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In her essay "The Other History of Intercultural Performance," interdisciplinary artist Coco Fusco describes her satirical Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit . . ., an international caged collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña. In this performance, Fusco and Gómez-Peña posed as Guatinauis, a fictional group from an island in the Gulf of Mexico, in a museum exhibit of exotic Otherness that challenged the 1992 commemoration of Columbus's "discovery" of the New World. At the same time, their project highlighted a 500-year-long tradition of cultural performance in the West-the exhibition of racialized, gendered, sexualized, colonial Others. Although the historical spectacle of difference naturalized and justified economic inequality, slavery, and genocide, Fusco's essay returned the colonial gaze by turning an analytical lens onto spectators and identifying a colonial unconsciousness exhibited in the multiple ways that nonwhites, caged and uncaged, are consistently engaged as racial stereotypes. Fusco's view of intercultural performance as a vehicle for stereotypes, or "natural[ly] fetishized representations of Otherness, [that] mitigat[e] anxieties generated by the encounter with difference," is a compelling approach through which to explore another type of "caged" performance located in the central Philippines.1
On 17 July 2007, 1,500 inmates in the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) performed their rendition of Michael Jackson's Thriller music video.2 The CPDRC's Thriller represents an exercise program initiated to build teamwork and reduce gang activity through dance. Inmates are taught American pop-cultural works like those of Jackson, the Village People, and Souljah Boy by a local choreographer, and the CPDRC uses recorded performances to project an image of its program. Of all the performances, Thriller is the most well-known. First uploaded to the user-generated website YouTube by CPDRC administrators, Thriller has built a viewership of over 48 million, making it once the third top favorite video of all time.3 What really makes the Thriller video so immensely appealing? What does it mean to choreograph discipline onto "deviant" bodies through US popular dance?
In this essay, I will argue that although Thriller aims at reducing gang violence and promoting discipline, the dance also discourages critical cultural engagement, configures the politics of sexuality and mimicry in new ways, and effectively extends racial and colonial inequalities. The first section of the essay introduces the dominant narrative of discipline surrounding the Thriller...