Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-2l2gl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-26T07:46:32.552Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Riffing off intellectual property in contemporary dance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2022

Mario Biagioli-Ravetto  and
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli Open the ORCID record for Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli [Opens in a new window]
Mario Biagioli-Ravetto
Affiliation:
Distinguished Professor of Law and Communication, University of California, Los Angeles, United States
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli*
Affiliation:
Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media, University of California, Los Angeles, United States
*
Corresponding author: Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, email: ravetto@tft.ucla.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Dance disappears the moment it becomes visible, the complexity of its ontology matching that of its production and of its intellectual property status. Its creative process is both collaborative and hierarchical, involving the transmission of knowledge from one body to another, remembering steps, recognizing moves, mimicking, and improvising gestures as well as coordinating the roles of dancers, choreographers, and studios. Matthias Sperling’s Riff (2007) directly addresses many of these issues, which inform the specific content of the piece as well as its conceptualization, development, and the copyright licenses that underpin it. Sperling’s performance is clearly conceived as a rite of passage, a dance through which a dancer becomes a choreographer, going from “riffing off” other choreographers’ work to developing dance movements and phrases that, while tied to those of his predecessors, he can claim as his own. As such, Riff makes explicit and rearticulates the rearrangement of professional relations and roles, the difference between reperforming and innovating, between learning from bodies or from media, as well as how the property status of the work intersects with community norms and expectations of attribution.

Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 29 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue: Contemporary Dance, Knowledge, and Models for Ownership , May 2022 , pp. 201 - 216
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Cultural Property Society

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Banes, S. 2007. Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Benesh, R., and Benesh, J.. 1983. Reading Dance: The Birth of Choreology. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Benjamin, W. (1935) 1969. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.” Illuminations. Translated by Zohn, Harry. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Biagioli, M. 2022. “Replicating Mathematical Inventions.” Perspectives on Science vol. 30, no. 3, forthcoming.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burt, R. 2016. Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre Dance and the Commons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chapman, E. J. 2017. “Own the Dance: Analyzing Issues of Joint Authorship and Choreographic Works.” Social Sciences Research Network, May 2017. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3101193 (accessed 23 January 2022).Google Scholar
Chandler, M. 2020, “Whose Dance Is It Anyway? Carving Out Protection for Short Dances in the Fast-Paced Digital Era.” North Carolina Law Review 98, no. 4: 1001–28.Google Scholar
Chen, S. 2011. “Collaborative Authorship.” University of Illinois Journal of Law, Technology and Policy 1: 131–67.Google Scholar
Cook, M. 1977. “Moving to a New Beat: Copyright Protection for Choreographic Works.” University of California Los Angeles Law Review 24, no. 5–6: 1287–1312.Google Scholar
Cramer, L. B. 1995. “Copyright Protection for Choreography: Can It Ever Be ‘En Pointe’?” Syracuse Journal of Legislative Research 1: 145–59.Google Scholar
DeLahunta, S. 2004. Separate Spaces: Some Cognitive Dimensions of Movement. London: Proboscis.Google Scholar
DeLahunta, S. 2016. “The Choreographic Language Agent.” In Transmission in Motion, edited by Bleeker, M., 108–17. London: Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
FitzGerald, J. E. 1973. “Copyright and Choreography,” CORD News 5, no. 2: 25–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foster, S. L. 1995. Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Franko, M. 2011. “Writing for the Body: Notation, Reconstruction, and Reinvention in Dance.” Common Knowledge 17, no. 2: 321–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutchinson, A. 1970. Labanotation. New York: Theatre Arts Books.Google Scholar
Kovac, M. 2014. “Copyright and Choreography: The Negative Costs of the Current Framework for Licensing Choreography and a Proposal for an Alternative Licensing Model.” Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal 36, no. 1: 137–65.Google Scholar
Laermans, R. 2015. Moving Together: Theorizing and Making Contemporary Dance. Amsterdam: Antennae.Google Scholar
Lepecki, A. 2006. Exhausting Dance. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lincoln, E. 2003. “Invention and Authorship in Early Modern Visual Culture.” DePaul Law Review 52: 1093–1120.Google Scholar
Locke, J. 1965. Two Treatises of Government. New York: New American Library.Google Scholar
Lopez de Quintana, K. 2004. “The Balancing Act: How Copyright and Customary Practices Protect Large Dance Companies over Pioneering Choreographers.” Villanova Sport and Entertainment Law Journal 11, no. 1: 139–72.Google Scholar
Martin, C. 2020. “Whose Dance Is it Anyway?: Carving Out Protection for Short Dances in the Fast-Paced Digital Era.” North Carolina Law Review 98: 1001–28.Google Scholar
Narvaez, Rafael 2006. “Embodiment, Collective Memory and Time.” Body & Society 12, no. 3: 51–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pavis, M., Waelde, C., and Whatley, S.. 2017. “Who on Profit from Dance? An Exploration of Copyright Ownership.” Dance Research 35, no. 1: 96–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rainer, Y. 1968. “A Quasi-Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A.” In Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Battcock, G., 263–73. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ravetto-Biagioli, K. 2021a. “Dancing with and within the Digital Domain.” Body & Society 27, no. 2: 3–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ravetto-Biagioli, K. 2021b. “Whose Dance Is It Anyway: Property, Copyright and the Commons.” Theory, Culture and Society 38, no. 1: 101–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudoff, M. L. 1991. “The Dancer and the Dance: An Essay on Composers, Performers, and Integrity Rights.” Alberta Law Review 29, no. 4: 884–904.Google Scholar
Sadtler, S. 2013. “Preservation and Protection in Dance Licensing: How Choreographers Use Contract to Fill in the Gaps of Copyright and Custom.” Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts 35, no. 2: 253–92.Google Scholar
Schneider, R. 2013. The Explicit Body in Performance. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, J. 2021. “Dance As the Language of Love: Considering Joint Authorship in the Era of TikTok and after Kogan v. Martin.” Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice 16, no. 3: 259–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siegel, M. 1968. At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance. New York: Saturday Review Press.Google Scholar
Simone, D. 2019. Copyright and Collective Authorship: Locating the Authors of Collaborative Work. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singer, B. A. 1984. “In Search of Adequate Protection for Choreographic Works: Legislative and Judicial Alternatives versus the Custom of the Dance Community.” University of Miami Law Review 38, no. 2: 287–319.Google Scholar
Sperling, M. 2017. “The Warburg Institute and Siobhan Davis Dance in Conversation.” In Material/Rearrang-ed/To/Be, 53–64 (London: Siobhan Davis Dance).Google Scholar
Traylor, M. M. 1980. “Choreography, Pantomime and the Copyright Revision Act of 1976.” New England Law Review 16, no. 2: 227–55.Google Scholar
Varmer, B. 1961, Copyright in Choreographic Works. Study no. 28 prepared for the Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 86th Congress, Second Session. Washington: US Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Waelde, C., and Schlesinger, P.. 2011. “Music and Dance: Beyond Copyright Text?” SCRIPTed : A Journal of Law, Technology and Society 8, no. 3: 257–97. http://10.2966/scrip.080311.257.Google Scholar
Waelde, C., and Whatley, S.. 2018. “Digital Dance: The Challenges for Traditional Copyright Law.” In Transmission in Motion, edited by Maaike Bleeker, 168–84. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Waelde, C., Whatley, S., and Pavis, M.. 2014. “Let’s Dance! But Who Owns It?” Open Research Exeter. https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/16903 (accessed 27 November 2021).Google Scholar
Whiting, E. 2012. “Square Dance: Fitting the Square Peg of Fixation into the Round Hole of Choreographic Works.” Vanderbilt Law Review 65, no. 4: 1261–94.Google Scholar
Yeoh, F. 2012. “Preservation of Choreographic Legacies: A Case Study of the George Balanchine Trust and the George Balanchine Foundation.” Dance Chronicle 35, no. 2: 224–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yeoh, F. 2013. “The Copyright Implications of Beyoncé’s Choreograph ‘Borrowings.’” Choreographic Practices 4, no. 1: 95–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar