Over a decade ago, I read and loved *Apollo's Angels: a History of Ballet* by Jennifer Homans. (Here is my review.) It's a fascinating story, and one of the questions that stays with me is the role of the choreographer, not to mention the mechanisms of choreography. It has always been notoriously difficult to come up with a system of notation for choreography, because you not only have to synchronize movement to time, you have to note what each body part is doing--and those movements change all the time (that's part of what the audience is watching for). Ballet has developed some shorthand--e.g., first arabesque or glissade--but it's still a lot to note for one piece, especially when there are multiple dancers.
To those who would say that orchestras manage it with different instruments, I would answer that 1) musicians can use auditory cues to correct themselves, whereas dancers don't always have the luxury of seeing what their fellow dancers are doing, and 2) orchestras almost always have a conductor standing over them to make sure they get it just right; a master choreographer would have a bunch of challenges using a similar signaling system.
Video evaporated many of these constraints. Choreographers no longer had to depend on memory, they could just a watch a recording. But that, perhaps not ironically, blurred the line between production and reproduction: the price of being able to remember the exact steps means that in many cases you're less likely to innovate them, especially if it's a beloved production like *Sleeping Beauty*, *Gisele*, or *The Nutcracker*. Here I am reminded yet again about Frantz Fanon's distinction between static customs and dynamic cultures.
More recently, I've been following the saga of HYBE versus ADOR in South Korea open-mouthed and wide-eyed. There's a lot, but maybe start with this article. It's kind of perfect that when I finally found NewJeans, a group that could serve as my entree into k-pop, they would end up embroiled in a complicated legal issue. (Good thing I'd already been reading a bunch of Cory Doctorow's thoughts on the BS of intellectual property.)
As I said, there's a lot, but it seems like what it boils down to is both creative and corporate control of entertainment. The latest wrinkle is whether or not choreography should be copyrighted. Perhaps because of what I know of the history of ballet, perhaps because of Doctorow, perhaps because I'm a writer, my blood chilled when I read that.
Of course dance is an art form, and of course those artists should be recognized and compensated--but if we copyright choreography, we are confining ourselves to constantly rewatching *Sleeping Beauty*, *Gisele*, *The Nutcracker*, or something else that's 70-, 75-, or 90-years old. We will be locked in a world of custom, and it will be more difficult to create a dynamic culture.
I don't blame choreographers for wanting more money, and even wanting more credit; as the article linked above lays out, there's a good argument to be made that they are a key element in k-pop's elevated profile. I think they should be paid more for their contributions, but *up front*, and I think they should be entitled to royalties from those contributions. But dance is movement, and while a lot of what I've seen of the k-choreography (that's a term now, I just decided) is very innovative, it is not strictly "original" because it tends to be combinations of movements that have been seen before. This isn't a criticism of any of the choreographers--this is a reflection of the limitations of the human body.
This is also the nature of art: however you define it, it builds on what has come before it, whether refuting an idea or extending it. Almost no works of art are complete originals, like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. This is not a criticism of art or artists: this is just a function of time, memory, and how long we as human beings have been, in effect, talking amongst ourselves.
I bring up Doctorow because he and Rebecca Gilpin, his co-author of *Chokepoint Capitalism*, take apart the abusive system of entertainment or, if you prefer, cultural and artistic production, and the numerous ways in which those creators and contributors are absolutely screwed. And yet they do not endorse sophisticated schemes for intellectual property; in fact, those tend to take even more power away from the artists and put it into the hands of the corporations who own the intellectual property. I promise you, if choreography is South Korea becomes copyrightable, it is the conglomerates (chaebols) like HYBE that are going to get the lion's share of the payments, not the choreographer.
I think ADOR CEO Min Hee-Jin has a point that there was a lot of "copy-paste" of NewJeans' music, dances, and "looks", and the fact that it happened under the same conglomerate that doesn't seem to have featured a lot of productive communication could feel like a slap in the face, especially when there's so much time and energy spent putting those elements together in the service of communicating ideas or ideals. I also believe that copying without innovating can lead to the same chilling effect on culture, albeit via a different route. But the answer is not to copyright and make things harder to genuinely build upon. The answer is to respect creators (and producers) from jump so that they don't have to try and squeeze every bit of their creations and innovations such that nothing will be left for anyone else. That is a harder ask because it means addressing what's wrong in a creative culture--and I don't just mean South Korea--but it is necessary for real change.
Deb in the City
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