Conference Agenda

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.

“Excess” is a vague term: it signifies something as more than is acceptable or appropriate—a surplus, often without specifying the standards by which this “too muchness” is measured. Singular material elements rarely appear excessive on their own, but repeated elements gradually produce the perception of excess without ever clearly revealing the point which non-excess becomes excess.

The theory of cinematic excess finds its footing in 1977 with Kristin Thompson’s “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” shaping subsequent research on the topic (ex. Altman 1989; Williams 1991; Massumi 2021; Brinkema 2014; Koutsourakis 2021). Films, for Thompson, who draws on Roland Barthes (1977), Stephen Heath (1975), and Russian Formalism, are sites of opposing forces: 1) unifying structures that bind the film into a coherent whole, and 2) its material overflow: excess. To clarify, Thompson theorizes excess as the audiovisual elements of film that cannot be fully contained by its unifying structures.

I propose using Obayashi's House (1977) to elucidate a critical reading of cinematic excess by showing how “too muchness” can be identified in the musical soundtrack as a patterned stylistic mode rather than as a purely intuitive or functional force. First, I conduct a literature review of cinematic excess to clarify how the term has been employed and to acknowledge its historical vagueness—specifically, how excess is often treated as self-evident rather than methodologically defined. Second, I propose a method for analyzing excess. Third, I apply this method to House and its score to demonstrate how sonic excess operates as a stylistic mode that exceeds functional motivations. My ultimate goal is to render earlier scholarship on excess more accessible and to offer a replicable method for analyzing cinematic excess that can be extended to other dimensions of film. It is time to declutter the theory of cinematic excess.

In the music video for “Berghain,” the first single from her 2025 album Lux, Catalonian singer and producer Rosalía goes through her daily life accompanied by musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra performing as she does chores, goes to the doctor, and rides the bus. The excess of the spectacle gestures toward the grandiose drama and complexity of the everyday, toward the heaviness of common or equalizing affective realities and lived experiences (Kellner 2005, Debord 2021). The words to the song—sung in German, Spanish, and English—signal the artist’s cosmopolitan creative circulation and use metaphor to detail the emotional labor of quenching one’s desires for those of a significant other. More than a love song, the instability and discomfort of the song’s dynamic is further articulated through the divergent timbral contributions of Icelandic avant-garde performer and creative Björk and American experimental performer Yves Tumor.

I argue that metaphor is also present as a meaningful visual tool, shaping semiotic gestures to evoke anxiety, isolation, and spiritual conflict while drawing attention to a sonically driven class divide that Rosalía’s evolving sound continues to challenge through remixing. “Berghain” contributes to an existing canon of Rosalía employing visual metaphors to produce a cross-cultural visual imaginary inspired by her Spanish upbringing and global pop culture influences. I will demonstrate this by engaging in a comparative analysis of her music videos for “Malamente (Cap. 1: Augurio)” from El mal querer (2018), “Saoko” from Motomami (2022) and “Berghain,” additionally identifying a liberatory trajectory challenging the stratification of popular/vernacular genres and separation of classical and traditional styles.