Authorship Ownership and Control: Dancers' roles and materials

Dancers’ experiences of creating, learning, or passing on the dances they create and dance will constitute this research.The documentation of dancers’ situated knowledge, discourse and experience of authorship, ownership, and control will contribute to meaningful reflections serving the dance field itself by heightening awareness of the specificity of theseterms’ application in this community of practice. Dancers’ perspectives will also contribute to the advancement of theory and practice concerning creativity, intellectual property, and maintenance or preservation of authored materials andartworks. The project will span three years and generate a series of short performances, and an online publication with three mainparts.

This research aims to focus on the dancer’s experience of authorship. Dancers are considered interpretive artists when a written choreography pre-exists the dancer’s embodied enaction. This is clearly not the case in dance practices where dancers create roles, and materials. The performer’s authorial relation to the creation of roles and materials in artistic process and performance is essential to discussions of dancers’ agency in the North American and Northern European concert dance and performance field. There is a common assumption that an author is a singular, creative person who owns and controls the work ze produces. This assumption has been challenged by 20th century philosophers, critical theorists, and by changes in the technology of publishing. In current dance practices, however, the question of authorship remains strangely unexamined.

This research will focus on accessing dancers’ experiences of authorship, using conversations held in dance studios as the primary research method. The project intends to generate a series of short performances, and an online publication with three main parts: A Poetic Glossary of Dance Materials, Conversations To Remember, and Artistic Licenses for Dancers. • The poetic glossary of dance materials will be gleaned from the language dancers use to speak about their artistic materials. • In keeping with the oral tradition in dance, Authorship, Ownership and Control will generate conversations where the meanings that emerge from the rhythms, durations, proximities, affects, and textures experienced during the conversation will, along with the spoken language, be recognizable, and transmittable through memorization and performance. • In the last phases of the project the focus will turn to creating artistic licenses. Having established a vocabulary specific to dancers’ articulation of authorship’s qualities in their artistic processes, the researchers will invite experts from other fields to develop templates that dancers can adapt to their own specifications and carry forward as an artistic ground for their collaborative work. The artistic license templates will be published online and in print.

Researchers: Frank Bock Andrew Hardwidge Scott Delahunta Gabriel Schenker Collaborators: Cullberg Ballet, Sweden / Rosas, Belgium / The Tate Modern, England / Free-lance dancers /

Swedish Research Council

2024-2027

Episode 2 of Thorns: Rose Choreographic school podcast series 

Chrysa and Mette Edvardsen talk about their identities as performers and choreographers, translation in their practices and the politics of authorship in choreography and dance.

https://rosechoreographicschool.com/publications/thorns-episode-two