ABSTRACT
Dance, arguably, is one of the most prominent phenomena in contemporary popular culture. From international superstars ranging from Madonna, Beyoncé and the late Michael Jackson, to the more regionally-based dance icons such as Namie Amuro of Japan and Jolin Tsai of Taiwan, and to those numerous self-recorded videos posted online by fans, the prevailing visibility of the dancing body is both undeniable and inescapable. Yet the dancing body in popular culture, despite not being entirely ignored, receives relatively little academic attention compared with its actual significance. This neglect could result from dance’s corporeal nature which, in terms of Western philosophy, is considered ‘inferior’ to the mind; 1 possibly because these bodies are located in a field which, in Taiwan for instance, is traditionally considered the opposite of ‘serious high culture’; possibly because popular dance is often marketed under the categories of popular music, a field where corporeality has always been overlooked; 2 and possibly because these ‘popular bodies’ are categorized as dance, a relatively marginalized discipline in the arts and humanities. 3 In other words, the dancing body in the popular field is often alluded to as naive or superficial. Counter to this persistent view towards these highly visible dancing bodies, my aims are two-fold: first, to stress the popular dancing body’s importance in terms of culture, politics, music, economics and aesthetics; and, second, to formulate an analytical framework which has the theoretical capacity to capture its high-speed transmission and mutation. Consequently, I set out to excavate the profundity of these bodies alongside their commonly misunderstood appearance of superficiality. I will argue for a contradictory sense of the significance of these bodies in everyday life through what I refer to as ‘superficial profundity’. Using Homi Bhabha’s idea of ‘cultural translation’ 4 in tandem with Judith Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’, 5 I embark on a reinvention of a new analytical method for these bodily practices, which I term ‘performative translation’, to examine these highly-mutable bodies in the (online) encounter between sound and image.
