Fogarty & Evans/Movies, Moves and Music, 3. From Beat Street to Step Up 3D: The Sound of Street Dance Films

The relationship in street dance films between cinematic sound (including music, effects and dialogue) and dance moves reveals a tension between production and reception, representation and labour. The film being exhibited always encounters the possibility of external sounds, especially those created by the cinema audience itself, resulting in the co-creation of an event, a temporal experience sounds different each time and thus is never duplicated. Street dance films frequently include performances by top dancers in international street dance scenes whose cultural capital stands in some contrast to the status of the films themselves. That is to say, while hip hop music is now taken very seriously by fans, critics and scholars, street dance films, packaged as supposedly trivial forms of Hollywood light entertainment, are not taken seriously at all even with their documentation of the talents of top dancers. Through ethnographic and sonic analysis of these films and their reception, this chapter reveals both the reflexive and hidden relationship between these popular, commercial movies and hip hop culture more generally.