Abstract
This paper delves into the process of choreographing 'fangirl & the liner notes,' an interdisciplinary performance that combines poetry, music and movement and is advertised as a one-woman rock show. Sitting at the crux of femininity, teenage angst, and rebellion, the show unpacks the identity of the American Girl who becomes a Woman through an auto-ethnographic reflection of the music that shapes us during our formative years. 'fangirl & the liner notes' collaged my practices in writing and dance, and established a common language between concert dance and the music industry. By choosing alternative venues to premiere the work, I sought to make the movement accessible for viewers and open the door for them to engage with the content's deeper questions.

A One-Woman Rock Show
The Warehouse was packed to capacity: 150 people, standing room only. Walking through the front door, several pool tables and the stale smell of smoke greeted the audience. Through another set of double doors, they entered a back room with a bar in the corner, a small wooden stage, and a rickety sound booth. In this space, everyone knew how to dress, how to act, and what to expect from the room. All that was left was the content, which they were more than willing to leave as an enticing and perplexing surprise given the ease with which they could show up, be carded and wrist-banded at the door, enjoy the music blaring through the speakers, and chat about this local “band” they knew nothing about.

fangirl & the liner notes was the headlining band. In actuality, it was an interdisciplinary performance combining poetry, music and movement, advertised as a one-woman rock show. The show engaged with the process of unpacking identity, telling a mess of stories about the American Girl who becomes a Woman. Through the lens of a white, cis-gender, able-bodied, female choreographer and writer, I questioned who this figure is in terms her multiple characterizations across popular culture. What does she look like? How does she move? In unpacking the multitude of identities tied into the American Woman, I questioned how I could create a performance space where these characters co-exist, interact, and engage with the audience.

fangirl & the liner notes

fangirl & the liner notes is a performance that sits at the crux of femininity, teenage angst, rebellion, and release. The experience of teenage angst is a turbulent and undeniably visceral time in life. It is when we most fully question our identities while simultaneously remaining vulnerable to media that molds our personal tastes and beliefs. The work turned an autho-ethnographic eye inward as I looked to the pop-punk—Blink-182, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, Green Day—that soothed my hormonal rage with a pulse that held my body at attention. I explored how my ballet- and modern-trained body stood at odds with an inner moshing, elbow-throwing thrasher, and considered how teenagers seek refuge in music. I took a magnifying glass up to energetic, and at times misogynistic and provocative, pop-punk lyrics, and reflected on my own experiences “fangirling” over musicians of the early 2000s, both at concerts and alone in my bedroom.

Researching the American Girl/Woman

fangirl & the liner notes originated from re-listening to Green Day’s She’s a Rebel. The song describes a simultaneously rebellious and alluring character—she’s intimidating and domestic. Her pseudonym is “Whatsername,” a stand-in for everywoman. Thematically, North American music across all genres and time periods has its own version of “whatsername,” shown in music scholar Virginia Cooper’s study of feminine images from 1,164 popular song lyrics. Cooper’s findings reveal this faceless figure as evil, mothering, a sex object, delicate, child-like, on a pedestal, attractive, in need of a man, and supernatural.¹

Music, and the society where it’s produced, dually defines femininity and holds women accountable for fulfilling every role. Marion Meade’s 1971 New York Times article synthesizes the incongruities present in rock music’s rebellious aesthetics, exposing the paradox of women in rock lyrics as “insatiable, sex-crazed animals or all-American emasculators.”² Simultaneously, the converse expectation is that these same women exist only to serve and enhance the lives of men. This contradiction doesn’t exist solely in rock music, but in society’s general understanding of the American female’s persona and how she operates. The book, Pretty in Punk: Girls’

Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture, dubs this “the femininity game,” which begins in adolescence where the rules of girlhood, as constructed by a white man, are learned by every Western female regardless of class, race, or age and utilize heterosexual, middle-class white women as the model.³  The femininity game is especially important during adolescence, where skewing the roles of masculinity and femininity results in rebellion.

Rock genres have codified rebellion, yet, maintain women as insubordinate and submissive. Influenced by my parents’ classic rock, I was continually exposed to “the dominant catechism of rock where women are both attainable and containable.”⁴  fangirl & the liner notes reflected on my teenage music preferences and how I constructed my own image in relation to Green Day’s fictitious American Girl. Researcher Gayle Wald notes the use of “girl” rather than “woman” as an important moment of contradiction within youth and contemporary music and a conscious choice in light of 1990s girl culture. Appropriating the innocence and ambiguity of girlhood, this movement resisted “patriarchal femininity” by caricaturizing the “trivialization, marginalization, and eroticization” of women in rock music.⁵  These satirical representations of the ideal American Woman combined with popular culture’s opposing expectations became problematic as I began to define womanhood.

Making the Band

In creating fangirl & the liner notes, I focused on interpretations of pop-punk’s music, lyrics, videos, aesthetics and movements that shaped my notions about the identity of the American Girl. I was interested in the strain between her binaries and explored what Whiteley describes as, “the opposition between pure/impure, controllable/uncontrollable [and] active/passive,” prominent in her various descriptions within rock music lyrics. By illustrating these tensions in movement, I hoped to unify instances and images of passivity, control, and the “uncontrollable.”⁶

At first, I took the traditional dance concert approach to this material and spent a year playing with embodiments of the American woman with a cast of five undergraduate students at Florida State University. Naturally, the first discussion with my collaborators centered on beauty standards, as well as racial and gendered stereotypes. While lyrics across all genres tended to superficially describe this girl, I clarified my motivations to uncover her hidden layers. As a result, I asked my dancers to focus on the American Girl’s actions and the assumptions one might make about her based on those actions as a way of embodying her heart instead of her skin. She is a mask and a costume, an idea that anyone, regardless of age, race, or background, could find herself thinking about or rebelling against.

I worked with a composer to deconstruct the pop-punk music, placing white noise behind the sound score, abstracting the choreography against a black backdrop, and fitting the work for a proscenium stage. While the end result represented my research questions, it didn’t resonate. Fangirling over music is an intimate and widely understood experience, as is teenagedom. So, I went back to the root of where it all began—my thrashing body suspended inside a moshpit.

What started out as cast of five dancers became a solo show featuring one other collaborator. Together, we unpacked what it meant to exist in a paradox, being both a solo and duet form, physicalizing the friction held within our bodies. Often we talk about contradictions as either/or binaries, but Green Day’s use of one particular lyric in She’s a Rebel revealed to me a different kind of demarcation: “she’s the salt of the earth and she’s dangerous.” My collaborator and I delved into this lyric while playing our physicalized version of the femininity game. She can be this and that. There’s momentum in the “and,” which fueled further breakthroughs as music served as a fundamental anchor.