Los Angeles Pierce College Britney Spears MTV VMA Performance Analysis Research paper outline Thesis Statement:Britney Spears in the 2000 vma awards perfor

Los Angeles Pierce College Britney Spears MTV VMA Performance Analysis Research paper outline
Thesis Statement:Britney Spears in the 2000 vma awards performance seduces the audience,
and also makes the audience feel like they are capable of seduction.
Essay: Prove by saying how she seduces the audience:
-First things first what are you seeing in the performance, starting from the king of pop
Michel Jackson and her turning into this seducing female.
-Her movement, Glanses, back up dancers, her being the ultimate “sex” object, “sex”
goddess. BE RAW.
-Be creative and say “watching this when I was 13 year young, I knew that one day I am going to
grow up and dye my hair blonde like Britney”. I saw a glimpse of what empowered female
sexuality looks like. Go back to the thesis and say what the performance does. She is being
seductive, and she gives off a fantasy femininity. The fantasy looks like a barbie, blonde, thin,
surrounded by attractive men, in a world with no other women. How she is now the “king of
pop” from Michael Jackson to her. Then say what this is communicating, it’s the year 2000, and
she’s a woman, and she’s taking the throne of pop. You can say stuff like, “This performance was
my moment that I created my own fantasy in my head”. MAKE SURE to include all four
readings as references, and link them to the performance.

britney spears 2000 vma performance
➔ Introduction
◆ Opening sentence, including thesis:

● Why out of all performances I chose Britney Spears 2000 mtv
performance.

● Britney spears: Which of Britney’s dances I find most interesting and why
I chose her 2000 MTV performance.
●

● What is interesting and how I connect to it, and what my argument is
about the performance. How it links and ties up with Bench’s “Screen
Sharing”, Conquergood’s “Performance Studies”, Foster’s
“Choreographing History”, and Mattingly’s “Digital Dance Criticism”.

➔ Methods
○ QuestionstoMAYBEthinkabout

◆ “What a movement analysis of the 2000 MTV performance reveals

◆ What do they represent?

◆ How do they represent these things?

◆ How do you interact with these dances?

◆ Do you dance along?

◆ Do you fantasize about what it would be like to be Britney for a day?

◆ what is happening choreographically within Britney Spears’s performance back in
2000 for the MTV VMA awards, under her hit “oops I did it again” and many
more.

◆ How does Britney move, and how we connect her movements to her lyrics.

◆ Where are those movements from?

◆ Who choreographs them?

◆ Do they illustrate the lyrics or say something different?
◆ Reflexive comments on intro, methods, and discussion. An email the professor sent out.
1. Your research paper should center a close analysis of a performance, broadly defined. A major
intervention and methodology in dance studies is “choreographic analysis” or a close reading of bodies
and movements. In other words, by doing a close readings of the bodies and movements—beyond the
name for the movement or pose—dance studies scholars are able to unearth knowledge that other fields
often overlook. In your paper, I would like to challenge you to center a close analysis of bodies and
movements.
2. Building on the first point, because I want you to pay close attention to bodies and movements, your
research question might be something like: what does a movement analysis (along with a close reading of
the location, etc.) reveal about this performance?
3. A research question is just the thesis posed in a question form. If your question is “what does a
movement analysis reveal,” your thesis will be “a movement analysis reveals” . . . . Based on the question
posed in the second point, your thesis will answer what a movement analysis and close reading of other
elements of the performance illuminate. I want you to challenge yourselves by writing a dance studies
paper in that you are centering a critical movement analysis, which is typically not done in any other field.
4. In terms of structuring your paper, since you are centering a movement analysis, the bulk of your paper
(I would estimate about 12 pages) will be movement analysis along with close readings of other relevant
elements of the performance. The rest of the paper will be composed of introduction (1.5 to 2 pages with
methods and positionality) and conclusion (1 page). The conclusion can discuss the broader implications
of your research and/or point to future directions for research about the performance or topic you are
discussing.
5. If you were writing a paper in an English class, you would likely also be doing a close reading.
However, the difference in dance studies is that you have to create your own written text based on the
performance. In other words, first you translate the movements in to words and then you analyze them.
There is no one way to go about writing a dance studies research paper, but because you will need to
translate movement into words, doing a choreographic analysis of the piece might be a good place to start.
Then ask yourself, your research question: what does a movement analysis about this performance reveal?
Again, the answer to that question is your thesis.
6. It is not enough to simply insert your movement analysis into the body of the paper. The topic sentence
and concluding sentence of each paragraph must tie back to the thesis. Also, you can further elaborate on
descriptions of movements in the paragraphs, which help to illustrate your thesis.
7. Your positionality statement should ideally tell the reader who you are (race, gender, class, sexuality,
religion, nationhood, ability, etc.) and how that is relevant to the paper. This would be a great place to
briefly cite one of our many readings that articulates how research is always subjective. Also, you may
want to identify experiences that are relevant to why you selected this topic and that have well prepared
you to write about this topic (such as dance training, how many years, etc.) A positionality statement does
not need to be long or even an entire sentence. For example, take a look at the Brenda Dixon Gottschild
reading we did for Week 7 in which she identifies as an African American woman and then moves on. BE CREATIVE AND HAVE FUN!!! 52
The I n t er nati o nal J our nal o f S cr eendan ce
Dancing in Music Videos, or How I Learned
to Dance Like Janet . . . Miss Jackson
Melissa Blanco Borelli
I
n 1989, when I was a senior in high school, Janet Jackson’s album Rhythm Nation 1814 was
released. A slick concept album, it addressed social injustice and economic disparities,
universal concepts that my teenaged naiveté witnessed on a daily basis as I got off the L
train in the East Village of New York City to go to school. Some of the lyrics advocated social
consciousness and I learned many of the songs by heart, but my overwhelming response
to that album was corporeal. I wanted to dance like Janet. I remember programming our
family’s VCR for the MTV premiere of the 30-minute long form music video, which featured
the first single from the album, “Miss You Much,” along with two other songs, “Rhythm
Nation” and “The Knowledge.” Unbeknownst to me, I was participating in what historian and
former Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin might call a “pseudo-event” or what Marxist
theorist Guy Debord might label a “spectacle” of advanced capitalism. Boorstin’s pseudoevent describes an event whose sole purpose is to be reproduced (via advertisements or
publicity).1 While Debord’s spectacle, as he describes it, “is not a collection of images, rather,
it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”2 The video premiere
and the subsequent video rotation of both “Miss You Much” and “Rhythm Nation” (long
form) enabled a social relationship to occur between those who were fans of Janet. It was
imperative that you not only owned the album, but you had to know some (or all) of the
choreography from her videos:
Face forward. Legs a little wider than hip distance apart. Arms extended diagonally
away from torso with the left arm diagonally down and the right arm diagonally
upwards. The arms bend simultaneously back towards the torso, palms facing inwards,
middle fingers barely touching as both hands figuratively cover the heart or left breast
while simultaneously, the left leg slightly bends as you shift your weight towards that
side of the body. Legs straighten again while the left arm rotates to make a 90-degree
angle (the right arm stays in place) and the hand makes the universally known peace
sign in front of the face so that the left eye can peek through the two fingers. The torso
rotates slightly to the right, both arms follow, with elbows bent close to the torso, and
the hands almost close but suddenly flap open twice . . .
I have briefly described the beginning of the choreography for the chorus of “Miss You Much.”
It was also probably the easiest part of the choreography to learn and perfect. After infinite
amounts of time in front of the television pushing the VCR rewind and play buttons, I learned
it and I felt I had accomplished something. All I knew was that I just really wanted to dance
like Janet. Senior year, I had a friend named Gavin. He was either a sophomore or a junior (I can
no longer remember). When we would run into one another in the hallway, or on our way to
class, or in the stairwell, or outside the school building, or on the First Avenue L train platform,
D an cin g in M usi c V id eos , o r H ow I L e ar ned to D an ce L ik e J ane t . . . M iss J ack so n
53
we would give each other a sly look and then suddenly break into those first eight counts
of the Miss You Much choreography. We didn’t care if people thought we were strange. 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. In hindsight, the marketing, publicity and subsequent rotation of the spectacle of Janet Jackson’s
black and white music video on MTV meant nothing to me. I just wanted to dance like her
and each time the video came on, it was an opportunity to see if I approximated her skill.
I employ the use of the rhetorical repetition of my desire in order to begin to articulate the relationship between mediated performances of popular dance and the audience/
spectator; for it is through the ubiquitous availability of such mediated performances
that dance on screen becomes (corpo)real and tangible. Dance and performance studies
scholars speak to the ephemerality of performance, choreography, and even dance itself.
In other words, once it has occurred live, on a stage, it no longer exists. The notable debate
between performance studies scholars Peggy Phelan and Philip Auslander comes to mind
at this moment for it sets up the ontological predicament of dance, performance, spectatorship, and subjectivity.3 If the live body is the sole arbiter of authenticity or reality, how
might one consider its presence and representation through mediated sources? For Phelan
and Auslander, the primary site for the consideration of the live body is the art performance
space (e.g., a theatre space, the prosceniums stage, or a museum gallery). I wonder how
popular dance forms might trouble their respective claims given the fact that in late capitalism most popular dance forms circulate primarily in mediated ways (e.g., music videos,
YouTube, or television dance competition shows). Fortunately, Amelia Jones’s article offers
a prescient theoretical lens through which to consider dance in music video and the role
of the performer/celebrity. Her pronouncement that body art, “through its very performativity and its unveiling of the body of the artist, surfaces the insufficiency and incoherence
of the body-as-subject and its inability to deliver itself fully (whether to the subject-inperformance her/himself or to the one who engages with this body)” offers useful insights
applicable to popular screen dance.4 She calls into question the ontological status of both
the live and mediated event by claiming, “There is no possibility of an unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product.”5 As a result, Jones’s insights allow me to consider how
popular dance on screen comes with an arsenal of mediation already built-in. It is these
statements made by Jones that I want to reflect upon as I muse about my affinity for dance
in music video and my memories of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation.”
There is something about learning music video dances that makes me feel as if I “know”
the celebrity, if only through the embodied, physicalized practice of rehearsal. Just as the
cult of celebrity is a mode of production, popular screens provide fans different types of
access to other modes of production. For example, if the body of one of Janet’s fans can
learn moves created exclusively for her celebrity brand to trademark and circulate through
a variety of mediated circuits, then perhaps the fan body establishes the intersubjectivity
that Jones refers to when she writes that “while the live situation may enable the phenomenological relations of flesh-to-flesh engagement, the documentary exchange (viewer/
reader ↔ document) is equally intersubjective.”6 Fan culture becomes an ancillary mode of
production for the celebrity. Thus, a relationship is forged between the performer and her
audience, and it can be a theoretically complex one, given the effects of mediation.
54
The I n t er nati o nal J our nal o f S cr eendan ce
Gavin went to see Janet perform live at Madison Square Garden (I was unable to go as
I was abroad with family), and he later admitted that watching the live version of “Miss You
Much” was different and not as exciting as the first time he saw the video. Here, the live-ness
or presence of the actual celebrity body (he was sitting really far away from the stage, so Janet
remained a mediated presence on the screen above the stage) became a simulacrum of the
mediated celebrity body, the one he had become habituated to experience. Thus, the live
re-presentation of the original or ‘authentic’ mediated event—the live performance of the
“Miss You Much” video choreography—materialized as the simulacrum of the video thereby
instantiating Jones’s assertion that “the relationship of these bodies/subjects to documentation (or more specifically, to re-presentation) most profoundly points to the dislocation of the
fantasy of the fixed, normative, centered modernist subject.”7 Janet live was not the same as
Janet at home on MTV and this realization destabilized Gavin’s perception of Janet altogether.
Postmodern celebrity bodies, specifically pop music artists, engage in a self-fashioning
choreography. Obviously tied to the demands of a patriarchal, globalized, late corporate
capitalism, a pop artist like Janet Jackson is beholden to the demands of her record label
and how it chooses to invest its capital through the type of image, music, and style Janet
Jackson-as-corporate-brand represents. The process through which a celebrity pop icon
trademarks herself offers an example of Jones’s idea that the documentary traces of the
artists’ performance “could, in fact, be said to expose the body itself as supplementary, as
both the visible ‘proof’ of the self and its endless deferral.”8 The act of trademarking, whether
through the celebrity image, dancing ability, sound, or talent highlights the process of
becoming a corporate-produced subjectivity or even more specifically, a celebrity-brand/
body. In this instance, the celebrity-brand/body shifts into the realm of commodity within
the mediated terrains of popular screens (e.g., celebrity webpages, or sites such as MySpace,
YouTube, Vimeo, VeVo, or even a Twitter account), which enable that very body’s endless
deferral. Thus, Janet Jackson (self ) is not ever really accessible, yet she always is a mediation
of that “self.” And it is that mediated self, i.e., Janet-as-celebrity-brand/body that allows for a
social relationship to exist between Janet and her fans.
I have a friend, Ed, whom I met in college. We loved going out dancing together. One
day, I walked in on him watching the 30-minute “Rhythm Nation” video in a student center
lounge. He was dancing along to the choreography in real time. I noticed the sweat on
his forehead and some sweat marks on his t-shirt (he had been wearing a wool plaid shirt
which he threw off as he was dancing). Like me, he wanted to dance like Janet. Unlike me,
he absolutely did . . . and, I will admit, I was a bit jealous. Here, Janet was materializing not
as a fully knowable body-as-subject, but as a physical body that labored (and sweated)
to learn, practice, perfect, and perform those very moves that had Ed sweating inside the
student center. In a way, Ed knew what it was like “to be” Janet . . . even if it was only by
dancing like her. Jones’s assertion that “the ‘unique’ body of the artist in the body artwork
only has meaning by virtue of its contextualization within codes of identity that accrue to
the artist’s body and name”9 seems quite appropriate to my argument. Janet’s video dance
performance becomes meaningful every time it gets repeated, especially since her celebrity trademark has always been innovative dance skill that requires practice and re-iteration.
Music video dance is made exclusively for mediation, circulation, and transmission
in service of corporate and celebrity capital. Its navigation through the variety of media’s
circuits assures its ‘real’-ness and its tangibility. The dancers in the video make it corpo-real
D an cin g in M usi c V id eos , o r H ow I L e ar ned to D an ce L ik e J ane t . . . M iss J ack so n
55
as do the fans that learn and imitate the moves.10 Just as “body art depends on documentation,”11 music video dance does as well; it cannot exist without it. I do not claim that
there is a fully knowable self present in music videos, but what is available is a branded
performance that resurfaces and is made “real” each time it is witnessed on the popular
screen, re-interpreted by the performer for live audience at a concert or awards show, or
re-enacted by fans in dance classes, or different sized screens in living rooms, classrooms
and bedrooms. The first popular screen iteration exists as the documentary trace that will
later provide the infinite acts of performative deferral. Thus when Janet performed “Miss
You Much” (or another one of her tracks from Rhythm Nation ) at her live concert, at the
Grammy’s, on Saturday Night Live, at the MTV Video Music Awards, her chorus of back-up
dancers, all dancing in unison with Janet, highlight the transmission of (popular) dance
forms from bodies to bodies and more importantly, the embodied-ness of popular dance
practices and the crucial role that the screen plays in establishing such practices.
Watching the video several times on VeVo12 in order to prepare for this essay, I found
myself getting out of my seat and trying to remember the choreography. I managed to stimulate some of my muscle memory and some steps resurfaced here and there, but I was unable
to complete a full eight counts (other than the first set that I described above). In other words,
I failed miserably. Nevertheless, I reflected on how, almost twenty-two years later, my physical
engagement with the performance is contingent upon its accessibility through a screen
which lets me watch the video over and over until I can, finally, dance like Janet.
References
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediated Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1999.
Jackson, Janet. “Miss You Much.” Filmed 1990. VeVo video, 4:21. Posted June 2009. http://www.vevo.com/watch/
janet-jackson/miss-you-much/USUV70702300.
Jones, Amelia. “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation.” Art Journal, 56, no. 4 (1997):
11–18.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Notes
1. Boorstin, The Image.
2. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 2.
3. See Auslander, Liveness, and Phelan, Umarked.
4. Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia,” 13.
5. Ibid., 12.
6. Ibid., 12.
7. Ibid., 12.
8. Ibid., 14.
9. Ibid., 14.
10. Here, I am reminded of a recent flash mob performance of the choreography of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies in
Picadilly Circus, London where about 50 women dressed similarly to Beyoncé (in the video) danced in order to
promote both her upcoming concert at the O2 Arena and Trident gum which was sponsoring the event.
11. Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia,” 15.
12. Jackson, “Miss You Much.”
3/24/2020
“4. Screen Sharing: Dance as Gift of the Common” in “Perpetual Motion” on Manifold @uminnpress
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Chapter Four
Screen Sharing
Dance as Gift of the Common
In November 2013, pop star Pharrell Williams released a twenty-four-hour online music video, 24 Hours of
Happy.1 It features four hundred people dancing along the streets of Los Angeles alone or in small groups,
moving in their own individual styles while lip-syncing to Pharrell’s continuously looping song “Happy,” written
for the animated feature film Despicable Me 2. In addition to being a durational work made for the web, 24
Hours of Happy is a clock; mousing over the screen reveals a time-telling feature. Every four minutes, the length
of Pharrell’s song, the spotlight shines on a new performer or group that has a single take to walk, sashay, turn,
stomp, fist-pump, jump, kick, bounce, and snap their way down sidewalks and across streets. Throughout the
twenty-four-hour video, there are cameo appearances by familiar faces, such as Steve Carrell, Alex Wong, Magic
Johnson, and Ana Ortiz. At the top of each hour, Pharrell himself appears dance-walking through alleyways,
boxing rings, and bowling alleys and singing with a gospel choir. Prompted by the lyrics to “clap along if that’s
what you wanna do,” the performers collectively sidestep and sidewind around neighborhoods and businesses
from sunrise to sunset—and then they keep going.
A few dancers perform steps that reveal expertise in a dance style, such as tap, ballet, or popping, but the
majority of participants represent the dancing abilities of the general population. A Steadicam operated by Jon
Beattie tracks their movement, which is sometimes mundane, occasionally on point, and frequently delightful.
The continuously receding camera forces them to keep pace, and the emphasis on the dancers’ forward motion
shapes the movement vocabulary available, filtering all gestures—however stage, street, or silly—through the
lens of pedestrian locomotion. The only edits appear at the conclusion of each iteration of the song. The camera
points skyward or at the floor to set up the next take, smoothing transitions between each performance. The
result is a never-ending music video without obvious cuts. Recalling the hyperdances discussed in chapter 1,
video controls allow viewers to pause/play and fast-forward or rewind through different scenes, and the work
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includes information about the production team, participants, and view count. But 24 Hours of Happy also
exceeds the capabilities of hyperdance, being filmed in public spaces and circulated online, as we saw with dance
in public in chapter 2, and incorporating contributions from the crowd, as we saw in chapter 3. Thus 24 Hours of
Happy is a fitting piece for the concluding chapter of this book.
Made for sharing, the participatory elements of 24 Hours of Happy situate the work distinctly within a social
media era. Viewers can share a moment from the video on their social media accounts, comment on any of the
scenes, and, of course, purchase the music track on iTunes. In this chapter, I focus on additional ways in which
24 Hours of Happy is shared: the independent artist Anne Marsen from the online film Girl Walk//All Day
discussed in chapter 2 accused Pharrell of plagiarizing the concept for the twenty-four-hour music video,
Pharrell’s fans re-created short versions of the music video and posted videos of themselves to sites such as
YouTube, and designers Julie Fersing and Loïc Fontaine have, in turn, created a website called We Are Happy
From to aggregate the distributed fan-produced content into a single dedicated site. As the proliferation of online
“Happy” phenomena shows, as dance circulates through social media, the boundaries between theft,
appropriation, sharing, homage, participation, and fandom blur significantly.
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Figure 28. Screenshot of a woman dancing in Los Angeles’s Union Station from 24
Hours of Happy (2013), featuring Pharrell Williams, directed by We Are from LA,
produced by Iconocast Interactive.
Figure 29. Screenshot of a man dancing on a Los Angeles street from 24 Hours of
Happy (2013), featuring Pharrell Williams, directed by We Are from LA, produced
by Iconocast Interactive.
In Spreadable Media, Henry Jenkins and his coauthors suggest that commercial and cultural appropriative
tendencies are embedded as fundamental flaws in Web 2.0 logic, which “transforms the social ‘goods’ generated
through interpersonal exchanges into ‘user-genera…
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