Description

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Synchronized dance and the shifting dialogue between the power of forms and the forms of power.

A popular form of artistic expression, synchronized dance is often belittled as a minor form of art that stands for a great variety of often conflicting phenomena: the desire to create a Taylorist form of art; a manifestation of American standardization in an economically strained Germany; the endorsement of the precision and efficiency in the name of Americanism; the incarnation of capitalism and its misguided ways; a linguistic and patriarchal taxonomy that categorizes women as garçonne, New Woman, or Heidi; the consumption and reification of women as commodities; the community of Hitler’s elite troops; and so forth. Synchronized dance shows draw attention to a state of hypnoptic forms which, under the guise of entertainment, propagate nauseating ideologies, and crime—but not only. The myriad associations triggered by the spectacle of synchronized dance raises fundamental questions about the nature of forms. Do they carry an eternal meaning, as the proponents of the Modern Movement imagined, or do they, on the contrary, yield to any meaning imposed on them?

To examine in detail the condition of the synchronized dance form questions whether such body manipulation belong to the past, or not. The omnipresence of revues attracted numerous contemporary analyses, but what is happening to the meaning of form and what does this spectacle used for occasion such as Donald Trump Inauguration or North Korean parade still mean today? The debate around a “rational and empty form” is not useless, since this very emptiness shapes ideologies and is no more confined to a single political conception or to a factual opposition between democracy and extremism than it is linked to a specific era or geography. Neither de-historicized nor depoliticized, synchronized dance rekindles the question of the aesthetics of very relative ideologies.

About the Author

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Alexandra Midal is an independant curator, film essayist, Professor of history and theory of design at HEAD–Genève, and Head of theory at ENSCI–Les Ateliers Saint-Sabin, Paris. Former director of the Regional Contemporary Art Funds of Haute-Normandie (FRAC) and a former assistant to the artist Dan Graham for public commissions, her research is situated at the intersections of design, art, politics, and cinema.