Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

Is Appropriation the Same as Stealing and Why Is It Happening More Now?

| 303 Is Appropriation the Same as Stealing and Why Is It Happening More Now? Blog post, January 31, 2011, dancemagazine.com I took offense to Sarah Michelson’s obvious appropriation of In the Upper Room,Twyla Tharp’s 1986 masterwork, but it seemed that no one else did. Perhaps appropriation is just an accepted part of the culture now. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. After I posted this blog I learned about choreographers who “borrow” in a more transparent way than Michelson in her piece Devotion. See also my postscript. Watching Sarah Michelson’s piece Devotion at The Kitchen, I was getting more and more upset as her dancers donned a series of outfits that mimicked Norma Kamali’s costumes for Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room. That ballet was heavenly for me, whether danced by Tharp’s own dancers or by American Ballet Theatre. I loved it for both its supreme challenge to, and faith in the dancers, and for the spiritual uplift, riding on the celestial waves of Philip Glass’s music. In Devotion, the costumes were not the exact design of Kamali’s for Upper Room, but you couldn’t miss the little black-and-white-striped dress, the red racer-back leotard, the red socks, and the rolled down leotard over baggy trousers. At least two of the moves were also borrowed from Upper Room, namely, a jolting run, and a run-and-leap by a woman caught mid-leap by a man. After the show I got even more upset when I searched the special thanks page (the longest I’ve ever seen) and did not find the names of either Norma Kamali or Twyla Tharp. So how deliberate was this connection? Did Michelson want us to recognize Tharp’s piece inside hers? Was she creating an ode to Upper Room? Or was she exploiting a twentieth-century masterpiece? Clearly the paintings by tM Davy, mounted high up on the walls, with their saintly glow, were odes to baroque religious paintings—and I didn’t mind that. And I didn’t mind the fact that Michelson was using some of the same Philip Glass music (“Dance iX”) that is heard in Upper Room. A lot of choreographers use his music, and it was credited in the program. (I also want to say that, before the first Norma Kamali costume made its entrance, I was enjoying Rebecca Warner’s long solo quite a bit.) I called Jodi Melnick, who had danced in Upper Room as part of Twyla’s company, and who was listed in Michelson’s special thanks. She calmed me down, and together we recalled some of the times we’ve seen this kind of ap- 304 | Through the Eyes of a Dancer propriation before. Jodi herself ran off with Giselle’s mad scene in a piece of Vicky Shick’s called Repair in 2005. I loved it. I thought it was hilarious and moving at the same time. Vicky had embedded an over-the-top melodrama within her cooler, more fractured phrases. And in 2008, Juliette Mapp inserted Trisha Brown’s short “Spanish Dance” in her piece Anna, Ikea, and I. (“Spanish Dance” is something I had been in long ago and was pleased to do it again, with Juliette.) She loved that iconic piece of Trisha’s, just as Michelson, presumably, loved Upper Room. But in this case, Juliette got permission from Trisha to do it, and we were coached by (and joined by) Diane Madden, Trisha’s rehearsal director. And Trisha was invited to attend. However, in that same concert, Juliette also replicated the exact choreography of a section of Merce Cunningham’s Septet (1953). For this she did not get permission, thus stirring up some indignation from the Cunningham foundation. She had seen the segment on YouTube while looking for traces of Viola Farber’s dancing. (Viola was a ghostly but definite presence in Anna, Ikea, and I.) Juliette told me recently that she never meant to antagonize Merce or his people, and, looking back, she wished she had requested their permission. YouTube: It’s changed the dance landscape. So much of our dance past is posted on it that we are awash in our history. I think the reason visual artists started appropriating way before dancers did is that their past is out there, in galleries and museums, for anyone to snatch ideas from. Duchamp drew a mustache and goatee on a reproduction of the...