Creativity and the emergence of principles of ownership

Contemporary dance is an embodied art form that combines rigorous physical and mental training with an exceptional emphasis on creativity.Footnote ⁷ The genre is one in which new work is expected and produced by artists (see Hetty Blades in this issue), and, thus, new “material” is constantly being asked for and generated.Footnote ⁸ This material exists in movement patterns – “phrases” in the language of many its practitioners – that are combined into, or sequenced to make, a dance work. Phrases are generated in a number of ways in the dance studio, with improvisation often key. The embodied nature of dance means that it circulates fluidly, with movements, ideas, and knowledge exchanged from body to body without explicit formal transaction.Footnote ⁹ Artists share their unique practices as a way of creating dialogue with other artists and contributing to the development of the art form.Footnote ¹⁰ Movements are often re-embodied and reworked to varying degrees during pedagogical and choreographic processes.Footnote ¹¹ These practices are generally accepted within “the community,” relying on assumed norms of behavior and reciprocation. This ecology has been described as a form of “commons,”Footnote ¹² implying that choreographic knowledge is a shared resource. The introduction of the term “community” by these writers reflects an important aspect revealed in the papers that follow. That is, contemporary dance practitioners consider the “domain” in which they work to be made up of multiple people making art works that in some way connect them all together. “Community” is a self-designation and points to an underlying sense of something in common. We explore, in context, what this “commons” might be.

Complicating a notion of commons, however,Footnote ¹³ some have theorized the apparently freely offered contributions of dance makers in relation to the anthropological notion of the “gift” as a way of conceptualizing the transactions that take place between dance makers in the “community.”Footnote ¹⁴ While such descriptions require reflexivity (it is in how the specifics of exchange and, thus, transaction occur that the interest lies, not in identifying them as within a particular typology of economy), these analyses do suggest a different political economy to that in which conventional intellectual property operates. Part of the “ground clearance” of this issue is to establish the need for a specific and nuanced description of creation and exchange within particular dance-making and pedagogical processes. Why? As Michael Brown wrote, there is value in “emerging ethnographic studies of views of cultural ownership in specific places, as distinct from the abstract and often romanticized depictions of traditional ownership practices that typically dominate policy discussions in multilateral organizations such as UNESCO.”Footnote ¹⁵

Choreographic processes in contemporary dance have been studied from a range of perspectives. However, despite this range of approaches, there is to date a lack of detailed ethnographic examination of ownership and sharing within that creative process. One counter-example – Rudi Laermans’s exemplary study Moving Together (2015) – explores ownership within the creative process, providing detailed descriptions based on the Brussels dance community and the work of the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. As the detail and theoretical sophistication of that work demonstrates, the subject is as rich and as complex as any genuinely “thick description” of the nesting of interpersonal, institutional, and societal/cultural relations anywhere. His work leaves no doubt that there are specific conditions, expectations, and assumptions that shape the field of contemporary dance making, knowledge sharing, and pedagogy.

Any attempt to distill general rules and understandings within the contemporary dance community needs to take into account the specifics of time, place, politics, and history (see Siobhan Davies and James Leach in this issue).Footnote ¹⁶ This is particularly so when the situation relates to knowledge sharing and makes it the specific focus of scientific attention and research. When Marcel Mauss referred to the gift as a “total social fact,” he asserted that gift-exchange relations are a central part of a wider form of sociality in which specific personhood and political institutions are also major elements.Footnote ¹⁷ Many anthropologists spend their scholarly careers describing the inextricable mutual constitution of “elements” upon which practitioners and analysts focus. One must remain skeptical of simply removing the notion “gift” from the wider social context in which it has meaning and re-describing another society’s practices using the concept. The complexities of exchange are based on specifics as to how and where persons come to be constituted in a particular society, how their products attach or are detached from them in the process of exchange, and on the logics of recognition that also involve particular constructions of gender, societal hierarchies, belief systems, and so forth.Footnote ¹⁸

In recent work using ethnographic material about contemporary dance, for example, we have highlighted how the personal, and the interpersonal, shape the flow of movement in creative improvisation in a way that both draws upon and challenges Western assumptions about individuals and their singular capacity for internal creativity. These studies point to how there is something emergent in the dance studio that is neither of one body or of many individual units coordinating. It is something “between” that draws on and explores the very nature of politics and domination, cooperation, and engagement between bodies that are also persons and that are situated in a particular society and history.Footnote ¹⁹ Part of any description of ownership principles therefore needs to be quite clear in its contextualization.

In other work, we have gone so far as to suggest that the “material” worked upon in creative improvisation is the moral, social, and political reality of being a human being as a body, with a body as the only means we have of being at all. Culture is embodied, therefore, in the very process of making artistic material in a specific historical and social milieu.Footnote ²⁰ Our approach then is to be interested in reciprocation, exchanges, and transmissions in their historical and social complexity. We would like to understand the principles and assumptions that shape creative collaborative processes in this field and, in addition, illuminate processes of making and transmission in an artistic genre that has been overlooked by social science in current understandings of practice-oriented creativity.

Approaches to art in the social sciences have been supplemented in recent decades by a focus on creativity,Footnote ²¹ social process,Footnote ²² and “making”Footnote ²³ that highlights process and emergence and the role of skilled engagement with materials. However, dance has been notably absent from this development. By looking at a form of creativity based on the emergence of ideas and forms through bodily movement (that is, embodied, unarticulated), there is scope for an important contribution to the literature. We lack descriptions of dancers’ understanding of their relations with one another and how the unfolding of these relations is the material worked upon in dance creation. Two or more bodies improvising together in the dance studio work with the shape of their interaction, exploring both structure and time through how each other feel and respond in the interaction itself.Footnote ²⁴ Choreographic material works on a world of relations to space and social other, relations that constitute and unfold these things. Philosophical articulations of understanding dance in this way can be discovered in the work of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, José Gil, and Alva Noë.Footnote ²⁵

We suggest that further detailed ethnographic investigation of the process offers a significant addition. Ownership refers to the conditions of transactions, obligation, and sharing of dance, and we propose to make apparent the frames under which these actions are made possible. In a recent article on the circulation of music and value in Melanesia, Monika Stern and I make a strong claim that there are discernible principles at work that govern the creation and circulation of music and dance in that region. Artistic material made under these conditions generates enduring value and enduring connections. It facilitates social reproduction through ownership attributions that are not “property.”Footnote ²⁶ Analogously, contemporary dance, as the contributions here attest to, resists propertization.Footnote ²⁷ What then are the specifics that generate this “resistance” in this case, and what do they have in common with other bodily forms of knowing and heritage?

The framing for these writings is to interrogate what gets created and exchanged in contemporary dance describing how “ownership” figures in these processes. We notice, for example, that although property makes occasional appearances within, and perturbations in the domain of contemporary dance or traditional music (see Luke McDonagh in this issue), it somehow does not have much purchase in the domain, and the self-defining community remains resilient.Footnote ²⁸ What then is it that is made and circulating in this arena that property does not “attach to”?Footnote ²⁹

The context of intellectual property

The performative nature of the material, the nature of the knowledge involved, and the flexible and changing modes of collaborations within the communities of dancers and choreographers that we address create significant challenges to intellectual property law’s ability to comprehend and regulate these practices – challenges that many who are concerned with the loss or appropriation of intangible heritage have long articulated.Footnote ³⁰ Just as with traditional knowledge and cultural heritage, the whole issue of control over intellectual and cultural property in dance is not only fraught because the form does not lend itself well to notation in a “fixed medium,” according to intellectual property standards. There is also something fundamental in the way in which the “in between” unfolds from these practices and forms a core part of their realization of value, which is lost in the abstraction of making a “knowledge object.”Footnote ³¹

While intellectual property law remains central in the context of the public performance and dissemination of the final “product” of dance,Footnote ³² the practices of authorship, attribution, and credit sharing (as well as those regarding the sharing of knowledge between generations and with others outside the community) are regulated by norms developed by the participants themselves – norms that may be both only partially explicit and may change in time with the structure of the community and in response to new technologies and internal developments (such as the introduction of digital documentation). When a dance artist works with a well-known choreographer, they are not just making their body available as material for the choreographer but also contributing their creativity and ideas (see Siobhan Davies and James Leach in this issue).Footnote ³³ In return, perhaps they learn technique, styles, or ways of generating movement ideas. Attribution may be a kind of reciprocation, but the realities of cultural and institutional expectations may interfere or distort the distribution of benefit. When one emerging dance maker, for example, allows another dancer to use her choreography and the performance is successful, who gains from the valuable reputation and through what mechanism? Given that contemporary dance as discussed here is situated within the commodity economies of Western Europe, how do such mechanisms operate without devolving to property and intellectual property ownership?

The issues we identify in the dance domain overlap with significant challenges faced in the digitization of intangible cultural heritage more widely. After more than 15 years, the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) efforts to broker consensus around the text of a treaty for the protection of “traditional cultural expressions” are deadlocked. Over the same period, we have come to understand more about the inherent limitations of national intellectual property laws where embodied and collective creativity are concerned. Meanwhile, the implications of new technology for the collection and circulation of detailed information about making art and culture have become increasingly apparent. The obvious benefits of digitization in terms of building general knowledge seem to be offset, to an extent not yet fully understood, by the risks it poses to cultural survival.

In a more recent piece, Brown highlights various “perils” involved in heritage management.Footnote ³⁴ He identifies two major factors that give rise to these perils: “administrative mind” and over-zealous state involvement. The former, often arising from good intentions to protect and preserve the diversity of national or global heritage, requires the cataloguing and categorization of aspects of peoples’ practices. These thus become both concretized, and the administration and policing of the boundaries of such practices (or the groups that they are said to belong to) results in a removal of control over them from the practitioners themselves. The concerns that Brown outlines when it comes to state involvement in heritage are multifaceted, but, to summarize and focus on just one, the state, in its guise of protecting national interests, may well and in multiple documented cases does, have different interests from the practitioners or guardians of heritage (see McDonagh in this issue). These problems are exacerbated rather than diminished when the heritage in question is “intangible” – that is, when it is not fixed in objects but, rather, in ideas, practices, arts traditions, and so on. Brown is one of many in recent years who have talked of an impasse in the application of intellectual property law when it comes to preserving and protecting intangible heritage.Footnote ³⁵ Brown’s argument allows a clear sight of the fact that, as he puts it, “[e]ven thoughtfully designed heritage-protection laws and policies tend to be flawed affairs.”Footnote ³⁶ I suggest that this is because the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and WIPO are apparently only able to conceive of “protection” through “property.”

Where can we look for inspiration in the light of the near universal agreement about the inadequacy of intellectual property law as a way out of the need to treat the creators and guardians of artistic and other intangible creations with fairness and respect? As Brown puts it, “[t]he multiple deficiencies of an IP [intellectual property] based model have led the heritage-protection movement to cast about for more promising frameworks.”Footnote ³⁷ Such a search would have to acknowledge the structural and logical difficulties that Brown highlights and delineate an approach that does not aim for more control but rather seeks to shape where, and, indeed, if, such control by administrators, experts, and the state are appropriate and helpful at all. At the very least, it promises to make visible and legible the different interests and assumptions of those looking to protect intangible heritage.

Ethnographic methodology and property

This special issue is exemplary of this effort – that is, we examine the practice and context of one particular contemporary area of the production of intangible art work to show how its principles and self-organization function. We point out how the mores and social principles involved are complex, embedded in particular historical and cultural places, and thus both differ and (inevitably) overlap with wider assumptions and principles in law and the administration of business in which they exist. We do not seek to recommend principles from one domain of practice for others but, rather, to recommend an approach to thinking about ownership and transmission, protection, and artistic/community/social regeneration that attends to the concerns, interests, practices, and underlying values of practitioners in any of the fields that could be designated cultural heritage. Methodologically, we intend to point to a research process that we believe will have a series of concrete and practical outcomes in the end: one that begins from understanding the principles of ownership and sharing in different practices, made possible by a detailed description of those practices. In this issue, we take one practice that is available to us (contemporary dance) and move from there to examine what is or is not appropriate under current law and precedent to that genre.

The collaborative and embodied forms of knowledge in contemporary dance are largely inaccessible unless experienced directly through body-to-body transmission.Footnote ³⁸ The recent appearance of artist-led experiments that try to bridge this gap with computer-aided recording and processing (visualization) offer a unique opportunity to understand the effect of digitization on these kinds of knowledge forms. The results of these experiments have been modest in number, but they include a high-profile proliferation of diverse projects attempting to realize customized approaches responding to the interests, desires, and methods of particular artist(s).Footnote ³⁹ At the same time, advances in networked computer technologies and streaming video appear to offer a public platform for diverse dance artists to share their moving ideas easily and worldwide. William Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies is a seminal example, initially created as an annotated video to teach dance-making techniques to members of his company, it was subsequently published and is widely used, both with and without Forsythe’s approval, in dance pedagogy worldwide.Footnote ⁴⁰ Then there is You-tube and so on, social media video platforms that apparently make everything accessible. But, as I discuss below, much is also lost in these forms of digitization, and what is lost is most apparent in the abstraction of knowledge from the social conditions of its production.

In much heritage and cultural property, we are interested by knowledge forms that cannot, and/or perhaps should not, be separated from the bodies and processes of their production. Contemporary dance provides a proximate and pertinent example for us because of its living form in the context of contemporary art, because of the necessarily collaborative nature of much of its process, because it is process based, and also because of motivations and ethics on the part of many practitioners that constitute it as a self-described “community.” We are concerned with the various phenomena that are not objects and, therefore, not property or not appropriately property.

Body-to-body transmission

Dance tends to be concerned with the ownership of movement and performances that are current. There is a processual, affectual articulation of connections to the material. This is perhaps made clearest in relation to the notion of “loss.” Loss of what? What part of a dance could be thought to be lost (see Blades in this issue)?Footnote ⁴¹ In seeking to address this question, we point to the importance in dance of the inbuilt assumptions and reciprocations that give the genre its creative form and that are part and parcel of what Blades terms its “ontology.” To have them shorn from work is to decontextualize dance to detrimental effect.

Scott deLahunta’s chapter engages with the question of under what conditions might the bodily, tacit, and experiential knowledge of dancer artists be communicated when they are not working together in the same space? DeLahunta experiments with notions of “tacit knowledge” that come from Michael Polanyi and Harry Collins but settles instead on a description of “trade literature.”Footnote ⁴² For context, Polanyi and Collins wrote about science that has an explicit knowledge component – they were not trying to replace explicit knowledge with tacit knowledge or argue that they were equally valid ways of knowing but, rather, argue that the one (explicit) relies upon the other (tacit). DeLahunta plays with how this could look or play out for dance. His contribution “clears the ground” by looking closely at what dance makers communicate and how that communication can be located outside the body. He uses the concept of a professional trade literature to draw attention to a variety of publications by dance artists who have a desire to share their practical knowledge with wider audiences, and he discusses how this communication might take place effectively (or not).

DeLahunta not only describes an autobiographic trajectory of involvement with projects that have sought to make explicit the structures and processes that lie behind dance making but also expresses the recognition that there are aspects of this bodily practice that resist transmission. They are too deeply engrained, too much of a “skill” in Gregory Bateson’s terms (that of having to remain below the level of conscious thought in order to be achieved).Footnote ⁴³ Using detailed descriptions of four examples of trade literature in dance, he describes how prior knowledge in dance practice gives a special access to the contents of this literature that is professionally communal. It is thus a form of ownership, by marking out inclusion, which claims knowledge but not property. These observations, arising from many years work on articulating “choreographic ideas” reveal a kind of relationship to the body and practice that are put into relief (much as in Ravetto-Biagioli and Biagioli-Ravetto’s article in this issue) by conventional property and intellectual property thinking.Footnote ⁴⁴

Dance’s ephemerality may be stilled and captured by technology, but what is not there for capture is the unsaid and unarticulated that dancers know in each other and that generate the trust and exchange that they operate. To communicate something is to possess it however briefly,Footnote ⁴⁵ to have it in oneself to “express,” and, thus, deLahunta’s highly thoughtful and informative article gives us a clearer sense of what it is that dance makers possess and transact between themselves. As Ravetto-Biagioli and Biagioli-Ravetto put it in this issue, “[t]his suggests that dance is more than just performing or copying ostensible movement – movement that can be replicated by watching a film or video.” And, in turn, this involves us in what several articles in this issue question – the “ontological” nature or status of dance.

Ontology, commons, and community

Blades’ detailed article in this issue analyzes the central notion of “commons” and thereby what exactly is created – out of what and under what terms.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, she also focuses on a “community” of those who share a “resource” but with a sharp analytic eye for questions of where and when a movement becomes a resource and in what ways – what the fixing of a “work” does in terms of both taking from, and contributing something back, to the “community” or pool of resources. Blades offers a link with other kinds of “intangible heritage” where oral transmission, restricted circulation, master-pupil relationships, and so on are the norm. Yet, crucially and in parallel to Davies and Leach, she shows how the “dance commons,” reputation, and value are deeply embedded within the overall logic of Western capitalism. Even as a protest against, or conscious alternative to, Western capitalism, it remains bound to the form of economy in which it arises and operates, which is perhaps one place where the gift analogy (in a classical Maussian understanding of the term) breaks down. “The commons” is part of a particular political economy and history, just as is the Maussian “gift.” They are not equivalent descriptions. Both gift and commons tend to be used idealistically, but neither are universal human institutions. Blades makes perfectly clear how each description should be read in relation to ownership and sharing in contemporary dance.

The “dance commons” that Blades describes is a complex artifact of the need to copy, learn, share, and move; of the conventional funding structures that support this artistic genre;Footnote ⁴⁷ and of the role of reputation, recognition, and visibility. These give shape to a “commons” that is not only something that exists to be drawn upon but also an achievement of the form itself. As Ravetto-Biagioli points out, “commons” has two distinct meanings in John Locke’s philosophy of property: that of a pool of resources and, more significantly, as an agreement between people on how to behave in relation to them.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is this aspect of agreement that Blades uncovers. She concludes that “[o]pen-ness as a proprietary stance is linked to the open-ness of dance work ontology and identity,” showing us the particularity of contemporary dance, the context of which is as deep seated as the possessive individualism, state support, and bureaucracy that frame it in a very specific historical moment.

One lesson we might take from this is that any attribution of cultural property will also be dealing with such deep complexities. The “take away” is perhaps less the unsuitability of copyright, which seems obvious after reading Blades’s consideration of the way in which dance is made, but, more, the possibility that, with an in-depth analysis of the “ontology” of anything that is claimed as heritage, one could also draw out principles that already govern its creation and circulation. There are already norms and codes appropriate for those who wish to make use of it. These seem to be learned as aspects of how movement material is made in itself.

Of course, cultural property precedents are formulated not with the “good actors” in mind but also with those who wish to appropriate things from others. The aim is protection, and it is not much good saying that protection should follow the norms of the producers when that is patently not even part of the consideration for appropriators. Perhaps one thing to note here is that, with its current status and state funding, contemporary dance has managed to flourish without fixity and without propertization, a move that cultural property, certainly in its bureaucratic form, relies upon and encourages. As Davies points out clearly in her interview in this issue, there is nothing inherent in dance practice that means that its practitioners have to avoid commodity forms and logics of transmission and control.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet, for her, these logics are allied to forms of damage – even of damage to the bodies of dancers themselves. Her thoughtful and articulate rendering of the link between an approach to dance that imposes forms of movement on dancer’s bodies, their resulting lack of creative autonomy, and the celebration of a lone creative choreographer who apparently has all the ideas is illustrative of the way in which an art form can mirror the society in which it exists. Dancers become merely a vehicle for ideas and creativity located, and owned, elsewhere. They can be forced to perform in ways that are not sustainable, purely in terms of physical health. Moreover, as labor, dancers do not participate in the community or in the creation of the dance commons as a live and vital element of their own self-realization. The parallels with commodified heritage are clear.

Fixation, technology, and copy-loss

Ravetto-Biagioli and Biagioli-Ravetto open their article with a long discourse on the notion of fixation in relation to dance as it is the crucial move that makes dance into property (and recall Brown on state codification in relation to cultural property).Footnote ⁵⁰ As with several other contributions in this issue, they dwell on the “ontology” of dance – what it actually is – in order to understand its relationship to a powerful element of the context of capitalism in which contemporary dance exists: the law of copyright. As with McDonagh, they show how the phenomenal existence that dance takes makes it a poor fit. However, unlike the examples that McDonagh draws upon, which are about an evasion of property in some ways, they show how this very ambiguity of form and existence is taken up by a particular artist to make a series of observations in a dance work that reflect (upon) this very ambiguity and reveal how such work has intricate connections to memory, self, other, and presence in the domain/community. Matthius Sperling’s dance work Riff Footnote ⁵¹ thus provides them with the opportunity to conduct a detailed artistic analysis of negotiating the abstractions that Blades in this issue is able to distill from her research into dance. As Ravetto-Biagioli and Biagioli-Ravetto explain, “Riff provides a paradigmatic example of the problem of belonging: who can own such creations if they can only be non-objects, moves and gestures articulated by multiple bodies and actors in response to each other? Finally, how can ‘belonging’ evoke both a sense of being part of a culture or group as well as holding exclusive ownership in a work?”Footnote ⁵²

In this “ontology” of dance in relation to the law, they argue forcefully that dance resists property because “all possible ‘fixations’ of dance are inherently external to it as a work … [that]… points to a serious mismatch between law’s conceptualization of copyright and that of dance by both its makers and its viewers.” The mismatch is “systematic,” in part because “the law implicitly acknowledges that the stability of dance as an object of property can result only from copying, not just ‘fixing.’ The property is the copy because only the copy has the qualities of an object” (being not the movement of the dancer but, rather, its recording (copying) in some form that allows its fixation). Their article then falls on the side of examining dance ontology’s relation to the defining context of the law, complementing those contributions that examine this ontology in context as well as from the “inside” of the practice, as it were.

Whatley’s article offers a fascinating case study that highlights and exposes the mechanisms by which technology, and, specifically, video and digital motion capture, is allied to both property and directly to its guarantor, the nation-state. I wish to dwell for a moment on this alliance of technology and property. Ravetto-Biagioli and Biagioli-Ravetto show clearly that the mediums of recording increasingly available to dancers and choreographers are the very same as those that make the possession of dance less of a bodily and community matter and more of a legal and object-like one. In other words, video recording of dance is, as James F. Weiner has argued, an act of transfiguration, and “the more totally [transfigurative] the medium, the more total the depicted object is transfigured … it is precisely the property of video that in bringing-forth the conditions of its own production as subject matter … conceals this very transfiguring effect.”Footnote ⁵³ Weiner’s point about the effects of apparently neutral media is that they embody the metaphysic of their origin. Ravetto-Biagioli and Biagioli-Ravetto uncover exactly how such a metaphysic operates with property as its constitutive component to eliminate the aspects of dance that lie behind the common understandings pointed to by deLahunta’s “trade literatures,” Blades’s “community,” or McDonagh’s “social norms.” As Whatley writes in relation to video and motion capture techniques applied to Greek traditional dance, “whilst different capture processes were employed to record each dance genre in order to share it more widely, the originating dance itself actually slips away and becomes ungraspable so instead ‘returns’ to the individual dancer or dancing ensemble, inseparable from its home community for the purposes of capture.”

Whatley’s narration of the process of making these recordings returns us forcefully to both of Brown’s two elements troubling heritage protection: the nation-state and its interests, which rarely align with any group of communities, and the need for abstraction, fixation, and preservation. As Whatley writes, “[e]ach dance genre is a complex movement system, and the necessary segmentation of the practice, for capturing and analysis purposes, can mean that the dance as a coherent multi-level cultural expression effectively disappears through its atomization and categorization.” As Ravetto-Biagioli and Biagioli-Ravetto summarize, “dance is more than its performing or copying ostensible movement – movement that can be replicated through watching film or video.”Footnote ⁵⁴ It is this “more” that I in part characterize as that which is emergent from the relationships between bodies or body-minds (see Davies and Leach in this issue).Footnote ⁵⁵ In the making of dance, we can also locate the mores and principles, the norms and assumptions, that have helped make the genre resilient and, as we see in Blades, Davies, Ravetto-Biagioli and Biagioli-Ravetto, able to adopt and utilize the property form at specific times and around the edges of their core interactions, but that also leads them to rely on “acknowledgement, adaptation, quantity, and community,” as Blades leads us to call them.

Normative and informal

Just as Whatley reveals, music, movement, and dance are often not just closely associated with, but are actually central elements of, each other. In the Irish traditional music scene presented by McDonagh, dance is key to the structure of the music. He focuses on music in this case because, while it is an integral part of Irish traditional dance, it is also more readily subject to legal dispute and thus acquires “commodified property-object status in intellectual property law.” Yet McDonagh shows how, “like dance itself, Irish traditional dance music tends to resist property categorization, and practitioners of traditional dance music often do not follow the Lockean liberal-utilitarian labor theory that artists should assert rights in their labors.” He describes three overlapping claims that situate the genre as heritage – not intellectual property – much like the cases described by the other authors in this issue. McDonagh emphasizes the passing on, person to person, of the music. He shows how this happens in the context of a sense of cultural nationalism, which in turn results in a recognition of value by the state. The music is then a candidate for commodified expression without alienation, contributing to a wider aura of identity that can be marketed to tourists. These factors combine to make it possible for the genre to exist “somewhat outside the formal legal system,” a space in which social norms take precedent. It thus sits within the same frame that Blades examines – namely, already-made dance as a “shared resource” that is governed by informal and normative codes. McDonagh returns us to the ways in which social norms and wider context inform and shape the ownership and transmission of dance even within the context of a nation-state with clear interests in its existence. The ontology of this music/dance form shares much with contemporary dance in that it is both a constant source from which performance can be generated, its history is one of borrowing, and what is perhaps most central are the connections that this borrowing generates: “The music is in a constant state of redefinition … [and] while the individual is present, the overriding sense is on a collective sense of ownership.”

McDonagh complicates the story that I outline above about the alliance between technology and property in an illuminating manner, showing how recording and sharing can be facilitated by digital communication technologies without necessarily undermining the principles of sharing and reciprocity. He puts this down to the fact that, “[h]ere, the law is not paramount: it is social norms that govern the use of Irish traditional music.” The fact that digital transmission seems more feasible/positive in this case than in others may indicate a disjuncture between dance as form and music as form. Even though Irish traditional dance music does not follow a property logic, it is still music, and, as such, it may be more suited to digital archiving and transmission than dance itself is. In fact, reminiscent of the positions of dance makers described in Ravetto-Biagioli and Biagioli-Ravetto, Davies, and Blades, “the modes of transmission are constantly being expanded to encompass new technologies and elements of commercialism. Remarkably, this occurs without destroying the Irish traditional dance music’s essential sociality and common sense of shared ownership.” McDonagh concludes that both UNESCO’s formulation of cultural property, and WIPO’s concept of traditional knowledge “lack appeal as [they] would formalize the informal, normative ways by which traditional musicians share tunes.”

Davies, the acclaimed London-based dance maker, tells of how, through the process of making dance works over a long career, she has come to deal directly with issues and pressures around ownership and attribution. An inspiration to the aforementioned artist Matthias Sperling, these considerations came to shape her working practice. She articulates that the material she is interested in making is material that comes into being in ways that reflect alternatives to dominant cultural and institutional assumptions about how mind or intellect forms matter. She is also explicitly political, revealing how there is a gendered dimension to the assumptions she challenges in her practice. Locating her arts practice firmly in this context in this manner reveals how economic pressures on dance makers often lead toward the work of “individual creators” and “individual minds,” turning dancers and their bodies into “receivers” of forms generated outside or beyond them. The underlying theme of ownership that runs through the interview is central, as it is where and how Davies has made explicit an alternative to expected institutional hierarchies and modes of making work.

Her reflection on her work leads us to think again about how and what is made “between people,” as exploratory work is undertaken in the studio. Despite the art form’s unique possibilities and approach to ownership, as described and elaborated in depth by Blades in this issue, it nevertheless is confronted by, or also embodies, widespread conceptions of the person and correct modes of institutional organization in (this case in) contemporary UK society. One might ask, how could it be otherwise? What is so captivating, however, is the way in which there is a conscious and sustained effort on the part of the dance makers led by Davies to address and ethically engage this context. As with Sperling’s work discussed by Ravetto-Biagioli and Biagioli-Ravetto in this issue and by Ravetto-Biagioli in another text,Footnote ⁵⁶ this attention to the very conditions of making – its situatedness within a legal, institutional, and social context – is both material for, and matters to, the makers of this form of contemporary art.

In sum, our volume reveals within the field of contemporary dance – a dance genre emphasizing the making of new works that are embodied, performed, cooperatively produced, and even collectively owned – complex processes of transaction, sharing, ownership, and knowledge production. Considering different case studies, the collection explores how conventional notions of property and cultural heritage are challenged by the specific sociality and aesthetic exchanges inherent in dance. The aim of the special Issue is to make these insights fruitful for a broader discourse and policy around protecting cultural heritage, thus taking the analysis beyond dance.