This paper presents Michael Jackson as a dance-maker keenly aware of his historical song and dance predecessors and frames Jackson’s dance-making process as “choreographic curation.” Jackson’s assemblage of a wide range of movements, rhythms, gestures, and postures from across dance genres was tied to his understanding of their historical context, as well as what he saw as their particular expressive capacity, yet Jackson’s fans were not always versed in his allusions to or citations of his historical precedents. I situate Jackson’s choreographic curation within the history of American popular dance and musical entertainment and its cross-cultural tradition of borrowing, appropriation, and fusion. I then tease out the complexities of cultural memory and (re)collection in popular dance provoked by Jackson’s frequently unrecognized use of gestural and choreographic movement citations: what was created as an “obvious” homage or critique is not always seen as such. Michael Jackson bridges late modernism and early postmodernism in his adult choreographic work; Roland Barthes and Frederic Jameson’s assessments and concerns about postmodernism are reflected in the distance between Jackson’s authorial intent and his audiences’ varying receptions of his multi-layered, complexly nuanced texts of song and dance. While many of his short films employed tropes from narrative cinema and therefore had clear storylines containing coherent moral messages understood as Jackson’s authorial voice, Jackson’s choreographic process and product was postmodern in its cross-cultural sampling, collage-like effect, and seemingly incongruent juxtaposition of movement idioms, stylistic genres, and abounding inter-textual references. Jackson’s curation of musical theater’s fusion of tap, jazz dance, ballet and ballroom dance, several decades of black social dance, and hip-hop, particularly the techniques of breaking and popping, ironically created a recognizable “Michael Jackson” dance vocabulary, an indelible physicality and rhythmical emphasis, and of course the many iconic gestures, moves, and poses that we recognize and remember.
About the presenterElizabeth June Bergman
Elizabeth June Bergman is a dancer, interdisciplinary scholar, and educator who researches the cultural history and production culture of the U.S. commercial dance industry. She holds a Ph.D. from Temple University (2019). Elizabeth received an MFA from The University of Iowa (2009) and has subsequently taught at UI, Temple, and Bryn Mawr College. She currently serves as Chair of Pop Moves Americas, a node of the international research group for popular dance and performance.