Miranda, “OG Bobby Johnson - Choreography by Tricia Miranda - #TMillyTV,” YouTube, 24 Apr 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXKHJFHNKRw, Accessed 2 Apr 2019.

134 The quickness of the face muscles matches the fast-twitch muscle movement needed for much of the choreographed footwork. The movement also lends itself to facial exaggeration because there are mimetic and gestural moves that involve the face, like looking one way or the other, drinking or smoking something, or interacting with one’s hair. Discussing the facial close- ups of a Krumping solo on So You Think You Can Dance, dance scholars Sherril Dodds and

Colleen Hooper note “the screendance face both displays the codes and conventions of the particular dance idiom, and also the compositional modalities of camera work and editing, which re-choreograph faces” (93). In the case of class videos the micro-choreography14 shown off by a closer and mobile camera is not in fact necessarily choreographed by the person ‘whose video it is.’15 While there are influences of Krumping in most studio combinations, the expressive face is additionally part of the individuality and improvisation brought even to the unison performance, part of ‘going hard,’ the development of a performing persona, and leaning into the affect created through the lyrics and music of the song being danced to. Choreo is constituted by many movement influences and modes. The last crucial defining characteristic is the genre’s relationship to music.

Word Playing and Beat Killing16

One definitive component of Choreo as a movement genre is a very close interaction with the music, both lyrically and in the instrumentation or production. WilldaBeast calls this choreographic mode “word play” (Hyland). Word play in linguistic, musical, and movement contexts has a long history in Afro-diasporic practices, and has had a tremendous impact on the

135 shape of American popular culture.17 The connection of music and dance is particularly important in popular contexts, and I believe Choreo inherits this approach from the traditions of music video and live performance choreography, themselves indebted to the innovations of choreographer Cholly Atkins, who was key to artist development at Motown Records.

At Motown, Atkins created a choreographic style called vocal choreography, performed by the record label’s artists while singing, and which helped to popularize the music. According to dance scholar Jacqui Malone, Atkins taught Motown artists “to perform their music by doing dances that worked their magic not by retelling a song’s storyline in predictable pantomime but by punctuating it with rhythmical dance steps, turns, and gestures–drawn by the rich bedrock of

American vernacular dance” (17). For example, performing “You Really Got a Hold on Me” on

Shindig! In 1964, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles hug their arms around their middles as they sing the eponymous first chorus. It is the first choreographed mimetic move, and it is followed by a grinding hip swivel in a deep knee bend that emphasizes the brass section’s highlighted part of the instrumental (MjFanSally). Through televised performances like this, the movement came back into people’s living rooms, as Malone notes: “back home, Afro-Americans copied their idols’ steps and ‘moves,’ adapting them for talent shows and house parties— reclaiming material that had come full circle back to its vernacular source” (16). This cyclical vernacular and choreographic folding and developing likewise happened with Soul Train, music videos on MTV, and now continues with YouTube.

Following Atkins’s lead with vocal choreography, dance in these contexts use lyric-based mimetic movement with popular steps to highlight the specific stories, rhythms, and instrumentation of the music. 18 Studio combination videos also highlight the choreographers’

136 and dancers’ attentiveness, creativity, and humor in relation to the given song, which are part of the videos’ promotional strategy. The play of signifiers in which dancers engage comes directly from the aesthetic and conventions of Black creative traditions, and mastery within both choreographic and freestyle contexts by people from many different backgrounds and identities shows their mastery and respect for these traditions. To illustrate the musicality and word-play of

Choreo as a movement genre, I focus on examples from videos choreographed by Tricia

Miranda, WilldaBeast Adams, and Janelle Ginestra in part because they were some of the earliest captured in-class videos and are some of the most popular.19

There are many kinds of word play in Choreo combinations. Sometimes the gestures are directly mimetic, like in Miranda’s choreography to “Bitch Better Have My Money” the lyric

“you just bought a shot” is accompanied by the left hand coming up to the face with thumb pointing out of fist towards the mouth, or for “back seat of your foreign car,” the arm is outstretched as if on steering wheel, while the torso leans away from it (Tricia Miranda

“Rihanna”). Sometimes the gestures are referential but novel; as shown in figure 2.2, in “7

Rings” Ginestra takes “lashes” from a list of items Ariana Grande sings about buying, and places each hand, palm out and fingers splayed, above the eyes, fanning them down and back up to the forehead like a two-syllable blink (MissJanelleG “7 RINGS”).

137

Figure 2.6 Referential but novel lyric-based choreography. Janelle Ginestra’s choreography for the lyric “lashes” referring to the purchase of the large false eyelashes popular in current fashion exaggerates the length and position of the trend, creating a new and not mimetic movement that is nonetheless traceable to its real-life referent. Screenshot from MissJanelleG, “7 RINGS” – Ariana Grande | Janelle Ginestra Choreography | #IMMASPACE” YouTube, 25 Jan 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKluQKVWjdk, Accessed 15 Feb 2019.

Alternately, movement references can operate at the same level of metaphor as the lyrics, or even literalize those metaphors.20 In “Trini Dem Girls” by Nicki Minaj, Miranda uses a lot of

Dancehall and Caribbean movement vocabularies and movement qualities, but highlights a specific Jamaican dancehall move after the lyric “Jamaican girls” in a list of Caribbean demonyms. Operating at the same level as the slang in the lyrics, “pat pat on the kitty cat” is accompanied by light tapping on the pubis. In Migos’s song “Bad and Boujee,” covered by

William Singe in the version WilldaBeast Adams choreographed for a class, the lyric “hop in the frog,” which refers to getting in a car, is literalized through an added ribbit in the music, and the dancers crouch, frog like, and give a small hop (Tim Milgram “Bad and Boujee”).21

Choreography can also refer to literal references at a more abstract level. In the same video

138 during the lyric “my diamond’s a choker,” the necklace referenced becomes the left arm crossed over the chest with the right arm and hand gripping the belly to mimic choking, and then pulsing a few times in and out of this pose to the timing of the syllables in the line (see figure 2.7).

Figure 2.7 Abstracting literal lyrics. WilldaBeast Adams takes the choker necklace mentioned in the lyric and transforms it into a mimetic choking movement. Screenshot from Tim Milgram, “Bad and Boujee – Migos (William Singe Cover) Choreography by Willdabeast – Filmed by @TimMilgram,” YouTube, 27 Mar 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBnGRbdtrjw, accessed 15 Feb 2019.

Nonverbal musical components like matching to the beat, rhythm, and hitting on sound effects are also common, as well as the rhythm and delivery of lyrics which often dictate the rhythm or at least emphasis of the movement that matches it. For example, in “Trini Dem Girls,”

Miranda choreographed a jump up and forceful kick back with one leg to a loud “bRAH!” The movement hits its farthest point hard with the end of the exclamation, and then recoils.

139 These compositional tools are also used in freestyle, where these skills are developed first historically and in individuals. Exemplary in this regard is dancer Trevontae Leggins in

Miranda’s “OG Bobby Johnson.” He begins his turn in the cypher with a quick cha-cha step, hips and arms exaggerated as he steps forward to take his turn precisely on the lyrics “speaking

Spanish.” Later, he drops suddenly into a full split with his arms above his head on a “boom.” As with the choreographers, these moments show the dancers’ knowledge of the music and generic expectations, and their skill to not only make quick compositional choices, but clever ones.

I argue studio combination videos are expressions of fandom towards the recording artists whose songs the dancers are using in addition to their promotional force for the choreographer.22

In this analysis, mimetic and metaphoric movements directly connected to the lyrics of the song can be seen as moves to cement the connection between the choreography and the song—and by extension, between the choreographer and the musician. Dance artists can particularly benefit if a class video appears online soon after a song’s release, or, as with the case of Tricia Miranda’s

“Bitch Better Have My Money,” between the release of the song and the official music video.

Online audiences use YouTube as a music listening service. If available, the official music video will likely be what people watch for this purpose, but if not, then a popular class combination video using the song may very well be the highest return on YouTube’s search results. It is common to see three or four different choreographers post videos using the same new, or newly popular, song in a week’s span. While the self-promotional aspect is extremely important, the fandom and inspirational aspect of this cannot be ignored. Especially for dancers who grew up dancing highly musical/music-oriented choreography, it is common for a positive reaction to a newly-discovered song to translate into a desire to choreograph it, and students similarly are

140 likely delighted to get to interact with the new song they have been loving, or to encounter it for the first time in this context. Sometimes the movement is not recognizably mimetic, or does not tie to a lyric, but it appears to be referential. Deciphering the choreography engages the audience in the dancers’ and choreographers’ playful interpretations and draws them into a deeper experience of the music, at the same time.

All of the components which comprise Choreo as a movement genre, and the changes the form has undergone to develop and incorporate them have been captured through the documentation of class combinations and the subsequent shift to a presentational screen genre.

Class Videos as an Emergent Screendance Genre

It can be difficult to pinpoint an exact starting time or originating artist for any genre, because all genres are in response to and derived from existing practices. Only once a genre has solidified does it become clear what characteristics should be looked for in earlier productions to determine where they fall in the chronology and classification of the new genre’s development.

As has been discussed, direct historical precursors to studio class videos were predominantly for documentation, and were filmed with stationary cameras, using the light available in the studio, and featuring only one group doing the choreography. Eventually, around 2011, videos grew in length and production, focusing mostly on the choreographers, with one or two student groups.

Around 2013 to 2014, videos shot at the end of Hip-Hop classes began to change, slowly taking on the characteristics we associate with the now-codified genre.

141 The features which most clearly define the screen genre of class videos as a codified genre are from all sites: in situ, in production, and in their circulation. They are: a single, well-lit studio setting; a Choreo (or adjacent movement style) combination repeated by multiple groups, at least one of which is shown doing freestyle movement, whether in space given in the combination, or as a coda. The movement is captured without editing cuts during a single group, and minimal transition between groups. It is shot with a mobile camera, typically with front and back movement, done by an ambulatory videographer hired for the purpose. The videos are published on YouTube, though copies or excerpts—both authorized and not—are circulated on other platforms. Finally, the official paratexts, including titles, description box information, and on-screen text, includes the song title, performing artist, choreographer, videographer/editor, and sometimes featured dancers.

The class video screen genre and the Choreo movement genre have both evolved during this decade; they are mutually but not exclusively constituted. ‘Choreo’ existed before class videos, and continues to exist and thrive in multiple screen and live genres and settings. Class videos also do occasionally feature different movement styles, including heels classes,

Contemporary movement, and even Broadway Jazz, although all are informed by the setting, students, and music which overlap with those of Choreo Hip-Hop. Given that, it is the screen genre itself which was emergent, roughly between 2013-2017, during which time it codified and began to change within itself, the effects of which will be discussed at the end of the chapter.

Where much genre formation is discursive, as discussed in Chapter 1, it also happens in the material itself, particularly in genres for which a discourse or habit of reception does not exist at first, and which is not understood by outlets for criticism and coverage. In the case of studio

142 combination videos, genrefication happened primarily through the content and its capture: in situ—in the interaction and evolution of choreography and freestyle sections, the dancers present and their sartorial and interactive choices; in production—in the videography, editing, formation of groups, and shifts in lighting; and in circulation—each of the other sites end up being shaped through the particularities and demands of platform, shareability, and the economies of celebrity.

Fabian Holt, in his study on genre in popular music calls these places where genre coherence happens through the intersection of existing components, scenes, and people, “center collectivities” (21). His example is salsa in late 1960s New York City, where the elements of

Puerto Rican musical traditions came together with Cuban son. In these locations at particular times, there are “clusters of specialized subjects that have given direction to the larger network” including the performers, producers, critics, and fans. Only subsequently does the role of mass mediation and corporate companies come into the larger network that “creates and sustains a genre’s identity” (20). While the movement vocabulary that gets integrated into choreography and freestyle in class videos actually comes from numerous locations in the US (and elsewhere)—particularly Oakland, Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, and New York—the center collectivity of Choreo as a movement genre and class videos as a screen genre is Los Angeles.

While there are nuances within Internet genre that need to be attended to, there are nonetheless certain tendencies in the process of genrefication that are pervasive and that differentiate it from legacy media and literary forms. First, pace; a genre can develop much more quickly online, and more genres happen within a given time. This is possible because of technological developments, including new equipment and new platforms and their features, as well as the rate of exchange between locales and individuals who bring their own knowledges

143 and aesthetics to bear, which begins to differentiate. Secondly, there is greater variation; there are more different kinds of genres, demarcated by smaller-scale differences. This is possible given the many niche subcultures of the Internet, and their overlapping constituencies. Internet genres proliferate but once a structure is set up, it remains highly productive. YouTube-native genres like haul videos, unboxings, and get ready with me videos, just to name a few, are all envelopes which can continue to be filled by many people and products. Thirdly, as discussed in

Chapter 1, there are different genres of reception for Internet genres, which in turn have their own particular impacts on content creation and creators.

One of the large debates in the Internet genre literature is the question of when and how to declare a new genre. In her article published in 2009, “A Model for Describing ‘New’ and

‘Old’ Properties of CMC Genres,” Theresa Heyd argues that the extant genre theory made it difficult to argue for the emergence of new genres because it was based on communicative functions, many of which were believed to hold stable through medial change. That is to say, a joke is a joke, an urban legend is an urban legend, regardless of its mode of circulation. Many of the video genres manifest on the Internet had clear precursors, especially cooking shows, sketch comedy, and educational content, among others, and of course many of the most popular videos uploaded to YouTube officially are directly from other contexts: segments of late night talk shows, movie trailers, record company produced music videos, and advertisements. But there are also so many new formats, techniques, kinds of content, editing styles, modes of address, kinds of paratexts, and technologies that respond to and cause all the above. As a participant on many different social media platforms and as a consumer of other digital media, I constantly encounter new, clearly (to me) differentiated types of content. They are differentiated in my observation of

144 them, but also by a convention of titling and labeling, especially on YouTube, that marks video type for easy identification and for clickability. Supporting the dissonance that I note in my experience of genre on the Internet and its representation in the literature, Heyd remarks “CMC researchers are reluctant to proclaim genuinely new genres. In this sense, there is a stark contrast between the perceived discourse reality of Internet users and the results of CMC research” (240).

I argue it is the salience of the forces in combination with the circulation, formal content, and modes of engagement that makes new digital genres new, and in fact genres. In her article on

TED Talks, genre theorist Julia Ludewig makes a necessary intervention into Internet genre by discussing the educational-inspirational talks as an emergent discourse genre developed in a simultaneously emergent video genre. She argues that “context and genre are mutually constitutive” for this “dynamic and composite genre” (3); both the talks themselves and their video format have genre antecedents, but together they form something new. The comparison is useful not only because Ludewig chronicles the emergence of a genre through its capture and distribution in online video, but through a shift from primarily documentary force to presentational force as the audience shifted from exclusively live to primarily in circulation. The popularity of the videos has made the talks the central part of TED conferences, where they were once only a component. Similarly, filming the combinations for class videos has largely eclipsed the rest of the components of a studio dance class.23 Ludewig describes this process as “a mutually reinforcing feedback loop in which a form is generified to a certain extent, then reaches a new audience and from there generifies further” (8). In the case of the TED talks, a new discursive genre framed by an intentional videographic style, and in the case of classroom videos, the choreographic and movement style of Choreo emerged alongside the particular

145 framing and editing that Milgram pioneered.24 Ludewig identifies mediatization of the events as a crucial part of TED’s rise to fame as an organization, not only because of the audience reach, but because the recording reframes the talk itself into a performance for the presenter, as well, creating a “rhetorical echo that enhanced the inherent genre disposition” (8). This is an example of videographic entextualization as well; in the case of studio videos, the enhanced performance of the students because of the presence of the camera has also contributed to the videos’ solidification as a presentational genre.

Similar to the live context of the plain but branded stage of the TED talk, the artistic documentation of the studio changes the setting’s valence. In Vernallis’s discussion of setting in music video, she mentions that abstract spaces are more universally understandable, and are not culturally constrained, thus broadening the possible viewing audience (Experiencing 203). I would go further than that, suggesting that once again these class videos manage to carry multiple contexts with them at once. Because they are non-narrative in a closed-off environment, the studio as captured in class videos is both a specific place and a switchable place, something dance scholar Harmony Bench has called “any-place” (“Anti-Gravitational” 59). The studios are more distinct than a “no-place,” which Bench glosses as “anonymous, acontextual, blank space”

(54). These spaces are seen historically in popular screendance in the soundstages used for

Busby Berkeley production numbers, and the infinity coves used in Madonna’s Lucky Star

(1983), Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (2008), and in many advertisements. But they are much less of a site than the city streets seen in Yak Film’s work, or locations chosen for concept videos.25

The studio is at once abstract—a large space that fits people and can be filmed in—and contextual. People who have taken classes in studios or who know the scene, the mirrors,

146 wooden or marley floors, and other classmates carry meanings, experiences, and expectations that are generalizable to other similar spaces. It is simultaneously specific, with each studio becoming a particular destination and environment through visual branding and repetition.

Though they now work in other spaces as well, the big Unity in Diversity and dark red walls of

Millennium Dance Complex, seen in figures 2.1-2.5 and 2.7, visually signified a Miranda-

Milgram class video collaboration to me in the early years, and came to exemplify the genre as a whole before it expanded. This is not dissimilar from what happens to at home vloggers, who now have specific set ups for filming and are recognizable in that way. Through the codification of this genre, the studio has shifted from an anyplace—the studio you dance in wherever you live, at your college, at your YMCA—to a set of very specific places which purposefully distinguish themselves visually through colors, lighting, and branding.

In addition to the center collectivity of Los Angeles and its studio setting, perhaps most important to the class video genre’s development as such is its videography, particularly the introduction of the mobile camera and its collaboration with the space and the dancers in it, which began to set these videos apart from other online content. Class videos, as well as other kinds of dance videos, thus point to how a theory of genre on the Internet must also make room for co-present and physical contexts, despite the asynchronous and global distribution and consumption of the genre itself. I turn now to the evolution of class videos through the development of a novel videographic style. These videos are a window into how a genre emerges and solidifies on the Internet, cohering through the choices and actions of those making instances of it and those who come to understand it as such utilizing existing conventions, technologies, and genres, and creating something new in their confluence.

147 Genrefication through Videographic Innovation

Tim Milgram’s camera work is very recognizable, and literally shapes the performances seen in class videos. His is now the default style of camerawork across the many videographers who film and edit class videos. To make the class videos, Milgram and others typically use a stabilizer rig or gimbal which is either held by or attached to the body of the videographer who walks through the space of the studio as the students dance.26 The typical class video features a wide shot including the entire dance floor and with it the waiting, watching, marking classmates on the sidelines. Mostly through analogy to Milgram’s work, the average video consists of forward and backward movement every 2-6 seconds during the combinations, with some lateral movement to accommodate traveling within the combination, and then some close-ups, and a curvilinear movement around the space during freestyle sections, or sometimes to open a new group’s turn. This mobile camera is the definitive videographic aspect of the class video as a screendance genre.

To my knowledge, Tim Milgram and BrazilInspires were the first videographers in the class video genre. On Feb 7, 2013, the cusp of the genre as I have identified it, WilldaBeast’s

“Upgrade U,” filmed by BrazilInspires came out (WilldaBeast Adams “Beyonce’”). It has several important features: multiple groups, a small amount of freestyle at the end of a turn, a hired videographer, and a titling convention. But, there is footage from more than one class, at different studios, and also much more editing than is later used; between and within groups there are changes from black and white to color, there are emphatic camera movements added in post- production, and there are some lens-flare effects. Also, there is no camera movement other than

148 following the groups if they might move out of the shot. Nonetheless, this is probably the most viewed class combination video, currently with over 114 million views in early 2019. Although

BrazilInspires’s video anticipates many of the conventions of the class video genre, it is Tim

Milgram who solidified them. I will therefore mostly focus on Milgram’s work since, in addition to being the most numerous, popular, and specific within the genre, the videographic vocabulary he established has been the model for subsequent videography in studio class contexts, which has both adapted and reinforced its main characteristics.

Many incremental changes and additions came together to cement the aspects of the class video as a codified genre. Milgram’s video of Miranda’s choreography to “Anaconda” from the fall of 2014, offers an early example of the emergent genre, but one that clearly follows its conventions (Tricia Miranda “Nicki Minaj- Anaconda”). It is Miranda and Milgram’s first class video together, and his central role is reflected by his name being included in the title of the video. The convention of name placement—first the musician and song title, then the choreographer, then videographer—has persisted, although few other videographers have gained the celebrity to warrant their mention in a video’s title. While affordable camera technology improved over time, and hiring videographers with their specialized equipment has made a big difference in the visual quality of the videos, attention to lighting also was a big shift; in the early years of class videos Milgram’s lighting was always the best.27 Since then studios themselves seem to have invested in brighter general lighting, or a filming specific lighting look. By “Bitch

Better Have My Money” in April of 2015, the genre is fully exemplified with all its constituent parts, including multiple groups of dancers, the inclusion of freestyle, and good lighting—though variations and shifts do occur after that point. At over sixty million views by spring 2019, this is

149 also Miranda’s most-viewed video, in part because of another marker of successful genrefication: it was covered on Buzzfeed and in the New York Times as well as other popular media sites, reaching people not already subscribed or tuned in to dance on YouTube (Burton,

Hawgood). While all of these elements are important to class combination videos, I contend that

Milgram’s introduction of a mobile camera was necessary to define the class video as a screendance genre.

The mobile camera

Sherril Dodds argues that thinking of video dance as a hybrid site between dance and televisual practices and conventions helps to account for the “innovative interrelationship” between them when brought together (Dance on Screen 126). This is most seen in the class videos in the way that the classroom and platform context has led to the ambulatory, mobile camera. This is not the shaky mobile camera of early amateur videos, but a steady, intentional movement of the camera both external to and echoing or highlighting the movement it records. A similar moving camera is used in some other YouTube videos, especially in DIY, cooking, fashion, and decorating videos. In some cases, this is a practical choice to show a part of a room not included in the frame, or to capture a whole outfit while still showing the details. But it also becomes stylized as a way to animate a static final product, especially if in-progress versions have been previously shown. While dance would seem to provide adequate movement on its own, I believe the mobile camera adds greater interest to the final class combination, not

150 previously thought of as interesting on its own. It also highlights individuals, brings out different qualities in each group, and is itself a kind of creative exploration.

Interestingly, most of the videographers for the class videos are or were dancers or teacher-choreographers themselves; some of Milgram’s first class footage was of his own class’s concluding combination.28 In a video showing how he films, Milgram notes he consciously does not use editing effects too much, because he wants to film it such that the footage itself is sufficient (Milgram “Filming Dance”). In addition to the care to really capture the movement, and the mobile, ambulatory use of the space, this approach shows the importance of these videographers’ dancing experience. The camera locomotes, shifts its weight, circles, is taunted, approaches, reacts, because it is attached to a dancer who is also in a kind of improvisatory performance. The constant motion is motivated by the videographer, but other motion is precipitated by the dancer, whether because the videographer is intrigued or confronted into responding. For example, some dancers will deliberately move towards the camera, demanding a response from both the videographer and viewer (see figure 2.8).

151

Figure 2.8 Dancer Darrion Gallegos approaches videographer Tim Milgram. During Gallegos’s solo turn of the combination, Milgram used his signature steady in-and-out movement, making choices about levels to capture the movement. Here in the freestyle section, Gallegos charged quickly and continuously forward, forcing Milgram to back up three times. Screenshot from Tricia Miranda, “F*** The Summer Up - Leikeli - Choreography by @_TriciaMiranda | Filmed by @TimMilgram,” YouTube, 8 Aug 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIshlpqpG3s, Accessed on 2 Apr 2019.

The movement of the camera is the videographic signature of this screen genre, alongside its unobtrusive editing. While cuts between groups forge the repetition which is so crucial to the genres specificity, there is no editing within a single group. The lack of edits distinguishes these videos from the persistent use of jump cuts in music video and first-person educational or conversational YouTube videos.29 Typography and thumbnail design is another distinguishing feature. Though a small percentage of the duration of these videos overall, it is an important part of their recognizability and promotional force. Typically, the thumbnail has the title of the song in a white, all-caps, sans serif font centered over one group of dancers (see figure 2.9). In the

152 opening of each video in a similar font the title of the song, name of the choreographer, videographer, and sometimes their logos appear interspersed with footage from the class.

Figure 2.9 The use of typography in class video thumbnails. This screenshot shows the thumbnails from all the videos uploaded on Tricia Miranda’s channel from April 2015 to April 2017. Not only does the MDC setting give them a uniform appearance, but so does the typography, functioning for the most part to signal their genre. From Tricia Miranda, “Videos,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/user/patriciapink4u/videos, Accessed 2 Apr 2019.

While the general videographic and editing style determines this genre—and has in large part developed out of Tim Milgram’s work—there are some distinctions in videographer’s styles and how they approach their own position and their interaction with the dancers, as well as how they transition between groups. Some utilize lateral and circular movements that are the hallmarks of Milgram’s work, while others employ front and back movement almost exclusively.

Tony Bellissimo uses more zoom than walking, and often uses jump cuts even in the middle of

153 combinations to transition from zoomed in to pulled back. He also lifts his camera for floorwork to get almost overhead shots, rather than floor-level close-ups, which Community Artistry favors. Community Artistry’s low camera angle compels dancers to make a clear choice between looking straight ahead into the mirror, and playing to the camera, a choice made in all cases, but made more obvious when the camera is not at eye level. Some videographers like Kenny

Washington and OLittleBoy, use cross-fades between groups. MyTypoLife’s movement occurs at twice the rate of other videographers, and his editing includes some effects, like a bounce or jostling of the camera in post-production, which is common in the comedic and meme-related content for which he became well-known on the Vine platform.30 Donovan Okimura, who now works under Milgram’s auspices, represents TMilly Productions’ style immaculately and his videos look like Milgram could have done them himself.31 Whether because of style, personality, or availability, some choreographers seem to work fairly exclusively with one videographer, like

Tricia Miranda and Tim Milgram since October 2014, or choreographer Josh Williams with

MyTypoLife. Others, like choreographer Nika Kljun, have worked with almost all major videographers. Some videographers are affiliated with a specific location—for example, Ryan

Parma has shot most of the videos at MDC since 2017.

At the end of many groups’ turns, a freestyle section occurs. These segments bring the already in between of participatory and presentational of the movement context of the Hip-Hop circle, particularly in its cypher form, to further complicate the class video. Emerging from the long history of afro-diasporic dance practices,32 a cypher is a collective enterprise that mixes improvisation, competition, and mutual support,33 and is a privileged location for practitioners and community members; it is a space created by and for the direct participants in the dance

154 event. In a cypher, dancers take turns freestyling before stepping back out to take their place in the circle. While many forms first practiced in the cypher’s participatory context have made their way to purely presentational venues, the circle form has stayed quite resilient, with the exception of opening the circle for cinematographic purposes. When B-boys started performing for the camera, the circle was forced to open, and the people who formed the audience ring were made to spread out so that non-participants could view the events.34

In the freestyle sections of class videos, often all the dancers in the group improvise at once, performing separately and often for the camera, although they do sometimes interact with each other. In these codas, the dancer might carry on a theme from the phrase, highlight their particular skills and training, and continue to interact with lyrical and musical cues. Over time the videos have included more increasingly-long freestyle segments, and in some videos, an inclusion of turn-taking individual freestyle sets, especially in the classes of Josh Williams,

Tricia Miranda, WilldaBeast Adams, and Janelle Ginestra, creating a cypher-like experience. In these segments, the other group members and perhaps the teacher are still in close proximity, and watch the freestyler intently, often hyping them through movements and sound as well as their gaze—which may be through the mirror or direct. The rest of the class also watches, generally from the position from where they watched the combination. In these segments, whether group dancing or one at a time, the camera is generally more mobile in a lateral and circular way, coming closer and sometimes almost seeming to complete the curve of the circle of gathered people. DeFrantz argues the most important features of the cypher which must be recorded for it to be responsibly filmed are “the engagement of a witnessing audience, and the individuality of each competitor” (122). Milgram’s mobile videography captures both.

155 The hybridity of the videography in its motion reflects a relationship between the movement origin and its spatial and videographic capture; unlike many forms that are used in dance film, Hip-Hop dance did not originate as a stage form. Instead of moving from a stationary frontal proscenium view to a multi-directional camera, Hip-Hop forms were historically flattened out to admit the camera and the viewer. Given how these particular choreographers and venues are tied to Hollywood and its film, music video, and advertising productions, the frontal videography for the choreographed component of a group’s turn, as if almost on a dolly track, is not surprising. But it is accompanied, and I think also influenced, by the rounder, more dimensional, and more intimate filming during the freestyle period.

Once again mixing inheritances, forces, and contexts, class videos include both the frontal movement and performance of the choreographed combination, and the participatory, closer experience of the cypher, with its freestyle and its proximity. I argue this happens not only through the valences of the movement contexts and the actions of the dancers, both active and watching, but also through the presence and position of the camera, which in this genre sometimes serves to bring the viewer into the cypher, through its circular mobility creating the circle afresh. Staging and the camera flattened out Hip-Hop performance, as did the editing of pre-shot footage as in music videos. In the style of videography used by Milgram and others, the movement of the camera is recorded alongside the movement of the dancers, so its proximity is the viewer’s proximity, creating brief moments of re-cypherization in filmed space. Class videos and their documentary and representational forces offer a complication to an authenticity narrative that separates the studio and the cypher, the choreographed and the improvised.

156 Class videos lack the quick edits, hyper-close ups, and abstraction of dance film, quickly edited music videos, or 21st century movie musicals—perhaps in part because the perceived authorship of the work is shifted; while presentational, these videos still center choreographers’ labor, rather than imagined as a director’s or cinematographer’s project, as film is. Nonetheless videographers are crucial to the development and success of the genre. Their creativity has become bodily movement of the camera copresent in the space, rather than in the editing suite, or on a laptop. The repetition of the same choreography by different groups of performers is part of the generic innovation of these videos, and it enables what many other forms of screendance cannot, which is both full shots and closer shots while still conveying the whole body over the course of the video. Even when there is a close-up where feet are out of frame, or perhaps a hand that went too far to one side—that moment will have been shown in another group.

Through the labor and creativity of the dancers, choreographers, and videographers involved, class videos developed a set of formal characteristics, a complex of forces, a particular circulation, and both dedicated and casual audiences. Recognized by creators, viewers, and the platform on which it is hosted, class videos have become a codified Internet screendance genre.

Videographic Entextualization: Documentary Force in Presentational Screendance

In addition to the component parts which serve documentary force in this genre as it has cohered now, it is important to remember they are in part a remnant of an earlier, less-defined set of videos that were almost exclusively documentary—and promotional—in nature, including teaching reels, student footage of friends in class, and early self-promotional YouTube videos

157 advertising combinations to be taught. The theory of forces, as explained earlier, does not necessitate knowing intent but rather accounts for what effects are produced through the processes of making and receiving texts. The documentary force of the class videos is one of the least intentional—the most intentional are likely presentational and promotional—but rather it comes from prior versions as well as the class context itself; entextualization always carries some of the original context with it. The genre as it cohered comes out of an impulse to do something artistic and presentational and therefore circulatable—hence the camera movement, the title overlays, and the costuming and performance—but it has the initial documentary context at its core and takes that forward as these videos circulate. Currently, they circulate as presentational texts, but identifying the places where they overlap and diverge with other documentary media sheds light on the multiplicity of function in web video, the complexity of genre formation therein, and the challenge this poses for limited definitions of screendance.

I focus in this section on the aspects of the class combination video that create their documentary force, within a review of the documentary function in screen genre and dance documentation in particular in screendance literature, and as it has been covered as a component of social media. I argue the presence of documentary force in these videos necessitates a change in our understanding of screendance as an analytic category. The videography and editing help shape the documentary force through the capture of full body shots, repetition of the combination by multiple groups, and little editing between groups. While the actual teaching of the combination is not typically shown other than sometimes as part of the opening or title montage, and not every student’s turn in the center is featured, the videos function to mark who was there

158 and what happened at the given class, as well as the salient movement and music of that week, which is about the relevant timescale for online content.

Despite their capture of specific moments in time, these videos are not instances of the

Documentary genre proper. Many of the characteristic components of documentary film are not present in class combination videos, like voiceover narration, talking heads (or any speaking at all),or editing to include examples or illustrations of narratives, or changes of scene.35 And they do not circulate with the rhetorical impact a documentary might have to inform in order to persuade, which is often supported by the narrative or visual structure. However, they do fit documentary scholar Bill Nichols’s broad definition: “Neither a fictional invention nor a factual reproduction, documentary draws on and refers to historical reality while representing it from a distinct perspective” (6-7). In the case of popular screendance as a genre itself, the documentary force overlaps in some of its formal and rhetorical characteristics but maintains the larger characteristics that identify it as popular screendance. Just as feature films can cover real events and persons, but are not documentaries, even primarily presentational screendance also has a documentary force—they are documents of the era of technology, aesthetics, choreography, and the individuals involved.

While they capture important historical and factual information, class videos also share characteristics with performance documentation. In some dance for camera and screendance literature, documentation is rendered as “mere documentary” or re-presentation and dismissed as not an artistic pursuit. This makes sense as a reactionary move or a rhetorical device to establish the creative and abstract possibilities of dance on camera as its own endeavor. Of course, documentaries as a genre themselves have found multiple formats and modes, and would

159 consider their own form to be artistic and worthwhile, with its own variations and disputes, but genre and disciplinary discourses are always concerned with differentiation. Douglas Rosenberg asserted a typology that distinguished dance documentation, dance for television, and dance for camera, explaining:

Dance documentation is generally done to preserve a choreography or a performance in its totality. Television dance is generally shot with multiple cameras placed in strategic locations, including one wide or master shot. The resulting footage is subsequently edited together in post-production to give the viewer multiple viewpoints of the dance while still preserving the choreography. [...] Dance for the camera is something else entirely and occupies a wholly different space than dance for the theater[...] It is not a substitute for, or in conflict with, the live theatrical performance of a dance, but rather a wholly separate yet equally viable way of creating dance works. (“Video Space” 279-280)

This class video genre calls for a rethinking of typologies like this one, as it does preserve a choreography in its totality with a single camera, but also gives multiple viewpoints through a mobile videography, is minimally edited, but is wholly different from what seeing the combination as another student would be like, or even if the same choreography were filmed at a competition like World of Dance or for a stage performance; some combinations do appear in these other performance and screen contexts.

In part how these multiple categories are all met simultaneously is through the repetition built in to the genre’s structure. In an essay on the role of the edit in dance film, Karen Pearlman pushes back against complaints from audiences that “the editing is too fast or there are too many close-ups, so that they can’t ‘see the choreography’” (96). She respectfully notes Fred Astaire’s insistence on full body shots in his films but argues “cinema has other things to offer in an experience of physical movement than just recording the dancer’s moves” (96). Rather than obscuring the dance a viewer imagines existing in full somewhere, she remarks, “This is a screen dance, whose ultimate choreographic form is created with the cuts” (96). The question of ‘seeing

160 the choreography’—a complaint about dance film, quickly edited music videos, or movie musicals—is rarely an issue with class videos, because the repetition of the choreography by and multiple groups ensures that the combination is seen cumulatively. Kiri Miller notes the bad reputation of repetition, which indeed confounded many early viewers of the burgeoning genre.

But she also notes the possibilities repetition opens:

In popular-music and media studies, repetition often has negative connotations: of mass production, commodification, lack of originality, mind-numbing sameness consumed by a docile public. But scholars and practitioners of traditional rituals, games, and performing arts have a different relationship with repetition. In these repeating practices, each iteration may reinforce precedents or subtly alter them, gradually creating new traditional narratives, musical canons, embodied performance techniques, and cultural ideologies. Playing along with mainstream popular media is like performing any established repertoire: It entails repetition with a difference. Over time, those accumulated differences are transforming our understanding of musicality, creativity, play, and participation. (226)

I argue that this cycle of repetition with difference is active and quickened within each class video itself, as well as in the genre, and from this repetition emerges individuality and nuanced performance; indeed, both the competent performance of the assigned choreography and the differences within and between groups, including freestyle, are what make it worth watching the same combination repeated so many times. Through the different groups the viewer sees not just a record of how the end of a class usually proceeds, but also the varied embodied techniques of the dancers, cultural ideologies enacted or rejected, and many instances of innovation in musicality and play, in addition to the documentary aspect of an aggregative picture of the choreography despite and because of camera movement and close-ups.

Philip Auslander divides performance documentation into two modes, the documentary and the theatrical, with the main difference being the centrality of the experience of the synchronous, co-present audience. In the documentary mode, ”the event is staged primarily for

161 an immediately present audience and that the documentation is a secondary, supplementary record of an event that has its own prior integrity” (“Performativity” 3-4). On the other hand,

Auslander argues, the live audience sometimes loses its importance:

when artists decide to document their performances, they assume responsibility to an audience other than the initial one, a gesture that ultimately obviates the need for an initial audience. In that sense, it is not the initial presence of an audience that makes an event a work of performance art: it is its framing as performance through the performative act of documenting it as such. (“Performativity” 7)

There is also a co-present audience, but it is different from the audience of the circulating performance. Their presence is what makes this kind of video an in-between space, and they are part of its instructional force. As mentioned in Chapter 1, seeing an audience react—whether in narrative film or in the filming of a live event—allows the viewer to learn the values of the practitioners, the live audience, and the context, in turn informing their own judgments and values. In capturing the live audience, these videos capture the full atmosphere and event and not just the work itself (see figure 2.10). This contributes to the promotional force of the videos where a desire is created not only to learn the movement but to do it in that studio, in that atmosphere, with those people. Watching the combination in situ has instructional force; there is a lot to be learned from watching other students dance, let alone when those students are some of the most in-demand in the commercial dance world. As in a class that is not filmed, the students are performer-watchers. Even those watching from the glass outside the class—specially installed for this reason—are taking class later. Additionally, the cypher-like aspect of the crowd legitimizes the studio as a Hip-Hop space, allowing the videos to circulate differently, perhaps.

162

Figure 2.10 Documentation of the live audience in situ. Following a highly skilled solo turn and freestyle coda by Richard “Swagg” Curtis (center in grey sweatshirt and black pants with yellow stripe), fellow student Sean Lew (bottom left) throws his shoes at Curtis. This is a mark of extreme respect in Hip-Hop battle practice. Additionally, other students are clapping and congratulating Curtis. Screenshot from Tricia Miranda. “Dawin ft Silento - Dessert - @_TriciaMiranda Choreography | Filmed by @TimMilgram #DessertDance” YouTube. 25 Sep 2015. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe6ACKMyF7I

For these reasons, in contrast to Auslander’s assessment of performance documentation, the presence of the initial audience is in fact crucial to the end product here. At the same time, because of the camera work and the skill and interaction it elicits from the dancers, it does also intersect with his explanation of the theatrical mode: “These are cases in which performances were staged solely to be photographed or filmed and had no meaningful prior existence as autonomous events presented to audiences. The space of the document (whether visual or audiovisual) thus becomes the only space in which the performance occurs” (“Performativity”

2). This is also an accurate description of class videos, whose pedagogical process is made performance through its capture and circulation via videographic entextualization.

163 In Sherril Dodds’s essay “Values in Motion: Reflections on Popular Screen Dance,” she posits that in the case of performances made for the camera, there is no dance without the film.

She argues that screendance camera work create not only the finished work but also the specific performance, in some cases including the capabilities of the featured performer(s). Dodds labels the often stunning though mythic dancer created in the editing room a “superbody” (“Values”

448). Through this analysis it can be said that not only does the performance not exist outside of its filmic representation, but in some cases neither do the performers as such. However, class videos as a screendance genre may be unique in that they complicate this assertion; the documentary force and the presentational force are at play simultaneously, so the movement itself both is and is not “meant for camera.” The superbody is largely missing from YouTube- native dance videos, even those without a strong documentary force.36

In studio combination videos, especially the lack of editing and the repetition by many dancers, albeit very talented ones, means they are feasible. Amelia Jones argues the importance of “the role of documentation in securing the position of the artist as beloved object of the art world’s desire” (15). She is analyzing and critiquing photographic documentation of body art, but as Melissa Blanco Borelli notes, she is prescient about the way screendance circulates online

(“Dancing” 52). While it is the public audience and commercial industry whose attention is sought rather than the art world’s, the entextualization of the choreographer’s work through documentation helps garner it. In terms of the success of the videos as circulating texts, I think the most important component is the skill and intensity of the dancing itself—the presentational force. But as part of a larger promotional context for the dancers, choreographers, videographers, and studios at which the classes take place, it is the documentation which solidifies success

164 through its creation of performance. The documentary force—rather than an emphasis on presentation, narrative, representation, or any of the production elements that attend forms which center those—shows that these studios are real, as are the participants, and are therefore reachable, attainable, and copyable. This drives people to attend, hire, replicate, and rewatch.

Performance studies scholar Richard Schechner discusses performance not as (just) a finished product, but as an event in a chain of events that includes past imaginations, interpretations, and presentations of the same event; the rehearsal process; and more.37 I suggest looking at studio-based combination videos in this way can account for their circulation as individual YouTube videos as well as their constituency in the ongoing oeuvre and biography of choreographers, dancers, and even specific studios. That is to say, these videos are unique in part for their simultaneous existence as both rehearsal and performance; process and product. In the same way, these combinations—and specifically the videos of the combinations—come out of the class processes, a pedagogical process, but become material, become shareable and likeable.

This is not through the fact of its filming—the documentary videos do that already—but the way in which it is filmed, and the effect the circulation has on its subsequent filming and editing. The choreography exists outside the camera’s presence, but the performance does not. Not because, as in Dodds’ superbody or Kappenberg’s lack of body or Pearlman’s defense of cuts, the editing is the dancing, but because of the knowledge of the entextualization and its subsequent recontextualization as presentational, the movement of the videographer in space, and often through the direct address of the dancer to the camera.

Mediated discourse analyst Rodney H. Jones discusses digital processes of entextualization and the way it enables quick reassessment and adjustments, as in retaking a

165 photo if one of the friends captured does not like the way they look, or in using filters and editing after a photo or video is taken. He notes “the result of a complex process of negotiation among watchers and spectacles in which the watchers of one moment might become the spectacles of the next. […] It remains unfinished, contingent upon these subsequent viewings and negotiations, dynamic processes dependent on multiple feedback loops” (296). As Ludewig observed in the changes TED Talks underwent once they became a circulated genre, entextualization can change the original context, too. The dancers are definitely mindful of the camera, in that they interact with it, but they also do not always do so, instead looking forward into the mirror as is often the case in classes. Additionally, the success of the videos has increased the length of time spent in the class on filming.

In their circulation, Schechner explains, products of process—rehearsals made into performance—often lose a legible connection to their origins, therefore seeming to emerge fully formed (39). I argue that in the moments of filming and uploading, the space of the studio, the dancers present, and the combination performed becomes intelligible to the viewer as performance, with many of the marks someone who watches live or screendance might expect: costuming, a framed setting, frontal facing, expert dancing, and camera work that frames and enhances the movements of the dancers. At the same time, the setting is still recognizable as a studio, the shot often includes other dancers marking the movement in anticipation of their turn, and the repetition of the phrase by multiple groups is extremely rare in live or screen performances, as is the sweat drenched shirts. In these ways, the origin of the performance is not obscured. However, through entextualization, there is a shift in expectation of competency, which is exactly what Bauman says in his famous definition of performance: “the assumption of

166 responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence” (Bauman 1977). The shift is from a space of rehearsal, the classroom, where the expectation is for a competent student—paying attention, working hard, etc. but not necessarily having to be perfect in performance—to a space of performance, where there is an audience, to which students are responsible, and who will demand (and richly reward) competence.

These videos are both artifacts of co-present events and works intended to be circulated in video form. The role of the live audience brings clarity to the kinds of performances happening, and the distinct performance and videographic strategies of the unison sections and the freestyle sections. While the fairly frontal, unison sections, which encapsulate a known and continuing live dance form of class combination challenge Dodds’s assertion that in the screendance context, there is no dance before its delivery on screen, the intimate, circular camera-dancer connection within freestyle sections show just how important the camera and

‘cinematic gaze’ are in the creation of that performance and the overall video as a work; the camera helps recreate and involve the at home viewer in the very different live context of the

Hip-Hop cypher.

In Auslander’s article “Cyberspace as a Performance Art Venue,” he makes a distinction between a ‘venue’ and an ‘archive,’ explaining that “a performance venue is a place where performances occur in the present, while an archive is a resting place for memories of performances past” (123). While as discussed, YouTube has been correctly and interestingly analyzed as an archive, it also circulates current performances. Auslander argues that the Internet

“is primarily a venue for performance documentation” (“Cyberspace” 123). While the documentary force and inheritances of studio classes are essential to their genre, through

167 production and circulation, including the development of a new videographic style, what was once the culmination of a pedagogical exercise is made performance. As Auslander asserts in his later work on performance documentation, “It may well be that our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity of these pieces derives not from treating the document as an indexical access point to a past event but from perceiving the document itself as a performance that directly reflects an artist’s aesthetic project or sensibility and for which we are the present audience”

(“Performativity” 9). While recency and currency drive content production on the Internet, the present is multiple on an asynchronous platform like YouTube; the performance begins at the moment of the video’s viewing, on the venue of YouTube.

However, in Rosenberg’s important 2012 book Screendance, in which he explores the question of screendance genres, he makes no space for performances on the Internet, though

YouTube was already seven years old and heavily utilized. He does not leave space for its complications, either; in a graph of mediated dance Rosenberg positions ‘documentary’ away from ‘screendance’ on the side of ‘live dance,’ alongside ‘video art,’ while positioning ‘cinema’ and ‘television’ closer to ‘screendance’ (Screendance 113). Rosenberg also comments that specificity in identifying genres is uncommon in live dance (Screendance 115); as discussed in

Chapter 1, this is untrue for popular dance genres, where genre naming and policing is a matter of community, legitimacy, and citationality. The vagueness Rosenberg sees in screendance genre naming, and the assertion that “genres do not readily announce themselves, though, and this is where the process of excavation must be undertaken” (Screendance 111) is similarly untrue for popular screendance genres and genres on YouTube in general.

168 In the case of dance video, Internet screendance genres also lack the limitations and expectations of live dance or established dance film placed by funding and exhibiting structures; as long as someone makes a video that fits the technological requirements of the platform, they can upload it. In this way, Internet screen genres emerge much more quickly and are much more thinly sliced because they are determined most strongly through user discourse and practice— users being both producers and consumers. While there are larger umbrella categories one could argue for—say ‘home videos,’ they are always parseable to smaller ones.

An argument for inclusion of class videos in screendance is an argument that extends to other dance video genres that circulate on the Internet—they tend to share the promotional, instructional, and documentary forces that pervade almost all social media. Rosenberg’s observation that “[d]ance tends to conform to the space of media, to its pace, to the patterns of viewership and distribution, and to the way in which media objects are consumed” (Screendance

112) does in fact apply to dance videos on the Internet. They tend to be simpler in editing and effects, and more focused on the movement itself. But they are still screendance, and argue perhaps for the use of Internet Screendance Genre as a category for those Internet-native videos which function both as an Internet genre and a screendance genre, simultaneously.38

Further Negotiations

Emergent genres cohere, and then begin to develop further as they solidify. In her study of TED Talks, Ludewig points to routinization, internal drift, and new modes of distribution as part of this development, often driven by new or increased audiences which incentivize or

169 demand these changes (Ludewig 8). Screen genres become more polished technologically and in the performance, and then begin to have offshoots and copycats. In Holt’s description of genrefication in popular music, he divides the timeline of genre formation into three parts:

“formative and subsequent developments,” when the genre is emergent, a period where the genre is “founded and codified,” and lastly “further negotiations,” a period that can last years or even decades, depending on the genre, and through which new genres often grow (20). Class videos are now in their period of further negotiations, demonstrating how new genres create new communities, conditions of reception, production, economies, and further generic development.

Since the genre’s codification in 2016-2017, there have been a few shifts and additions to the landscape. These have happened in the dancing itself, in the ways in which people respond to those changes and understand the genre, and in the genres of reception that attend class videos.

Finally, the success of the videos has resulted in institutional and infrastructural changes, as well as drawing the attention of legacy and commercial media interests.

The reception of class videos parallels many online fandoms and audiences. In addition to comments on YouTube and Instagram, and interaction with choreographers and dancers on those platforms as well as Twitter, class videos have a strong fandom and set of receptive practices, including reuploads and edits of favorite choreographers, dancers, or specific pairings or groups; similar fan production for these dancers or choreographers’ projects outside of the studio; reviews and reaction videos, a YouTube genre where someone watches another video while recording themselves doing so and narrating their reaction to it.39 Finally, there has been coverage in media outlets like The New York Times, Dance Magazine, and Buzzfeed.

170 While Choreo is already eclectic in its movement sources and music tastes, studio videos as a screen genre have begun to show more different kinds of music and different kinds of movement over time, not only using various kinds of Hip-Hop and R&B songs but also remixes, slower vocal covers, electropop, and even indie rock. For example, in June of 2017, Jake Kodish used a slower, more vocal focused cover of Portugal. The Man’s “Feel It Still,” already itself an electric-indie pop song. The choreography was almost identical to his usual Choreo movement, though slower. While sometimes the movement stays the same despite musical shifts, non-Hip-

Hip music elicits more movement from lyrical or commercial contemporary dance, both in the choreography and the freestyled segments. The viral sensation of Sherrie Silver’s Afrobeat- inflected choreography for Childish Gambino’s music video “This is America” brought that movement vocabulary into the American consciousness, and has led to Afrobeat influences in studio combinations as well (Donald Glover); Nika Kljun used the popular South African move

Gwara Gwara in her choreography for “SONNY- Run Around” in September 2018.

Galen Hooks is one teacher who utilizes contemporary or lyrical movement and often songs with more drawn out and emotive instrumentation and vocals. More recently, she has spearheaded an even further expansion of genre with a video for “Jet Song” from West Side Story in June 2018. Featuring many of the same dancers who appear in all the class videos, the movement took a lot of inspiration from Robbins-esque jazz dance, though inflected by the crispness and musicality of current commercial dance, and by the training of the bodies doing it.

While the video did not include freestyle—the combination was over a minute, and there is no evidence the dancers are trained to improvise in that vocabulary—the videographic style is exactly that of the class video. The combination travels expansively over the large swath of floor

171 cleared for the groups, but Milgram followed the movement as he usually does. In the description for the video he commented on the uniqueness of the assignment exclaiming “my legs were tired after filming!” (Tim Milgram. “West Side Story - Jet Song”). In addition to the movement vocabulary and its use of space, there were some other differences from typical class videos. The dancers were instructed to mouth the words, for example, which is usually discouraged in movement genres other than Musical Theater. Additionally, the first three groups shown were trios, and the spacing and choreography indicated they had learned it as such, which is another change happening, with more class combinations featuring duet or trio-specific choreography. Nonetheless popular dancer Sean Lew ends the video with a solo, as he often does in many class videos, but in the context of “Jet Song,” a group narrative number, it seems out of place.40 While this video is absolutely a member of the class genre, these negotiations show tensions in the generic fabric when conventions are mixed.

In addition to the choreographed movement, the performance and structure of freestyle sections has also evolved, and with it has come changes in the videos’ reception. Some combinations are leaving as much as four eight-counts of open or lightly scored space inside the combination, seen for example in WilldaBeast’s “Bad and Boujee” in March 2017, and in Jojo

Gomez’s “Money” in November 2018. In these cases, not every group may be shown with a freestyle coda, or the codas are brief. There is also an increase in videos that have multiple solo turns, rendering the difference between the choreography, individualized interpretation, and freestyle difficult to discern.41 Additionally, freestyle codas have increased in length, and in some groups, individual dancers take turns, as in a traditional cypher. Both of these shifts appear in Tricia Miranda’s “OG Bobby Johnson” from April 2017. Following a forty-four second

172 combination, a group of five young men freestyle sequentially over two minutes. The video is

9:46, and has six groups. Even considering the intro, time for edits, and a four-count intro before the combination, the video contains as much freestyle as combination, if not more. All of these changes start to shift the focus from the creation and instruction of the choreographer and choreography onto the dancer and the broader dance context, deepening one of the multiplicities which already characterized the genre.

These changes have led to another round of negotiation about what this genre is and what viewers can expect to see in it. Whereas the repetition of groups was a point of contention at the very beginning of the genre, and the mobile videographic style took some getting used to for a few, now the more frequent extended, cypher-like space brings up new questions.42 Janelle

Ginestra’s choreography for “7 Rings” from January 2019 features a highly-gestural and simultaneously full-bodied combination with a lot of space for individuality, going along well with singer Arianna Grande’s exuberant and self-assured lyrics. Several groups do extended freestyle codas, including two solos for which many other students crowd close in an open cypher to cheer and watch, even before the choreographed portion is over. This also happens in the first solo of the video, which is Janelle herself (MissJanelleG “7 RINGS”).

Showing how much the classroom space has faded in salience for some audience members, perhaps in concert with unfamiliarity of the cypher context, there is a great deal of discussion in the comments section about how much people should or should not be on screen while others are having their turn. In just one of many comments along this vein, each with hundreds of likes and many with multiple replies, viewer Kennedy Marthaler says “Is it just me or is it annoying af [as fuck] that the people on the sides always have to be in the shot?? Like

173 they really can’t give the person the spotlight for one minute.” Other viewers attempted to defend the practice; user Cole stated, “It’s a dancer thing. You want to be so close that it’s like the dancer can hear you hyping them up in their ear. It can be annoying but it’s great for the person dancing.” While peace oguntade put it simply: “I honestly can’t blame them. People tend to gravitate towards greatness.”

Policing genre is often also about policing identity, as is discussed at length in Chapter 1.

I believe that some of people’s ire, particularly towards the oft-mentioned “leopard pants guy”

Amari Smith—who is the most far-forward and emotive during Janelle’s performance—is partly a reaction to him as a femme-presenting young black man. Though none of the comments refer to this specifically, and many do not identify him at all, the undercurrent is there. But this tension that people do not want to see others in the frame, maybe at all, also marks the genre’s move into presentationality. Even some of the commenters who identify themselves as dancers who have taken class, say they prefer that the performing group be the sole focus. These discussions raise questions about ‘etiquette’ but also crucially about genre and the multivalence at the core of these videos, and therefore what rules apply. Is it cypher rules or class rules? Should videographer Jordan Lunsford privilege documenting what happens in a class meeting through the pedagogy and guidance of Ginestra and WilldaBeast, or guaranteeing a clean and clear shot of the dancer? In an interesting parallel to Crazy Legs’s role in the park in the early days of breaking, WilldaBeast comes in the frame to back the group up before Audrey Partlow’s freestyle, whether to give her space to go off, or to let the camera capture it, or both (see figure

2.11). Ginestra and WilldaBeast generally encourage cyphers and interaction, and in fact Adams

174 often moves through the space to encourage dancers in their classes. But perhaps this was a particularly familiar or energetic group and the proximity seemed too much.

Figure 2.11 WilldaBeast Adams telling students to back up. Audrey Partlow is about to finish the combination and her fellow students have come in close to form an enthusiastic cypher around her, encouraging her performance. Amari Smith, who many of the disdainful comments were about is third from left. Screenshot of MissJanelleG, “7 RINGS” - Ariana Grande | Janelle Ginestra Choreography | #IMMASPACE” YouTube, 25 Jan 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKluQKVWjdk, Accessed 15 Feb 2019.

The class video genre has so far resisted simplification or streamlining and maintained the multiplicity—it is a class, it is a cypher, it is a performance, it is a screen work, it is promotional, and it is fandom. Perhaps this resistance comes in part because other genres fill those single spots more. But there are clearly tensions and developments that could change that, and audience members who want it. Unintentionally, more concept-video like framing, with a focus on just the group and something interesting in the back, is happening because of a shift in the economics and infrastructure of the physical studios, which I turn to now.

175 The popularity of class videos online as well as the videos’ relation to taking class in a physical space has led to a dramatic increase in physical, personnel, and economic structure to support them, including new studios, videographers, and channels. Even before class videos existed there was national and international travel to Los Angeles studios like MDC, Debbie

Allen, and Movement Lifestyle for their training and auditioning opportunities.43

In addition to choreographer and videographer channels posting class videos, studio and business-level channels now also post them. The Millennium Dance Complex channel posted their first instance of the class video genre June of 2016, and Movement Lifestyle posted their first around the same time. DanceOn, previously a dance video-magazine, posted their first mention of the genre on their news and trend coverage in a “Girls Who Kill it in Class” video in

March of 2016. Having now moved to a role as channel/manager/brand broker for YouTube- based dancers, they began hosting their own DanceOn Class series, the first of which was uploaded December of 2016. The BEAST Network channel and production company, an offshoot of WilldaBeast Adams and Janelle Ginestra’s IMMABeast dance company and workshop series, films and posts videos of many choreographers teaching in the new

IMMASpace studio, shot by someone from the production company. WilldaBeast’s own channel continues to use a range of videographers at various studios.

IMMASpace is not the only new location for classes and their recording. In addition to established studios like Debbie Reynolds picking up Choreo and its attending screen genre, several new spaces have been built and opened in the wake of the class video boom. These include Playground Studio, whose feature is brick wall with three-feet tall red marquee letters spelling PLAY (see figure 2.12), which was opened in January 2017; KreativMNDZ Dance

176 Academy is new; and in 2016 Millennium Dance Company moved from its historic Moro Landis location to a new, larger one which they built out specifically for their purposes.44 There are also international studios, most popularly 1MILLION Dance Studio in Seoul. Their channel, which started in 2015 and began posting class videos including the videographic elements of the genre in 2016, has over fourteen million subscribers in early 2019, more than any American-based channel with similar content. All of these studios have very defined visual hallmarks, particularly on the wall that is behind dancers as they are filmed. As mentioned previously, through the codification of this genre, the studio, previously an interchangeable space, has become a set of very specific places which purposefully distinguish themselves visually through colors, lighting, and branding.

177

Figure 2.12 Studio branding through backdrop. Playground LA opened in 2017, I believe in response to demand created by the prominence of the class video. It is easily identifiable in videos shot there through its PLAY marquee letters. The space is otherwise fairly unmarked and uncluttered. Screenshot from Tim Milgram, “6ix9ine, Nicki Minaj, Murda Beatz - “FEFE” Dance Choreography by Jojo Gomez,” YouTube, 17 Aug 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccMEWmIA4DY, Accessed 3 Apr 2019.

Tim Milgram, I have argued, is largely responsible for the formative stage of this genre.

The changes in his work and business exemplify some of the general shifts already described, but also represent his particular role and fame. Milgram has developed his own production company,

T Milly Creative, employing other videographers who work within his established style, sometimes alone and sometimes on videos that give him directing or producing credit. His channel now has class videos, dance videos, sponsored or ‘official’ dance videos, and previews for tutorials on a subscription service available through his site for $9.99 a month.45 He shot the

“official dance video,” itself an interesting new genre, for rising singer-dancer DaniLeigh’s song

178 “Be Yourself,” which appeared on both of their channels, and a promotional video for popstar

Ciara, which aired on her Instagram to tease a new single.

He still shoots a large number of studio videos, the majority of which are at his own studio, which he opened in September 2018. His feature wall is immediately recognizable, as two vertical neon lights stand out on a dark background. The effect is very dramatic in the concept and other dance videos he is filming in the space. He also has the capability to change the colors of the lights, and a smoke machine of some kind, which was even used in a class video

(“Cardi B – Money”). These shifts towards the presentational make a great deal of sense for a versatile space and business person. Whereas class videos shot by Milgram used to have some of the best lighting, now, with the ‘mood lighting’ of his new studio, dancers become shadowed if they come up too far from the back wall, sometimes obscuring freestyle sections and often cutting off one of the main choreographic and improvisatory features, that of the facial movements. In the class context, it is somewhat at odds—again, in negotiation with—the values of seeing the full body movement as well as the detailed labor being put in, and also with the simultaneous development of more freestyle content. The lighting is particularly bad for students with darker skin color, whose faces are even more obscured by poor lighting (see figure 2.13).

Less significantly but still of interest, black clothing, very common in dance and exercise wear, is also shadowed, again diminishing the ability to see clear movement.

179

Figure 2.13 Stylized studio lighting decreases documentary force of class videos. In the 2015 video Milgram shot at MDC, dancer China Taylor’s facial expressions and dark-clothed limbs are clearly visible. In the 2018 video shot in Milgram’s new sparsely lit studio, whose back wall is painted black, the dancers’ faces and even parts of their bodies are obscured. Screenshots from (left) Tricia Miranda, “Rihanna - Bitch Better Have My Money - Choreography by Tricia Miranda | @timmilgram @rihanna,” YouTube, 26 Apr 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQraeOG-3L8, Accessed 2 Apr 2019. (right) Tim Milgram, “Cardi B - Money - Dance Choreography by Jojo Gomez - #TMillyTV,” YouTube, 9 Nov 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_9EnTTEWY, Accessed 2 Apr 2019.

Recognition as a genre from the outside has led to cooptation by and cooperation with commercial projects, specifically class videos’ incorporation and use by more established media and celebrities, and in advertisement. These include clips of class videos appearing in the music video for the remix of “Mi Gente,” as well as on Ciara’s Instagram. These recirculations are interesting because they show that musical artists are interpreting the videos as an act of fandom and circulating them like that. Unlike those examples, and many other instances of amateur and web-native genres used by commercial culture, most commercial use of the class video genre is in cooperation with and paying the choreographers, dancers, and videographers who created and distributed the genre.46 This may be in part because those involved are already working in the commercial sphere. There have been sponsored classes, like Tricia Miranda teaching for Degree

180 MotionSense deodorant, orchestrated through DanceOn (DanceOn), as well as more traditional ad campaigns, like one for Puma. Shot by Milgram, these five thirty-second spots are portions of a sparsely staged class in a two-level studio space, featuring a Nova Miller song made for Puma, with a combination by JoJo Gomez and freestyle sections by her, Jade Chynoweth and Caché

Melvin (Nova Miller Official). The dancing is strong, but the acted-out hyping from only eight people total in the space feels lackluster. The well-dressed dancers, all decked out in Puma sportswear and shoes, do index the care people take with their dressing for class, however

(see figure 2.14).

Figure 2.14 Class video genre approximated in advertisement. This advertisement for Puma shoes and active wear features a unison combination and brief freestyling. The set is recognizeable as a studio setting, but has visual interest in the back. It also stages the live audience, though it is sparse and their acting is a little forced. The bare midriffs and attention to style also accurately reflects class videos. Screenshot from Nova Miller Official, “Nova Miller x JoJo Gomez x Jade Chynoweth x Puma,” YouTube, 8 Aug 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BkiRjcDuPY, Accessed 15 Feb 2019.

181 Lastly, there have been some interesting collaborations with musical artists. In a very early example, in September of 2015 “Water Dance” by Miranda and Milgram features the artist

Chris Porter, who came and took class and actually performs with one of the groups. It is more music video-like than other class videos, and it includes more editing to including a kind of a cypher intercut with Porter lip-syncing. In 2017, Demi Lovato came to a class for her song

“Sorry Not Sorry” with choreography by JoJo Gomez, and watched the combinations, telling everyone at the end “thank you for dancing to my song!” (Tim Milgram “Demi Lovato”). This choreography was in turn performed at Lovato’s live performance two weeks later at the 2017

VMAs by Gomez and two other dancers who were also in the class (Demi Lovato).47

In April of 2017, singer Dawin was present at Dana Alexa’s class for his song “Pepper

Spray.” In a rare inclusion of dialogue in class videos, at the end of the video Alexa is shown addressing Dawin and the class, saying with clear frustration “In a time where artists are like, blocking our videos, and ripping them down, and not respecting dancers, it’s so nice to work with an artist who cares enough to show up and support the dancers.” To which Dawin responds

“All I can say is, I respect all of you, […] you pay very close attention to the music, so that makes me feel good, so I want to support you guys.” In a move that shows that others may share these sentiments, choreographer Kyle Hanagami was given advance access to the song “Dance to

This” by Troye Sivan, featuring Ariana Grande. The video was published on Jun 14, 2018, only one day after the song was released, delighting and astonishing viewers. Hanagami revealed how this was possible in the video description, saying “Thanks Universal Music Group and Troye

Sivan for sending me the track to choreograph to ahead of its release. All the dancers in class were so excited and love the new song!” The official music video came out a month later,

182 making it a rare instance, as with “Bitch Better Have My Money,” where for a period before a very successful music video release, the most salient visual for a popular song was a class video.

Given his own start as a YouTuber, Sivan may have had a guiding hand in this particular collaboration, but these developments hopefully indicate a possible legitimation of the class video genre which might lead to some remuneration for the labor and promotional value put into their production, which would itself mark a new stage in the genre’s development and in fact for dance video on YouTube in general, so far largely unmonetizable through the platform.

Conclusion

I focus in this chapter on a unique product that did not previously have an outlet. With their mixture of process and presentation, class videos combine elements usually kept separate.

Class videos developed together with the YouTube platform, the Internet-driven economy, and scholarship on the above. Tracing the genre’s development chronicles the rise of a new videographic style, the incorporation of fad movement into choreography, and the genre’s real economic and physical effects on individuals, cities, and the Internet. The stages of its creation and continuation are a chronicle of how genrefication happens on the Internet, at the nexus of a constellation of forces. Through the parallel and complementary innovations in the dance genre of Choreo and the screendance genre of class videos, where both have nonetheless branched and thrived in combination with others, this illustrates the tie between form and content but also, as seen in memes, challenges, and more, that once a generic container is made, what fills it is highly mutable, and similarly content easily takes new forms of delivery. Finally, the processes and

183 performances of the studio are entextualized through the framing of novel videography into a product, layering presentational force on top of documentary and instructional force and allowing it to become primary through the recontextualization in circulation. In contrast to previous moments where a turn to presentationality meant an obscuring and eschewing of the participatory context, both the movement conventions, which include both individualized performance of unison and freestyle sections, and the videography itself, carry forward the originary participatory context of the movement. Through this process class videos constitute a screendance genre that expands definitions of performance as well as screendance itself.

184 Chapter 3: Rhetorics of Representation and Consumption in Online Dance Advertising

“I got, I got, I got, I got/ Realness, I just kill shit ‘cause it’s in my DNA.” A black male dancer1 with a top knot bun freestyles around a diner to Kendrick Lamar’s high energy trap song

“DNA,” arms breaking through the words ‘American Eagle’ which mark the one-minute video as an advertisement for the clothing brand. He climbs on the counter and slides through booths, later pausing for a moment between tables to raise his shirt to display the back of his jeans and the brand name on the waistband of his American Eagle boxers. This image quickly cuts to the back of a pair of jeans held up by a studded belt, which begins to move as a blond white boy with a buttoned-up polo shirt grabs his guitar to go onstage at a club. A red headed white girl in all white denim stretches at the barre in a white ballet studio where she later performs a pole dance under colorful lights. Another black male teen in dark jeans and a matching jean jacket hops, pumping his arms as he travels through the stage space of a theater with heavy red velvet curtains. A plus size black woman with flowing purple hair dances confidently down the aisle of an ornate auditorium in a crop top and ripped jeans with fishnets underneath before dropping into a front split downstage center. A slim afro-latinx teen with a teased out ‘fro, pastel windbreaker, and chain on their jeans walks through a skate park and poses joyously on a ramp. Two black teen brothers Turf on a pedestrian highway overpass, their boom box attended by a female friend in high-waisted button-front jeans. A squad of female cheerleaders—all in the same light wash jeans in a range of sizes with their cheer tops emblazoned with the letters AE—do a routine in a

185 hallway between the lockers; they later repeat their performance at the school gym, where they are joined by a short, stout white teen boy with a mop top, selvedge jeans, a white tee, and an open short-sleeve denim shirt, who is first shown listening to headphones and subtly bopping down a suburban residential street. An alternative duo dances through the aisles in a record store; one has short hair and menswear styling and the other has bright yellow hair in two pigtails that brush her pale shoulders, bared by a floral off-the-shoulder top. The second figure is quite tall, and the camera focuses on her bottom taking up the frame as she shuffle-scoots into it, paralleling earlier scenes. Finally, the camera angle tilts and shifts, tipping over the world of a very slim, pale, black-haired girl, causing her to lose her balance. The motion of the frame shunts her into the green room at a recording studio, sliding through the door along with the slogan of the campaign: “Make Moves” (American Eagle “Make Moves”).

These eleven scenes, all shot in Detroit, unfold sequentially and interspersed, uniting the performances of these young adults as they inhabit their own particular favorite spaces, styles, and modes of movement (see figure 3.1).2

186

Figure 3.1 Collage of sequential scenes and individuals in “Make Moves.” The casting of people with different styles, shapes, and identities demonstrates that American Eagle’s clothes can be worn by almost anyone who is watching. Screenshots from American Eagle, “MAKE MOVES: NEW NE(X)T LEVEL JEANS,” YouTube, 25 Jul 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Acxaue_Wk, Accessed 8 Apr 2019.

The text of the description box, functioning as advertising copy, proclaims:

Make Moves is about the daily grind. Make Moves is about passion. Make Moves is about celebrating you. Real musicians, artists, students and dancers show how they make their own moves in AE Ne(x)t Level jeans. How do you Make Moves? Show us what you got. #AExME. (American Eagle “Make Moves”)

“Make Moves” posits that in the swirl of dance and denim, there is a dancer who looks or moves like the viewer. Through showcasing the individuality of their customers through the range of sizes, genders, identities, and styles their products can accommodate and affirm, American Eagle shows that they understand the mentality and buying power of the young individual in the social

187 media era. The consumer is no longer a blank space, but rather is looking to see themselves reflected and addressed by their media and their consumption.

Taking as its focus advertising campaigns such as American Eagle’s, this chapter investigates the visual and compositional rhetorics of representation and consumption in the space where old and new economies and in dance video intersect most obviously in the age of social media: dance in advertising.3 Informed by the aesthetics, promotional, presentational, and representational forces of their co-circulating and informing genres like music video, class videos and other web-native genres, these ads have the additional goal of selling a tangible product. These advertising videos often reflect two interrelated rhetorics of representation and consumption which I propose here: millennial multiculturalism and virtuosic individuality.4 Also occurring in non-commercial social content and informed by prior decades of media and political movements, millennial multiculturalism is a rhetoric that incorporates the individual within a whole in a way that celebrates and monetizes the individual’s personal, racialized, gendered, and bodily traits without directly addressing their place in larger systems of power. As I am proposing it, what makes millennial multiculturalism particular is the site—it is a media and representational rhetoric rather than institutional or governmental. Its economic core is consumerism and marketability, and it has more space for more kinds of people to be represented and to succeed within this rhetoric at a rate and scope greater than ever before. To account for this last component, I propose the frame of virtuosic individuality as the predominant mode of self-presentation in the age of social media, late-stage neoliberalism, and the gig economy.

Virtuosic individuality emphasizes personal branding; its rhetoric states ‘even if you are not good at something in particular, you are good at being you. And if you do have a talent, you can

188 build your brand and your persona around it.’ Brands harness these representational rhetorics, dance, and videographic forms of the social media era to appeal to consumers whose identities are projected through self-mediation and viewing practices, and which are affirmed rather than formed through the consumption of goods.

I take as my main category of analysis web-native dance-centric advertising, where casting and choreography come together to try to appeal to the sensibilities of millennial and gen

Z consumers while still sometimes reifying stereotypes about which people—and bodies—do what kinds of movement. These ads mostly use the aesthetics of social media in order to circulate easily there: being set in real locations (often outdoor places), utilizing persona rather than character or narrative, and portraying goods in use in daily life. Brands and products using these modes and rhetorics are generally more personal than those household items which still tend to depict nuclear family units in narrative contexts, though there has also been an increase in the diversity of casting and scripting in that arena to include multiracial families and queer couples. The products whose advertisements use these representational rhetorics and feature movement tend to have a direct connection to the body: clothes, shoes, smartwatches, makeup, and grooming products. The use of dance links these ad campaigns to the current popularity of dance in the media, but also intimately ties the products to the body. As dance scholar Colleen

Dunagan notes of its use in clothing ads, movements “meld the signifying image and its cultural meaning with the product at the most basic level possible inside of the commercial medium. The dancers wear the clothes as they dance; thus, in a very real sense the viewer sees the clothing dancing” (“Performing” 8). Not all ads in this vein use choreography—or freestyle—per se; walking, gesturing, or filmed modeling sessions are also very common. Following the lead of

189 Dunagan and Melissa Blanco Borelli (“Gadgets”), I take these more quotidian movements framed through video as meriting a dance studies lens for their emphasis on corporeality and for their similar display of the product in motion.

The rhetorics and modes of representation I discuss in this chapter are at play in other media, but dance videos are particularly apt for demonstrating the metonymic rhetoric of millennial multiculturalism, where the whole requires the constituent participants for its success, without a mechanism to reapportion the resultant benefits. The movement in these ads often includes sequential solos which lead up to group movement, establishing the personas and identities of each performer before putting them in collaboration with others. This differentiates them from previous versions of multiculturalism which displayed superficial difference but still emphasized homogeneity. Dance-centric advertising physicalizes larger theoretical concepts in freestyle or solo choreography such as the virtuosic individuality of self-presentation on social media; and in unison, simultaneous, or sequential group performance, the polymorphous group is framed actively as togetherness-despite-difference.

In the following section, I look more closely at the function of dance in advertising, its representational force, and the way direct address through movement and slogans hails the viewer as consumer. Subsequently, I explicate my theory of millennial multiculturalism in conversation with previous theories and supported by advertising industry marketing recommendations before turning in the next section to consider the concept of the virtuosic individual formed through self-mediation and in representation. Each of these representational rhetorics appear together in advertisements, as I explain in a section on affirmational identity through consumption, which posits and portrays individuals with ‘cultural’ as well as ‘personal’

190 identities which can be bolstered through slogans and supported by the advertised product. I close the chapter by considering the instances where multiple individuals come together, cementing the millennial multicultural image in order to target more potential consumers while nonetheless creating representations of heterogeneous groups in cooperative motion. In each section I attend to advertising campaigns and relevant other dance videos that exemplify these concepts, paying particular attention to how their representational force is formed through choreography, casting, costuming, and copy.

The Dancing Body Hails the Consumer: Choreography, Casting, and Slogans

Dance on the popular screen has always had a complicated but close relationship with the market and consumerism in film, television, and music videos. This relationship is most apparent when advertising features dancers—where their creative and physical labor directly serves the bottom line. Advertising also provides dancers with large audiences—the largest some of them may ever have—and therefore provides key opportunities for dancers to broadcast their abilities and spread movement innovations, both on television and online. In her book Black Social

Dance in Television Advertising: An Analytical History, Carla Stalling Huntington focuses on the use of black social dance in advertising and its impact on the self-perception and consumption behaviors of the viewers. In Huntington’s analysis, the purpose of advertising is to get the viewer to engage in economic exchange by creating desire through accessible imagery; in the context of an advertisement featuring dance, this desire is the ability to dance, created through performance, which then transfers to the item being sold. She contends that in this way dance has the power to

191 sell goods and services beyond itself, and that commercials using black social dance implicitly connect consumer desire with a generalized envy of a perceived black mastery of dance. Further,

Huntington notes that since the 1940s, black social dance in the advertising context was performed primarily by white performers. Because of this, she characterizes the use of black social dance in advertisement as an a-historical commercialization of long-standing cultural practices, which enables companies to profit from the dance practices’ cultural capital while disempowering black dancers and erasing the dances’ communities of origin. While dancers featured in ads since the late 1990s have been more racially diverse, this critique of the commodification of the dance forms still stands.

In “Performing the Commodity-Sign: Dancing in the Gap,” dance scholar Colleen

Dunagan analyzes the ways in which Gap ads from 1998-2000 drew on signifiers and production aspects from Hollywood musicals to create stylized campaigns centered on ‘product personality’ at the nexus of clothing and the popular dancing body. The staging of social dance forms through filmic strategies contributed, Dunagan argues, to “framing these commercials as performances even as they work to produce a commodity-sign” (“Performing” 17). Advertisers have long sought ways to make commercials more appealing to viewers, and dance has played a large role in amplifying the dimension of entertainment. Dance is currently in an extended moment of primacy, but it is particularly linked to the media forms being consumed online. This is especially important for online advertisers; since it is increasingly possible to skip, block, or click away from ads, they need to be particularly interesting to circumvent that impulse. Just as the Gap ads would have seemed more like other TV programming than like other commercials, online advertisers blur the lines between the commercial, the professional, and the amateur so as

192 to fit into existing viewing practices and devices. While web-native dance-centric ads replicate the core relation of dance and capital inherent in advertisement, commercial content has also taken up some of the attending modes and tendencies of Internet production when it adopted its new styles and platforms. This includes more integrated promotions, relationships to and appeals for fan content, and increased representation of marginalized communities.

Although commercial interests benefit from the representation of both web-native forms and a wider range of people, the circulation of labor and images does real work for viewers.

There have been many discussions and testimonies in the last five years or so asserting the impact that seeing oneself represented in media can have, often accompanied on social media by the hashtag #RepresentationMatters.5 This discourse is particularly common in print, video, and podcast cultural criticism of film and television, as new productions continue to be the ‘firsts’ in many arenas, and as more characters and actors from marginalized groups appear on screens. Of course, not all representations are good, and not all viewers have embraced the trend.6 Given that in advertising representation is commodified for marketing purposes, the ethics and values of this portrayal is particularly fraught. Dunagan weighs these complex factors as they center on images of the dancing body. She writes:

Advertising appropriates dance as part of its effort to diversify its market. This effort to diversify serves under-represented communities and subject positions in that it broadens the social identities represented in mass media and creates a space for these voices. However, the appropriation also liberates social categories from lived experience and social relations to market static ideological subject positions as opportunities to change social identity through consumption. (Consuming 153)

The potential for the misuse of representation remains, as does the danger that mere images of marginalized identities will be considered sufficient in the face of structural discrimination that exists for models, dancers, and workers outside of the world of the video. But I argue that the

193 subset of ads I analyze in this chapter focus more on affirming consumers’ subject positions— showing products, people, and movement in context. This is a use of millennial multiculturalism and virtuosic individuality for the purpose of higher sales, but also has a strong representational force grounding practices in lived experience rather than abstracting them. Before turning to these concepts in more detail as they unfold through dance-centric ads, I will first offer a brief analysis of the slogans which frame the movement.

Slogans and the Direct Address of Dance in Advertising

The slogans used alongside visual images in contemporary Internet-native ads attempt to link an esteem for the product with the consumer’s identity and sense of self, in order to establish a kind of equivalence. The linguistic features of many current slogans form their rhetoric, matching or framing the visual representation in the ads. They use second person direct address, imperative mood, and reflexive or emphatic pronouns,7 hailing the consumer by calling out to them and implicating their selves in the act of consumption.8

An early exemplar of this kind of slogan is YouTube’s “Broadcast Yourself,” in use from

2005-2011. Burgess and Green see it as an ‘exhortation’ supporting the rhetoric of Web 2.0, despite the fact that the platform supported both “public self-expression” and the distribution of broadcast media content nearly from its inception (4). John Hartley remarks on the shift in representation from commercial media to YouTube and related platforms by arguing that the slogan gestured to a wider set of people making content, in turn increasing the range of representation (133). This shift has been seen in advertising, too. Interestingly, YouTube

194 discontinued the slogan around the time when established brands and media outlets began to utilize its rhetoric and format.

The pronoun in “Broadcast Yourself,” is interpretable as both reflexive and emphatic, simultaneously presuming a coherent self and demanding its presentation (in other words, it is you who broadcasts you). That demand comes from the use of the imperative mood, the verb form in which commands are given. In an analysis of the imperative in advertising, linguist

Margarita Philippova comments that the imperative has ingrained cultural, linguistic, and personal meanings for people, derived partly from their daily interactions with authority figures, and partly through the verb form’s frequent use in advertising. In addition to its longstanding use to compel the viewer to purchase, Philippova observes that the imperative mood also functions to compel involvement in the brand and larger causes through their call to actions (6). Famous imperative slogans include: (1) Coca-Cola’s 1991 “enjoy,”9 (2) Apple’s ground breaking “Think

Different” from 1997; and, widely regarded as one of advertising’s best, (3) Nike’s “just do it,” used from 1988 onward. These slogans and companies paved the way for our current economic, social, and advertising structures.

One of the things that distinguishes these important slogans from their millennial counterparts is their lack of subject or object pronouns with human antecedents; for example, if

Nike’s slogan were crafted today, it might be ‘Just Do You.’ In English, the imperative does not require a subject pronoun, and it still rarely appears in contemporary slogans other than in the ubiquitous conversational ‘you do you.’ But the implicit second person of the imperative is made explicit through object, reflexive, and emphatic pronouns in many slogans I observed, and often it is singular. This direct address functions rhetorically in its shaping of the viewer. In addition to

195 advertising copy, Dunagan sees direct address in visual elements like the gaze of performers, direction the dancer is facing, and poses. (Consuming 56). She explains that the ‘you’ of slogans—or the direct address in television ads—is a parallel to the direct address of the audience in live performance. In the context of online and social advertising, I see it additionally

(or more immediately in this era) as mapping on to the direct address of social media through statuses, tweets, vlogs, and video or photo captions. In both cases, the dance itself has a specific role to play. Dunagan argues the direct address of the spectacle of the dance hails the viewer as both audience member and consumer (Consuming 4). Following Althusser, this hailing is ideological— “viewers accept their positioning as subjects and consumers in relation to the ad and, implicitly, the larger economic structure of capitalism” (Consuming 55). Current consumers may do even more than that when they also become producers through their presentational and promotional display of purchased goods or services on their own social media accounts.

The common narrative of a product supporting an ongoing lifestyle is well illustrated in a

2016 ad for LG’s Signature Refrigerator (Matthew Gould-Lucht). Savion Glover is reading on his rooftop deck and, upon finishing his orange juice, he goes inside. Crossing the roof and living room with his characteristic hinged upper body and swinging arms, tapping complexly as he locomotes, Glover’s traveling movement familiarizes the viewer with his living space and its décor. He pauses the record player and the instrumental funk soundtrack stops; he then dances unaccompanied, standing on toepoint on top of a record sleeve he has thrown on the floor. The music returns and he descends the stairs, and tip-tip tap-taps through the kitchen, spinning to grab a clean glass, the ends of his locs swinging where they have escaped his bun. The music fades as he approaches the fridge, and he knocks rhythmically on the dark glass front to reveal a

196 full juice pitcher, then does a quick series of taps before swiping his foot under the door, causing it to open and play a little tune. As the door closes, the music returns and Glover taps off frame while the text is overlaid: “Tap to look inside and a hands free door/Your Signature is Your

Essence.” The soundtracked music, the tapping, the knocking, and the foot swipe all interweave as part of the rhythmic composition of the piece that is the advertisement. Similarly, the fridge is integrated into what is portrayed as a quotidian scene for Glover—extremely well-designed, styled, and expensive, but nonetheless a space that supports his activities (see figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Savion Glover leads the camera into the kitchen. Following Glover through the house to perform the simple task of getting juice shows both the ease with which the product integrates into a lifestyle while also posing a parallel between the excellence of the dancer and the fridge; note the matching colors of the two stars. Screenshot from Matthew Gould-Lucht, “Signature Demo – Savion Glover,” YouTube, 29 Nov 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=C50WeYuvP-A, Accessed 9 Apr 2019.

The integration shows that the fridge does have unique and novel functions, but that those functions fit perfectly into an established life—they allow for a continued rhythm. The slogan helps establish that the product would be perfect for ‘you,’ the interesting person watching, who has a signature of your own already. The message works even if the viewer does not possess the

197 same kind of panache as Glover, but who wish to believe that they already have this kind of unique lifestyle and personality.

None of the elements of these slogans—hailing through second person, the use of the imperative, or insinuating what the product can do for the consumer—is new in advertising.10

But I note that their usage—combined with dance (also a historic advertising practice) and the appeal to uniqueness and expression—reveal the kind of active formation and representation of self-identity (virtuosic individuality) that is a perceived, and actual ideology of this moment across generation Z, Millennials, and even generation X. Many of these slogans presuppose

‘you’-ness to be formed before consumption, such that use of the product is an affirmation and a broadcasting of it. Show ‘em what you got (Shoe Carnival), your signature is your essence (LG),

More for your thing (AT&T), show them what moves you (Aéropostale): these slogans hail consumers with signatures, moves, and things, presuming that the person has these identifying characteristics, and is missing out on an affirmational experience. Once the consumer is consuming the correct products, they are influenced to broadcast and amplify the message further with a hashtag. The hashtag often transforms the slogan into the first person, referring to the person who is posting, as with #IAMGap (Gap)11 #thisbody (Lane Bryant) and #AExME

(American Eagle). The slogans and the attending visuals also set up this individual to relate to others in a particular way—through building community and togetherness. The multicultural millennial’s vision of togetherness is not about homogeneity: it is about “celebrating unsimilarities together” (Etsy), being “united by flavor” (Qdoba), and dancing together in different styles. The consumer is exhorted to join this community through a first-person plural imperative: “Bailemos, TargetStyle” (Target “Target Celebrates”).

198 Heterogeneity in Media: Millennial Multiculturalism

As derived from observation of advertising, class combination videos, and music videos, and in conversation with the literature, I propose millennial multiculturalism as a rhetoric that incorporates the individual within a whole in a way that celebrates and monetizes the individual’s personal, racialized, gendered, and bodily traits without addressing their place in larger systems of power. It is a metonymic relationship, characterized well by the sentiment

“unity in diversity,” which entered into the popular dance discourse through the now iconic

Millennium Dance Complex wall—which requires the constituent participants for the success of the whole without necessarily reapportioning the benefits accrued. This rhetoric is physicalized in the choreography featured in these works and its performance, wherein freestyle improvisation and dancer interpretation exists in and alongside the framework of prescribed choreography performed in unison and in groups.

Both as an observed rhetoric and as a proposed theory, millennial multiculturalism is tied to the multiculturalism of the turn of the twenty-first century, but it differs in a few important ways. It is targeted generationally, it is part of consumption-based identity formation, it allows for a multidimensional understanding of identity, and as a representational rhetoric manages multiplicity within groups and the absorption of these messages by the individual in order to manage their own place within the group.12 Also, crucially, this ‘multiculturalism’ includes a broader variety of identities derived from belonging to various non-ethnic, racial, or religious cultures and subcultures. Additionally, millennial multiculturalism also draws on affiliation with experience- and physically-based affinity groups and communities like LGBTQIA+; and on

199 one’s relationship to body positivity, disability, tattoos, and inherited traits like freckles, albinism, or red hair. Through the Internet, these traits and attitudes have coalesced into communities of support and representation. I will first turn to a discussion of the existing analysis and critiques of multiculturalism which continue to apply in the present moment. Then I turn to the particular ways this instantiation of multiculturalism is used in conjunction with dance to market goods, individuals, and itself.

Theories of Multiculturalism: Managing Difference

Critical race and postcolonial theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Jodi Melamed,

Sara Ahmed, and Sneja Gunew all use the term ‘manage’ in discussing how states and institutions deal with their heterogeneous populations. Synthesizing their work presents a few ways through which difference has been managed within states, institutions, or communities historically: (1) excluding or eliminating differences (e.g., genocide or second-class citizenship as in Jim Crow laws in the United States); (2) ignoring differences (e.g., colorblind or postracial rhetoric); or (3) exalting or emphasizing differences without necessarily changing circumstances

(e.g., multicultural and diversity rhetoric). In her article theorizing neoliberal multiculturalism,

Jodi Melamed glosses Multiculturalism as “a kind of accommodation that replaced a focus on substantive political and economic goals with an emphasis on cultural diversity” (15). These scholars’ foundational work established a critique for this third rhetoric in a time when it was widely embraced, opening the door alongside long-existing activist communities for a current

200 moment when the structural basis of discrimination and oppression is not universally accepted but is still widely discussed and known.

In “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From racial liberalism to Neoliberal multiculturalism,”

Jodi Melamed traces multiculturalism’s development as a long trajectory out of the post-war period of racial liberalism, when a kind of antiracism and later nonracialism became part of U.S. government identity. Analyzing the way this manifests in the late portion of the 20th and early

21st centuries, Melamed proposes the category neoliberal multiculturalism, which “seeks to manage racial contradictions on a national and international scale for U.S.-led neoliberalism,

[…] which hinders thinking about or acting against the biopolitics of global capitalism” (3). Omi and Winant assert that a colorblind racial ideology was neoliberalism’s central logic (211).

Colorblindness and multiculturalism are not the same rhetorically, but they have the same underlying desire: to control racial and ethnic difference in a way that makes them appear to no longer be a factor in economic or political decision-making. In each case, discrimination and inequality based on the characteristics either lauded or ignored remains (Omi and Winant 229).

In her article on the importance of visual representation and analysis to critical diversity studies, management scholar Elaine Swan introduces the idea of commodity diversity, a symbolic practice of the commodification of racial difference. She looks at a ‘corporate motivation art’ diversity poster using the common mosaic metaphor to show how it falls into the category of works that “produce a racial ideology that reinforces unequal power in organizations” (78). While the workers featured on the poster were men and women of a range of races and ethnicities, she argues that this representation is actually a “strategy of containment” meant to defuse possible antagonism rather than change power structures. It does this through

201 depicting the models with no additional markers of identity than phenotype, so that all appeared otherwise the same in style, class, and ability—white enough—and separated through the mosaic image (78). This rhetoric of interchangeability was common in the first waves of multiculturalism, where religion, race, and ethnicity are transformed into ‘culture,’ and are therefore seen to be shareable and mutable. Discussing the rhetoric espoused by many working with interfaith families in the early 2000s, religious studies scholar Samira Mehta notes “This popular form of multiculturalism celebrated diversity as a rich array of cultural resources while downplaying the possibility of conflict or power imbalance resulting from difference. Instead, this form of multiculturalism called individuals to strive to ‘break down barriers’ and ‘build mutual understanding across our differences’” (Mehta 85).13 She investigates the negotiation of identity and practice in interfaith households through blended consumer engagement, but the same processes observed by Mehta at the level of the multicultural or multiracial individual or family occur in the larger societal rhetoric which takes each person together in a whole which is multicultural through its conglomeration.

Much of what circulates in the creative and consumer spheres still follows a strategy of

‘diversity’ and ‘multicultural’ representation made popular in media and institutions in the late

1980s through the first decade of the 2000s. However, perhaps in part in response to the peak in colorblind rhetoric in the wake of the election of President Barack Obama, this has begun to change.14 Millennial multiculturalism is a product of the post-post racial era, a hyperracial ideology due in part to newly-brash white nationalists, and in part to those trying to oppose and perform opposition to them. While colorblind rhetoric gained popularity in discourse overlapping the popularity of multicultural rhetoric, millennial multiculturalism does not show indebtedness;

202 instead, millennial multiculturalism lauds and publicizes the ethnicity, sexuality, and size traits of individuals. Media creators form their content and audiences around these identities such that there are for example hijabi makeup channels, plus size fashion vloggers, and queer sewist bloggers. In the dance world, individual dancers are sometimes identified primarily through their visual traits in comments or even articles. This can also be by choice. For example, a commercial for Lane Bryant (a plus-size clothing company) recently featured the Pretty Big dance company, whose members are all in the manufacturer’s size range (Pretty BIG Movement).

As proposed by Melamed, neoliberal multiculturalism is an analysis that covers both economic systems and racial projects. I propose millennial multiculturalism as a particularization of existing theories in the current moment, serving the main consumers of social media. It is a specific rhetoric at play on social media, connected to—rather than replacing—an overarching analysis like Melamed’s that can account for racial and economic projects at the level of governments or multinational corporations. Late-stage neoliberal capitalism is still the large system within which everything operates, but the theory of millennial multiculturalism focuses on the ideologies and desires of makers and consumers of media circulating on or influenced by the Internet as they negotiate larger structures.

Marketing Millennial Multiculturalism

Marketing companies and sites remark that millennials respond well to advertising that has a multicultural component or sensitivity to diversity; they want to see advertising that represents their values. In the current moment, multiculturalism is a rhetoric with promotional as

203 well as a representational force, used to sell media and to sell things; both to people whose actual multiple identity formations are cemented or broadcast through engagement and consumption, and to those who wish to think of themselves as supportive of the first group. As such, companies that want the money of these demographic groups position their products as supporting this aim through their easy integration into the lives of the diverse groups of people displayed in their ads, and through demonstrating how the product functions within that group.

Tracing the rise of multiculturalism as a lived concept from the late twentieth century into the turn of the millennium, Mehta points to how this paralleled the advent of a “consumer-based mode of identity formation” (83). These parallel rhetorics are present in advertisements, as advertisers hail individuals while also appealing to their desire for group belonging, presenting the millennial multicultural image as a possible reality achievable through interaction with the brand. In each case, the rhetoric is delivered through casting, slogans, setting, and choreography.

In the first wave of multiculturalism, there were many books on what was labeled ‘the multicultural consumer,’ both academic and geared towards businesses and advertising sectors.

The important 2000 work Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity by consumer and immigration historian Marilyn Halter reported on the effects of the increased buying power of ethnic groups as they use consumption to reinforce their identification. Industry reactions to these new markets included the modification of existing products, the creation of new goods, services, and entertainment, and the targeted marketing of all of the above. Millennial multiculturalism is different—it is not a rhetoric targeting any one ‘cultural’ group, nor does it tend to manifest in ads which target a specific group (generational and one could argue liberal)— it is instead aggregative.15

204 In a white paper for The American Advertising Federation on millennials as a market,

Rochelle L. Ford and her co-authors focus on the importance of capturing the attention of the generation for companies’ financial success. But contrary to those groups reported on by Halter, the millennials Ford et al. interviewed did not want to be targeted specifically through heritage markers, but rather through the product itself, demonstrating fandom as a component of millennial identity formation, and supporting the common Internet dictum that ‘content is king.’

However, they want that content to be inclusive and respectful of their and other cultures (4).

Brand identity and ideology can be conveyed through advertisements, websites, and other content. As Ford et al. suggest:

Millennials respond to mission statements, well-crafted narratives and brand heritage that they identify with and revealed that they would support brands that empower them, make their lives easier and demonstrate a shared desire to support causes they believe in. Millennials repeatedly emphasized a desire to use their consumerism to contribute to positive change that appeals to their interests. (5)

The generation after them shares much of this sentiment. In a Google ‘magazine’ on Gen Z’s social media use, brand awareness, and attitude towards consumer products, they focus on what that generation labels ‘cool,’ because this insight can indicate what they pay attention to, what they may aspire to, and how to market to them. Through survey data, the report asserts “For

Generation Z, what’s cool is also a representation of their values, their expectations of themselves, their peers, and the brands they hold in the highest regard” (ii). In addition, responses showed they want their brands as well as their celebrities to be philanthropic and to treat employees well (Google ii).

So, while it has many roots, and may be well-intentioned, millennial multiculturalism’s prevalence is partly because industry research suggests that millennial and Z generations want to

205 be shown this world, even if it is imaginary. Companies use millennial multiculturalism in their media output to create a brand that appears progressive—which is fashionable—whether or not they actually act on these values. As Internet culture journalist Amanda Hess notes: “A company with a soul becomes relatable, but in a deceptive way: The more we think of it as a ‘brand,’ the more our focus shifts away from things like labor practices and supply chains and onto issues of narrative and identity” (“What Happens”). Many companies are in fact making changes on these fronts, too, but it is the public-facing things that make the biggest difference for most consumers.

Millennial multiculturalism certainly might impact decisions elsewhere, but it is more about a marketing and representational rhetoric rather than functioning at the organizational or governmental level.16 As neoliberal multiculturalism accounts for the functioning of global economies and interests vis à vis race, millennial multiculturalism does so for the economies of social medias and social worlds, and the representational rhetorics which facilitate them. Like other representational rhetorics, millennial multiculturalism can use the images of ‘diverse’ bodies to accrue capital that does not subsequently benefit the communities indexed in a company’s advertisements. Nonetheless, the representational force is enacted for the viewer.

The Individual in Millennial Multiculturalism: Virtuosic Individuality

I propose the frame of virtuosic individuality as the predominant mode of self- presentation in the age of social media, late-stage neoliberalism, and the gig economy. Virtuosic individuality is an important component of my theorization of millennial multiculturalism because it highlights the ways in which the individual is incorporated into the larger whole both

206 representationally and economically. This follows the way in which neoliberal multiculturalism utilizes cultural, racial, and ethnic groups within the nation, and how the individual is used as a token in institutional diversity.17 In the economic and representational rhetoric of millennial multiculturalism, the individual’s raced, gendered, and bodily traits constitute their (marketable) selves alongside any skills. Then it is the self—the persona—who is incorporated into the whole, whether that is a group shown in a commercial, or as a consumer in the market.

The term ‘virtuosic individuality’ can be found as an undefined idea seeming to point to the particularity of a musician’s excellent performance.18 However, in my conception, virtuosic individuality is not as much about the particularity of a person’s virtuosity in their given field, but rather the virtuosic performance of a person’s individuality. It is true that those who excel currently in long-understood artistic, trade, or business pursuits can and must still distinguish themselves from others in their areas of success. However, what is most particular about this moment is that people not engaged in areas traditionally considered virtuosic can turn facts or elements of their lives into something consumable. Their pursuit is their cultivation of self: their mode of dress, their food consumption, their perspective on parenthood, their body and their relationship to it, or some combination of these and many others. While success in this form of representation does require skill, especially in photography or videography, editing, sometimes writing, and certainly in marketing and understanding online platforms, the virtuosity arises from the perfection and portrayal of a complete individual; you have to be good at being and demonstrating yourself. This in turn has folded back into the modes of presentation and performance for visual and performing artists who work through the Internet, including the

207 dancers and choreographers whose work comprises the music videos, class videos, and advertising discussed in this chapter.

Striving for virtuosity in the quotidian may be a particular condition of the life led via social media, as every moment of a daily life can be glamorized and made enviable through correct posing, framing, and filtering. But the same platforms are also a place for critique and for reflexivity and offer representation for many groups not depicted—or not depicted well—in other media forms. These goals can also be carried out in the genres and aesthetics of the platform alongside that which they critique. Virtuosic individuality as a particular mode of

Internet-based being and representation exists within the larger context and history of the individual within an American culture shaped by the last decades of the 20th century, including issues of tokenism within corporate diversity and media; the economic reality of the commodification and earning potential of the individual through the development of a ‘personal brand;’ the place of the individual as neoliberal subject and its political ramifications and extensions; and the longstanding role of consumption as a part of identity formation.

The self in the age of social media is a combination of technological, generic, and representational developments and modes.19 While certain individuals and communicative genres thrive more on given platforms, and each platform has its own specificities, I believe the current concept of self is multi-modal. It exists at the nexus of selfie culture, vlogging, avatars, Facebook statuses and Twitter quips, the invention of front-facing cameras and the platforms that use them most (namely Snapchat and Insta Stories), and the subsequent discourses about all of the above.

It is also multi-directional, with self-mediated forms approximating the gloss of professional publications and commercial pursuits attempting the aesthetics of the individual Internet user.

208 These environments all come together in advertising geared towards Millennial and Gen

Z consumers. Advertising accomplishes the fusion of these ideals through casting, costuming, and slogans, but also through dance forms that highlight individuality through the use of improvisation and innovation, extending those compositional influences into other styles. These ads are geared towards individuals raised and immersed in a culture which prizes developing their own individuality, cementing the image of the particular good or service advertised as both unique itself and capable of creating (or, I argue, affirming) the consumer’s individuality. The product and its contribution to personal brand through consumption and then display in daily life and on social media helps to make the individual a fuller instantiation of their desired self vis-à- vis the world; it also renders them ready to be subsumed (or embraced) by the market and the rhetoric of millennial multiculturalism.

The Performance of Self in First-person Mediation20

Media studies literature has mostly considered the representation of the individual in the age of social media only in self-mediated forms. However, because of marketing guidelines and an incorporation of social media trends, a kind of representation of individuality—of a self—also pervades commercial and non-fiction media. In ads, music videos, and dance videos, the mode of virtuosic individuality appears to promote and preserve personal brands, position a product as identity-affirming, or implicitly integrate that product into current life. In order to consider how virtuosic individuality appears elsewhere, its origin through self-mediated platforms and genres, always themselves complex must be taken into account. In no small part because of

209 representational and generic multidirectionality, the ‘you’ that is circulating on social media is both an empowering possibility for positionality and radical honesty, and for the codification of the self as sellable and sell-to-able.

In her book The Selfie Generation, culture critic Alicia Eler discusses the importance of selfie movements such as those around chronic illness, voting participation, and LGBTQ visibility, often facilitated through hashtags. Eler suggests that these posts both highlight a personal aspect of a marginalized identity and contribute to the creation of a collective message.

She argues that “the selfie is an aesthetic with radical potential for bringing visibility to people and bodies that are othered” (372). Crucially, Eler discusses the way the selfie is created and circulated with an intent to be witnessed; the self is formed both through the presentation to and through interaction with those who could view it, viewers who may have been the inspiration for or could be inspired by that post. Selfies are a mode of representation filling gaps left by other media, which have been slow to either document or fictionalize marginalized experiences like disability, body size, and queerness, and are only doing slightly better with racial representation.

The selfie (and potentially, its accompanying caption) can also capture complex identities which often get obscured elsewhere.

With the adoption of the visual aspects of the selfie, advertising and other forms of commercial media have also brought some of their representational force, with campaigns highlighting (possible) consumers not previously seen on screen. This is done through wider casting, using working models, actors, or dancers scouted from their personal accounts (or through sponsoring content on those same accounts); through display of selfies and photos actually taken by social media users who are consumers of a given brand; or through the

210 simulation or replication of this phenomenon. Shown in figure 3.3, the September 2018 window display of the Times Square American Eagle clothing store was an example of that last strategy, full of square pictures of women of different races in many styles and sizes of bra. The women’s

Instagram handles are at the bottom of their smiling, carefree pictures, and a sign in the middle of the display exhorts “Don’t change you. Change your bra!”

Figure 3.3 Commercial replication of self-mediatization. The square format of each picture mimics Instagram’s grid layout, and each model’s Instagram handle is written on their photo. Photo taken by Alexandra Harlig, American Eagle window display, Times Square store, New York City. 18 Sept 2018.

211

This campaign, which extends to videos on Aerie’s YouTube channel, and to these amateur models’ use in product photos for online ordering, has real representational and also promotional force, as it uses the aesthetics and possibility of self-mediation for the company’s gain (Aerie).21 This is not necessarily a change from the selfie’s original context, however. Eler argues: “the selfie tows the line between vulnerability and publicity, capitalizing on the space in between. Thanks to social media, marketing to individuals on a hyperpersonalized level has become accessible, easy, and seemingly carefree. And always, the product is you” (277).

Like the selfie, YouTube also attracts multivalent producers and users; this phenomenon has led to what digital media studies scholar Thomas Simonsen describes as “a fuzzy border between social identity and self-promotion, changing the perception of how we regard representations of the self” (Identity Formation 229). In his dissertation on vlogging, the self, and authenticity, Simonsen describes that even vlogs—let alone other video genres on

YouTube—hold both public and private versions of the person’s life, emphasized in different moments. This is true not only by default but through generic and formal aspects like filming setting, asides at different angles, or moments of planned self-reflexivity about the platform or the endeavor. These allow a sense of closeness for the viewer but also limit how much is actually shared. Taken together, Simonsen calls this “controlled performative self-presentation” (Identity

Formation 241).22 As such, the identities put forward in a vlog are then “representations with a referential relationship towards the real world;” (Identity Formation 242) that is, not unreal, but not unshaped. The vlogging format is at the nexus of the commercial, competitive component of

YouTube, and the highly-social nature of the platform and its modes of production and consumption. Simonsen argues “in between this co-existence, the audiovisual presentations of

212 the self are characterised as a cultural commodity, where authenticity and the self is constantly performed” (Identity Formation 245).

Neither the performed self (indexed to reality), nor discourse about it is new, as evidenced by the long history of makeup, fashion, and portraiture; the literature on the presentation of self, notably Erving Goffman in the 1950s and Judith Butler’s turn to the performance of gender; and work on pre-Internet mediation focusing on home movies, documentary film, and reality TV. What makes the performed self particular to this historical moment is the many modes it can take, the way it functions in the marketplace, and the interaction between mediatization and other kinds of performance. Further, performances can now be entirely self-mediated from capture to distribution. Simonsen points to this with Vlogs and what he calls first-person mediated genres (Identity Formation 229), where the control is in the hands of the individual rather than the outside camera, editor, and promoter present in either legacy production or commercial work circulating on YouTube. Interestingly, as production value and budget go up, and depending on the genre, even many first-person YouTube channels now do have assistance with various stages of the process. However, Simonsen emphasizes that control remains in their hands, as the YouTubers are still the head of the endeavor. This is in part because the identity of the project or business is so often tied to the virtuosic individuality of the literal face of what has become a business or a brand.

In her article “What Happens When People and Companies Are Both Just ‘Brands’?”

Amanda Hess discusses how the idea of the personal brand fueled and then became requisite in the gig economy, which has become necessary for economic survival for many, despite the continued thriving of corporations. The concept of the personal brand has gained popularity both

213 in discourse and in practice since it was coined by Tom Peters in a 1997 Fast Company article,

“The Brand Called You,” where he proposed it as a mode of autonomous creativity in contrast to the model of the corporate workplace. The idea has adapted to changes in both the economy and technology; Hess notes that in this age of personal branding through self-mediation, if they gather enough attention and good will, an individual can become profitable. In the current moment, a personal brand is formed in part through consumption and endorsement of the products of existing companies, whether through paid sponsorship or as a kind of fandom and marking of identity through consumption. This loops directly into the brands and media presence of existing companies. As Hess explains, “a ‘lifestyle brand,’ after all, is just a regular brand that appeals to people’s ‘personal brands’ —which, in turn, are increasingly organized around courting relationships with lifestyle brands” (“What Happens”). Because of this interrelation, and in distinction from Peters’s original conception, a personal brand often has less value to the individual than it does to the companies that facilitate it and profit from its endorsement.23

However, individuality—as performed in self-presentation and -mediation as much as through one’s portfolio or resume—is now requisite, both in the national and international scale gig economy, and in the now mostly project-based artistic world. It is now an expectation for dancers in the popular dance sphere (as well as many in the concert dance world), to have a personal brand and social media presence that includes their daily lives in addition to highlighting their performance personas or abilities.24 In turn, the celebrity and fan base which these performers garner through their online content makes them more likely to be hired to promote existing brands or appear in music and dance videos, where their virtuosic individuality works alongside the movement or choreography to sell a specific concept or product.

214 Kaycee Rice is a teen dancer who has gained celebrity through her appearance in class combination videos, and who maintains a strong presence on her YouTube and Instagram accounts. Rice has appeared in both an official Nike advertisement and in video posts on her own channels which have a strong promotional force on Nike’s behalf. Rice appeared in an ad for

Nike leggings, freestyling and jumping acrobatically to show off the range of mobility they granted her, supporting the slogan’s invitation to “Move Unlimited” (“Kaycee Rice”). Rice also designed her own Nike shoe as an extension of her personal brand, which won a contest to be produced, in part through a mobilization of her fan base as voters. Once it became available, she shot a promotional video for the shoe. This concept video functions as a Nike ad despite not being one, featuring close-up shots of the shoes and Rice freestyling in a darkened studio wearing the shoes, dark leggings, and an oversized black sweatshirt with the Nike logo repeated over it in white (“I DESIGNED”). This is an act of fandom and also of what feminist media scholar Erin Duffy calls entrepreneurial brand devotion, “where digital content creators visibly align themselves with certain commercial brands in the hope of riding on their coattails” (451).

Instances of this exert promotional force for both parties and may be hard to distinguish from sponsored or commercial content (see figure 3.4).

215

Figure 3.4 Kaycee Rice promotes Nike products. The image on the left is from a Nike-produced ad for their girls’ clothing line which was promoted with Rice’s name. On the right is a still from the video Rice made to share her excitement about the shoe she designed, which won the contest through her established fan base. Screenshots from Kaycee Rice **Official Channel**, (left) “Kaycee Rice - “The Coolest Tights w/Nike Young Athletes,” 12 Jan 2017, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNrK9OsmuxY and (right) “I DESIGNED A SHOE FOR NIKE - Kaycee Rice,” YouTube, 20 Jan 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_6GsAYRLeM, Accessed 9 Apr 2019.

Rice clarified in the video description “I was not paid to do this video. I did it because I am proud of my creation and I want to share it with all my fans” (“I DESIGNED”). Further entangling the directions of entrepreneurial endeavors, Rice and Lew also each sell their own lines of merchandise; Weirdo and Lewser. The copy on the Weirdo site perfectly encapsulates the attitude of virtuosic individuality and self-promotion governed by millennial multiculturalism, defining that being a weirdo means ‘just being you.’25 The merch says ‘just be you,’ WEIRDO, and the full slogan of the acronym: We Embrace Individuality Realness

Diversity & Originality (“What Does Weirdo Mean”). This slogan—and its index to MDC’s

“Unity in Diversity” as well as many other advertising slogans—demonstrates how pervasive the rhetoric of millennial multiculturalism is and how deeply it is entwined with virtuosic individuality; Rice positions herself in relation to brands and makes a place for herself by controlling her image and her message.

216 As the literature on the techniques and meanings of selfie-culture, vlogging, and the creation and maintenance of personal brand show, the self in the age of social media is performative, branded, and filtered, but sometimes reflexive. It has the potential for both sociality and commerce, and is formed multiply, through the interweaving of the online self, the daily self, and the aspirational self. Simonsen notes that Vlogging is primarily personality- and direct communication-based, rather than based in narrative or visual conventions. This is also mostly true of formats like Insta Stories or Stories on Facebook. But other modes of self- presentation are highly stylized and aestheticized; the complexity of the Internet is that all modes and styles exist and circulate simultaneously and (in the case of many of the major platforms) adjacent to each other. My assertion is that the features Eler, Simonsen, and Hess note in their individual topics pervade all production online, including dance. These include the centrality of the personal brand, a publicization of features of your body and experience, and the controlled performative self. Whether an individual is consciously engaged in commerce or not, their virtuosic individuality, which is all of these elements in confluence, enters them into the economy that trades on the commodified self.

Virtuosic Individuality in Motion in Commercial Production

Elements of self-mediated presentation that performers and content creators employ in their own work are also used in projects that have directors, videographers, or distributors; that is to say those which are more similar to legacy media production. The texts I discuss in this chapter are not primarily first-person mediations through which the individual in social media

217 has been mainly constructed, but they are part of a larger media culture through and against which self-representation developed, and which always picks up and utilizes these modes and discourses in the service of art and commerce. Music videos and advertisements also form part of the industry towards which many on social media orient their aspirational labor (Duffy). The ubiquity of cameras does adjust the behavior of individuals in front of a camera—I argue the modality of the performance of self in different screen genres is always present and so is layered onto all non-fiction performances as well as in daily life. The use of creators, dancers, models, and videomakers with established personal brands means more individuation even within commercial productions, sometimes leading to greater creative control for those individuals, and always carrying the historical value and promotional force of star persona.

Simonsen argues the desire for authenticity in vlogging and other content represents the paradox of the commodified self, because the audience wants entertainment value but also “the impression of the real” (Identity-formation 243). This extends to most Internet presentations of self and others, and has also impacted many advertisements that circulate online. Whereas older ads and legacy media ads are more scripted, even narrative, video ads on social media are often without characters or plot. They may have a premise or a mood, but many of these ads use the hired cast members’ performance of self as the character. This persona is encapsulated by their readable identity markers and their physical expression, and they are often shown walking through an environment, getting ready for something, or dancing, often outdoors or in a real place (see figure 3.5). In an Instagram ad for New Balance shoes produced by the magazine

Refinery29, for example, a young black woman in bright colored clothes and sneakers walks and dances around Brooklyn while her voiceover describes her life and style, including how she has

218 adapted to her anxiety. At the end of the ad she skips on the Brooklyn Bridge to the sound bite

“being 100% me, it’s the only way to be,” and the ad closes with the slogan “Be Fearlessly You”

(Refinery 29 “Be Fearlessly you”). While it is not uncommon for advertisements to include some kind of information about the individual featured, especially if their career or accomplishments support the product in some way, in many cases the visual cues are meant to be indicative of an individual’s totality and context, tying style to virtuosic individuality and to daily life.

Figure 3.5 Virtuosic individuality in context. This New Balance ad exemplifies the tendency to shoot outside, capturing products in use and in motion in a non-narrative performance. Screenshot from Refinery29, “Be Fearlessly you,” Instagram, 30 Sept 2017, www.instagram.com/p/BZr0MB5Fcmm, Accessed 8 Apr 2019.

219 Those commercials that use dance do so perhaps in lieu of narrative, but also as a way to have a premise that backs their slogans, often around the way their products support the consumer’s best life as related to their sense of self. Many ads which use dance emphasize both the spectacle of performance and the impression of the real that Simonsen describes, balanced through movement. This is in contrast to traditional product advertisement that shows a car on a closed track, or might use a doctored comparison to a rival project. The bodies shown really have those clothes on (though they may have been tailored), and the dancing largely eschews special editing effects.26 Even in those videos with a staged premise—like the 2016 back-to-school ads for Shoe Carnival and H&M with breaking- and Choreo-inflected battles between kid dancers— the movement may be choreographed, but the performance is always really a kid wearing new clothes, dancing very well (Tim Milgram “Shoe Carnival;” H&M). They also often include freestyle sections, which elicit real reactions (see figure 3.6).

220

Figure 3.6 Balancing spectacle and the impression of the real. Freestyle sections even in choreographed ads elicit unplanned reactions from the other performers, as pictured. Screenshot from H&M, “H&M Kids: Back To School - Autumn 2016,” 10 Aug 2016, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjDUyXhl80I, Accessed 8 Apr 2019.

The movement styles prominently used now in choreographed works like advertisements, music videos, and class combination videos are those that highlight individualized performance, even in the context of unison movement. This is a direct analogy to the individuality highlighted and preferred in the context of the self in the age of social media; even in cases where trends are seen as unifying or homogenizing, different twists are necessary economically and lauded socially. In addition, choreography used in advertisement utilizes these embodied performances of virtuosic individuality to reinforce the idea of a unique but consumption-bound self to which companies can sell products. Individuality is highlighted through a range of physiology, personality, clothing, and videographic and editing choices.

221 Virtuosity in dance has historically referred to strength, flexibility, speed, height, precision, and control, mostly deriving from ballet in the concert dance context and acrobatics in the popular sphere, and their influence on modern and contemporary movement practices (L.

Robinson 170). These elements are also seen in the judging and discourse about breaking, which has moved it into other Hip-Hop forms as well. In her examination of the spectacle of the unison crew televised competition performance, dance studies scholar Laura Robinson expands virtuosity to account for precision unison and the creation of what she calls meta-bodies (176). In contrast to Robinson’s subject, I want to discuss the virtuosity of individual performance, even that which exists inside unison performance. This virtuosity sometimes takes the traditional size and shape of virtuosity, but it is often seen in much smaller movement features, movement choices, and personal aesthetics that distinguish dancers from each other. In addition to the curated output by dancers on social media platforms, individuality is seen in three main choreographic devices in dance media circulating online: in the specific performance of a dancer within unison choreography, in freestyle solos, and in choreographed solos that often culminate in unison movement. These approaches are all used in music videos, class videos, and advertisements, although they are preferred in some formats more than others.

The differences and particularities of dancers’ performance vary in ways both intentional and not. Among the instances of individuality are: the musical interpretation, even in musically- dense and lyrically-tied choreographic styles of Hip-Hop; extreme facial expressions of exertion and emotion; and differences in trajectory and movement quality even when completing the same move. Additionally, these differences are also part of the aesthetic and ethos to ‘go hard’

222 which pushes people to their maximum physicality and so into whatever their personal movement style is, due to other training, physiology, personality, or identification.

This individuality marks a shift from the precision unison choreography in music video to unison with highly-varied interpretations and sections clearly left up to the individual, as seen in the class videos discussed in Chapter 2. The 1989 music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm

Nation,” was one of the first choreographed music videos with a larger group, influencing the videos of boy bands and girl groups in the following decade and beyond. Lyrically, the song supports unity within the group by identifying a nation of rhythm, which dancers’ precise choreographic unison corporeally manifests in the video. The dancers’ timing, body type, costuming, and lighting—black-and-white-film with many shadows—erases individuality or difference despite diverse casting. Deriving from this legacy, precision unison and matching performers is still privileged in some spaces despite the emphasis on individuality in others. For example, the 2017 Missy Elliot video for her song “I’m Better” features a dance chorus of thin black women in identical costumes and wigs performing in synchrony. And, as seen in Laura

Robinson’s research, precision unison is still preferred in crew competitions, whether on televised reality programs or stage-based competitions like World of Dance or Hip Hop

International, which in turn do circulate online. There are many different variables to consider when comparing these genres to the ones I consider in this chapter, including competition versus performance, pre-formed crews rather than groups assembled through casting or in class, and the particularity of individuality in the online space in distinction to the other contexts in which crews appear.

223 In order to concretize the concept of virtuosic individuality as carried out through movement, I turn now to two examples of individualized performance in different but connected video genres and choreographic contexts. These are a music video for Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” and a web-based clothing advertisement for the fast fashion brand ASOS. While in Chapter 2 I discussed the role of individualized performance in making class videos interesting despite their repetition, in music video and advertisement it also serves to promote the performer and the work or product along with them. Not only do these genres circulate together, with many of the same dancers working between them, but viewers become accustomed to modes of performance, which advertisers then adapt for their use.

The 2015 music video for Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” choreographed by New Zealander choreographer Parris Goebel and featuring her ReQuest Crew and Royal Family dance companies, was extremely successful. It is an early example of individualized performance in commercial content, and the virtuosic individuality was so impactful that a popular Buzzfeed quiz allowed the quiz-taker to find out which of the video’s dancers they were most like

(Chavez). Filmed in a white box, the thirteen dancers in colorful sportswear are in motion the whole time, doing Goebel’s signature Hip-Hop choreography, characterized by pelvic and torso isolations, group formations, and popping movement. The video employs minimal editing, while the choreography uses large- and small-group unison, various shapes of formation, and spatial arrangements that use the depth of the space and the foreground (Justin Bieber).

The movement is still unison when it has been choreographed as such; that is to say, the same shapes are being created in synchronized time to the music. But because of the complexity of performing some of the movement, because of dancer personality, or because of different

224 dancers’ anatomies, the movement looks different on each dancer. Historically, performance groups which prized synchronized, unison movement, like the Tiller Girls, Rockettes, Busby

Berkeley choruses, and corps de ballet, curtailed the variety allowed in height, body type, and especially race (Van Aken). In contrast, the dancers in Goebel’s companies are quite varied in their appearance. They are all women, with a range of body types, and represent the racial mix of

New Zealand, including those with European, Asian, African, and Maori heritage. The particularity of the individual body impacts the fluid spinal or pelvic movements which are a feature of Goebel’s choreography, as the length of bones and amount of flesh—fat and muscle— that needs to shift to allow curvature also impacts how contractions and extensions of the spine and pelvis look. This is highlighted in a recurring motif, where dancers travel across the floor on their hands and knees, arching and contracting their spines as they move. Throughout the video there are sections of ticking, a variation of Popping with multidirectional isolations of quick muscle contractions. In the choreography ticking acts as a prompt; the dancers are all doing it in tempo to the music, but the directionality and the particular muscles engaging, and so the parts of the body moving, are chosen by the individual dancer (see figure 3.7). These are only some ways the talented dancers are given room to distinguish themselves while still performing the assigned group choreography.

225

Figure 3.7 Individualized group performance in a music video. While all the dancers are ticking moving their torsos and hips in segmented circles in a similar bent knee position, they are each doing it differently. The colorful costumes and use of depth also helps distinguish dancers; choreographer Goebel is center, in black. Screenshot from Justin Bieber, “Justin Bieber - Sorry (PURPOSE : The Movement),” Chor. Parris Goebel, 22 Oct 2015, YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRh_vgS2dFE, Accessed 8 Apr 2019.

In an ASOS clothing brand ad produced and circulated by online magazine Refinery29 through Instagram, they put forward a message “Our motto: dress and dance to your own beat.”

(“Our motto”). Supporting this message are three soloists, four changes of clothing, and dancing in a few urban locations—a cityscape, a train yard, and an overpass. All young women, there are two white, slim dancers specializing each in ballet and clogging, and a plus-size black dancer whose expertise is Hip-Hop. Other than one moment of unison, where they cross their left feet over their right and turn around back to the front, all the movement appears to be freestyled in their respective genres, with a few moments of parallel shapes made.

The use of different movement styles, paired with ideas about the body and race, is a common phenomenon in current online advertisements. The costume changes, multiple settings,

226 and ‘diverse’ casting allow ASOS’s slogan to imply that their clothing can support or accompany the movement, style, and identity pursuits of many different people. All three dancers have strong social media presences preceding their appearance in this ad. This casting highlights two of the major trends in the process—capturing a broader slice of who consumers might be and using those performers or models who have developed a strong personal brand and display virtuosic individuality. The settings once again place the products in use in motion in the world.

Spacing and filming also contribute to the presentation of individuality and the individual within groups. In many videos, sections highlight particular dancers by placing them in the front of a unison formation, showing them in a small group section, or in a solo. This not only shows their individual skills or styles at that moment, but also familiarizes the viewer to their characteristics, which makes the viewer more attuned to that dancer when they appear subsequently, even in a large group in unison. The same could be said for costuming choices, with a tendency towards themed but individualized costuming; this is much like the costuming in

Golden Age musicals, where group identity was often marked by color family or pattern, and individuality through the specific garment types and shapes. In the music video instance, a kind of informality or individuality may be part of the effect, though there still are many videos for which very specific clothing is designed and desired.27 In the studio context, individual people make their own decisions about getting dressed, but, because they are informed by trends and merchandise availability, the choices often nonetheless result in a somewhat-cohesive sartorial aesthetic.28 In the case of advertising, the clothing variance is an important part of appealing to a range of potential purchasers, as well as demonstrating as much of the product range as possible.

227 While projects like the ASOS ad have promotional force for the dancers within it, their image and their dancing ultimately are used most to benefit the product they sell.

Virtuosity to what end?

In Paolo Virno’s critique of post-Fordist capitalism, “Virtuosity and Revolution,” he discusses virtuosity—in the Marxist definition, service labor that has no tangible product—as intrinsically political. As Mackenzie Wark summarizes, “Post-Fordist labor becomes like the virtuoso performance, which is already like politics, in being public and lacking a goal outside of itself” (np). However, because of the centrality of intellectual labor in the modern economy, virtuosity is “subsumed by the culture industry” and by maintaining the workplace itself (Lear).

The capacity and creativity that might have gone to political action—the potentiality of virtuosity—is in Virno’s analysis instead absorbed for the benefit of the company (and in some cases, the State). Because of this, Virno asserts, “virtuosic activity comes across as universal servile labor” (207). And so, the goal is then to achieve non-servile virtuosity—acts that surprise, that come clearly out of their ideological and production contexts but that nonetheless are moments of rupture with them. As Jazz scholar Nicholas Gebhardt argues about Jazz music improvisation, this kind of act “circumvents the logic of the act’s material making even as it affirms the act’s relation to a past that is perpetually ready to be remade” (147).

Quoting Marx, Virno asserts “When ‘the product is not separable from the act of producing,’ this act calls into question the self of the producer and, above all, the relationship between that self and the self of the one who has ordered it or to whom it is directed” (207). In

228 the case of the performing arts especially, the self is inseparable from the act of producing.

Indeed, in the current moment, much creative and intellectual labor falls into the Marxist use of virtuosity—there is no physical object produced. However, there are consumable products made: things which can be owned through download, distributed through sharing, and used through viewing or listening. In my argument, virtuosic individuality is a form of the commodified self, and the self is one of those products—representable, circulatable, consumable—that is produced through intellectual and creative labor. In the case of self-mediation, the self and the one who has ordered the product are the same.

At question is whether instances of virtuosic individuality found within content that has been ordered and directed by others retains any of the radical potentiality Eler suggests in selfies, or achieves the status of non-servile acts. The presence of individualized performance and the continuity of personal brand means that there is a kind of self-mediation—self-representation— present regardless of the production circumstances, which has not always been possible historically. This is a solidification of the connection between the self and labor in many ways, on one hand manifesting Virno’s contention that the connection between intellectual labor and paid work disrupts the necessary use of those faculties for political action. On the other hand, I believe the phenomenon of virtuosic individuality leads to greater individual control over a person’s mediation and commodification, and representation can be a political intervention itself.

The concept of the personal brand was at its inception an attempt at a different mode than top-down production and self-definition through assigned work—the very conditions Virno would describe as servile virtuosity. In actuality it has contributed to the precarity of the gig economy. Because as Hess and theorists of neoliberalism in general note, all individuals and

229 their money-making capacities are still subsumed within the market. In much the same way, commercial media utilizes the agentive performance of self of virtuosic individuality—derived from social platforms—for its own purposes. However, there are ways in which I think the specificity of performance in virtuosic individuality remains meaningful and political, despite the profit it makes for large organizations. Recognition of individual dancers and their skill might mean more remuneration for those dancers and a recognition of the value added by dance in general, which might enable larger budgets for dance in future productions. The draw of individual dancers for videos through search capabilities has led to more crediting of dancers in class videos, and there is an increase in crediting in music videos and ads-as-dance-videos.

Finally, the representational force—of seeing someone not just in the general identity categories you may affiliate with but occupying particular spaces within them—can be empowering for viewers who may become makers or performers themselves, or who may just experience life differently with a different conception of themselves.

Advertising Affirmational Consumption

Having described the individual as represented in and circulating on social and even legacy media, I turn to interrogate why the individual is such a focus of this media. In addition to the centrality of the individual in neoliberal policy and in public culture through self-mediation, it is the individual who purchases, uses, or watches. And, since the early 1900s, this consumption has in turn helped define individuals and their identities. Identity formation through consumption has a long history;29 what sets the current interaction between consumption, identity, and

230 representation apart is the increase of affirmational rather than aspirational messaging in advertising, the levels of control the consumer has on the projection of their own image post- consumption, and the way that image and idea itself becomes then content that is consumed. As mentioned, it is representative that YouTube’s original slogan was “Broadcast Yourself;”

Internet personae operate through individuality, self-mediation, and self-promotion. That promotion is often partly through proximity to established brands often also promoting themselves online, which have in turn positioned themselves in response to their consumer’s social media use. Identity formation through consumption has always been wrapped up in media and youth culture, including dance. As is the case today, advertisers, producers, and publishers harness the cultural capital of fashion, music, and live and screen performances for their own benefit, in turn helping define the styles of the day which young people adopt and adapt.

The particular relationship that contemporary media offer to the individual they often center plays into consumption. In the case of advertising, I argue that campaigns offer the good or service of the company in support of personal brand, or in a larger sense, the affirmation of consumers’ current identities. This is in distinction to the historical position of advertising, which presents goods and services as changing or bettering one’s life. Instead, much contemporary advertising posits a defined individual—one might say a virtuosic individual (or at least the hope for it)—and an argument that the tangible good, service, or piece of media furthers the cause of the person’s self of sense and their identity. Then, depending on if they display their engagement with the brand in any way, it will also affect what other people think of them. This is something advertising executives and brand strategists are increasingly aware of, and has led to changes in production, marketing, and engagement strategies. Companies and brands that successfully

231 understand this consumer approach to their purchasing decisions are rewarded with loyalty and with publicized enthusiasm.30 As acts of entrepreneurial brand devotion, this kind of self- mediated content in turn solidifies the consumer’s own personal brand in relation to the one whose goods they purchased.

When looking at a non-narrative piece of media like a dance video or an ad, casting and visual impact signification are the main points of access to the underlying branding strategy, indexed to common ideas of identity markers. I read the casting of people with discernible visual traits—skin tone, visible disability, religious head or body coverings, freckles, hair color, type and style, body size, shape and height, pregnancy, age, gender, clothing style as linked to subculture—as intentional identity markers, purposefully chosen to allow a range of viewers

(possible consumers) to see themselves using the product. But the viewer does not actually know how those models or performers identify—their socio-economic experience, belief systems, political views, their mental health or invisible disability status, their relationship to their heritage, or their gender and sexuality as they experience it. In works without documentary force or character development, the only available information is that which can be put forth visually, or through paratexts few people will see.31

In some ways this is troubling, as it can lead to yet another era of stereotyping and its complex relation to symbolic and structural violence. However, the use of visual identity markers also matches how young people are in fact representing themselves and their identities currently through consumption, styling, and sharing both online. They make their affiliations and identities clear through clothes and hair styling, makeup, graphic tees and bags, and especially pins and patches. These items show affinities with the brands or artists who made them, but also

232 with race, politics, disability, queerness, fandom, or even communities of practice like sewing or

Ultimate Frisbee. Products, brands, and the campaigns that market them must similarly appeal to these affinities and make a case for their presence in the life of an already-formed individual.

Advertisements both portray the use of the product and model its display through the visual representation of choreography which leaves room for individuality, or shapes it, but also in the way in which a product is situated in relation to the performer’s life. As seen in the LG refrigerator ad with Savion Glover, this tends to be a very integrated or processual use, in distinction to before-and-after displays typical in legacy advertising. Like the choreography and staging of these ads, the slogans which commonly accompany campaigns where this kind of representation and movement occurs posit an already-fully-defined individual with a strong sense of identity to whom they are speaking, and in whose lives the product will fit perfectly.

The positioning of the product as affirmational happens through showing the product already in use as part of the daily events of the wearer, or as part of the expression of personality, or in whatever scenario the dancing might be taking place. While ads without dance still have this orientation, I believe part of the utility of dance in these ads is that it is processual and literally in motion, allowing the products to be part of something, rather than being static or separate. It also is in distinction to the before and after advertising narrative, or an aspirational one. Aspirational advertising is historical and also ongoing; in this style of ad, something is promised as a longer- term solution, a motivator or mind frame changer—see Under Armour’s #TransformYourself campaign, which featured ads with Olympians and then used the slogan in online listings for workout gear (Jeff Yeats)—or as a more immediate shift. Dunagan provides a perfect example of this older transformational model of consumption with a 2002 Red Stripe beer ad, where a black

233 Jamaican character dancing well gives a can of beer to a white tourist which “actualizes his potential ability” and gets him to join in (Consuming 156). While the racial rhetoric is different from the millennial multiculturalism seen in the online ads of the 2010s, so too is the transformative aspect.32

Ads promoting affirmational consumption instead often show a product as part of a quotidian scene or an already-established routine. For example, in a fifteen-second preroll ad for

John Frieda hair products, a young, lighter-skinned black woman with long, tightly-coiled hair uses their hair styling products first before attending a dance rehearsal and again later, after showering before going out to meet friends (“Tame Flyaways in a Beat”). The slogan, “Your

Hair Talks. Make a Statement.” positions one’s hair as a unique identifier and a location of signification. In turn, John Frieda wants to be part of that, or to make that possible. It is especially noteworthy that a mainstream hair product company—that is one with mostly white clientele, historically—are showing themselves as a usable product for a black woman with a natural hairstyle, itself a statement.33 In another similar ad, for Degree MotionSense deodorant, three women are shown getting ready for a night out—each is singing and dancing around their respective apartments at various stages of getting ready before they put their spray deodorant on and continuing to dance. The continuation of the movement before and after the application of the deodorant demonstrates how the product supports the users’ ongoing activities, as seen in a shot from the outside of the apartment building (figure 3.8). At the end, one of the women meets up with a friend to dance at a rooftop bar (Degree Women). The slogans for this campaign:

“Dance More. Live More. The more you move, the more it works. It Won’t Let You Down” assert the freedom the product gives the user; the dancing provides evidence for their claims.

234

Figure 3.8 Dancing continues after product use. Prior to pulling out to this shot, the ad has just shown each of the women in their own apartments getting ready and using the deodorant. The ongoing dancing shown through the windows supports the ad’s claims. Screenshot from Degree Women, “NEW DEGREE® STAY FRESH WITH MOTIONSENSE™ – ULTIMATE FRESHNESS IN NEW SCENTS YOU’LL LOVE :15,” YouTube, 4 Feb 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSPBH1VciLQ, Accessed 8 Apr 2019.

Identity Formation Through Representations of Consumption

The use of dance in advertising, alongside practices of casting, costuming, and ad copy, helps convey certain ideas and frameworks about identity and its relation to consumption. I believe that many contemporary ads posit a viewer and consumer with an existing and ongoing sense of self—an identity—which the product being advertised can support. However, this is a relatively new representation, and is not reflected even in Dunagan’s 2018 book. I think this is due largely to the differences in television and Internet-native advertisement, and in the recency of the phenomenon. Despite the shift I have observed in some exemplars, the longstanding ideas

235 and rhetorics around consumption and identity in advertising persist in many other instances, and also serve as a substrata for online advertising.

Dunagan asserts that advertising posits identity as both fluid and static; it asserts static categories between which people can move themselves through consumption (Consuming). This is still true in some ads produced within the rhetorics of virtuosic individuality and millennial multiculturalism; it can be observed in how choreography is assigned in relation to a dancer’s presumed identity because of skin or hair color, body type, or other features. However, there are many more categories than have historically been presented, ranging over subcultures, sexuality, and bodily traits that are communal identifications in the social media age. There is also less of an assumption in the advertisements that people would want to move between static categories; that is to say, to use their consumption to change their identity. Instead, there is a move towards recognizing that people might have multiple identifications all at once, though they may choose to highlight them at different times or in combination.

In the debut ad for singer-designer Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty line (Snobette), models of many ethnicities and skin tones walk through a cityscape individually before all coming together on a rooftop. The camera pans over the assembled group, promoting the fact that Fenty’s foundation was the most shade-inclusive ever (Schallon). The ad features Halima Aden, a

Somali-American model who wears hijab (see figure 3.9). While this visibly marks her as

Muslim, her inclusion is multiple; she also wears makeup, and requires a shade of brown not frequently sold. As ads begin to acknowledge the complex constellation of identifications encapsulated in the people they feature, they also do so for the consumers they address.

236

Figure 3.9 Halima Aden (right) and Fenty’s multicultural cast. They are shown here on a crosswalk, a popular location in these ads, on their way to join more models. As is common, each model was first shown one at a time in different contexts to highlight their multiple identities and affiliations as well as their makeup looks. Screenshot from Snobette, “Rihanna Debuts Fenty Beauty Campaign Ft. Halima Aden, Slick Woods and Leomie Anderson,” YouTube, 1 Sep 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_FoFRnZPh4, Accessed 8 Apr 2019.

Dunagan argues that dance in advertising “models a subjectivity that is at once both the rational Cartesian expressive “I” and the rhizomatic, ongoing, serial creation of self—an emergent “I,” produced through intersecting relational flows of interests and actions”

(Consuming 158). Despite being developed in relation to legacy advertising, this analysis maintains its relevance, questioning whether young consumers do in fact have a conception of their self that they want confirmed or affirmed, or if that is merely the requisite representational mode for existing in the current mediated economy. An ASOS ad featuring the same model in twelve very different scenarios and outfits exemplifies Dunagan’s analysis that “[b]y highlighting the body’s ability to assume and discard style, dance-in-advertising promotes consumption-as-performance-of-identity,” positioning “subjectivity and identity as fluid and

237 relational” (Consuming 15). Each scene captures the model with completely different styling and demeanor, such that while she remains the same mixed-race skinny woman with very short hair and bleached eyebrows, she takes on personas moving from 90s Hip-Hop aficionado to punk to queer femme dandy to casual millennial, to a DJ at a party where dancers do the afrobeat move gwara gwara (ASOS). Her changing styles of embodiment, along with the clothing, support the ad’s slogan, “my style is never done.” Some of these varied personae are shown in figure 3.10.

Figure 3.10 A single model demonstrates the sartorial range of ASOS. In lieu of multiple cast members, a single model demonstrates the range of identities and style the clothing company can affirm, while showing an awareness of the internal complexity of individual consumers. Screenshots from ASOS, “ASOS AW18 | My Style is Never Done,” YouTube, 18 Sep 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gRhiFQfXIo, Accessed 9 Apr 2019.

238

The description of the video sheds light on the marketing rhetoric of the ad: “Welcome to the ASOS AW18 collection, where we believe being unapologetically yourself is the only way to live freely. Watch as Jazzelle explores every side of her personality, from extra-terrestrial entity to futuristic cowboy, and let it inspire you to discover your own ever-changing identity.” This

ASOS ad shows the continued relevance of Dunagan’s analysis, while also demonstrating a shift in rhetoric. The ad does portray someone using consumption to change the sartorial representation of their identity, but the rhetoric in the advertising copy makes clear this is supposed to be affirmational; each outfit and scenario is a component of herself, rather than a way to become someone new or different; it is not a change but rather an expression of already existing multiplicity.

To complicate matters slightly, the presumption of a fully-formed identity may nonetheless set up an implicit aspirational frame. The rhetoric is affirmational, but it is possible these ads and the larger ‘you do you’ ethos sets up a new desire—not to be someone else, or to change who you are, as might have been the reaction in an era of transformational advertising rhetoric—but for a strong sense of style, self, and identity, and for the ability to show it has been obtained, through consumption and display. In a New York Times Magazine essay on the now ubiquitous ‘you do you’ ethos as a reflection of contemporary society, Colson Whitehead concludes “Given the rising, merciless It that you and I face day in and day out, surely haters are the least of our worries. Might as well do you. Perform the impersonation of your best self.

Maybe you’ll get it right this time” (np). While ads and their products claim to affirm and support, the rhetoric of consumption does always open the space of desire and through it both new performances and new possibilities.

239 Consumption allows for the affirmation and broadcasting of intersecting and multiple identity formations and identifications through sartorial and design composition, and forms of display both in person and online. Identity creation, affirmation, and broadcast happen through consumption, capture, and circulation. The identity put forward then circulates in tandem with the advertising which promises it. In order to do this, the products must fit into the consumer’s life, and to portray this fact successfully in their marketing. One of the ways they bolster this in addition to positioning the products in-motion through the processual depiction of daily life is through slogans and other ad copy. But the individual is also layered, multiple, and networked.

Thus, non-narrative media like music videos, dance videos, and advertisements fall squarely into the representational rhetoric of millennial multiculturalism, often depicting groups, where each person is differentiated though together.

Composing the Group from Individual Performers and Consumers

I now turn to the role that group performance (including but not exclusively, unison) plays in meaning-making and the representational rhetoric of millennial multiculturalism, particularly in advertisements and in the class combination videos.34 As a rhetoric that manages difference, millennial multiculturalism thrives in unison and group performance where unity is portrayed through individualized performers moving together, whether in space or through editing.35 As with any diversity or multicultural project, the representation can obscure the need for actual structural change, even sometimes doing symbolic violence. However, I argue that the

240 shared time and space of movement in these recent works demonstrate a way towards a truly representational polymorphous body politic and a way of being together equitably.

As discussed in the introduction to theories of multiculturalism, previous versions of managing heterogeneity, in part through representation, have actually erased difference and consolidated power, even in instances when equity was being sought. In her essay, “Corporeal

Representation in/and the Body Politic,” feminist historian Moira Gatens examines the metaphorical and metonymical relationship of the body in the rhetoric of representation and the body politic. Reparticularizing and literalizing the body metaphor to be centered in the moving body, I argue that in the case of these videos, and other media presentations of bodies, in fact

“the body politic is constituted by a creative act, by a work of art or artifice, that uses the human body as its model or metaphor” (80). Gatens’s critique comes out of feminist theory and focuses on the incorporation—the bodily subjugation—of woman to man in classical literature and prevailing political thought. She writes, “insofar as [man] can maintain this apparent unity through incorporation, he is not required to acknowledge difference. The metaphor functions to restrict our political vocabulary to one voice only: a voice that can speak of only one body, one reason, and one ethic” (83). The critique can be applied to other groups and identities; while slogans like “United by Flavor,” “Be Together, Not the Same” and “Unity in Diversity” do acknowledge difference, they may still privilege its incorporation into the whole. Like the man in

Gatens’s analysis, this whole has historically systematically ignored and bypassed the labor of many of its constituents, particularly those of color. She historicizes our understanding of representation “in the sense where one body or agent is taken to stand for a group of diverse bodies. Here we are considering the metonymical representation of a complex body by a

241 privileged part of that body” (81). While I argue the rhetoric which exerts the representational force in these videos is particular to the current time period, the question Gatens poses remains highly relevant: “who is represented by this image of bodily unity” (83)?

The representational rhetoric of the heterogeneity of dancers in advertisements and in class videos is very similar; however, the production context is quite different. In some ways, the ads mimic the classes, especially given overlap in specific dancers, and as part of this recent surge in interest in dance media. But in many ways, they are both fulfilments of an image represented in earlier multicultural rhetoric and media representation, and of current ones. One main difference in the two video genres is the way the range of performers are chosen. I assert that a large part of the appeal of the class videos is the way they fit into the larger millennial multicultural mediascape, including the range and individualities of the dancers. One of the things that makes these videos and their representational force different—from the multiculturalism of Hollywood dance movies, or even the contemporary technology and clothing companies who use many of the same dancers who appear in combination videos in their advertising—is that the videos capture a reality outside of casting, although always in close proximity to it. In the case of the classroom makeup, the distribution of age, ethnicity, body type, and gender identity is actual; seeing who is there is part of the documentary force of the video.

The people who are there are the best dancers who have access to the major studios in Los

Angeles. But the representational force comes through how they are divided up, perform their identities in various ways, and are framed at Millennium Dance Complex by the large “Unity in

Diversity” sign. This combination of attention to promotional force, virtuosic individuality, and the investment in heterogeneity is what characterizes millennial multiculturalism.

242 Unity in diversity, synonymous with many of the other slogans circulating on YouTube, is an answer to those schemas which required sameness or representation without difference, and functions not only rhetorically but as a compositional element of millennial multiculturalism.

Ads and other videos which utilize these compositional tools and framing devices revise previous models of representing heterogeneity.

Media studies scholar Inna Arzumanova’s critique of multiracialism in Save The Last

Dance argues against its denial of structural racism through dance scenes. She suggests that

Dance is positioned as an equalizing medium, allowing mastery to smooth out otherwise fragmented and intersectional identities and managing to exaltedly transcend what figures as traditional identity politics. The de-racializing of bodies that these narratives allege assumes a deliberate reduction of identity to a moment that produces a pure corporeal meritocracy for the audience’s marvel. (167)

Gatens points to the “dream of equity, based on corporeal interchangeability” originating in 19th century liberal thought (86), which has manifested more recently in colorblind ideologies. As has been established, colorblind rhetoric always ends up defaulting to whiteness as representative of the totality, or as Gatens phrases it, “the metonymical representation of a complex body by a privileged part of that body” (81). While earlier versions of multiculturalism did show images of people of different backgrounds, it still led to the mosaic of commodity diversity, which Swan argues “visually represents racial difference within a sameness grid and commodifies it” (78). I argue that the compositional element of presenting individuals first before combining them— often showing them coming together in space, but also through serialized campaigns—breaks the grid of sameness and allows each person to be considered on their own before joining the group, establishing an impossibility of interchangeability and rather the potential for collaboration.

243 Towards a Polymorphous Body Politic

There are a few compositional ways ads are representing a polymorphous body politic.

First, through actual unison movement, performed with individuality or interspersed with freestyle or solo movement; non-unison but coordinated choreography, coming in and out of each person doing ‘their style’ and dancing together; and serialized or sequential group movement formed through editing. Any of these may also be used in combination in a single video or across a campaign.

The use of unison choreography shows brand identity or multiplies a point, for example, just how stretchy a particular style of jeans is in a thirty-second Aéropostale ad. The ad uses popular dance choreography emphasizing pelvic circles and bent knees to test the limits of the jeans’ flexibility, and ends with the framing copy “the only jean you need: Seriously Stretchy

Jeans” splashed on the screen. The seven women dancing are all very slim with the same straight body type, but include Black, White, Latina, and Asian dancers. The casting—along with different colors of the jeans and slightly different styling, as well as moments of solos and individualism—allows the brand to reach a greater range of consumers, while (as shown in figure 3.11), the unison works to create spectacle and feelings of belonging (Aéropostale).

244

Figure 3.11 Unison magnifies a selling point. Because it is promoting a specific product rather than a brand, unison is an effective tool in this ad, here demonstrating the stretchiness of a new kind of jean. Screenshot from Aéropostale, “Seriously Stretchy Jeans from Aéropostale,” YouTube, 20 July 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPiC_fTPIbc, Accessed 8 Apr 2019.

Frequently the created group is aggregative, with a series of individuals shown before coming together, as already mentioned in the Fenty Beauty example. In other cases, like in those ads for MotionSense, and American Eagle Jeans, they are never shown all at once, but instead one at a time in their own settings, united through look or through brand, as if to say: this brand can be for a lot of people, including you. In either case, presenting members of the group separately breaks the grid of sameness Swan critiques and allows each person to be considered on their own. An example of the first approach is in an ad for Qdoba, accompanied by the copy

“At QDOBA, we believe that no matter how great our differences may be there will always be something even greater that unites us–our undeniable love for flavor. We are all

#UnitedByFlavor.” The ad is filmed in a restaurant with editing and filming that cuts up the body, and the quick pace of more traditional commercials. This Instagram ad shows one white

245 teen girl using ballet movement vocabulary while the other dancers, another white woman, an afro-Latina woman, and a Black man, each perform in their own styles of Hip-Hop. Wearing different (though colorful) clothes, they carry their own dishes, but they all share a quesadilla together at the end as their solos culminate at the table (Qdoba). Though in some ways the look and editing of the ad make it more akin to older and television commercials, the use of graphic overlays of shapes as if they were stickers on Snapchat or Stories (see figure 3.12), and the aggregative group show its integration of social media era aesthetics and compositional tools.

Figure 3.12 Solos leading to group dancing and the use of graphics. Each dancer has a brief solo, their individuality bolstered by a personal screen adornment, including stars, (left) as well as the cheese, avocado, and lighting bolt emojis. After each solo there is a moment of simultaneous dancing before they sit together to share a single dish (right). Screenshot from Qdoba, “At QDOBA, we believe,” Instagram, 28 Jan 2018, www.instagram.com/p/BegdFCNlUfz/, Accessed 8 Apr 2019.

246 In “Gadgets, Bodies and Screens: Dance in Advertisements for New Technologies,”

Melissa Blanco Borelli considers how the body can respond to the alienation of technology and its place in the market. She argues that there is potential in the movement itself;

the collective action of dancing together creates new communities that negotiate different ways of being autonomous within capitalism. Furthermore, it is through dancing together—cooperating in learning the choreography, maintaining the proper timing and rhythm in synchronicity with other bodies, and keeping the appropriate distance from other bodies so that they all have equal amounts of space to execute the moves—that a type of politics of togetherness emerges. (“Gadgets” 425)

An Android Wear ad advises the viewers similarly with the slogan “Be Together. Not

The Same.” Dancing in collaboration and separately to an upbeat refrain of “this is me on the regular so you know,” twenty-two dancers diverse in race and gender are featured in brightly- colored casual clothing. The movement is mostly Popping, Tutting, and Bonebreaking, including finger- and face-Tutting to highlight the advertised smartwatches worn on the wrist. Small groups work together to create intricate moving geometric shapes, with solos that highlight individual dance style differences, and the ad ends with everyone on screen and freestyling

(Android). As Blanco-Borelli notes, “it is through this acceptance of difference rather than a synthesis of it where the potentiality for cooperation emerges” (“Gadgets” 425). This ad features several of the components used to portray millennial multiculturalism in advertising, including sequential individuals or small groups adding up to a bigger one, and a combination of freestyle and unison movement. More than most, it uses the cooperation of the established individuals to accomplish feats that are impossible on one’s own, including complicated group tutting formations and interesting shapes, as seen in figure 3.13.

247

Figure 3.13 The group in collaboration. Much of the movement in the Android smart watch ad requires multiple people in coordination with each other; the formation pictured here draws attention both to the advertised product and to the multicultural casting, which each contribute to the ad’s promotional force. Screenshot from Android, “Android: Wear what you want (party on)” YouTube, 19 Mar 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybg5klCxQGA, Accessed 8 Apr 2019.

The current landscape is different than that which Gatens analyzes, insofar as most people—and certainly advertisers and casting agencies—understand that the body politic is in fact complex, and does not try to symbolize it with one simplified stand-in. Instead, there are many individuals chosen to represent a category within that group of diverse bodies. While in some ways this is an improvement, it of course obscures the multiplicity and complexity found within groups of peoples, and the ways affinities and socialities flow between and amongst cultural groups. In the Target ad for the 2017 Latin Billboard Awards, four different settings play out, full of products, colors, and clothes, with dancers representative of the many shades, ethnicities, shapes, and sizes of the Latinx community, and of all ages (“Target Celebrates”).

248 Rather than seeing Latinx as a singular identity, the music, a remix of the classic “Oye

Como Va” and dance styles reflect the regional and stylistic differences of the larger Latinx cultural geography. With each change in musical form and setting, a common referential phrase for the style appears on the screen. These forms and encouragements include Bachata, whose

“un, dos, pam!” (one, two, pow!) mimics the rhythm of the lateral step and pushed out hip of the base footwork; Cumbia marked by “media vuelta” (turn around), perhaps a reference to the complex partner turns used; Reggeaton music accompanied by Hip-Hop and breaking choreography and the exhortation “hasta abajo” (get down); and finally Salsa, labeled rueda (a group form of Salsa done in a moving circle). At the end, everyone dances together and we are instructed to all dance in the first person plural imperative: “Bailemos” Positioning Salsa rueda at the end of the ad is an intentional compositional and rhetorical choice paralleling the uses of sequential solos before group performance in other advertisements; it shows a social mode of

Salsa, the most pan-Latinx dance form, as a way for everyone to dance together after showing them separately (see figure 3.14). The ad also shows that people and groups previously represented as singular, in this case Latinx, are now understood to be more internally complex, demonstrating a microcosm of the larger process.

249

Figure 3.14 Salsa Rueda as culminating group dance. Dancers and models who have appeared in previous sections of the ad featuring different music and dance genres come together at the end in the circle of Salsa rueda. Screenshot from Target, “Target Celebrates Music and Culture in “Oye Como Va” Remix by DJ Afro,” A Bullseye View, 28 Apr 2017, corporate.target.com/article/2017/04/billboard-latin-music-awards-dj-afro, Accessed 8 Apr 2019.

In the rhetoric of millennial multiculturalism, a particularly late-stage neoliberal context, virtuosic individuality, skilled freestyle, and choreography from varied sources offer a form to answer those questions. This unity may still be a fantasy in the broader sense, but it is one which allows for bodily difference through individualized performance by many bodies together and their subsequent circulation through representation.36

The historical conception of the political body is as neutral and unitary—a default to white masculinity. Gatens argues that what this definition cannot “address is how different bodies “fill” the same ‘empty’ social or political space” (85). While gains have been made,

Gatens cautions that a “polymorphous body politic” (85) does not yet exist. Twenty years after

250 her observations, I offer the gathered virtuosic individuals dancing together in advertising, as well as in music videos, class, and concept videos as a momentary representation of such a body politic; a hope lingering in millennial multiculturalism despite its use of this hope for financial gain. I argue that dance videos show the individualized dancing group illustrating a polymorphic body politic, as choreography, and dancing address how different bodies fill space. This happens not only copresently, though this likely has a larger impact on the dancers themselves, but also through edited sequential solos, and asynchronously, as in a fandom or consumer base linked through hashtags and tagged photos and video. The community and unity formed in the groups and in the videos is both because of and despite unison and group performance—it demonstrates the possibility of a kind of being-together-separately. This is evident not only in freestyle sections, but in the individuality of performance of unison choreography. These two instantiations of virtuosic individuality forefront the particular dancer’s training, abilities, and performance of self-identity, but do so within a frame provided by a structure—that of choreography, and the camaraderie of shared unison, labor, environment, and in the case of advertising, consumption, framed by videography and shared further through circulation.

Conclusion

Theories of multiculturalism, including my own analysis, argue that multicultural visual rhetoric is often separate from the realities of structural racism, even if people wielding them think they can address these issues. Can a representation of enacting a kind of polymorphous body politic have an impact on the structural realities of race? In other words, not as a sole tactic,

251 but as part of a network of policy changes, or as a precursor; can this representation re-engage with structural racism? The conversation around #RepresentationMatters argues that in a way, they can—that seeing characters, stories, and performers with larger ranges of identities and experiences can change people who identify and those who become allies or learn more about other people’s lived experiences. I think the representational force of these videos with their virtuosic performance of competence as well as individuality have similar potential. On the other hand, these videos are also part of a long history of people of color performing on stage and on screen for a wide audience, where their labor and creativity may benefit them personally (though at a historically dramatically lesser rate) but does not do much for larger understandings and enactments of equality. Americans have long enjoyed the virtuosity of black bodies without feeling compelled to extend rights or fair treatment to black people. The difficulty then is to how to critique these videos in a way that still accounts for the conditions of late-stage neoliberal capitalism and the need for respect and remuneration of embodied and expressive labor.

Millennial Multiculturalism is the pervasive cultural rhetoric ‘managing’ heterogeneity in the current mediascape. Advertisements and combination videos operate and circulate within it, while at the same time offering glimpses of an alternative representational, rhetorical, and actual possibility of a polymorphous body politic. The representational power of more types of people and their bodies in action has been shown to be strong and impactful, but it is difficult to address structural issues in this way. At the same time, products of millennial multiculturalism like studio-based class combination videos and advertisements present an image of a heterogeneous body politic not often seen.

252 In the images that circulate as well as the co-present circumstances where they are photographed and filmed, these videos offer the possibility of some kind of real engagement with a genuinely polymorphous body politic that attends to difference and its historicity, both in media representation—which carries a great deal of weight in the modern image-centric existence—and at the governmental level. In the coming together of variously-identifying individuals in collaboration and composition and in real joy and effort, I glimpse the possibility of this body politic. I would argue that this engagement is particularly possible in dance media, where people move together in physical or digital space as embodied individuals. I propose that the performances in advertisements and many co-circulating videos and their consumption is a way in which heterogeneity is managed which starts to envision and shape new possibilities, while nonetheless operating within and reflecting millennial multiculturalism and the capitalist imperative of the contemporary era.

253 Conclusion

I began this dissertation with the assertion that understanding dance on YouTube necessitates an analysis that complicates binary classifications like amateur and professional; understands the influence of YouTube-native production and commercial content on each other; and accounts for the multivalence of genre, intent, and impact, for which I introduced the idea of forces. The focus of each chapter demonstrated these complexities in different ways. In the first chapter, I laid out the ways in which members of the dance video viewing audience have taken on the roles of critic, educator, and genre police for their fellow viewers through the creation of social paratexts, both written and visual. To do so, these users also take on the roles of evidence gatherer and distributor, in addition to having often mastered some kind of video production themselves. These acts disrupt previous hierarchies of assessment and the separation of text and commentary and have in turn impacted the growing amount of coverage of popular dance in longer-form cultural commentary. In discussing class videos in the second chapter, I point to the way in which the videographic entextualization of a previously pedagogical space through a documentary capture leads to a final product that is a performance. Class videos are a presentational Internet screendance genre with a great deal of cultural capital as shown in the way it has evolved, gained a large viewership, and been adapted into various kinds of commercial projects as well as gradually being recognized by performing artists and their record labels. However, revealing the tension between popularity and professionalism, the performers in the genre are not being compensated; in fact, they are often paying to take the class. Despite the

254 way the entextualized version circulates online, the live context still operates within a traditional infrastructure, where students pay a studio that in turn pays the teacher for the instruction, revealing the continued importance of an awareness of the structures of power and production in situ. In the third chapter, I turn to advertisements which fall well within the traditional structures of professional production. However, even here there are overlaps and contributions from the online context, including the display of product in action in quotidian scenes; the movement vocabularies used; the centrality of virtuosic individuality which positions the self as persona and as personal brand; and the millennial multicultural values displayed through casting and composition. These values have been popularized and circulated in the social media era, allowing for greater expression and representation of a wider range of identities, as well as education about those identities, and respect for them.

The pace of creation, varied audiences and creators, and multiple streams of funding mean that the content on YouTube and its creators call into question many assumptions and categories used prior to the platform’s advent. These issues are only becoming more complicated as YouTube and other social media platforms have been legitimized as a space for advertising, commercial content, and talent scouting. The application of the concept of forces enables a discussion of the ways in which the texts which circulate online often carry multiple meanings and multiple purposes, which is also connected in part to the status of the creator but also the audience—the other viewers and users on multiple platforms, all of whom fall into negotiated, tenuous, and networked positions of relative knowledge, power, and influence.

For everything YouTube has done for dance, or that dance has done on and for YouTube, the cultural, economic, and legal valuation of dance in the United States constrains the

255 understanding of the complexity of the cultural production in circulation on YouTube and other platforms, and curtails its possibilities for remuneration. The material and historical conditions of popular dance, always against a backdrop of racialized discrimination, have led to different economic structures in the Internet-connected economy for dancers and choreographers than for other content creators. Dancers mostly operate within traditional means of earning; teaching, studio ownership, being hired to appear in live or filmed performances, and choreographing for those. At the same time, some opportunities are particular to the social media era and are in line with other content creators, giving them greater creative control than other modes may, including brand sponsorship, multi-channel networks, merch, tours, online paid tutorials, and the possibility of success through self-curated social media presence. With this economy comes issues, including the uncertain exchange value of views and subscribers, particularly depending on issues of platform, genre, and copyright; and the continued relationship of popular forms with mass media infrastructure.

This relationship is particularly interesting looking at the ways in which Internet-native dance and videographic forms, values, and practitioners have appeared within primarily Internet- circulated commercial projects, specifically music videos and clothing advertisements. Part of the larger complexity of participatory and convergence culture, commercial use, and collaborations both subsume and broadcast the innovations of dance communities, amateur filmmakers, and subcultural entrepreneurs. These music videos and ads transmit social media- native movement, videographic, and promotional techniques, but within longstanding infrastructures that primarily benefit those with preexisting economic and cultural capital, whether brands, celebrities, or along lines of class and race.

256 Nonetheless, the complexities of dancers’ and choreographers’ desire for and access to commercial funding must be considered, including how this reflects and shifts historical relations between popular dance and capital. I argue that the social media context of mediation and the possibility of self-controlled outlets for the making and distributing of filmed popular dance changes the reception for commercial mediation of popular dance by communities of practice which have not always embraced monetization, or who at least have been reported on in this way. The videos and their makers considered in this dissertation, and many more on YouTube, raise questions about the commodity value of dance itself, about ways to negotiate the tenuous relationship between circulation and remuneration, and the cyclical desires for success and innovation that entangle dance with the market.

Bodily labor, and particularly dancing, has historically been valued less than other forms of labor in the United States, an inheritance of Enlightenment and Puritan conceptions of the body and in no small part due to the number of racial and sexual minorities engaged in the field of entertainment. In addition to attention to screen conventions and circulation, attending to the economics and power relations of YouTube reveals the ways in which YouTube offers new models for compensation of and agency over bodily labor, but also continues established ones.

What remains to be seen is whether the systems in place on YouTube in fact afford the dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers more agency and creative freedom than previous models, and if so, how that increased freedom lines up with remuneration. Because those individuals and communities that invest time and energy in the development of dance practices are often marginalized in other aspects of society, compensation for their labor is of special importance, whether movement innovators are working onscreen, onstage, or in some other venue.

257 Despite the incredible amount of time the world spends on YouTube—about one billion hours of video is watched on YouTube per day (“YouTube”)—it is still related to legacy media ideas about legitimacy, success, and value. In the same way that the multivalent and varied dance production on YouTube requires new definitions and uses for ideas of amateur and professional, they also require an understanding of the disconnect between numerical success and monetary stability or profitability. The future of YouTube as a platform and future research on it must include a focus on the ethics and economics of the continued interrelation of the commercial and the participatory. Continued commercial use of fan production and issues of copyright around both music and dance show there is much to be worked out in how separate systems and values of development, citationality, and the distribution of capital can interact together productively, and without distancing producers or consumers.

258 Notes

Introduction

1 See Penney and Dadas; Vernallis “Unruly Media.”

2 An extensive subway and poster ad campaign around New York City in Spring 2019 suggests Vimeo may be attempting to change its position in the video platform hierarchy.

3 For more on Black cultural production on Vine, see Daileda; Gaillot; Giorgis.

4 See Edmond for a review of how music videos have changed since YouTube; Vernallis

“Unruly Media.”

5 See Bragin “From Oakland Turfs to Harlem Shakes” for a critique of the racial politics of viral dance videos.

6 React videos, made popular by Fine Brothers Entertainment, consist of one or more people being filmed as they watch and comment on something for the first time, with an inset of the original video playing simultaneously.

7 See Bench, “Single Ladies’ is Gay” and “Monstrous Belonging”; Pullen; Thomas;

Kraut “Reenactment as Racialized Scandal” for analyses of dance fan production.

8 See Harlig “Fresher than You.”

9 See Bragin “Shot and Captured.”

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10 See Edmond for a thorough review and critique of generalizations of YouTube content, focusing on one-take OK Go videos as complicating established ideas about editing.

11 Increased length also enables content creators to allow ‘midroll’ ads in the middle of videos which are monetizeable, leading to greater earning potential.

12 See Blanco Borelli, “Dancing in Music Videos;” Harlig “Communities of Practice.”

13 It is unlikely they are earning ad revenue through YouTube as other content producers with their view counts would be; you cannot earn money on copyrighted content you do not hold the copyright to. In fact, sometimes the videos are taken down entirely for copyright infringement.

Chapter 1

1 All view and comment counts are as of August, 2015.

2 For historical examples, see Eve Golden, Vernon and Irene Castle’s Ragtime

Revolution; Matthew F. Delmont, Nicest Kids in Town American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia; and Nelson George, The Hippest Trip in

America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture & Style.

3 Many content-hosting sites have comment sections on the page that the content is displayed, including Facebook, Instagram, Vine, 9Gag, Tumblr, news sites, blogs, and others.

This is a characteristic and an innovation of the social media era. In The Meaning of Video

Games, Steven Jones also discusses proximate video game paratexts.

260

4 This literature is cited throughout; notable contributors include Patricia Lange, one of the first to explicitly look at the pragmatics of YouTube comments (“Commenting”), and one of the most-cited in the literature.

5 Harris and Hiltunen, section 2.1 summarize other terminology currently in use, including Internet linguistics, digitally-mediated communication, digital networked writing, electronically-mediated communication, keyboard-to-screen communication, electronic communication, and Internet-mediated communication.

6 One of the only publications that considers comments fully and as evidence is Ann

Werner’s article “Getting Bodied with Beyoncé on YouTube.”

7 While once visible in the description box, tags are currently visible only to the uploader and the search algorithm.

8 See Henry Jenkins’s blog posts “Fan Vidding: A Labor Of Love” Part One and Part

Two and their comments for more on the long history of vidding and the vidding community pre-

Internet.

9 Italics in original.

10 Thanks to my colleague Erica Haugvedt for introducing me to a nuanced critique and application of reception theory as used in literary studies, and Elena Benthaus for her introduction to televisual audience theory.

11 This is also true of Instagram, Twitter, and formerly Vine, which can be cross-posted to

Facebook.

12 Gene Smith calls this “Object-centered sociality,” also an attribute of Tumblr, one of his main case studies (182).

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13 This recognition of the text as central to the interaction of its audience echoes Michael

Warner’s theorization of a public as formed by discourse around a text.

14 The idea of the ‘social paratext’ is my own, although Allan F. Westphall, in his Books and Religious Devotion: The Redemptive Reading of an Irishman in Nineteenth Century New

England does use these words together in his introduction, but not throughout. He uses it to discuss marginalia with direct address: “social paratext of Connary’s books—a particularly performative dimension of the paratext where we find him addressing his family.” Erik A.

Hanson uses the phrase in passing in his blog review of Steven Jones’s The Meaning of Video

Games.

15 Metadata as such is very important to YouTube users, as the search algorithm relies both on user-generated meta-data like title, category, and tagging, and on statistical metadata like view count and video quality. For more on metadata and the social Internet see Gene Smith,

Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web.

16 At the time of writing, other viewers can express their approval or disapproval of a comment, its sentiment, or its author through pushing an up or down thumbs icon, or reply directly in a threaded comment structure. Comments are sorted by ‘top comments’ as a default setting, which privileges highly rated comments, comments by the uploader, and at one point, comments by people in the viewer’s Google+ circles (Rose). The current comment structure, including threading, was introduced in 2013, explained by critics and proponents alike as promotion for Google+ as a social media platform, and as a way to better prevent exposure to less pleasant comments thought to be permitted by YouTube’s anonymity (Hill). Google+ was

262 phased out in 2018. For more on the possible impact of anonymity on YouTube comments, see

Harris and Hiltunen, esp. section 2, and Lange, “Publicly Private and Privately Public.”

17 The process through which personal innovation enters the common movement vocabulary is under-studied. Generally speaking, it is through a combination of time passing, overt permission or mentorship given by the innovator, and through biting, which over time or volume becomes less illicit.

18 Jenkins’s 2006 book Convergence Culture was formative in the development of transmedia Internet scholarship.

19 The movements used include the following foundational ones: the Mike and Ike, where the feet are in a V with the weight on the ball of one foot and the heel of the other, then inverted to switch back and forth; Dribbles, where the feet kick straight out, accompanied by the same side arm, in a 1, 2, 3, pause rhythm; Tom n’ Jerry’s, similar to Dribbles but to the side; and the

Irk & Jerk, where the right leg kicks out while the left leg chugs away, both feet return to center, and then switch. See PAUSE EDDIE’s tutorial video for these and other Footwork moves.

20 Eastwood rarely responds to comments, so his attention to Lady Sol’s comment is doubly deferential.

21 The 2011 Flockey video brought this phenomenon to my attention, so it was interesting two years later to see that he again was at the center of a generic debate in another videoed demo at SDK, this time over his music choice (YAK Battles “Flockey Locking”). This perhaps indicates that Flockey is particularly interested in pushing boundaries; comments on the 2013 video indicate that some of the viewers are aware of his oeuvre, and have noticed this tendency and appreciate it, while others either are not familiar or are not interested.

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22 Uncle Sam points are a foundational locking move of exaggerated pointing named after the gesture of the figure in the “Uncle Sam Wants YOU” military recruitment posters.

23 Because YouTube’s platform had a different threading system for comments at the time some conversations were happening, after the switch in format older conversation on older video got disassembled. Exchanges presented as conversations were reassembled by me through noting user names and conversational referents.

24 This commenter is not a total outsider, however, as can be seen from the reference to what dancers associated with the underground movement think, and particularly the use of the words ‘ski’ and ‘head’ which are both names that describe Hip-Hop devotees and practitioners.

25 It is difficult to say which comment was toprated as the system has changed since the exchange to a system of likes and dislikes on comments, and the old data was wiped in the change.

26 Aufderheide and Jaszi offer the following typology for fan video in an article on the use of copyrighted material on YouTube: Parody and satire, Negative or critical commentary,

Positive commentary, Quoting to trigger discussion, Illustration or example, Incidental use,

Personal reportage or diaries, Archiving of vulnerable or revealing materials, Pastiche or collage

(5). Side-by-side videos engage in several of these.

27 It should be noted that split-screen videos appear in other modes on YouTube that do not serve a commentary or paratextual function, for example split screen is used in narrative story telling to expand temporal or viewpoint possibilities, and is often used in one person covers of songs as a way to multiply the performer for more complicated vocal or movement arrangements. In addition, split screen is often seen in gaming videos where it is used to show

264 two players playing, not to compare an original and a copy, although dance video games split screens do sometimes show the screen avatar and video of the live player side-by-side. Of course, side-by-side comparisons have a long history in advertising, which uses them to insinuate the superiority of one product over another. In recent years, this strategy has particularly appeared in advertisements for Macs and PCs. This use of the visual rhetoric of comparison almost certainly influences the way viewers interpret side-by-side comparisons in other contexts.

However, technologically and in terms of textual productivity these cases are very different because an advertisement is a single video staged and produced by a single entity, whereas side- by-sides line up two independently made videos into a third product.

28 As I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, titling practices on YouTube are part of the clarity of genre for users on the platform. Take for example a fan remake of the movie trailer for Man of Steel titled “Man Of Steel Trailer - Homemade Version: Side-by-Side Comparison” which makes both its content and form very clear (Dustin McLean).

29 The side-by-side video is no longer available on Do-Nguyen’s channel, though the original cover video still is. The entry in references leads to a re-uploaded version on a third- party’s channel.

30 Thanks to Harmony Bench for making me reconsider the neutrality of this side-by-side.

31 An example of a third-party uploader, while not a dance example, is worth including for its explicit motivation articulated in the description box. It is the side-by-side of the opening credits of the television show Simon & Simon and the faithful remake done by Jon Hamm and

Adam Scott for their first “The Greatest Event in Television History” special on Adult Swim.

The uploader’s comments seem to indicate an inevitability to the existence of the side-by-side.

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He says, “since I didn’t see this anywhere else I thought I’d upload it “ (eji313). The YouTube users who uploaded the side-by-sides evidently believed that merely being able to see the remake was insufficient, that simultaneous comparison was a necessary or desired viewing experience for others to fully enjoy the efforts of Hamm and Scott. This is a highly social paratextual function performed by eji313, as it makes the work more viewable and enjoyable for the audience.

32 For an analysis of de Keersmaker’s legal position, see Merlyne Jean-Louis “If You Sue

Me You’re Out of Your Mind—Copyright and Moral Rights Issues Surrounding Beyoncé’s

‘Countdown’ Video.” For an analysis of the racialized component of the outrage against

Beyoncé, and the complex politics and aesthetics of reenactment, see Anthea Kraut,

“Reenactment as Racialized Scandal.”

33 It remains unclear why this part of their interview was edited out of their original audition footage. Whether intentional or accidental, it clearly demonstrates SYTYCD’s lack of awareness of popular dance and its ethics and social codes, despite the volume of their auditionees who are practitioners.

34 Beyoncé fans (fandom name “the Beyhive”) are well known for their sometimes verbally violent defense of the star. Beyoncé detractors are equally forceful.

Chapter 2

1 These dates and the dates throughout the chapter are approximate and to the best of my knowledge; I reached the timeline of this genre by going backwards through the uploaded videos

266 on the channels of known videographers and choreographers to find the earliest occurrences of the features which ended up codifying into the genre. When coding these videos, I found myself much more inclined to count those videos filmed at Millennium Dance Complex. They are easily visually recognizable, with their red hue. Furthermore, that space is rarely used for other kinds of videos, whereas those with thumbnails of outdoor locations are likely concept or semi-narrative videos, and those at Movement Lifestyle, the other studio where class videos were filmed in the early years, were often more presentational studio-based concept videos, perhaps because ML’s studio walls are black. While the location does not define these videos, it clearly is part of the larger aesthetic and of my experience of the genre as it coalesced.

2 Other presentational forms that manifest mostly through staging and performing repertory tend to be taught through mastering roles in individual works; this is quite common in

East and Southeast Asian forms.

3 See Naomi Bragin, “Oakland Turfs” for a critique of what she calls choreo-centricity as a kind of anti-blackness.

4 See Kimberly Monteyne’s Hip Hop on Film, in which she looks at the Hip-Hop films of the 1980s as musicals, providing a revisionist definition of the postclassical musical which focuses on setting and the use of space, opening the genre up to include Hip-Hop film.

5 Budda Stretch claims in his faculty biography at New York’s Broadway Dance Center to have been one of the first to teach Hip-Hop in a mainstream dance studio when he started at

BDC in 1989; it’s still likely the classes were more frequent in Los Angeles (“Budda Stretch”).

6 In the 2015 Urban Dance Camp (a European popular dance intensive) class schedule, for example, many of the classes are titled not with a style but with “choreography” or specified

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“Hip Hop Choreo” “Partner Choreo” “Iso choreo” “Lyrical Choreo.” Others, including

Dancehall, Popping, Krumping, Locking, likely to more particular and transportable skills taught, rather than focusing on the combination (“Timetable”).

7 Thanks to Benny Simon and Lyndsey Vader for discussing how they think about the role of combinations in their own pedagogy with me.

8 Also interesting is which groups do not get filmed, and which are filmed but do not appear in the final edited version of the video. Sometimes videos with additional groups, often titled in that manner, will appear on the videographer’s channel if the main video was on the choreographer’s.

9 In some early instances, censored versions of the song are played when kids are taking their turn to perform, which would have been another reason to separate dancers by age, though this happens less frequently after about 2017.

10 Groupings by gender have a historical precedent in screendance; in the jazz class combination scene in Center Stage, for example, variations to the choreography have clearly been assigned according to the gendered groups, which perform separately. In the combinations captured in the class videos, there occasionally seem to be variations offered, but most changes in the performance of the choreography along traditionally gendered movement quality or vocabulary seem to be the choice of the dancer according to their own identifications and style choices.

11 What is not captured is what other training is going on outside of the videos or outside these classes. The kids for example might have conditioning classes or more skills-based classes.

Adults might additionally be going to the gym, taking yoga, or going to Hip-Hop sessions.

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12 Teacher-choreographer Galen Hooks includes ‘freestyle roulette’ as part of her training method, see Galen Hooks.

13 I discuss individualized performance and its relation to personal brand in depth in

Chapter 3.

14 Dodds and Hooper borrow micro-choreography from Erin Brannigan.

15 Some choreographers emphasize the face more than others, whether through explicit instruction or by modelling. Janelle Ginestra performs herself with a highly expressive and mobile face. She clearly sets the facial choreography in her concept videos, see for example

MissJanelleG, “IDFWU.”

16 Beat killing refers to a moment when a dancer precisely matches a musical tempo, rhythm, or effect with their movement, especially in cypher or freestyle situations.

17 See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifiying Monkey.

18 In Experiencing Music Video, Carol Vernallis suggests that dance in music video primarily functions to promote the song’s musical features. This is done through imagery that highlights the chorus, “the most successful or saleable feature of the song” (164); body percussion that highlights particularities of the rhythm (171); and most importantly movement that emphasizes the beginning and endings of phrases or sections (216).

19 A non-exhaustive list of choreographers currently teaching in Los Angeles and filming highly viewed class videos includes WilldaBeast Adams, Dana Alexa, Alexander Chung, Alvin de Castro, Johnny Erasme, Brian Freedman, Janelle Ginestra, JoJo Gomez, Galen Hooks, Aliya

Janell, Jake Kodish, Luam Keflezgy, Nicole Kirkland, Nika Kljun, Yanis Marshall, Blake

McGrath, Tricia Miranda, Bobby Newberry, Matt Steffanina, Josh Williams, Taiwan Williams,

269 and Phil Wright. Marshall and Newberry often work together, as do Adams and Ginestra. Others co-choreograph with each other or sometimes older teenage students for classes and workshops on occasion.

20 In the group freestyle of the first group in “Bad and Boujee,” the line “Dabbin’ on ‘em like the usual (Dab)” comes up. As an extension of the popular use of the dance to celebrate a victory, or as a punctuating mark, this lyric refers to besting someone. In the context of the freestyle, that metaphor gets re-literalized into actually dabbing, that is, performing the dab movement (Tim Milgram, “Bad and Boujee”).

21According to the annotation of the lyrics on Genius, the car is specifically a “Porsche

911 Coupe, whose headlights are famous for bulging out like the eyes of a frog” (“Migos–Bad and Boujee”).

22 Kristin McGee considers some of these issues in her article on videos made to the

Beyoncé song “Flawless,” though she does not account for the labor of the original choreography and misunderstands the class video as a “remake,” not a genre of its own.

23 This usually includes a warm up, strengthening, skill building, and stretching.

24 TED hired a filmmaker in 2005 who created the videographic style which is still in place in 2019, including tight shots on the face for emotional moments, capturing the audience reacting, and a simple stage design which includes the TED logo prominently (Ludewig 7).

25 There are also in-between videos, which use the studio to do concept, one-take, or edited videos, in which case the use of the studio shows an aesthetic of necessity or availability.

It is likely much easier and less expensive to get into that space than others, or to deal with permits or traffic with larger numbers of dancers.

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26 These are rigid harnesses and mounts that use gyroscopes or gimbals to maintain steady shots without needing a dolly. In a video on the technology used in his video production,

Milgram says he has used a Glidecam stabilizer though he now uses the Letus Helix. Glidecam and Steadicam are both brand names that are quickly genericizing like Kleenex or Band-Aid, because of their ubiquity in film production. He does not stabilize in post-production, preferring to get the best footage while he films (Tim Milgram, “Filming Dance”).

27 In the video for Nika Kljun’s combination for “Hotel” in May 2015, three lights

Milgram must have brought with him are reflected in the mirror (Nika Kljun).

28 While I do not think this has particularly shaped the videography—I do not think there is a presence of male gaze; the camera is equally invested in students of all gender and sexual expressions, mostly dictated by the dancer themselves—but all of the videographers I am aware of are male. Diverse racially, but all male. One exception is Kristina Marie, who filmed purely documentary videos on MDC’s channel in 2015-2016. This does have an interesting parallel to recent reports in the film and music industry about the lack of women and non-binary artists on the production side (“2018 Statistics,” Stacey L. Smith et. al).

29 Exemplified by some of the earliest and still robust content creators like the

Vlogbrothers and Wheezy Waiter.

30 MyTypoLife/Typo is the only videographer other than Milgram whose work I can identify without seeing him named; his camera movement is hectic, going in and out every one second or less.

31 This is a partial list of videographers. Others ’I am aware of include Mike Dones,

BrandonEsparza, Ryan Parma, Jon Hernandez with Tim Milgram, and Jordan Lunsford under

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The Beast Network. There are many more, including people working for companies or collectives, and there are certainly more now than when I started watching, due to the fact there are more studios, more classes, and more interest in both the classes and the videos.

32 See Osumare, DeFrantz, Gottschild.

33 See Schloss, especially 94-106 for a good explanation of the cypher in contemporary

B-boying.

34 As Sally Banes reported, following being filmed for the first time, “The next time Rock

Steady was breakdancing in the park, the crew’s president, Crazy Legs, was walking back and forth saying, ‘Open up the circle’” (151).

35 Some have more documentary aspects than others. For example, at the beginning of the video of her choreography for “Cage of Bones,” videographer BrazilInspires captures Janelle

Ginestra talking to the class about you being your own best teacher (Brazil-Lionheart

Entertainment).

36 A notable exception is the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, a dance-superhero narrative series directed by Jon Chu, which Naomi Jackson covers extensively; and some memes which use editing as part of their joke.

37 Class and rehearsal are not the same contexts, as rehearsal is for a specific performance, so the distinction is important. However, these classes collapse contexts so that class, rehearsal, and performance are simultaneous.

38 Harmony Bench’s concept of ‘social dance media’ begins this work (“Screendance

2.0”), but is particularly about sourced, cumulative, and social movement, which would be included in Internet Screendance but is only a part.

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39 YouTube first recommended a ‘react’ video of a class video to me for the first time in

June 2017; they are now more common and done by a number of different channels.

40 Hooks also just did “America” in duets (Tim Milgram. “West Side Story – America”).

On an Instagram post about the video she noted she wanted to help the students diversify their training given the resurgence of musicals including several in production, West Side Story among them (galenhooks).

41 I believe that dancers adhere less strictly to the given choreography when they perform a solo, as opposed to with a group; solo dancers often also appear in a larger group in the same video which gives a good comparison.

42 For example, in 2016, viewer Brent Adkins derisively described Tim Milgram’s style as “The extremely advanced cinematography of slowly zooming in, then slowly zooming out.

Then doing it again” (Brent Adkins).

43 There are specific rental houses and ‘dorms’ available to traveling dancers and groups.

I can only imagine that the videos’ popularity has increased this traffic.

44 They were forced to leave by the land owners; the land will now house a Whole Foods

(Luckie).

45 The Beast Network, run by WilldaBeast Adams and Janelle Ginestra, also has a

$9.99/month subscription service.

46 For more on the commercial use of amateur and web-native dance and videographic genres, see Harlig, “Fresher Than You.”

47 It was also performed on The Tonight Show, Good Morning America, The Today Show,

Ellen, and The American Music Awards, between Aug-Oct 2017 (Demi Lovato, “Videos”).

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Chapter 3

1 There is a kind of surveillance I found myself doing when watching videos trying to assess markers of race, gender, and orientation to see what representation was present. This is not a kind of viewing I want to be doing, because while I do think representation is important, and in some cases it may only be really visible if very clear, I have no right and no reason to be judging people’s identities or evaluating their belonging in any groups.

2 The main text of the description box does not give details about the individual performers, but you can learn about them through other videos featured on the channel. For example, in the video dedicated to Isaac—who I read as a tomboy skater—we learn that they are genderfluid, adopted, and Brazilian; they introduce themselves at the beginning of the video in

Portuguese (American Eagle “THIS IS AE X ME: LOOK BY ISAAC”). The two women in the record store are sisters, and moved to Detroit from a rural town—this kind of urban migration is common for many millennials and Gen Zers (American Eagle “THIS IS AE X ME: LOOK BY

CARLY & PRIZZCILLA”). The casting, costuming, and setting of the original ad suggest some of this complex layering of identities and styles—but there is still a lot more to each person, and the ancillary videos serve to articulate some of the complexity of those featured.

3 Many of the ads or campaigns discussed in this chapter are multi-platform, running in some version on YouTube as pre-roll ads or existing as their own videos, running as both ads and content on Instagram, sometimes appearing on billboards and posters, and even occasionally on legacy media streaming. I have cited the main YouTube versions of them unless supplementary campaign material is relevant or they are only officially hosted on other platforms.

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4 I use the term Millennial here both as a nod to the Millennium Dance Complex, where most of the videos in which I first considered the phenomenon were filmed, as well as for the generational name given to those born roughly between 1982-2002, who are among other things characterized by their use of social media in identity formation, and to whom most media with this rhetoric is geared. I use the term Millennial descriptively and without judgment or disdain for those included in the generation. See Kendzior for a good history and critique of the often negative use of the generational term in the media.

5 For example, in a story about a queer girl coming out to a clerk at a comic shop after seeing a queer character on the TV show Supergirl, the clerk wrote in her essay about the encounter: “So, next time you’re wondering why your favorite shows, filmmakers, authors, and publishers choose to introduce LGBT or minority characters, remember ... representation matters. It can literally save a life” (Ennis).

6 See for example racist reactions to a mixed-race family in a 2013 cheerios ad (Stump).

7 In English, reflexive and emphatic pronouns take the same form (myself, yourself, him/herself, itself, ourselves, themselves) but carry a different meaning. Reflexive pronouns indicate that the subject is performing an act upon that subject, for example: She steadied herself.

Emphatic pronouns emphasize who is performing the action, for example: ’I am going to bake the cake myself.

8 The ads and slogans from which I have formed the analysis in this chapter were those which caught my eye in advertisements served to me in my daily use of social media, streaming sites, and in public places. This is not an exhaustive list and may show a certain degree of targeting to my perceived demographic, tastes, and geography (Manhattan).

275

9 “Enjoy” is a variation of Coca-Cola’s 1886 slogan “Drink Coca-Cola and enjoy it.”

10 In fact, in a 1907 piece in Profitable Advertising, W.S. Crowe declares that advertising can lead the world’s progress if it becomes excellent: “It means copy that loses itself in its theme, so that people do not think of the copy at all, but only of the goods. It means copy which has the human interest and the element of individuality with personal pronouns and imperative mood, but with the persuasiveness which leads right on to a contract, not with the emphasis which begets objection.”

11 See Gabriel Beltrone in Adweek on Gap’s use of customers in their 2017 ad campaigns.

12 These ideas are indebted to Kimberle Crenshaw’s theorization of intersectionality as well as to the way it has been (mis)used by many later publications and in public discourse.

13 Mehta uses “millennial multiculturalism” in her title and headings, but not within the text, and does not explain it as a concept. Her millennial frame is temporal rather than generational, but as the first wave of multicultural rhetoric was at its height at the turn of the millennium, it makes sense to see my conception of millennial multiculturalism grow and become popular now that those who were coming of age then are coming into positions of economic and cultural power.

14 See Omi and Winant 211-244 for an in-depth look at this particular brand of colorblindness.

15 Targeted advertising continues though, often selling harmful products to young, poor, or marginalized communities. See Ayana Byrd. More positively, perhaps, there is an increased awareness—or at least, hope for an awareness—around the buying power of ‘minority’ groups, especially as the nation’s demographics shift.

276

16 It may be that representational rhetorics get solidified into corporate logics; the full impact of millennials moving into positions of power is yet to be seen. Ford et al. do consider how millennial’s views on diversity and inclusion will affect the workplace.

17 See Ahmed, Swan.

18 While I found the phrase in a review of a Shakespeare performance, in a commentary on a book on soccer, and in a guide to Irish music, most uses seem to stem from Dave

Hesmondhalgh’s article in Popular Music where he rebuts an argument that all electronic dance music is perceived as collective. He argues, “listeners and dancers are still aware of the idea of a musician: the locus of virtuosic individuality is transferred to the musician programming the technology. There are individual ways of programming synthesised harmonic-rhythmic riffs and rhythms, just as there are individual ways of singing, or playing a guitar.” The use most closely aligned with mine may be in a review of the book Futebol by blogger Ross Langager: “Perhaps

Bellos’ lack of interest in the tactics and organization of the game in Futebol was meant to reflect the Brazilian footballing ideology and its privileging of virtuosic individuality over strategic acumen. The game in Brazil is a medium for exuberant self-expression, a conduit for pure, unfiltered personality.”

19 This concept of self is mostly applicable to those who use social media—and is probably more salient for those who are social media natives—but is not bounded by age.

Additionally, through the interconnection of legacy/linear media and social/new media, news coverage, and daily discourse, I think the conception of self as influenced by the genres and technologies of social media is an even more widely-shared phenomenon.

277

20 I use (self) mediation throughout as a category in order to stress control of the tools of representation and production, and as inclusive of mediatization, the process of capturing things for distribution and the effects that produces.

21 Aerie is American Eagle’s under-, sleep-, and swim-wear brand. The advertising shows models dancing in the undergarments they model, process videos of the photo shoots, and interviews discussing the meaningfulness of the project. In these videos, there are women with scars, stretch marks, vitiligo, and armpit hair; older and younger women, bald women, less femme-presenting women, a model with down syndrome, a woman with a colostomy bag, two with mobility aids, and many different breast and body shapes and sizes (Aerie).

22 This can be seen between and within other platforms too; for example, a YouTube video may be quite scripted or choreographed, but Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram gives viewers and fans a look at the creator’s daily life and opinions. There can be differences even within a platform; on Instagram, for example, the grid is generally more public-facing and framed, while Stories are more likely to be off-the-cuff, or personal.

23 While self-mediated forms involved in personal branding allow creative control, they also give data to and earn profits for the platforms that hosts them.

24 This includes dancers’ appearance in videos with documentary force, like class combination videos. Depending on the individual, dancers are also active on Twitter, Instagram, and their own YouTube channels, which may feature choreographic and dance projects, but also the challenges, vlogs, and assorted personal content found on other first-person channels.

25 “WHAT DOES WEIRDO MEAN TO ME: Weirdo means to be outgoing, a little awkward at times, but not afraid to be who you are. It means someone who is kind-hearted,

278 spreads positivity, and expresses themselves. Being a “weirdo” doesn’t mean you are “weird” it just means you embrace the fact that you are different. Being different is what makes you standout as a human being. Just Be You and don’t let anyone bring you down, get in your way, and don’t listen to haters because YOU ARE AMAZING” (“What Does Weirdo Mean to Me”).

26 Memphis Jooker Lil Buck dancing on the side of a building, a car, and upside down on a marquee in a 2017 ad for Apple’s AirPods is a rare exception, although other than the special effects it follows the concept of a person in their daily routine (Apple).

27 Budget in addition to theme may sometimes impact individuality in costuming; Goebel and her dancers brought all their own clothes (Rudulfo); while the video has 2.9 billion views, it was not a high-budget project.

28 Very rarely, students may be asked to dress a certain way in a Twitter or Instagram announcement for a class.

29 As early as the 1920s, the bodies and embodied practices of young adults were at the center of a debate about a new consumerism, one in which identity formation happened partially through product selection, including engagement with jazz dances and consumption of their representations on film and newsreels. See Koritz, especially 39-84.

30 On Target’s corporate blog post announcing new in-house brands with distinct aesthetics, chief marketing officer Rick Gomez comments: “Younger guests are looking for support to express their creativity and individuality, whether that’s what they wear or how they show up in the world. Target can help them do just that by creating brands and experiences that reflect their interests, lives and voices” (Target “We’re at it Again!”).

279

31 Campaigns like AExME often have many supplementary aspects online, such as videos about each performer in their Make Moves ad, where you do learn a little bit more about the individuals.

32 Before-and-after moments still exist in online advertising; for example, in a Polaroid ad for Instagram in spring of 2017 with Shuffle dancers Puff the Houseman and Gabby J David. She is dancing in a red lightbox while he watches, gets up, and then cannot get into the dance until he puts on Polaroid shades, too (Polaroid Eyewear).

33 This ad was part of a larger campaign which included a documentary style video series about the importance of hair to different individuals and communities, including a Native journalist and wellness advocate (John Frieda US “Your Hair Talks”).

34 Music video is somewhat different, interestingly—white female stars such as Meghan

Trainor in “All About That Bass” or Taylor Swift in “Shake It Off” use diverse casts to promote themselves, but many black artists have used their videos to portray a black, utopian, often homosocial space. See the music videos for Beyoncé’s “Formation,” Janelle Monáe’s “PYNK,” and Missy Elliot’s “I’m Better.” See also J. Brendan Shaw on Lemonade.

35 Coming together through shared movement does not only happen in popular screendance, of course. Stage choreographer and dance scholar Ananya Chatterjea talks about this in her own work: “Because my dances tell stories of an ensemble of women who come from

‘everywhere and nowhere at the same time,’ and are as much about individual as community experiences, ensemble work embedded with individual voices is vital in my choreography.

Dancing together and performing unison choreography are important values in the work, as are respect for different approaches to the material, different body types, and different backgrounds

280 of the dancers. This difference-in-togetherness principle also supports the multiple narratives that often run parallel, merge, or comment upon each other in the choreography.”

36 Though only those which have the physical and mental abilities to learn and perform the movement; a disability studies critique of this concept is necessary. Some ads do cast models with disabilities, though rarely in unison or group situations, if there is movement in the ads.

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