Dance You Want to Know: Small Screens, Post‑Pandemic Stages and the Pull of the Crowd

A still from CDK Company's dance video, Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know."

I’ve been noticing something. It started, as these things often do now, on my phone. One of my favourite pop laments, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”, kept resurfacing not as a song, but as a dance: a viral clip of dozens of young bodies in retro office‑casual dress, swirling and lunging in tight formation across a pastel‑toned courtyard. The choreography by Netherlands-based CDK Company was sharp but not presentational, massed yet curiously intimate, as if a crowd scene from an old Hollywood musical had slipped into 2020s streetwear and discovered contemporary release technique. I watched it over and over, wondering: what am I looking at here? A music video? A fashion film? A new kind of ensemble dance built for the camera rather than the stage?

New from Criterion: Unforgettable Women

Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

When David Lynch premiered his TV series Twin Peaks in 1990, no one had ever seen anything like it: a surrealist teen soap opera, Peyton Place or Splendor in the Grass reimagined by René Magritte. His fans couldn’t get enough of it, and Lynch couldn’t get it out of his system. He kept the series going for two seasons (though he only directed half a dozen episodes). He filmed a prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, in 1992 – the year after he made Mulholland Drive – and rebooted the series in 2017. It was the last major project he worked on before he died last year.