Live Action Adverts

Increasingly, the dance flash mob is casted, and professionally choreographed. Perhaps T-Mobile's series in 2007 did it best, literally cramming a train station full of dancers who rocked out so hard, their infectious enthusiasm spread to passersby who picked up snippets of the choreo and joined in. Lately, however, the drive to control the message of the flash mob has generated a fourth wall in semi-public, but mostly private consumerists spaces.

The latest effort of Beyoncé to take over the world through hairography and pumps comes not from her Goldeness Herself, rather from a "flash mob" created for Target to celebrate the launch of her album at the retail chain, or given the date, her team's nomination for an MTV Music Video Award for best Choreography. This video has very high production quality and most strikingly, has a storyline, just like a regular advertisement would. Give it a look:



As you can see, the crowd is forced out of their space, their routine for shopping, not because they want to watch necessarily, but because the producer realized that the best place to stage the mob was by the registers, which became the backstage for the waves of dance crews. Displacing the shopper does not turn them into an audience member. In fact, it could be argued that this particular iteration of flash mob is not the "gift" we have come to enjoy from large scale group choreography. Done in tiny teams each with exceptionally virtuositic timing (seriously, who would pick up these moves in a few moments other than another professional dancer), matching costumes meant to harmonize with the other brand in the room--Target--this flash mob for Beyoncé is foisted upon the shoppers. There is no negotiation of space, the music pumped overhead tells them they are in a different space, and the cameraman definitely cut down their ability to move across the aisle to the check out lines.

This is not a dance flash mob: it is an advertisement that disrupts the main show just like a regular one. The only difference? This ad does not pay dancers residuals, stalks the viewer, blocking the exits, and unfortunately, the bathroom.

To Dance is To Calculate

Science Fiction writer, math coach, and former ballerina Catherine Asaro discusses how Western classical dance is an obvious form of physics. She goes on to talk about the math of classical music as well. All very rooted in"The Great Western Traditions," this interview still works to show how the division between art, science, and math is a false one that breeds gender bias and forecloses innovation.

This clip is an excerpt of a 20 minute interview for the Big Think. You may watch the entire video on their site.

Choice Time: Why Being Able To Choose Stops Action in its Tracks

From a corporeal perspective, this type of alienation returns as an excess of gesticulation, of disordered patterns seeking amelioration through organized communal release. The indecisive nature of modern society is best resolved through the ordered patterning of group choreography, as delineated in the above video. However, from a pure choreography perspective, we can then understand the decline of modern dance (which rewards singular works that are not easily performed by just anyone) and the rise of the dance flash mob (which by its very nature obviates choice and requires literal lockstep adherence in order for the performance to be a success) as yet another symptom of the Ideology of Choice embedded in Capitalism. Moreover, this "decision" to participate in a flash mob, already requiring that one does not fully think for ones self and absolves one's responsibility through the rubric of "play," feels like "true" action, and thus terminates while mimicking real social action. Perhaps we can think about the incredible array of dance competition TV shows as an attempt to harness the result of the angst of choice while generating even more, and therefore more ways to capitalize on this emotion/sensation of lack of actual social action.