Methodological Approaches to Music and Dance:
Exploring the Field of Heavy Metal and Its Genre Boundaries
September 08 – September 09, 2022, University of Siegen
Music and dance are connected intimately and especially in popular music cultures dance plays a vital role. Even though academic attention so far has rather attended to forms such as tap dance, salsa, hip hop or various forms of electronic dance music, heavy metal is no exception in this respect: It has developed characteristic, music-related bodily practices that at times serve to designate cultural membership as, for example, the term “headbangers” indicates. At concerts, the music is accompanied by common movements like headbanging and moshing and even more unconventional forms such as conga lines or ‘folkloristic’ circle dances can be found. As this suggests, the boundaries to other music genres are not rigid but porous: Historically, for instance, moshing and stage diving entered metal culture via hardcore and (music-)stylistic crossovers can entail extensions of a genre’s dance styles. The specific forms of movement are situated within a complex, relational structure and can vary by (sub-)genre, the course of a concert, the interaction among dancers, the dancers’ evaluation of the music, or the music’s aesthetic character and materiality to name but a few aspects.
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