Here's a relatively recent release that we missed back in December:
A description from the Press:
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.
A few blurbs:
"A magnificently complex argument based in meticulous archival research, Choreographing Copyright
examines the function of copyright in both affirming and contesting key
cultural values for artists of different raced, classed, and gendered
identities." -- Susan Leigh Foster
"Choreographing Copyright
is a provocative book that sheds new light on the history of modern,
vernacular and commercial dance. By attending to the raced, gendered and
classed biases that influence choreographers' claims of originality,
authorship and ownership, Kraut lends keen insight into the implicit
social politics behind the fixing of moving bodies. She finds in vibrant
case studies arguments about subjectivity, property, protection and
value writ large and pushes us to recognize the instabilities of bids
for personhood through creative expression." -- Nadine George-Graves
More information is available
here.
