Dance Monsters and the Thinly-Stretched Fabric of Reality
The Unbearable Lightness of a Netflix Dance Contest
I just broke a life-long streak1 of not watching reality television because my kids stumbled onto Dance Monsters and there on our little living room TV I beheld mostly-cute 3D cartoon “monster” avatars mirroring, apparently on the beat, apparently before a live audience, the sometimes-astonishing dance moves of humans somewhere else in motion capture suits.
Thus unsettling our entire concept of reality.
I’m from Florida. I grew up under the dazzling “magic” (deception) of Disney. A theme park in Orlando or a casino in Vegas will dump ridiculous money into maintaining and staffing an illusion, and they will manipulate the willing tourist-audience just-so to make sure the effect works.
Video makes this illusion so easy it’s almost dismissable: the camera perspectives are under the director’s control, and the whole thing is recorded and edited and subject to every level of manipulation.2
So then the immediate question becomes: what does the audience see?
The pat answer is “they see what you see” and that the dancing monster is projected as a hologram on the stage. This is the same technology that brings Whitney Houston back to life to perform in Vegas, and there are youtube videos that show people responding to astonishing holograms, end of answer.
But the viewer is not satisfied with that answer. We want to know how convincing it was. We want to know whether it glitched, and how badly. We want to know if there were tell-tale signs of fakery in the real that we can’t perceive on video.
We want to know its boundaries — is everything on the stage projected? When humans appear on stage and interact with the “monsters,” are they physically present on the stage or are they backstage?
For comparison, the Whitney Houston hologram was wooden and unconvincing — and the dancers always clearly kept to their spaces and never crossed into the hologram’s projection zone. These cartoon monsters are alive with movement, and they very frequently move into the spaces of dancing humans, interviewing humans, and each other.
When they try to hold hands — as when two are eliminated together and they are comforting each other — you can tell someone has yelled at them “don’t hold hands!” and they always quickly drop their grasp.
Which is a little sad, but also, from the observer’s perspective, a relief. We need there to be boundaries, no matter how slim, between the illusion and the real. Real people can hold hands. Deep breath. Okay.
But this still raises some questions. Who are their technological handlers? Where was this filmed? How many cameras and projectors were required to create this illusion?3
What kind of processing speed are we talking about here? How thick are these cables, how short the distance, and if those things changed, would it become impossible? Could the dancers be in England and the audience and judges in Orlando? Would that work?
When the “monsters” dance with backup dancers, are those backup dancers with the human in the motion-capture suit backstage? Are they also in motion-capture suits? Are they wearing costumes or are the costumes projected onto them? Are they pre-recorded? Are there two sets of backup dancers, one set on the stage and/or projected and another set with the live-performing human-in-capture-suit?
If the humans are projected too, are those even their real faces? Are they totally fake or just filtered to look cuter? Are they really wearing those clothes? Is that their current actual hairstyle? What is their real relative height compared to other humans and dancers around them?
Magicians fool people for a living — they deceive professionally. One of the first principles of magic is misdirection. Rather than astonishing us with the holograms by raising Elvis from the dead, or having a whale emerge from a gym floor to seemingly-splash a group of school kids, this show tells us to look somewhere else — judge the dancing. Get used to the monster avatar. So much so, that when the dancers are eliminated from the competition you’ll be astonished to see the human who controlled them.
Every time a human is revealed the people purported to be there (the judges, the audience) act astonished — why? What are they astonished by? That there’s a human being instead of a retro-robot? Or had they imagined what the human would look like and they were wrong?
Or is there a time-compression amazement? Are they, like us (the watching-an-edited video version at home), seeing the human appear, coiffed and coutured, more quickly than should be humanly possible?
The misdirection in this show is compelling — some of the dancers, and dances, are entrancing. Some of these dancers do triple backflips and land into a superhero pose. Some of the dances are funny, and you start to love the dancers a little through their moves. But more importantly, we’re being asked to judge them, compare them. Focus on the moves, the choreography, the story that’s being told with the dance, who you want to win — and so we are primed for the magic, we miss what the magician is doing with her other hand.
I guess what I’m saying, Netflix, is that you can put out a 10-part documentary on the making of this eight-episode dance contest and I will watch it twelve times.
I accept and am grateful for both your congratulations and condolences on the loss of my never-watched-a-reality-show streak. I made it long time. It was a tough streak to break. And this was the show what broke me.
There was a year of Post-production time:
Dance Monsters was filmed in October 2021. It was released over a year later, in December 2022, much to the sealed lips and excitement of judges like Ashley Banjo, Lele Pons and Ne-Yo, and host Ashley Roberts.
Dance Monsters is filmed at Black Hangar Studios in Lasham, Alton, in the United Kingdom. Those who got to watch filming were asked to meet inside Festival Place shopping centre, before being taken by coach to the studios.
Known as a “one-stop-shop” film and television studio, it has the UK’s largest permanent Green Screen Cyclorama and is actually one of the biggest studios in the country. It has full production facilities including large workshops, too.
Disney’s Dumbo was filmed at the same location, as well as The Grand Tour, Salmon Fishing In The Yemen, The North Water, Live Another Day, and one of the biggest franchise films, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.