Black creators in dance, and the copyright that would not hold them

by bam

Choreography was not a copyrightable category in the United States until 1 January 1978. Before that date a dance could be registered only if it passed as a dramatic composition, in Class D, which meant it had to tell a story or develop a character, and the rule came from a case a white dancer lost in 1892. After that date it could be registered only if it was fixed: written, notated or filmed. A dance that was danced and never written down was, in law, never a work at all. This course teaches that mechanism from the documents themselves, the 1909 Act, the Copyright Office's own Compendium, Circular 52, and the opinions in Horgan v. Macmillan and Hanagami v. Epic Games, and then reads the archive against it. You will open the Library of Congress finding aid for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Collection to a box of contracts and read four Black choreographers' names on four folder headings, one of them with a royalties schedule laid in and one of them closed to researchers until the year 2100. You will compare the two folders that hold what survives of the choreography of Revelations with the two boxes that hold its choral scores. And you will price a Labanotation score, because a score is not only a record, it is a revenue instrument, and every choreographer who was never notated was excluded from it. Nothing here is asserted that was not read from a source. Where the popular story is wrong, including about Alvin Ailey and about Janet Collins, the correction is the lesson.