This is not a dance

Film Quarterly

Volumn 59, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 22-34

  Chien, Irene ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049483165     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/fq.2006.59.3.22     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. By touting Dance Dance Revolution as radically active gaming, these articles position other video games as passive, sedentary, and disembodied. See Khanh T. L. Tran, "Karaoke for Feet - In the Latest Arcade Craze, Players Show a Machine Their Fanciest Footwork," Wall Street Journal (16 August 2000), Sec. B;
2. Alice M. Lee, "Electric Boogie," Entertainment Weekly (4 August 2000), 16;
3. Marco R. della Cava, "Karaoke for Your Feet," USA Today (21 August 2001), Sec. D. More recently, rhythm action games like Dance Dance Revolution have been hyped as "exergames" and "exertainment" that fight rather than contribute to the perceived crisis of childhood obesity. The Website Get Up and Move encourages people to lose weight by playing DDR; West Virginia's state health insurance agency is researching DDR as a cost-effective way to improve cardiovascular health; and a school district in California is integrating DDR into physical education classes.
4. See Get Up and Move, http://www.getupmove.com;
5. Ali-son Barker, "Study Uses Video Games to Fight Obesity," USA Today (4 April 2005);
6. Selicia Kennedy-Ross, "PE to Wed with Video in Redlands," San Bernardino Sun (16 June 2005).
7. "Bemani," from the game Beatmania (1997), is actually the brand name of the rhythm action game line from the Japanese video game company Konami, creator of Dance Dance Revolution, which currently dominates the market in this genre. Other Konami Bemani games, listed with the year of the original U.S. version's release, include Guitar Freaks (1999), Pop 'n' Music (1999), Para Para Paradise (2000), Drummania (2002), Mambo a Go Go (2002), and Karaoke Revolution (2003). Bemani gameplay has its antecedents in the popular arcade game Whac-a-Mole (1976), which in turn evolved from carnival midway and amusement park games. Like early cinematic apparatuses, carnival games such as skeeball and shooting ranges involved the player's active physical participation. In fact, Bemani has been credited with revitalizing an arcade culture that had been languishing since the 1980s, as well as with opening up the social space of the arcade to female players, who have been more willing to play rhythm-action games than the shooting and fighting games that formerly dominated video arcades. See Maggie McKee, "Interactive Arcade Game Starts a Dance Revolution," Santa Cruz Sentinel (21 April 2000).
8. The Japanese-only Game Boy and Game Boy 2 (both 2000), and Game Boy 3, Game Boy Oha Sta, and Game Boy Disney Mix (all 2001) releases are played on the portable, handheld Nintendo Game Boy. The Microsoft Xbox Ultramix (2003), Ultramix 2 (2004), and Ultramix 3 (2005) and Sony Playstation 2 Extreme 2 (2005) versions support online play. The Sony Playstation 2 Extreme (2004) and Extreme 2 versions support the EyeToy digital camera. The major releases of Dance Dance Revolution are as follows, in roughly chronological order: DDR, DDR Disney Mix, DDR Game Boy, DDR Konamix, DDR Max, DDR Extreme, DDR Ultramix, DDR Mario Mix, and DDR SuperNOVA.
9. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 9, 15.
10. In his book Bodies in Technology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Don Ihde opposes video game play's "reduced set of bodily actions" to the "healthy, implicitly athletic embodiment" (18) of Merleau-Ponty's "free-flowing, active 'sports body'" (15) in order to critique Merleau-Ponty's secretly normative body. However, Ihde erases the possibility of conceiving of an active, intentional body in video-game play at the same time. Dance is used as a foil to the video game's diminished embodiment: "The Nintendo phenomenon that emphasizes eye/hand actions has been seen to span bodies in technologies ranging from video games to surgery and is a new, if restricted, style of movement that is very far from bodily sports activity or dance, whether classical ballet or modern" (138).
11. Johannes Birringer, Media & Performance Along the Border (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 39.
12. Vivian Sobchack, "The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic and Electronic 'Presence,'" Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 161, 152.
13. Felicia McCarren, Dancing Machines (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 5.
14. See Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Genre, Gender, Excess," in Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003), 141-59.
15. See Dawn Bryant, "Game Puts Twist on Dance," The Sun News, Myrtle Beach, S.C. (19 June 2002);
16. Susan Lieu, "DDR: The Young and the Agile," The San Francisco Examiner (22 September 2002);
17. Jimmy Magahern, "Dance Dance Fever: Valley Arcade Rats Find Fame on the DDR Dance Pad," The Phoenix New Times (9 September 2004)
18. Jason Ko, DDR Freak, http://www.ddrfreak.com.
19. See Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004) for a valuable challenge to critical studies of new media technologies that focus on their capacity to transcend rather than re-invest the human body.
20. The female voice in Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix is credited to Audio Angel, also known as Rashida Clendening, an African-American actress and voice talent who is prominent in the San Francisco drum and bass music scene.
21. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 109.
22. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 152.
23. In the Super Cockpit virtual reality system, the Air Force pilot is securely strapped into a helmet-mounted display that blocks out sensory connections to the physical world and replaces them with three-dimensional projections that "exactly mimicked the world outside," except with information such as compass heading and flight path superimposed on the field of vision (Manovich, 111).
24. Vivian Sobchack, "'Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs' (A Phenomenological Meditation in Movements)," Topoi, vol. 24, no. 1 (January 2005): 56.
25. Video games that capture dimensions of bodily movement beyond accurate hits to a punch-pad type of controller have recently emerged. In the DDR family, Dance Dance Revolution Extreme (2004) and Extreme 2 (2005) integrate the EyeToy camera to capture the motion of players' hands and feet waving through the air, and Karaoke Revolution Party (2005) integrates the DDR dance pad with a microphone to capture both dance steps and singing. More extreme, although less widely played, is the video game The Journey to the Wild Divine: The Passage (2003). Promising a "reunion of mind, body, and spirit," Wild Divine is controlled by a biofeedback device that measures your heart rate and perspiration. Players must modulate their breathing and level of excitement to navigate a mystical fantasy world where they accomplish exercises such as levitating balls, shooting arrows, lighting fires, and controlling the flight patterns of birds.
26. Massumi, 6. Massumi's invocation of Henri Bergson's critique of Zeno's paradox of the arrow resonates provocatively with the streams of arrows in Dance Dance Revolution, which do not stop the game's movement as they pass through their targets, but flare in intensity and continue streaming until the song or the game ends. DDR's flocks of arrows, however, never hit their target and stop. They never provide the cessation that enables the retrospective plotting of the positions that divide their trajectory, and therefore radically resist positioning: "Movement, in process, cannot be determinately indexed by anything outside of itself. It has withdrawn into an all-encompassing relation with what it will be. It is in becoming, absorbed in occupying its field of potential" (7).
27. Simon Reynolds, "Technical Ecstasy," The Wire 105 (November 1992): 36.
28. Most of DDR's dance tracks, such as "MaxX Unlimited," "Brilliant2U," and "Dynamite Rave" are songs composed specifically for the Konami Bemani series, but more recent versions of the game feature licensed songs and music-video clips in abridged form. The screen-faced orientation of the player's body in DDR may emerge as much from rave and electronic dance music culture as from the video-game convention of player-facing-screen. In her analysis of the bodily movements of disco dancing versus those of rave dancing, Helen Thomas observes that rave dancers do not shift eyes, focus, and direction, nor project their bodies into 360-degree space or across the dance floor: "In contrast to the older dancers whose front and eye focus changed through stepping and turning and whose gestures inhabited the space around the body, the younger people danced on the spot, with their feet ... keeping a distinctive light (pulse-like) bounce ... focusing to the front." See Helen Thomas, "Dancing the Night Away: Rave/Club Culture," in The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 203.
29. Henry Jenkins, "Games, the New Lively Art," in Handbook of Computer Game Studies, ed. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 180.
30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 146.
31. See The Red Shoes (1948), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, for a highly self-reflexive cinematic interpretation of the fairy tale.
32. Vivian Sobchack, "What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh," in Carnal Thoughts, 67.
33. Sobchack, "The Scene of the Screen," 159.
34. Merleau-Ponty, 151.
35. DDR's "MaxX Unlimited" and "The Legend of MaxX" reach an arrow-scrolling speed as fast as 320 beats per minute. The human heart at rest averages 72 BPM and dance club music typically plays at 120-180 beats per minute.
36. See Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty" in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 333-36.
37. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 246.
38. These fans of anime, manga, and gaming call themselves cos-players, or "costume players."
39. McCarren, 34.
40. As the mythic location of Western cyberpunk dystopias, Japan in particular "has become synonymous with the technologies of the future ... a future that seems to be transcending and displacing Western modernity." See David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (New York: Routledge, 1995), 167.
41. Taussig, 144.
42. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 53.
43. Reynolds, 36.
44. Andrea Bowers, "Top Ten," Artforum, vol. 39, no. 9 (May 2001): 38. Bowers' video installation is Democracy's Body - Dance Dance Revolution (2001).
45. Jenkins, 183.