Deconstructing Fosse

This article discusses ‘Paramodernities #5: All That Spectacle: Dance on Stage and Screens’, the instalment of Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities series focusing on Bob Fosse’s film version of Sweet Charity (1969). Paramodernities was a 2018 series of performance pieces that examined the movement of six iconic works of choreography as a way to understand modernity. Fosse created an iconic style that circulated through Broadway and Hollywood, unlike the works of Balanchine, Graham and Ailey, which exist primarily on concert stages. The article explores how that commercial circulation changes dance and our perceptions of moving bodies. In particular, Sweet Charity illuminates the cultural stratification of modernism, poised between high art and abstraction and commodified popular culture, replete with racial appropriations and sexualized movement. In a battle over cultural capital, Fosse sets up dance as a shiny but haunted spectacle.