TV REVIEW : ‘Dance!’: Insight Into Music Videos

For music-video fans, “Dance! Dance! Dance!” (on VH-1 cable at 5 p.m. today) reveals names and credits of the most active choreographers working in the idiom. For the general dance audience, the hourlong special provides insights about creative conditions and priorities in what amounts to a world unto itself.

At his worst, director Scott E. Moore simply provides video resumes garnished with dance clips and sound bites.

But major issues do emerge from the interview fragments: Over and over we hear that these choreographers are hired guns--that working in music-video isn’t about getting a choreographic vision onstage. Similarly, in a statement so central it’s used twice, Paula Abdul calls dancers in music-video “icing on the cake . . . they really bring a lot to the party.”

Consider these statements in relation to concert dance, where dancers and choreographers are the cake, are the party. Music-video may have increased the visibility and earning power of American dancers, but it’s still light-years away from making good on Vince Paterson’s claim that “it has reinstated dance as a viable art alternative in America.” Russell Clark defines the excitement of music-video dance more sharply when he says, “You can get fine art and you can get rough art at the same time.”

Although we see glimpses of Madonna parodying the bizarre gender stereotypes of music-video, nobody speaks on this subject. But there’s talk galore about cannibalizing Hollywood--dropping a rock star into a facsimile of a vintage movie musical (Abdul in “All That Jazz,” Madonna in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Whitney Houston in “Funny Face”).

We’re told that such simulations are “tributes,” but, of course, they allow the star to borrow an archetypal, hypersexual glamour scarcely possible in the present tense.

At the end of “Dance! Dance! Dance!” Gregory Hines calls music-videos “dance fantasy pieces.” But, as we watch Michael Jackson in leather solemnly grabbing his crotch, and other equally infantile play acting, the question remains whether this is our fantasy or the stars’.