Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance

by Anthea Kraut

Overview

Choreographing Copyright is a new historical and cultural analysis of U.S. dance-makers' investment in intellectual property rights. Stretching from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the book reconstructs efforts to win copyright protection for choreography and teases out their raced and gendered politics, showing how dancers have embraced intellectual property rights as a means to both consolidate and contest racial and gendered power.

A number of the artists featured in the book are well-known in the history of American dance, including Loie Fuller, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, and George Balanchine. But the book also uncovers a host of marginalized figures—from the South Asian dancer Mohammed Ismail, to the African American pantomimist Johnny Hudgins, to the African American blues singer Alberta Hunter, to the white burlesque dancer Faith Dane—who were equally interested in positioning themselves as subjects rather than objects of property.

Drawing on critical race and feminist theories and on cultural studies of copyright, Choreographing Copyright offers fresh insight into the raced and gendered hierarchies that govern the theatrical marketplace, white women's historically contingent relationship to property rights, legacies of ownership of black bodies and appropriation of non-white labor, and the tension between dance's ephemerality and its reproducibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199360376
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Anthea Kraut is Associate Professor in the Department of Dance at University of California, Riverside and author of Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (2008).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Dance Plus Copyright
Chapter One: White Womanhood and Early Campaigns for Choreographic Copyright
Chapter Two: The Black Body as Object and Subject of Property
Chapter Three: "Stealing Steps" and Signature Moves: Alternative Systems of Copyright
Chapter Four: "High-brow Meets Low-Down": Copyright on Broadway
Chapter Five: Copyright and the Death/Life of the Choreographer
Coda: Beyoncé v. De Keersmaeker
Appendix: A Timeline of Intellectual Property Rights and Dance in the United States
Select Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"A magnificently complex argument based in meticulous archival research, Choreographing Copyright examines the function of copyright in both affirming and contesting key cultural values for artists of different raced, classed, and gendered identities."—Susan Leigh Foster, Distinguished Professor, UCLA

"Choreographing Copyright is a provocative book that sheds new light on the history of modern, vernacular and commercial dance. By attending to the raced, gendered and classed biases that influence choreographers' claims of originality, authorship and ownership, Kraut lends keen insight into the implicit social politics behind the fixing of moving bodies. She finds in vibrant case studies arguments about subjectivity, property, protection and value writ large and pushes us to recognize the instabilities of bids for personhood through creative expression."—Nadine George-Graves, Professor, University of California San Diego Department of Theater and Dance

"Choreographing Copyright is a well-written, well-researched (many of the pages are almost half foot notes), well-stated, well-argued dance tome. Even when the reader might not agree with the contentions made, there is absolutely no doubt to Kraut's thoroughness, thoughtfulness and expertise."—Critical Dance

"[E]xpertly researched..."—The Dance Current

"CHOREOGRAPHING COPYRIGHT is an illuminating book about copyright's complicated engagement with choreographic expression in the United States, written 'from a critical dance studies perspective that foregrounds race and gender' (p. xvii). It deserves a thoughtful reading by a wide audience within the IP academy, but will be of particular interest to anyone whose work brings a critical or interdisciplinary lens to bear on issues of copyrightability, authorship, ownership, equality, and the circulation of ideas within and across creative communities." —The IP Law Book Review

From the Publisher