Musical films

[Aaron Gerow]

Lorenzo was emphasizing a special case of films with couple dancing,  
not just musicals in general. I have an upcoming article on musicals,  
and I can attest there certainly are a lot of musicals, broadly  
defined. There are fewer full-blown musicals where the narrative  
practically stops and people start singing and dancing, but there are  
still quite a few. But most of those feature singing with limited  
choreography.

That doesn't mean there was not history of couple dancing. The  
Rokumeikan was famous for dancing in the early Meiji (and thus social  
dancing today is not just the result of the influence of Hollywood),  
and you can see couples dancing in a number of even pre-1960 films:  
Tokyo Rhapsody (where in one scene it is two women dancing!), Anjo-ke  
no budokai, and even Utau tanuki gassen (where a more "Japanese- 
style" dance between two characters is narratively important).

Of course, one of the biggest representations of social dancing in  
the last ten years in Japan was the Urinari Geinojin Shako Dansu Bu,  
where geinojin trained and entered real dance competitions (long  
before Dancing with the Stars).


Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner

Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University

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