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.

Consumer Culture and Appropriation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen T. Dunagan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Television Advertising ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Race Ethnicity

Chapter Four examines how advertising engages dance in the promotion of hegemonic ideological notions of social identity (i.e., categories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality), while simultaneously promoting difference and responding to contemporary developments. It looks closely at how advertising reveals cultural ambivalence and relies on nostalgia without memory to allow consumers to (re)construct a shared cultural history. In a similar way, dance in television advertising serves as a tool for reinforcing neoliberal economic and social theory. This chapter examines a range of ads that demonstrate dance-in-advertising’s relation to hegemony and its simultaneous promotion of developments in cultural knowledge and participatory aesthetics. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the ads function as spaces of intersection where affect meets ideologies, revealing how advertising reflects, informs, and responds to popular culture, mass media, and consumerism.

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.

WEST SIDE STORY 1981

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

scholarly journals Negative dialectic and linguistic turn: The actuality of Adorno’s concept of the conflict nature of modern societies

2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
Marjan Ivkovic
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Negative Dialectic ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Crucial Characteristic

The author attempts at questioning Habermas? and Honneth?s claim that the linguistic turn within Critical Theory of society represents a way out of the ?dead end? of the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists, who were unable to formulate an action-theoretic understanding of social conflicts. By presenting a view that Adorno, in his ?Negative dialectic?, develops an insight into a crucial characteristic of the conflict nature of modern societies, which eludes the lingustic-pragmatist Critical Theory, the author tries to defend and reactualize Adorno?s perspective. The paper analyzes some key aspects of the original idea of Critical Theory, and the ?negativistic turn? that Adorno and Horkheimer made with the writing of ?Dialectic of Enlightenment?. Having considered the central arguments of the ?Negative Dialectic?, the author presents his understanding of Adorno?s concept of social conflict, which is then being contrasted with Habermas? understanding of social conflict, formulated in terms of a systemic colonization of the lifeworld. Pointing out the weaknesses of Habermas? concept, the author aims at sharpening the image of the conflict nature of modern societies that Adorno sketches, concluding that his perspective is able to question the framework of intersubjectivity that Habermas and Honneth take for granted.

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.

West Side Story

On Sondheim ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 37-43
Author(s):  
Ethan Mordden
Keyword(s):  
West Side ◽  
West Side Story

The Maestro Pivots

Dearest Lenny ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 56-60
Author(s):  
Mari Yoshihara
Keyword(s):  
Music Industry ◽  
American Music ◽  
European Market ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
West Side ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
New Phase

With the arrival of Harry Kraut, Leonard Bernstein’s company Amberson entered a new phase of corporate enterprises that extended the maestro’s reach even further across the globe. Ironically, the enormous commercial success of West Side Story, the most American of Bernstein’s works, began to cause problems with some stakeholders, and Bernstein began to gradually pivot to the European market for publishing, recording, and films and videos. Bernstein joined the roster of the recording artists of Deutsche Grammophon upon the end of the contract with Columbia Records. The pivot exemplified the changes in the American music industry in the 1970s which made it increasingly challenging even for a musician of Bernstein’s caliber to conduct business in a way that was true to his artistic goals, economically sustainable, and culturally meaningful to a wide audience.

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