A Dance Between Chaos and Complexity: Choreographing the Spasm in Music Videos

Abstract

This article analyzes the use of the spasm as a choreographic tool in the following music videos: The Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” (1981), Radiohead’s “Lotus Flower” (2011), and Atoms for Peace’s “Ingenue” (2013). I read the choreography in these videos as representations of the spasm (as defined by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi) which can ultimately become a chaoide (as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) when deployed in specific ways by specific bodies. My analysis of these videos suggests opportunities for thinking about how the corporeal labor of the spasm—especially its contingent sweat alongside (un)successful moments of corporeal fluidity—mark bodies as agents capable of negotiating how they might control their own embodied relationship to semiocapitalism and its privileging of speed and productivity.