Tanz - Zeitschrift für Ballett, Tanz und Performance
November 2024 - Article - Author
There has been a revival of dance-centered music videos in pop culture for some time now. Although dance has always been a fundamental part of the format, some people nostalgically remember the heyday of MTV, because back then the synchronous formation dance of the background dancers was the essence of every music video. A type of dance that was relegated to the pop culture periphery, reduced to a decorative accessory, sometimes with the quality of a quote, but is currently experiencing a renaissance. The zeitgeist of “nowstalgia”, which combines a carefree imagination of the past with a delusional vision of the future, is reviving the heyday of video clip dancing. A pop culture phenomenon in which the singer Dua Lipa joins with her album “Future Nostalgia”, which was released in 2020. Her disco-pop video “Dance the Night,” released in June 2023 – part of the soundtrack and musical teaser for the blockbuster “Barbie” – once again illustrates the extent to which nostalgia has established itself as an effective marketing strategy in pop culture.
With the romantic comedy "Barbie", the largest US toy company Mattel achieved a commercial coup: the revival of the collective memory of the unpolluted pink plastic world of the blonde doll, mixed with a consumer-friendly pinch of feminism, thrilled the masses. The accompanying music video, for whose choreography the award-winning Charm La'Donna received a VMA nomination, demonstrates how dance (with a view to the virtual repetition on TikTok) can be distributed to the masses and even flatter an "enlightened" audience with the micro-subversive promise about the end of patriarchy. Here all worries are buried under the disco ball and the entire studio team is gripped by dance fever.
But is it really enough to counter the mendacity of glittering turbo-capitalism with escapism? In this world, even the tears of knowledge are turned into diamonds and pushed aside with a swing of the hip so that nostalgia can be joyfully welcomed. Blaming the makers for this is cheap, because how can critical work be possible if the manufacturer of the object being questioned acts as a producer himself? The only option is to escape into the past in order to face the future with “Radical Optimism”. Even if the world is on fire.
