Consuming Dance: Choreography and Advertising by Colleen T. Dunagan (review)

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...