jennifer said,

February 23, 2007 @ 6:21 pm

awesome video! but, i couldn’t copy that dance even if i wanted too!!!

SanderO said,

February 23, 2007 @ 10:09 pm

Intellectual property has economic value in this society. What can a choreography create of economic value if not his dance? But can this be copyrighted?

Why is a photograph which is so easily reproduced and often so easy to take any more “valuable” than a dance?

Even genes are being patented.

The whole intellectual property thing is a minefield and confusing and crazy… but artists need to be able to make a living from their work… and dance is a performance art which is fleeting and you could theoretically sell a view of the performance… like tickets to a sporting event.

Even musical artists can sell reproductions of their work as CDs and so forth… dancers? What can they market? And sadly they work and study the hardest of any performance art I would say.

What say you?

Tony said,

February 24, 2007 @ 2:47 am

Yes this is a tricky subject and it does beg the question…what does the dancer own and what can they sell? Perhaps all the dancer sells is their body. Maybe this is why we feel such sensitivity around the issues of Kristin’s post “Going Too Far?” http://thewinger.com/words/2007/going-too-far/ It turns all of our stomachs to think of the dancer as prostitute. However if we want to think of the dancer as owning anything more than their body we run into problems. I believe the creative act comes from the doing of the dance not just the conception of the dance.
In physics we often employ something called a thought experiment, in german edankenexperiment. Consider this. Take every position of ballet. Then take the outer product of all transitions from every position to every position and call that set D. If we were to patent all of these little dances we would then own all possible dances that could be constructed within the vocabulary of ballet. This is of course over simplified and absurd as any good edankenexperiment is.
The purpose of a thought experiment in physics is to bring out inherent contradictions embedded in certain ways of thinking. Lets try to find out where this contradiction resides. I don’t know…
All I do know is that when I dance I do nothing original. All I do is remember bodies that have come before me. Everything has been done before…and thats okay. This is how we pay honor to the dancing bodies that are no longer here.
In many ways choreography is a cenotaph and terribly hard to take hold of as a commodity for exchange. This is why I think dance is so amazing. Though bodies can be bought and sold, for only a “bit more than 115 pounds each,” the dancing remains elusive.