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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Started in 2010 as a “small Sunday morning movement practice” by Kate Wallich, Dance Church is cardio-based workout class that combines aerobics, interval training, and yoga against a vibrant soundtrack of house, disco, techo, and mainstream pop music. Due to COVID-19, the organization launched a beta version of VOD programming in partnership with Seattle-based “startup studio and venture capital firm,” Pioneer Labs, that was accompanied by a significant cross-platform rebranding in an effort to build a broader, global audience. Whereas many of their “boutique exercise” competitors such as SoulCycle or Peloton hail their consumers through radical self-improvement, constructs of branded exclusivity, and appeals to neoliberal hyper-optimization, Dance Church’s focus on the mediated interaction between the music, the dancer, and the participant utilizes the collective egalitarianism of dance music cultures to brand their ethos of “empowering dance and dance-artists everywhere.”
Building upon critical feminist approaches to branding within new creative economies, this paper utilizes textual analysis of these classes and their accompanying playlist on Spotify to examine how the subcultural capital of these musical genres are deployed to differentiate Dance Church within this emergent market while constructing a specifically racialized, gendered, and classed participant. Within this paper, movement operates as a framework of contradictory articulation where tech capital investment supplants the once-community based YMCA class into new global markets while also excavating the subcultural value of these dance musics to provide the platform with its uniquely branded expression. As the pandemic spurred reinvention for most exercise lifestyle companies, the branding practices of these VOD and live-streaming platforms are an emergent mode of tech-infused cultural production that reflect the ambivalences of a burgeoning media industry.
“Empowering Dance and Dance-Artist Everywhere”: Dance Church and the Strategic Creativity of Exercise Platform Branding
Started in 2010 as a “small Sunday morning movement practice” by Kate Wallich, Dance Church is cardio-based workout class that combines aerobics, interval training, and yoga against a vibrant soundtrack of house, disco, techo, and mainstream pop music. Due to COVID-19, the organization launched a beta version of VOD programming in partnership with Seattle-based “startup studio and venture capital firm,” Pioneer Labs, that was accompanied by a significant cross-platform rebranding in an effort to build a broader, global audience. Whereas many of their “boutique exercise” competitors such as SoulCycle or Peloton hail their consumers through radical self-improvement, constructs of branded exclusivity, and appeals to neoliberal hyper-optimization, Dance Church’s focus on the mediated interaction between the music, the dancer, and the participant utilizes the collective egalitarianism of dance music cultures to brand their ethos of “empowering dance and dance-artists everywhere.”
Building upon critical feminist approaches to branding within new creative economies, this paper utilizes textual analysis of these classes and their accompanying playlist on Spotify to examine how the subcultural capital of these musical genres are deployed to differentiate Dance Church within this emergent market while constructing a specifically racialized, gendered, and classed participant. Within this paper, movement operates as a framework of contradictory articulation where tech capital investment supplants the once-community based YMCA class into new global markets while also excavating the subcultural value of these dance musics to provide the platform with its uniquely branded expression. As the pandemic spurred reinvention for most exercise lifestyle companies, the branding practices of these VOD and live-streaming platforms are an emergent mode of tech-infused cultural production that reflect the ambivalences of a burgeoning media industry.
Bio
Paxton Haven is Doctoral Student in the Radio-Television-Film Department at The University of Texas at Austin with a BA in Political Science from The George Washington University. His current research interests include digital networks of contemporary music scenes, brand and consumer culture, and the cross-platform negotiations of the creative industries’ media production and labor. His published scholarly work can be found in Flow, Velvet Light Trap, and New Media & Society.