Where Are All the Dancers?
The Death of Dance in Movie Musicals
I, along with the rest of the world, saw Wicked (2024) last week. Despite being a huge fan of the musical (including on- and off-Broadway productions, I think I’ve seen it four times), I wasn't fervently anticipating this movie. Though I thought the casting was impeccable, early film clips left much to be desired. Many promotional stills were highly backlit, feeling a bit drab compared to The Wizard of Oz’s technicolor hue. I’ve grown quite tired of remakes and sequels dominating the box office and Wicked (2024) felt as though it fell into that camp, being a screen adaptation of a popular Broadway show.
But against all odds, curiosity got the best of me - or was perhaps forced upon me, via the heavy-handed efforts of a marketing campaign with an estimated budget of $150 million. I enjoyed the film quite a lot - specifically, the last fifteen minutes of it. The entire movie is quite charming, featuring great performances from Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey, but the last fifteen minutes - which features Cynthia Erivo’s “Defying Gravity” sequence - are utterly captivating. Just listening to Erivo’s “Defying Gravity” on Apple Music the next day brought me to tears - her performance of it in the film completely floored me.
Wicked (2024) succeeds because of its vocal performances. The movie leads two of the most talented vocalists of my time - Erivo and Grande - expertly conveying their characters’ emotions through highly evocative singing choices. Cynthia Erivo’s battle cry at the end of “Defying Gravity” - which has now been memed to death after her dealing it like a party trick on The Tonight Show, as well as the viral “holding space” interview - is powerful, heavy, and nuanced, bravely carrying the film’s themes on its shoulders. Wicked (2024) is undoubtedly a singing-driven musical - which might seem redundant. However, songs weren’t always the main assets of movie musicals. People used to know how to dance.
After Wicked, I was itching to watch another movie musical and turned to Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (2021), which I had never seen before. While I thoroughly enjoyed Wicked, many parts of it - specifically, the non-singing parts - admittedly dragged for me. On the other hand, West Side Story - which, like Wicked, is two hours and forty minutes long - kept me twice as gripped, and I was watching it in my living room.
Unlike Wicked, West Side Story is a musical that’s carried forward by dance - which makes sense given it was originally directed and choreographed by renowned dancer Jerome Robbins. Dance flares the film’s primary scandal; Tony and Maria, members of rival New York City gangs, waltz together at a high school dance, sparking a barrage of impassioned dance-offs and outpourings of emotion via movement. The number “Cool” would be far less intense without dance - Riff and Tony playing a stylish tug-of-war over a gun preceding the Jets’ “rumble” with the Sharks. “America” would be far less flirty and brazen, and “Gee, Officer Krupke” would be far less funny - the musical not only relies on dance as a source of entertainment but as a rhetorical device.
Film is a visual and auditorial medium, and movie musicals that lack dance lose out on the visual component significantly. While it’s challenging to capture the magic of live singing in film, there are many unique ways to film dancers. Spielberg, for instance, does a superb job of emphasizing the importance of dance throughout West Side Story. There is barely a still moment in the movie - something is always in motion, whether it’s the performers or the camera itself. A constant energy current runs through the movie, sometimes explosive, and other times a gentle buzz. There are many wide shots of dance scenes, with hundreds of dancers leaping out of their limbs, and long dance breaks in the middle of songs, when the audience hears nothing but Leonard Bernstein’s beautiful composition, the performers’ breathing, and the floor squeaking beneath their shoes.
Perhaps I’m a bit biased, having danced competitively and semi-professionally for fifteen years. But, in my opinion, Wicked lacked inspired movement - while it’s not a production particularly known for its choreography, the blocking could have been much more thoughtful. West Side Story (2021), on the other hand, is the exception amid a decade of American movie musicals that have seemingly abandoned dance. Where have all the dancers gone?
In 1894, Thomas Edison - inventor of the incandescent lightbulb and the motion picture camera - filmed dancer Ruth St. Denis performing “Skirt Dance” - this video has since been considered one of the first dance “movies.” Throughout the 1910s, dance scenes subsequently appeared in numerous silent films, including D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and Sergei Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days that Shook the World.
However, dance in American film truly took off when Fred Astaire and Gingers Rogers hit the scene in the 1930s. The duo’s performance in Flying Down to Rio (1933) catapulted them to household name status. They created nine more films together - including Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936) - before parting ways in 1938. While Astaire remained a top star in dance movies and musicals through the 1960s, Gene Kelly introduced a new kind of athleticism and dynamism to the craft in the 1940s and 1950s, starring in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and An American in Paris (1951).
The United States saw a dip in enthusiasm for movie musicals in the 1960s and 1970s, though Mary Poppins (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972) were a few great productions to come out of this period. Individual stars like John Travolta helped revive mainstream interest in the late 1970s, via Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978). This revival was held through the 1980s, during which films like Flashdance (1983), Footloose (1984), and Dirty Dancing (1987) captured the public’s fascination. Given the outlandish music and fashion fads of the time and eccentricity occurring in adjacent artistic spheres, a renewed interest in movie musicals throughout the 1980s tracks well.
The early 2000s dance movies that dominated the box office of my childhood were more hip-hop-focused, including Julia Stiles-led Save the Last Dance (2001) and Step Up (2006), which helped launch Channing Tatum’s career. Since then, dance-led movies - and movie musicals, in general - have dwindled. The last movie musical to win Best Picture was Chicago in 2003, and the last winner before that was Oliver! in 1968. While La La Land (2017) and West Side Story (2021) are exceptional outliers, all other 2010s and 2020s dance movies treat dance as set dressing, rather than a storytelling device in its own right, such is the case in Darron Aronofsky’s 2010 psychological thriller Black Swan.
Dance could be disappearing from American movies because mainstream interest in dance has changed significantly over the last hundred years. Couples dancing and social dancing have dwindled across American pop culture - a waning that began in the mid-20th century, as mainstream music preferences began to favor rock and roll. The further mainstream music leaned away from swing, the more mainstream dance culture shifted towards solo dancing, with moves like the Twist and the Mashed Potato gaining traction in the 60s. Today, popular music leans increasingly electronic, making dances beyond swaying and head-banging more difficult.
Further, increased social media usage may be making people feel more self-conscious and more eager to dwell within their more internal, online worlds. Though people have always been concerned about their public perception, this concern has reached new heights today, due to the pressure to curate a well-received social media presence. Public dancing is also incompatible with heightened surveillance occurring in public spaces - within which, people can easily take iPhone videos of your dance moves and upload them to Twitter or TikTok, igniting an unasked-for conversation. I find myself nervous to even text on public transit with people behind me, concerned they may read or snap a picture of my messages.
Heightened anxiety about online - as well as offline - presentation is making us - and the media we produce and prefer - quite serious. And dance - particularly the dance common in musicals - has an inherent absurdity. It requires one to physically move in a manner that’s purely for pleasure and amusement, not utility. Bouncing, twirling, leaping, and so on. And it has a necessary vulnerability. Amid this movement, onlookers are compelled to look at your body. Dance requires a kind of perception and awareness of your physical self that’s unusual - and sometimes uncomfortable - for those who largely dwell online, spending most of their days lifting little more than their fingers.
And it’s this exact absurdity and vulnerability that makes dance such a compelling storytelling device - such a necessary component of so many films. When characters break into song and dance in a movie musical out of seemingly nowhere, it creates a kind of hyperreality - a dream-like state, in which the lines between “reality” and “representation of reality” blur. Are we meant to believe that these characters, in our reality, all know the exact song lyrics and choreography? Do they live inside a separate, parallel universe in which this kind of collective knowledge exists? Or are they in a reality that’s like ours, but bent slightly - are we meant to suspend our notions of time and space, physical and social norms? More overt forms of physical expression are afforded to actors via dance - they’re able to stretch - literally and symbolically - beyond the typical bounds of their physical sphere to deliver a kind of message that standard movement can’t. As such, dance allows us to not only time-jump but reality-jump.
American interest in dance has changed, but it hasn’t disappeared. Young people have weened off the typical twentieth-century social dances and turned instead to more individualized, quick-rotating dance fads, most of which can be done solely with your hands and in the neat rectangle of an iPhone screen. The few memorable dance numbers in Wicked (namely “What Is This Feeling?”) follow this format - tight hand gestures focused on the waist up, appendages close to the body, all quite contained and easily replicable. There is still interest in dance - just dance of a different kind.
Truthfully, we are all drawn to movement - in all domains. In an increasingly ephemeral modern world, dance is one of the few things left that reminds me I have a body. Heart thumping, perspiring - movement of any kind can remind you of this, though it may not be so immediately artistic. The brush of two hands on a movie screen, the upthrowing of a drummer’s arms, basketball players gliding across a court in tandem. There’s a reason why brisk movement around a boxing ring is often called a “dance.” Dance may be one of the oldest art forms - with its earliest evidence dating back to around 8,000 BCE, predating written language. It’s not going anywhere - or at least it shouldn’t. And we all might enjoy it a bit more today if we weren’t made to feel so concerned with ourselves. And others.
I watched West Side Story for the first time after seeing Wicked too! Funny how that worked out. The movie didn’t quite work for me, but i did take note of the dancing. And Mike Faist—what a pleasant surprise.