[ecrea] Call for Papers: Advertising & Society - Dance

CALL FOR PAPERS – Advertising & Society Review: Dance

Journal: Advertising & Society Review

Editor: Linda M. Scott, DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and 
Innovation, Sai¨d Business School, University of Oxford

If dance is “the oldest of arts,”i and may even precede it by virtue of 
its universality, it comes as no surprise that the form possesses power 
and influence that has been picked up in advertising. As a system of 
communication as well as a celebration of the human body, dance combines 
form and content in a series of movements that can attain spiritual 
dimensions or re-instate the everyday with the full force of its 
material presence. Dance can be art, to be viewed and judged from a 
distance; it can be advocacy, expressing emotion and engagement with 
one’s socio-political surroundings; a signifier of identity and culture, 
rooted in historical origins; meditation; ritual; or ‘simply’ recreation.

Dance is a way of being and knowing that lacks formal exploration in 
advertising, even though we have by now accumulated a considerable body 
of persuasive texts that use, either as a primary or secondary feature, 
dance as a rhetorical device. As a series of movements that almost 
invariably is paired with music (in and of itself another powerful 
deviceii), dance explores and brings to the foreground a) the body and 
its movability, including the relations between various body parts; b) 
its relationship to space, establishing a connection with it or giving 
it transformative treatment; c) the expression emotion, thoughts, and 
ideas through movement, by mimesis or by metaphor, or through a complex 
vocabulary of its own, and in which both dancer and spectator must be 
enculturated.iii With the added layer of capturing it on screen and 
embedding it within another message,iv the dancing advertisement is a 
complex creature that does not lend itself to straightforward analysis, 
but cer
tainly enjoys rapt spectatorship.v

For this special Advertising & Society Review issue, we welcome all 
papers that bring in the vast scholarship on dance and illuminate its 
use in advertising. We aim to compile perspectives from widely ranging 
approaches, including historical, anthropological, aesthetic, or 
sociological. Perhaps advertisements that employ dance could form their 
own genre within the canon of persuasive texts, taking inspiration from 
the taxonomy of song and dance in musicals, to develop, deepen, and 
formalize our knowledge of dance as a narrative, rhetorical, or 
aesthetic device. Or, diverting our attention to most recent 
developments, we can explore the relationship between flash mobs and 
viral media – the interplay between technology and custom transforming 
the nature of dance and leveraging its power in promotional campaigns. 
Dance can be studied as a performance, or a semiotic system; a means, or 
an end; approached as a cultural artifact, or purely as a somatovisceral 
phenomenon. Dan
ce can underwrite synonymity and tap into streams of historical 
knowledge, situating a brand of product firmly within a cultural 
identity with little or no words.vi

Please submit an abstract by 15 October 2014.

The closing date for submissions is 15 January 2015.

Submission guidelines: Submission guidelines can be found on Advertising 
& Society Review’s website: 
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/advertising_and_society_review

Contact: For any enquiries, please contact the Managing Editor Astrid 
Van den Bossche at (advsocrev /at/ sbs.ox.ac.uk)


References

i Anya Peterson Royce, The Anthropology of Dance (Bloomington??; London: 
Indiana University Press, 1977), 3.

ii Linda M. Scott, “Understanding Jingles and Needledrop: A Rhetorical 
Approach to Music in Advertising,” Journal of Consumer Research 17, no. 
2 (September 1, 1990): 223–36.

iii Roderyk Lange, The Nature of Dance??: An Anthropological Perspective 
(London: Macdonald and Evans, 1975).

iv Judy Mitoma, Elizabeth Zimmer, and Dale Ann Stieber, Envisioning 
Dance on Film and Video (Routledge, 2003).

v Carla Walter, “Dance in Advertising: The Silent Persuader,” 
Advertising & Society Review 13, no. 3 (2012).

vi Carla Stalling Huntington, Black Social Dance in Television 
Advertising: An Analytical History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2011).



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