Waking the Witch

There is no ques­tion that Kate Bush has had a great influ­ence on bodyc­ity. We are no strangers to youtube, research­ing birds, dres­sage, for­eign dance shows, Janet Jack­son, and cat videos to name a few. But I find myself (this is Lake btw) always com­ing back to Kate Bush’s videos.

Kate Bush is a pow­er­house chore­o­g­ra­pher songstress who was at the front of the music video rev­o­lu­tion. Each music video tells a story with her as the main char­ac­ter danc­ing through foggy futures, forests, and shat­ter­ing glass. Her chore­og­ra­phy has the ele­ments of mod­ern dance that we all know, every­day ges­tures exag­ger­ated to sweep­ing moves, enthu­si­as­tic pranc­ing and the pre­ci­sion of a trained dancer. The danc­ing can be as nar­ra­tive as her videos, clearly try­ing to tell a story and lead her audi­ence, but what I love is her very par­tic­u­lar atti­tude, enthu­si­asm and weird­ness. Her quirky facial expres­sions, “edgy” cos­tumes and bizarre sets are what make her videos so charm­ing and enter­tain­ing. Look­ing back, the videos seem a lit­tle ama­teur­ish, lots of fog machines and dudes with beards, though I would guess she was on the cut­ting edge of video fx. But this just adds to the plea­sure of her videos, and it’s that aspect, the enthu­si­as­tic awk­ward­ness (as well as the straight up humor) that has been most inspi­ra­tional to me, espe­cially when we built the Hal­loween dance, “through the Glass Mass.” Here is a smat­ter­ing of some favorite videos:
The set and cos­tumes alone make this video amaz­ing, that and her sig­na­ture all male back-ground dancers.

This is the clas­sic folk story of the wife think­ing her hus­band is cheat­ing on her so she dis­guises her­self to trick him into adul­tery, note the dou­ble bass as the sym­bolic ges­ture of her husband.

She was only 19 when this sin­gle came out, sig­nal­ing the begin­ning of many cross-fades, mir­ror­ing effects, and fog machines.

Ever­body knows and loves this song, right? The video is a clas­sic and very mod­ern dancey, with fans.

I also have to men­tion “Army Dream­ers” which fea­tures an incred­i­ble sequence of her being blown up and fly­ing back­wards, ass over teaket­tle. In “Sat in your Lap”, the fx is taken to another level with video inserts of dunces and jesters danc­ing in her palms and roller­skat­ing. In “Breath­ing” she is in a plas­tic womb with an umbil­i­cal chord. “Cloud­bust­ing” fea­tures a pater­nal Don­ald Suther­land and is sim­i­lar to “Hounds of Love” in that they are her most nar­ra­tive videos. And she just looks so freak­ing cool in “Them Heavy Peo­ple.”

All of these videos are lit­tle mas­ter­pieces of music, dance, and video fx, they also hold a spe­cial time in tele­vi­sion his­tory. I grew up in the music video age when MTV still was music tele­vi­sion and musi­cians were best­ing each other with the coolest videos. I was lis­ten­ing to the radio today and heard tell of the vir­tual death of the music video. It sad­dens me to see that imag­i­na­tive, orig­i­nal, and weird music videos like Kate Bush’s have been replaced by unin­spired real­ity tv shows of washed-up actors and wannabes. Per­haps this is our cue to bring it back around and make a bodyc­ity pre-MTV music video. Stay tuned!

~Lake