Dance's relation to commercial advertising has, until now, remained a subheading, a sidebar, a footnote within the discourse on screendance, evading the scope of book-length scholarly endeavor. In Consuming Dance: Choreography and Advertising, Colleen Dunagan corrects this omission in dance studies by making the case for a discourse on dance-in-advertising. Collecting and analyzing print, television, and internet advertisements that feature dancing, Dunagan interrogates the politics and poetics of dance's incorporation, quite literally, into commercial advertising. Such advertisements, Dunagan argues, are charged with an affective potential that, on the one hand, produces a sensibility of pleasurable excess and, on the other hand, subsumes the dancing body into a matrix of cultural and economic hegemony. The argumentative trajectory of the book vacillates between these two points, giving each its due consideration and acknowledging the contradictions inherent in dance-in-advertising. In this respect, the project manifests the ongoing tension between consumerist logic and choreographic subversion, capitalist strategies and dancerly tactics. It seems as if Dunagan is asking, “Where's the line between dance's resistance against and incorporation into neoliberal capitalism and its corollary hegemonic structures?”
The book's companion website, which catalogs by chapter the fifty-eight videos that Dunagan analyzes throughout the text, further enhances the experience of engaging with Consuming Dance and its source material. By offering the live links to the commercials—which include advertisements for Gap, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, and Apple iPods—Oxford University Press grants readers the ability to watch and analyze alongside Dunagan. This transmedia coupling of book and website not only enables a more comprehensive purchase of Dunagan's arguments, but also offers accessible teaching tools that, when placed in conversation with the text, provides fodder for classroom dialogue around the commercial imaging of the dancing body. Alongside such pedagogical offerings, the site also reveals the seeds of Dunagan's methodological labor, as it includes a full sixty-three-page document of Dunagan's recorded examples of dance-in-advertising (840, to be exact). The inclusion of this document demonstrates an open-source approach that lays the groundwork for future researchers to continuing developing Dunagan's emerging archive of dance-in-advertising materials.
While the companion website enables a more direct engagement with the sources, the choreographic analysis that is woven through the chapters is completely sufficient as a way of knowing the source material. Each of the five body chapters includes a close reading of several examples—anywhere from six to thirteen commercials—that illustrates its respective argument. Thus, the reader can rely on Dunagan's study of the commercials with or without reference to the companion site. To be sure, the sources analyzed are all constitutive, US-based corporations and Dunagan's analysis of them appears to primarily concern US historical and cultural specificities—though this scope is not explicitly discussed. To complicate this omission, many of the brands discussed indeed frequently engage in international campaigns. Considering this point, there is an emerging opportunity for dance studies scholarship to grapple with how US cultural imperialism relates to dance-in-advertising.
Despite this omission, the text covers an impressively expansive discursive territory and attends to a range of social, political, cultural, and economic issues. Dunagan draws together theories on affect, liveness, appropriation, social identity, and subjectivity. Structurally, Dunagan approaches these discourses in an episodic fashion. That is to say, while the concept of affect frames the entire book, each chapter engages a different perspective and orientation toward dance's role in commercials and its production of affect. Upon reading, this organization might make it difficult to register the book's depth of argumentation, as the points of one chapter might contradict the points of another. Nonetheless, such an approach ultimately performs Dunagan's claims that dance-in-advertising is characterized by “polysemy,” “deterritorialization,” and “lines of flight”—three concepts that undergird the text as a whole.
Laying the theoretical groundwork for the rest of the book, chapter 1 outlines theories on affect in relation to phenomena of dance-in-advertising. Dunagan draws upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and by extension, that of Brian Massumi, to argue that the dancing body on screen conjures an affective potential that moves and arrests viewers. Though there is some indication of the ways in which corporate culture capitalizes upon the affective dimension of the dancing body, the chapter primarily foregrounds the merits of this incorporation. For instance, in discussing a Cheerios “Healthy Hearts” commercial, Dunagan highlights how a mother-daughter duet produces a “positive affect” that might “unite” people (34). In this case, the critical stance toward the neoliberal utilization of the dancing body is complicated, if not obscured, by a regard for the merits of that utilization.
In chapter 2, Dunagan examines sources of dance-in-advertising through a historical lens, tracing the ways in which dance was incorporated into advertising over the course of the twentieth century (with some reference to twenty-first century examples) in order to identify the shared attributes across print and television advertising. Extending the positions on “liveness” set forth by Philip Auslander, Dunagan argues that “advertisers often model commercials after other media forms by integrating advertising positioning strategies with the codes and conventions of concert dance, film musicals, narrative film, music videos, and screendance” (54). While this chapter provides a helpful analysis of the borrowing of discourses and elision of disciplinary boundaries, it obscures the ways in which media types cultivate varying cultures of consumption. The flattening of media notwithstanding, Dunagan aptly articulates here how the dancing body links together competing disciplines.
If chapter 2 unpacks the elisions across media, then chapter 3 hones in on the elisions of text. Here Dunagan addresses the elements of serialism, self-referentiality, and other forms of intertextuality that are embedded in commercials featuring dance in order to argue that through the dancing body, corporate brands engage in a borrowing and reorganization of cultural images and values in order to cultivate nostalgia, familiarity, and authenticity. Mobilizing Paul Grainge's concept of “nostalgia without memory,” she discusses how dance-in-advertising “[draws] on the discursive power of the past…to manufacture communities of memory as a means of claiming authenticity and generating affect” (93).
Chapter 4 presents the complexities of how dance-in-advertising accesses, shapes, and screens social identity in the era of neoliberal capitalism. Specifically, Dunagan hones-in on how advertising participates in the ongoing tradition of borrowing from black American culture in ways that reflect an ambivalence toward the structures of power that undergird such borrowing. Also covered in this chapter is the commercial screening of both normative and subversive gender roles through dance. Though the chapter begins with a critical thrust toward examples of borrowing and shaping cultural identities related to race and gender, there are several points where Dunagan articulates the redeeming qualities of this relationality. For instance, Dunagan asserts that “[dance-in-advertising] consolidates and reinforces normative categories of race, gender, class, or sexuality. However, sometimes advertising's discursivity employs dance to alter, adapt, and transform those identities, simultaneously embracing and disavowing difference. Sometimes, dance in advertising participates in moments of minor relational shifts” (136). This appeal to both reiterative and subversive qualities of dance-in-advertising continues a trend observed throughout the book.
Dunagan extends the notion of contradiction in chapter 5, which covers the performance of subjectivity suggested through examples of dance-in-advertising. Commercial advertisements tend to utilize the dancing body as a way to hail viewers so that they can relate to the dancing body and thereby to the product being advertised. At the same time, these commercials suggest that identity is flexible—that, through both consumption and dance, a person can become someone else. Dunagan identifies this contradiction but could go further in unpacking its political implications. Namely, this chapter begs an attention to political economy and its relation to subjectivity. How does consumption structure the subject, and why is dance an apt resource for this structuring?
The notes of contradiction coloring each chapter appear to be central to Dunagan's rhetorical strategy. As made clear throughout the text, dance-in-advertising embodies innumerable contradictions that are central to its production and consumption. This feature shapes the argumentative foundation of the book. However, the reader might also note that the text often contradicts itself at various points. Dunagan acknowledges this aspect of the book in the introduction, writing that her analysis of the commercial sources is “always partial and governed by [her] own contradictory and rhizomatic perspective” (11). Perhaps this feature is a notable attempt to align form and content, but the reader is ultimately left to unpack the degree to which dance's role in commercials is resistive, redemptive, or reiterative. Argumentative stylization aside, Consuming Dance contributes to the field of dance studies in its claim to dance-in-advertising as an outright discourse, its dual media format with potential pedagogical offerings, and its envisioning of the myriad ways that commercials featuring dance construct meaning.
