As the field of dance studies continues to expand, it reveals itself as an increasingly interdisciplinary field. Anthea Kraut's Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance is an incredible addition to these expanding cross-disciplinary conversations that both broadens the scope of dance studies scholarship and integrates dance histories and theories more deeply into adjacent academic fields. In conversation with critical race studies, gender studies, and critical legal studies, Kraut's book traces the formation of American intellectual property right laws through choreographic application. With an expansive scope, including more than a century of evidence across multiple genres and platforms (modern dance, ballet, tap, jazz, and Broadway), Kraut makes a clear and strong argument that “choreographic copyright has served to consolidate and to contest racial and gendered power” (xiii). Examining both the implicit and explicit perpetuation of whiteness inherent in the legal constructs of ownership, authorship, commodification, and subjecthood, Choreographing Copyright offers a critical expansion of the dance studies archive along with the ideological implications of understanding these oft-contested ideas through the histories of legal and federal regulation. Having already won Outstanding Book from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (2016) and the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Award from the American Society for Theatre Research (2016), there is clear consensus across disciplines about the importance and excellence of Kraut's latest work.

My own research is deeply invested in questions of choreographic monetary value, and Kraut takes on this complex area of inquiry as both a historian and a philosopher. Pitting embodied commodification against possessive individualism, object versus subject, each chapter of the book offers a case study, “a series of discrete but related examinations of how dance-makers with various degrees of privilege … engage with the discourse and legal apparatus of intellectual property law” throughout the past century (41). These cases prove Kraut's point that dance is an overt participant in capitalist marketplaces, perpetuating neoliberal ideologies. While intersections of art and money have often been taboo topics of conversation, their intertwining is neither new nor neutral. Nonprofit scholar Paul DiMaggio describes America's early twentieth-century cultural capitalists, newly rich industrialist magnates like Mellon and Rockefeller, institutionalizing elite European art forms (visual art, opera, orchestra) in order to spare them from the demands and influences of the commercial marketplace. Of course, these early institutions still had to deal with operating budgets and deficits, sell tickets, pay artists, maintain buildings, and build administrative and artistic infrastructures. And still, many of the artists and institutions Kraut historicizes were overtly commercial ventures (Broadway, vaudeville, etc.), never denying a money-making intent. This is all to say that for both the not-for-profit corporate structure as container and the commercial theatrical marketplace, Kraut would agree that dance does not and never has operated outside of economic pressures. Thus, the idea of a choreographic value expressed monetarily is neither threatening nor demeaning to the art; it is ontological. It is an essential tool for survival within the capitalist economies of its birth and growth. To ignore the weight of economic pressure on concert dance and therefore deny the dances a monetary valuation and thus copyright protection, is to both withhold essential tools for survival and to disregard an integral influence on choreographic creation and performance. Kraut's intervention into this conversation is her ideological unpacking of United States copyright law, revealing the deeply problematic racial and gendered subjugation that has been built into the theatrical marketplace. Choreographic copyright is thus understood as a regulatory tool for policing the reproduction and circulation of intellectual property, functioning both as an apparatus of the state and as a tactic employed by choreographers and performers.

Kraut opens her book with the well-documented case of Loie Fuller, a founding figure in American modern dance at the turn of the last century. In 1902 Fuller tried, unsuccessfully, to copyright her famous Serpentine Dance in order to keep chorus dancer Minnie Renwood Bemis from performing a version of it (43). Fuller failed to obtain the legal rights to the dance because, at the time, dramatic copyright demanded narrative, and her work was deemed too abstract in nature. While this precedent remained until the enactment of the 1976 Federal Copyright Law that explicitly included choreography, of particular interest is Kraut's assertion that Fuller's court case was “an effort to protect herself from mass commodification, replete with racialized implications, and to claim for herself the right of self-possession, which, because of the public nature of her livelihood, was always under threat” (48). It is then a significant historical shift to recognize the gradual move toward willful, and litigated, commodification that accompanies each successive case study (copyright protection as a way to enjoin reproductive commodification versus copyright as a method of ensuring profit from this reproduction)—ending with a Beyoncé versus De Keersmaeker “coda” that illustrates the continued “interlocking racial and artistic hierarchies” and the battle for authorial control that begets the right to commodify.

In the second chapter, Kraut focuses on the life of African American comic pantomimist Johnny Hudgins in order to discuss the tactics—performative and legal—that black performers in the early twentieth century used to control the commodification, reproduction, and circulation of their choreographic output. Hudgins, an unfamiliar figure to the dance historical canon, proves an essential figure in the American history of racialized policing of and profiting from embodied labor. A talented and celebrated performer, Hudgins was also a cunning businessman. Through two court cases (1924, 1927–28)—Hudgins's employer's failed attempt to enjoin his extracontractual performances and Hudgins's subsequent British copyright filing of Silence, a nineteen-page booklet chronicling his seven specialty acts—Kraut shows how black performers operated within a white-run theatrical marketplace and within a legal system that was predicated on the objectification and commodification of black bodies. Through newspaper reviews of his performances and legal documentation of these two cases, Kraut has reinserted Hudgins into his rightful place within the history of choreographic copyright. This methodological intervention, a record of Silence's copyright filing and also a record of the performance itself, is significant to a field always plagued by the scarcity of archival traces. In the subsequent chapter Kraut documents the alternate, and often performative, systems of copyright employed by African American populations that were segregated from the official, legal mechanisms. Her discussion of the “corporal autograph” or signature step as it applies to conceptions of the author has application far beyond the reach of this text (153). The racial politics of choreographic authorship, as it relates to the authorized transmissions of steps and performative borrowing, is a concept that has far-reaching implications for future dance studies scholarship.

In the second half of the twentieth century, choreographic copyright becomes more legible in official histories: Hanya Holm and Agnes de Mille fight for and attain protection for their Broadway choreographies; Faith Dane, a burlesque performer turned Broadway dancer, sues the producers of Broadway's Gypsy for their use of her audition material, and Horgan v. MacMillian, Inc. and Martha Graham School of Dance Foundation, Inc., and Ronald Protas v. Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc. become the two (and remain the only two) instances of choreographic copyright litigation following enactment of the 1976 law. While these events have been written about from the perspective of legal studies , Kraut offers the first exhaustive and collective examination of them from the perspective of dance studies, bringing choreographic close readings and theoretical considerations of authorship (see Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” [Reference Barthes and Heath1977] and Foucault's “What Is an Author?” [Reference Foucault, Bouchard, Simon and Bouchard1977] as ghosted figures throughout) to conversations that have been dominated by concerns for legal precedents and regulatory implications. By writing these stories chronologically, Kraut offers a dance history compendium easily integrated into larger narratives of race, class, gender, and intellectual property law in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The critical legal studies literature that Kraut joins serves as an important bibliography for future performance scholars interested in any of these ideas. These texts—most prominently Eva Cherniavsky's Incorporations: Race, Nation, and the Body Politics of Capital (Reference Cherniavsky2006); Martha Ertman's Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture (Reference Ertman2005); Mark Rose's Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Reference Rose1993); and Siva Vaidhyanathan's Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (Reference Vaidhyanathan2001) —are strong voices throughout Choreographing Copyright. While Kraut's book is a must-read for dance and theater studies scholars, the introduction of this legal studies conversation will resonate with disciplinary concerns for embodied labor, materiality as a means of durability, and authorship/ownership.

As Kraut says, “The history of dance in the United States is also the history of white ‘borrowing’ from racially subjugated communities, almost always without credit or compensation” (4). Many of today's largest American dance institutions are still descendants of this ideology, subtly perpetuating this racialized elitism in order to attract the generosity of cultural capitalist patrons. Thus, I find it is significant to acknowledge the shift in the racial politics of choreographic commodification. While Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, and other early twentieth-century white dance makers that Kraut examines used copyright to protect themselves from the racially marked practice of embodied commodification and salability, many of today's highest profile choreographers seek out opportunities for this kind of market participation. While a choreographic commodity operates in multiple arenas, its most significant contemporary saleable market is the museum space, a space founded on similar discourses of class and race. Thus, by commodifying dancing bodies in order to enter the museum, constructs of whiteness and capitalism are willfully aligned with embodied commodification, in contrast to the opposition Kraut historicizes. Alluding to these blurring boundaries in her “coda,” Kraut gestures toward the complications that a “digital age” will introduce into the already murky waters of choreographic copyright. Authorship and ownership are already contested areas for a dance culture predicated on oral and embodied transmission methods, stylistic borrowings, strong pedagogical lineages, and unchecked artistic influence. Throughout the history Kraut outlines, the ability to assert copyrights has been tied directly to the ability to afford litigation. While a YouTube generation enables a DIY culture to build audiences and create performance platforms without direct access to capital, I am anxious to know how this will reinforce or undo the racial and gendered hierarchies innate to the protection of intangible ideas.

Describing the raced and gendered politics of ownership, Kraut's historical narrative unveils the interdependence of American property rights and constructions of whiteness. And while the 1976 Federal Copyright Law requires a “fixing” of the dance (in video or notation) for filing, Kraut has shown how fluid and flexible choreography and choreographers remain—working around and through legal constructs in order to protect movement ideas, racial constructs, commercial interests, and performance legacies. With an acute lack of data, as the record of choreographic copyright and its litigation is particularly sparse, Kraut's suggested relationships between copyright litigation and negotiations of subjecthood will be strengthened from continued work in this arena. Looking forward to future scholarship at the intersections of critical legal studies and dance studies, Anthea Kraut's Choreographing Copyright has laid a vital foundation for scholars to contextualize and contemplate choreography as a powerful constituent part of the formation and regulation of American intellectual property rights.