Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance by Anthea Kraut (review)

As the field of dance studies continues to expand, it reveals itself as an increasingly interdisciplinary field. Anthea Kraut’s Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance is an incredible addition to these expanding cross-disciplinary conversations that both broadens the scope of dance studies scholarship and integrates dance histories and theories more deeply into adjacent academic fields. In conversation with critical race studies, gender studies, and critical legal studies, Kraut’s book traces the formation of American intellectual property right laws through choreographic application. With an expansive scope, including more than a century of evidence across multiple genres and platforms (modern dance, ballet, tap, jazz, and Broadway), Kraut makes a clear and strong argument that “choreographic copyright has served to consolidate and to contest racial and gendered power” (xiii). Examining both the implicit and explicit perpetuation of whiteness inherent in the legal constructs of ownership, authorship, commodification, and subjecthood, Choreographing Copyright offers a critical expansion of the dance studies archive along with the ideological implications of understanding these oft-contested ideas through the histories of legal and federal regulation. Having already won Outstanding Book from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (2016) and the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Award from the American Society for Theatre Research (2016), there is clear consensus across disciplines about the importance and excellence of Kraut’s latest work.

My own research is deeply invested in questions of choreographic monetary value, and Kraut takes on this complex area of inquiry as both a historian and a philosopher. Pitting embodied commodification against possessive individualism, object versus subject, each chapter of the book offers a case study, “a series of discrete but related examinations of how dance-makers with various degrees of privilege ... engage with the discourse and legal apparatus of intellectual property law” throughout the past century (41). These cases prove Kraut’s point that dance is an overt participant in capitalist marketplaces, perpetuating neoliberal ideologies. While intersections of art and money have often been taboo topics of conversation, their intertwining is neither new nor neutral. Nonprofit scholar Paul DiMaggio describes America’s early twentieth-century cultural capitalists, newly rich industrialist magnates like Mellon and Rockefeller, institutionalizing elite European art forms (visual art, opera, orchestra) in order to spare them from the demands and influences of the commercial marketplace. Of course, these early institutions still had to deal with operating budgets and deficits, sell tickets, pay artists, maintain buildings, and build administrative and artistic infrastructures. And still, many of the artists and institutions Kraut historicizes were overtly commercial ventures (Broadway, vaudeville, etc.), never denying a money-making intent. This is all to say that for both the not-for-profit corporate structure as container and the commercial theatrical marketplace, Kraut would agree that dance does not and never has operated outside of economic pressures. Thus, the idea of a choreographic value expressed monetarily is neither threatening nor demeaning to the art; it is ontological. It is an essential tool for survival within the capitalist economies of its birth and growth. To ignore the weight of economic pressure on concert dance and therefore deny the dances a monetary valuation and thus copyright protection, is to both withhold essential tools for survival and to disregard an integral influence on choreographic creation and performance. Kraut’s intervention into this conversation is her ideological unpacking of United States copyright law, revealing the deeply problematic racial and gendered subjugation that has been built into the theatrical marketplace. Choreographic copyright is thus understood as a regulatory tool for policing the reproduction and circulation of intellectual property, functioning both as an apparatus of the state and as a tactic employed by choreographers and performers.

Kraut opens her book with the well-documented case of Loie Fuller, a founding figure in American modern dance at the turn of the last...