Performing the Commodity-Sign: Dancing in the Gap

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Colleen Dunagan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
West Side ◽  
Movement Sequences ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Vernacular Dance

Between 1998 and 2000, the Gap clothing company produced three advertising campaigns whose visual images consisted of choreographed movement sequences based on vernacular dance forms, theatrical jazz dance, and the codes and conventions of the Hollywood musical: “khakis,” “that's holiday,” and “West Side Story.” Each campaign produced a series of commercials that employed dance and musical theater in an attempt to bridge the gap between entertainment and advertising, and between popular culture and art. By manipulating standard advertising conventions, the Gap framed these televisual texts as performances or artworks, rather than as advertisements, creating choreographic, performance-oriented commercials that became the sign of Gap clothing. As a result, the commercials have been identifiable, just as the clothes have been, by style alone.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen T. Dunagan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Television Advertising ◽  
West Side ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Cultural Formations ◽  
Key Aspects

Using Gap’s West Side Story campaign as an example, the Introduction lays out dance’s role in television advertising and its relation to key conceptual themes that inform the arguments of later chapters. Key aspects of disciplinary conventions, the function of spectacle in consumer culture, and the concept of affect are introduced. The chapter explains how concepts (e.g., rhizomes, planes of consistency, assemblages, deterritorialization, BwO) from Deleuze and Guattari’s critical theory inform the analysis and structure of the work. The chapter also introduces Lawrence Grossberg’s notion of cultural formations as a model for approaching popular culture as a topic of study and provides details regarding the scope of the study.

Robbins, Jerome (1918–1998)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia L. Foulkes
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
West Side ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Combine Movement ◽  
Goldberg Variations ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
The Town

Jerome Robbins was one of the master choreographers of the twentieth century who transformed musical theater and ballet. Beginning with Fancy Free (1944), Robbins left his mark on both disciplines by his use of humor and character, and by his ability to combine movement originating in multiple idioms. This auspicious beginning led to more ballets—Interplay (1945), Afternoon of a Faun (1953), and The Concert (1956)—as well as a number of hit Broadway shows: On the Town (1944), West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). He traversed different genres with ease, moving from Broadway to ballet, dance to choreography, and then to directing plays, films, and television programmes. Although he made his earliest ballets for Ballet Theatre (now the American Ballet Theatre), his longest affiliation was with the New York City Ballet, where he was appointed associate artistic director in 1949, and to which—after a hiatus of more than a decade—he returned in 1969 to choreograph some of his most acclaimed ballets, including Dances at a Gathering (1969) and The Goldberg Variations (1971). Robbins’s work often defined the historic moment, marrying music, movement, and expression with such quality and intensity that his works have endured as historical and artistic landmarks.

Taking the Reins

2021 ◽  
pp. 106-144
Author(s):  
Liza Gennaro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
West Side ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Bob Fosse

The genesis of the present-day director-choreographer, starting with de Mille’s role as director-choreographer on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ill-fated Allegro (1947), is explored. How she employed dance as a narrative and metaphorical device in support of the allegorical structure of the libretto, and how her artistic vision conflicted with her collaborators is investigated. De Mille’s directorial oeuvre is considered in the context of the male-dominated world of Broadway. Robbins’ ascendance as the most influential director-choreographer of twentieth-century musical theater is examined in a close analysis of his choreography for and direction of Pajama Game (1954 [co-directed with George Abbott, co-choreographer Bob Fosse]), Peter Pan (1954), Bells Are Ringing (1956 [in which he collaborated with Bob Fosse]), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). West Side Story (1957) will be discussed here as an anomaly in Robbins’ musical theater career. I argue that Robbins’ interest in movement innovation in relation to his choreography for the “Jets” in West Side Story (1957) differs from his previous musical theater works. In addition, I will examine Robbins’ West Side Story collaboration with co-choreographer Peter Gennaro.

Critical Reflections on the Operatic Canon

2020 ◽  
pp. 524-533
Author(s):  
John Rockwell
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
George Frideric Handel ◽  
Early Music ◽  
West Side ◽  
Half Century ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Music Revival ◽  
Critical Reflections

This chapter looks back at the core canon in opera, tracing its evolution and mutation during the half century when its author served as a professional critic and then festival director. The chapter sees the core canon as either fixed or shrinking over the last ninety years. The public’s resistance to Modernist dissonance led to an explosion of repertory in areas immediately outside what had been the traditional canon. The need for novelty has been sated by directorial innovation (Regietheater), the early music revival (with George Frideric Handel the principal operatic beneficiary), and the ceaseless search for new curiosities to revive from the past. Moreover, the operatic canon has been enlarged by lighter forms of musical theater (West Side story and Sweeney Todd) and also by influence from non-Western cultures bearing their own canonic traditions and repertories. This chapter is paired with Kasper Holten’s “Inside and outside the operatic canon, on stage and in the boardroom.”

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare

2019 ◽  
pp. 302-326
Author(s):  
Ray Miller
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
West Side ◽  
Stephen Sondheim ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Broadway Musicals ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Shakespeare’s plays have served as inspiration for a score of Broadway musicals. These musicals have contributed to the development of the musical theater libretto from a loose collection of sketches to an integrated “book musical” that equally values text, music, design, directing, and dance. While many are familiar with some of the most popular hits from those shows—including “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” from the Cole Porter’s musical, Kiss Me, Kate, or the balcony scene song, “Maria,” from the Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim collaboration, West Side Story, the contribution of choreographers and dancers to the translation of Shakespeare-inspired music, text, and scenography to the musical theater stage has not received due scholarly attention. This chapter considers the partnership between text and dance in selected Broadway musicals that have been based on the works of Shakespeare, focusing on choreography for musicals by George Balanchine, Hanya Holm, and Jerome Robbins.

WEST SIDE STORY 1981

1981 ◽  
Vol 36 (7-8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Weber
Keyword(s):  
West Side ◽  
West Side Story

scholarly journals The Influence Of Popular Culture On The Visual Music Album Cover

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Citra Kemala Putri
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Popular Art ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
The Aesthetic

Mass culture and popular culture is one of the important phenomena that was born after the postmodern era. In a society that lives in the midst of mass culture and popular culture, will grow consumer communities that produce new cultural symbols and activities. This discourse then influenced various aspects, for example, the emergence of popular music and popular art movements which soon became a commodities that was consumed by many youth people. This study discusses the influence of popular culture on the visuals of music album covers which take several album covers of international musicians from different time periods as samples to compare the similarities or friction caused by various art developments as their response toward happening trends. This study uses qualitative method. This study of various visual images was considering the aesthetic idioms of postmodernism, including Pastiche, Parody, Kitsch, Camp and Schizophrenia, as well as the concepts of several art movements, such as Pop Art and Lowbrow Art. The final result of this study reveal that several music albums using the Pop Art and Lowbrow Art style contained postmodern aesthetic idioms. Each album cover can contain one or several aesthetic idioms simultaneously.

Historical Sound-Film Presentation and the Closed-Curtain Roadshow Overture

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-155
Author(s):  
Ben Winters
Keyword(s):  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
West Side ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Film Presentation ◽  
Historically Informed Performance ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines historical presentational practices of sound film and, specifically, the extra music added to roadshow versions of films between the 1930s and 1960s—including Gone with the Wind, West Side Story, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It argues that such added music—which included overtures, intermission, entr’acte, and exit music—when combined with controlled theatrical lighting and use of the curtain, might have prompted a number of different cinematic listening experiences among audiences. It suggests that an understanding of these historical presentational practices might call into question comfortable assumptions about the nature of sound-film ontology and the relationship between cinema as “Text” and cinema as “Event”—issues that resonate with the discourse surrounding historically informed performance (HIP) practice in musicology.

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