Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:58:35am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Sonic and Visual Excess Session Chair: Polina Dimova | |
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“Come On Baby, Better Lose Some Weight:” Excess, Crossover, and Hearing Fatness in Dreamgirls UC Davis Critics and audience members tend to agree that the musical Dreamgirls, either on stage (1981) or screen (2006), is a fictionalized retelling of the Supremes’ story. However, Tom Eyen, Henry Krieger, and Michael Bennett, the musical’s librettist, composer, and director (respectively) claimed that Dreamgirls has nothing to do with the Motown girl group. The creative team also contended that the musical has little to do with the size of the characters’ bodies, specifically: that fatness is not integral for the character Effie White, originally played by Jennifer Holliday. Despite their protestations, Effie is narratively fat in the musical. For example, Effie’s fat body is referenced several times in the libretto and contributes to her expulsion from the fictional girl group, The Dreams. I suggest that Effie’s music is a sonic representation of her fatness and that body size is a crucial part of the Dreamgirls story because of its proximity to the history of Motown and crossover pop music. In this paper, I analyze key songs in the score to suggest that music highlights the body. Drawing on musicological scholarship about excess and madness (McClary 1991), musical glamour (Whitesell 2018), and Motown music (Flory 2021), as well as fat studies (Strings 2019; Jones 2014), I offer a new framework of analysis that measures musical excess via parameters like harmonic development, form, and phrase length. I then apply that framework to propose that Effie’s excessive music is an indicator of her fat body. For example, contrasting straightforward crossover songs assigned to characters with svelte bodies, in Effie’s showstopping number “(And I Am Telling You) I’m Not Going,” we hear a complex and irregular harmonic progression, elaborate form, and long, serpentine phrases. Her music is, comparatively, fat. In advance of the musical’s first Broadway revival in the 2026/2027 season, this close reading of its score illuminates the significance of body size in Dreamgirls. It also suggests a method of analysis considering musical excess as a marker for fatness that can be applied to other works. | |