Consuming Dance

Whether advertising clothes or technology, dance is staple of advertising today. 'Consuming Dance' offers a clear history and analysis of dance in advertising and demonstrates the ways in which the form articulates with, informs, and reflects U.S. culture.

In the twenty-first century, values of competition underpin the free-market economy and aspirations of individual achievement shape the broader social world. Consequently, ideas of winning and losing, success and failure, judgment and worth, influence the dance that we see and do. Across stage, studio, street, and screen, economies of competition impact bodily aesthetics, choreographic strategies, and danced meanings. In formalized competitions, dancers are judged according to industry standards to accumulate social capital and financial gain. Within the capitalist economy, dancing bodies compete to win positions in prestigious companies, while choreographers hustle to secure funding and attract audiences. On the social dance floor, dancers participate in dance-offs that often include unspoken, but nevertheless complex, rules of bodily engagement. And the media attraction to the drama and spectacle of competition regularly plays out in reality television shows, film documentaries, and Hollywood cinema. Drawing upon a diverse collection of dances across history and geography, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition asks how competition affects the presentation and experience of dance and, in response, how dancing bodies negotiate, critique, and resist the aesthetic and social structures of the competition paradigm.

The collection provides insights on developments in post-traditional religiosity (especially 'New Age' and 'Neo-Paganism') through studies of rave's Gnostic narratives of ascensionism and re-enchantment, explorations of the embodied spirituality and millennialist predispositions of dance culture, and investigations of transnational digital-art countercultures manifesting at geographic locations as diverse as Goa, India, and Nevada's Burning Man festival. Contributors examine raving as a new religious or revitalization movement; a powerful locus of sacrifice and transgression; a lived bodily experience; a practice comparable with world entheogenic rituals; and as evidencing a new Orientalism. Rave Culture and Religion will be essential reading for advanced students and academics in the fields of sociology, cultural studies and religious studies.

Because dance materializes through and for people, because we learn to dance from others and often present dance to others, the moment of its transmission is one of dance's central and defining features. Valuing Dance looks at the occasion when dancing passes from one person to another as an act of exchange, one that is redolent with symbolic meanings, including those associated with its history and all the labor that has gone into its making. It examines two ways that dance can be exchanged, as commodity and as gift, reflecting on how each establishes dance's relative worth and merit differently. When and why do we give dance? Where and to whom do we sell it? How are such acts of exchange rationalized and justified? Valuing Dance poses these questions in order to contribute to a conversation around what dance is, what it does, and why it matters.

Dance has proliferated in movies, television, Internet, and retail spaces while the spiritual power of dance has also been linked with mass consumption. Walter marries the cultural studies of dance and the religious aspects of dance in an exploration of consumption rituals, including rituals of being persuaded to buy products that include dance.

Qualitative Research for Physical Culture is a practical guide to qualitative research methods in the multidisciplinary field of physical culture. This innovative, unique and clearly-written book provides a complete one-stop manual to designing, researching and writing an effective research project. The authors identify the '7 Ps' of research which allows the reader to navigate a clear pathway through the research process. The '7 Ps' are divded into three areas: - Design which examines the Purpose of using qualitiative methods; Paradigms of approach; and the Process of putting together a project - Doing which looks at a range of different methodological Practices and the Politics of Interpretation of such approaches - Dissemination which examines the Presentation of research and the Promise - how to judge the quality of research Exploring interviewing, textual analysis, narrative analysis and field methods such as ethnography, case studies and participatory action research, the text also includes invaluable advice on the writing process and how to critically assess the quality of research, and will be invaluable as a teaching tool or essential reference for experienced and inexperienced researchers alike.