Minstrelsy to Music Videos

Music videos provide the most recent technology whereby American popular music and dance is spread and shared. Given that many music videos serve as extended commercial advertising for the artist or label, it is tempting to dismiss the entire format. However, what cannot be ignored is the music video as the continuation of formats of popular entertainment dominated by African-American vernacular movement and music. Given that dance and music have been historically inextricably in the development of African-American vernacular art, the music video serves this dynamic.

The term ‘Jim Crow’ exemplifies how tightly intertwined African-American oppression and African-American performance have been. The term Jim Crow actually comes from ‘dancing Jim Crow,’ a standard character in minstrel shows. It was the dance, not the melody that made Jump Jim Crow a dance craze.

The 19th century was the age of touring performers. This was the first instance of mass movement of vernacular dance and music across racial and state lines. The first documented travelling black minstrel William Henry Lane, known as Master Juba, combined the Irish Jig and Reel with the African derived movements of rhythms of the Juba dance. By the 1870’s, at the end of the civil war, travelling black minstrel groups, were commonplace in the North, South, and parts of Europe. W.C. Handy, considered the father of ragtime, as well as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith all began their careers as minstrel performers.

Minstrel shows developed into vaudeville where tap dancing, as we recognize it today, was further developed and transformed. The first all African-American managed and performed musical, A Trip to Coontown premiered in 1897 in New York City. Williams and Walker famous minstrel-vaudeville company showcased the cakewalk in a forty-week run at a Broadway variety theater in 1896. Shuffle Along, composed by Baltimore native Eubie Blake, one of the first all African-American productions, premiered on Broadway in 1921. (The original cast included Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker). It introduced the sixteen girl chorus line, showcased tap, soft shoe, and the Buck and Wing. When the first theater in Harlem opened in 1913, performers were able to move away from the Sambo and Jim Crow characters expected on Broadway.

At the end of World War II, in 1944, a federal tax on was levied on all dance halls. This ‘cabaret’ tax demanded a 30% (later reduced to a 20%) cut of the establishment’s income. The Big Band battles between Count Basie, Chick Webb, and Bennie Goodman at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem had developed based on the interactions and reactions of the swing bands with the swing dancers. The cabaret tax made the maintenance of such establishments financially impossible. In this new context, BeBop, a non-dancing jazz flourished. It is easy to forget today that jazz as we know it is rooted in the practice of vernacular dance.

However, vernacular African-American dancing, kicked out of the ballroom, continued to shift and develop at rent parties and other private venues during and after the Great Depression (Malone, 117). It also survived in the styling of Motown vocal groups. Cholly Atkins was an ex Broadway and vaudeville tap dancer who worked as the premier choreographer for Motown Records from 1865 to 1971. In New York City, in the 1930’s he started a tap dancing duo with fellow singing waiter, William Porter. As the ‘Rhythm Pals’ they found work in Hollywood recording soundtracks for white chorus lines. Hanging around the studios, Atkins witnessed other dancers at work, including the most famous tap duo, the Nicholas brothers. As Motown Records was getting off the ground in Chicago, Atkins helped organize, stylize, and polish the early performances of artists such as The Cadillacs and The Cleftones. His most recognizable work can be seen in Gladys Night and the Pips, The Temptations, and The Supremes. Atkins earned a reputation for his ability to “Prepare them [new artists] for the transition from the Chitlin’ circuit to Vegas” (Malone, 125). Atkins insisted on the use of tambourines, wooden blocks, hand claps, and foot stomps to ensure audiences unaccustomed to blues music could dance along to the Motown sound, (Malone, 121). A critical aspect of African-American vernacular dance that Atkins kept alive through Motown was precise visual polyrhythms. The popularity of Motown groups on television shows such as American Bandstand and Soul Train (in the 1950’s -1970’s kept American teenagers abreast of the latest choreography. “In whatever form Atkins’ steps materialized on stage, they were immediately enshrined in the hearts of an adoring teenager audience. These vernacular movements, simplified and reinterpreted, took on new and widespread life” (Stearns, 360).

Since the inception of film and television at the end of the 1930’s, dance has been tied to visual media. Dance and film are complimentary; Motion and rhythmic editing characterize both. Dance, like film, focuses depends on use of space, time and energy in relation to movement.

Many early filmmakers turned to the music hall for inspiration (Dodds, 4) including the “father of film” Eadweard Muybridge, who included ballroom dancing in his early moving picture animations. As early as 1919, film was embraced by the academic world of the nascent Modern dance community. Loie Fuller made a 35 mm film Le Lys de la Vie that focused on the manipulation of light and movement (Dodd 5). The 1930’s marked the ascending dominance of the Musical produced by Hollywood studios. The dance content of these films was rooted in vernacular forms of tap, vaudeville, and social dancing. Dance routines began to be choreographed specifically for cameras from Busby Berkeley’s geometric suspension of plot to Fred Astaire and Gene Kelley’s redefinition of how to film the dancing body. In the late 1970’s Dance Films- films about dancing- emerged: Saturday Night Fever, Fame, Footloose, Flashdance, Staying Alive, and Dirty Dancing achieved massive commercial success while smaller hip-hop films such as Breakin’ and Beat Street expanded the visibility of hip hop from both coasts.

DeMarigny (1988) points out the close ties between movement and film in the United States. “The American popular term ‘the Movies’ indicates just how fundamental movement (if not dance) is to the film and television forms.” Of course there are contrary voices. Most of these reveal an agenda for dance that is static, bound by a privileging of certain kinds of ‘authenticity’ that values the virtuosic, live dancing body along with codified technique at the top of a dance hierarchy. This classicist perspective offers a narrow conceptualization of dance that is located in the status quo, the pre-existing schools of technique (Dodds 18).

SINGLE LADIES:

In addition to the history of vernacular dance that Single Ladies references, it is also remarkable for moving away from the conventional representations of the dancing body that were popularized with the dance films of the 1980’s. There is a ‘body as project’ theme in dance films from Reaganite America that symbolically reinforce the individual’s right to personal achievement (Dodds 39).

‘The body as machine’ is to be tuned and presented in reinforced by editing that focuses on the feet and thighs, movement that is high-impact, repetitive, aerobic workout, the sense of the dancer’s need for a burning will, no pain no gain, a body driven by the need to succeed in performance, in recognition. Dance Film scholar Sherril Dodd explains that “Within Flashdance… the popular conceptions of dance are provided and maintained. The slim, youthful body, the ballet barre and rehearsal studio, the attire of leotard and leg warmers, the virtuosic movement content, easily recognizable styles such as ballet, jazz and ‘street dance’ and the personal economic struggle required to achieve success all contribute to this perception. Much of this imagery derives from a hierarchical and stereotypical framework: the dancing body as sexually unleashed, ballet placed at the pinnacle of aspiration, and the fetishized female body as a site of erotic spectacle…The result is a conventionalized dancing body that not only facilitates polysemic readings, (making itself accessible to the widest possible audience) but also commodified in such a way as to allow for commercial reward and dominant ideological positioning,”(Dodd 43).

What is refreshing about Single Ladies is the well executed minimalism of the set and costumes in relation to the complex movement and lighting. The dancers dance in a black and white void, where they can run up unseen walls. Their black leotards and heels allude to both Fosse’s fishnets and majorette’s layers of military dance attire (and perhaps even more directly to the shiny, ballet-cut leotards of the majorettes of southern drumlines). The lighting, like the choreography, is extremely complicated. The background shifts from black to white, or negative to positive in relation to the three dancers. The dancers’ full bodies are seen throughout almost the entire video. Shots that zoom in on a particular body part (of which there are about three) are only used to emphasize Beyoncé’s singing. Even in these movements, full movements of the backup dancers are contained within the frame. There are no reaction shots focused on male (or female) gazers. Though the song is about behavior and expectations between men and women in nightclubs, there is no nightclub scene, so common in R&B music videos.

Beyonce is part of a complex and confusing history in African-American female performers and their manipulation of sexual gaze and gender dominance. From early minstrel songstresses, to Motown, to all girl groups in the nineties (TLC, En Vogue, Salt & Peppa) there is a strong tradition of looking back, of returning the gaze upon the Jezebel. Beyonce’s lyrics in Single Ladies, in their demand for matrimony don’t serve this purpose. But the crafting of the complex movement does.