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

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.


Author: Anthea Kraut
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 12/01/2015
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.10w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780199360376

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2017

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).

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