This chapter examines from a transnational perspective 1 the contemporary urban dance musical , which rose to prominence before falling out of mainstream favour across Anglophone Western cinemas in the fifteen-year period from 2001 to 2016. The fall of the urban dance will be seen as the result of a confluence of factors beyond the exhaustion of narrative formula a genre faces through a limited number of generic cycles. These factors will be seen to include significant complications of meaning in different social contexts regarding the representation of class and racial difference as semantic features of the genre 2 (particularly as regards how the urban dance musical functions as a hybrid of the classic Hollywood folk musical and the classically integrated show musical) and the genreâs evident anxiety over its necessary intermediality with other popular platforms for hip hop dance (particularly the televised variety show or competition format). This will be examined first in holistic overview of the genreâs origins and various iterations, before narrowing into a comparative analysis of three separate cycles, which represent the genreâs primary means of iteration to date: the mainstream films from the Step Up franchiseâaka the White Cycleâversus the Black Cycle 3 in the USA, and the British Cycle. The segregation of the American iterations of the genre into two primary cycles will be seen as concomitant with the conservative development of the genre in historical context. On the other hand, the failure of the British Cycle to expand beyond two films in a franchise will be seen as evidence of the genreâs syntactic incompatibility as a transnational productâas it has evolved outside Americaâwith British nationalist ideology and generic tradition.
The contemporary urban dance musical will be referenced as a genre unto itself, heretofore, though it should be relatively self-evident that it stands as a specific subgenre of the musical . 4 What âtypeâ of musical it isâintegrated, folk, show musical, or (as will be seen) a hybrid of all threeâis less certain. Thus, it will be necessary to review the fundamental structures and foundational films of the genre as it has evolved, before qualifying its overall ideological project(s) and distinguishing between its various semantic features and syntactic structures. Admittedly, the title âcontemporary urban dance musicalâ might be seen as something of a misnomer, in the light of the argument that the genre appears to have come to the end of its life cycle. The contemporary urban dance musical will be taken here to refer to those films, which are united by certain key narrative and stylistic features that represent the most recent, substantive iteration in a series of the urban dance musical. They are chronologically and (to a certain degree, in that they feature more contemporary styles of hip hop than strictly break-dancing) semantically distinct from the break-dancing-themed urban dance films of the 1980s (such as Wild Style [Ahearn 1983] and Breakinâ [Silberg 1984]) , and range from Save the Last Dance (Carter 2001) to Honey 3: Dare to Dance (Woodruff 2016) . With this chapter being written in mid-2017, it appears that the genre is on effective hiatus from the American and British markets, without any high-profile original films or sequels in the offingâthough with hip hop remaining a major genre of popular music, dance, and culture across the globe, it is certainly likely that urban dance will be rejuvenated as/into a significant semantic feature of a rebooted cycle or subgenre of musical before long. Indeed, this chapter will conclude by theorizing its continuation in a transnationalized, intermedial form.
It probably goes without saying that hip hop music and dance are crucial semantic features of the contemporary urban dance musical , and as such partial determinants of an individual filmâs âmusicalâ status. This is also determined, of course, by how inextricably the music and dance numbersâwith the former being subordinate to the latter, in terms of spectacular effectâare integrated into narrative. The hip hop dance styles featured in such films are variants of street dance and range widely from break-dancing (which was highlighted almost exclusively in the earlier, aforementioned cycle of 1980s urban dance musicals ) to locking, popping, krumping, stepping, house, or new style and other variants. It is not within the remit of this chapter to detail the formal distinctions between each style, but suffice it to say that most contemporary urban dance films feature more than one style, with an emphasis on its status as âstreet,â i.e. urban in origin. Compounded by the fact that these filmsâ milieu is always (at least initially) urban, and usually specifically âplacedâ in/by an identifiable city, they are perhaps more perspicaciously collated as âurban dance musicalsâ than âhip hop musicals,â as the former title takes in more of the predominant semantic features of the genre. Indeed, their urbanity marks them as distinct from an older subgenre of American film musical , the folk musical , from which it is partially derived.
While the folk musical , as defined by DesirĂ©e J. Garcia (2014: 6), traditionally finds its âhomeâ in categorically non-urban spaces, in the urban dance musical , the city is home to its protagonists. Similar to the classical folk musical , however, âsetting the parameters of social belongingâ (ibid.) is foundational to its syntax. Instead of going on a migrational journey (except where they travel to a final showcase/competition), however, the protagonists of the urban dance musical are often forced to negotiate the space between virtuosic achievement/individualist gain and ensemble performance/collective harmony, in parallel with the subtexts of class conflict and conciliation. Education is frequently represented as the means by which the class differences that separate people can be erased, with hip hop /street danceâperformed competitively in informal âbattlesâârepresenting the working class , and more formalized styles of dance (such as ballet) or organized street crews, both of whom tend to perform on stages as opposed to the street, representing the upper class. In such a way, education in the urban dance musical secures social harmony, the utopian feeling of which is conveyed via ecstatic and spectacular dance numbers, as Dyer has suggested is the project of most musicals (1985) and as Knight has reaffirmed with regard to the folk musical specifically (2002). Capital gain is subsumed into communal drive.
However, as we shall see, towards the end of the genreâs lifespan (if it has indeed ended) and particularly within the American cycle, a fundamental âthreatâ to social harmony is represented as not so much the material lack of education on behalf of the individual or collective, but rather as a more abstract de-naturalization of hip hop dance as an expression of raw emotion. This is in and of itself an abstraction of the hyper-mediated or otherwise self-consciously staged performances-within-filmic performances that are represented as soulless and/or over(t)ly commercially drivenâeffectively, âincorrectâ means of musical/dance performanceâand which betray these films as profoundly insecure about their function as a means of entertainment and specifically as films.
Where the âfolkinessâ of the urban dance musical is challenged, furthermore, is in its ambivalent stance on race as a signifier of meaning/semantic feature, combined with its impulse towards formal and ideological integrativeness. As we shall see, this is responsible for the genreâs bifurcation in the conservative American market into two primary cyclesâaimed at white audiences on the one hand and Black audiences on the otherâand likely its overall transnational appeal as an ostensible purveyor of liberalist, pro-multicultural values. Alongside each narrative of collective harmonization, these musicals each foreground a central heterosexual relationship, shading its narrative towards dual-focus and its syntax according to a Platonic ideal of integration . Altman (1989) has theorized this to be the basis of the classical American film musical , and it has evidently been the ideological project of most integrated show musicals like Gold Diggers of 1937 (Bacon and Berkeley 1936) , The Broadway Melody of 1940 (Taurog 1940) , and The Band Wagon (Minnelli 1953) since the mid-1930s. 5 Problematically for the contemporary urban dance musical in America, however, after the initial releases of Save the Last Dance âwhich narratively foregrounds interracial romance , metaphorically echoed by the white female protagonistâs assimilation of hip hop dance as a signifier of Black culture into her personal balletic styleâand Honey (Woodruff 2003) , the most successful cycle of urban dance musicals , which is represented by Step Up (Fletcher 2006) and its four sequels, has all but erased interracial romance as a narrative possibility/semantic feature of the American urban dance musical . As such, early on in the contemporary urban dance musical , ideological conflict became a matter of style (e.g. hip hop versus ballet) and, metaphorically, of class . Consequently, historically important associations between Black culture and hip hop /street dance have been effectively elided from mass-market, American urban dance musicals since 2003.
Not coincidentally, then, did there arise a distinct strand or cycle of the contemporary urban dance musical in the mid-noughties aimed at representing Black-specific stories with Black actors for Black audiences : in all likelihood, a response to the blatant whitewashing of urban dance musical releases exemplified by the Step Up series. The Step Up films were evidently aimed at what Arthur Knight (2002: 16) has suggested is Hollywoodâs idealâand mythicalââintegratedâ market (read: deracinated), to whom racially specific narrative content would (theoretically) be ideologically irrelevant. Indeed, the fact that Step Up spawned four sequels and a copycat cycle in BritainâStreetDance (Giwa and Pasquini 2010) and its own sequel (discussed below)âarguably attests to its broad appeal, which is to say, its accessibility to a majority, i.e. largely white, audience . On the other hand, as Knight has shown, it has been abundantly clear to Black audiences that musical films are often âmanifestly not integratedâ by virtue of the fact that âthe creation of the ultimate utopian feeling in the integrated musical relie[s] on an explicit social-racial segregationâ (ibid.). Race relations may be simply too controversial for musicals to deal ...