CRITICAL RACE THEORY, GENDER, AMERICAN MODERN DANCE AND COPYRIGHT: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF CHOREOGRAPHY AS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY By CAROLINE JOAN S. PICART A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2013 1 © 2013 Caroline Joan S. Picart 2 To my loving and supportive husband, Jerry Rivera, whose patience, wisdom and compassion have sheltered me through many storms 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a debt of gratitude to the chair and members of my supervisory committee for their mentoring and supportiveness, the staff and faculty in the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida for their helpfulness, and the numerous University of Florida Levin College of Law faculty and administration who have assisted me in my pursuit of a joint degree in Law and Women’s Studies. I dedicate this thesis to both my beloved husband, Jerry Rivera, and two families: the Picart family in the Philippines and the Terrell family in Tallahassee, Florida. I am also indebted to the Cardozo Journal of Law and Gender, for granting copyright permission to reprint one of my articles, A Tango between Copyright and Critical Race Theory: Whiteness as Status Property in Balanchine’s Ballets, Fuller’s Serpentine Dance and Graham’s Modern Dances, which originally appeared in 18 Cardozo Journal of Law and Gender, No. 3 (Spring 2012); the article was an extremely less developed precursor to this thesis. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... 7 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 8 I INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 10 Preliminary Remarks............................................................................................... 10 Literature Review .................................................................................................... 18 Whiteness, Property Law, and Critical Race Theory ........................................ 18 Unique Features of this Thesis ......................................................................... 25 Copyright and Choreography: A Broad Historical Sketch ....................................... 30 The Difficulties of Copyrighting Dance Choreography ............................................ 34 Organizational Schema ........................................................................................... 39 II COMPARING AESTHETICS OF WHITENESS AND NON-WHITENESS IN RELATION TO AMERICAN DANCE....................................................................... 43 Preliminary Remarks............................................................................................... 43 Establishing “Whiteness” in American Dance: Balanchine’s Aesthetic ................... 48 A View of Non-Whiteness in Relation to American Dance ...................................... 60 Preliminary Remarks ........................................................................................ 60 Cohen Bull’s Interpretation of Traditional Ghanaian Dance as an Example of One Non-White Aesthetic .......................................................................... 65 White/Black Bodies in Relation to White/Black Aesthetics ...................................... 73 III LOÍE FULLER, “GODDESS OF LIGHT” AND JOSEPHINE BAKER, “BLACK VENUS”: NON-NARRATIVE CHOREOGRAPHY AS MERE “SPECTACLE” ......... 82 Preliminary Remarks............................................................................................... 82 Fuller’s Serpentine Dance ....................................................................................... 83 The Genesis Stories and Legal Precedent ....................................................... 83 From Skirt Dancing to Art Nouveau: The Rise of Loïe Fuller ............................ 87 Ugly Duckling, Fairy, and Orientalist Temptress ............................................... 89 La Loïe’s Legacy .............................................................................................. 94 Josephine Baker: Refracted Traces of a Non-White Aesthetic in American Dance .................................................................................................................. 96 Preliminary Remarks ........................................................................................ 96 Josephine Baker: Icon, Idol, Trickster .............................................................. 98 Baker and Fuller Compared .................................................................................. 109 IV GEORGE BALANCHINE, “GENIUS OF AMERICAN DANCE”: WHITENESS, CHOREOGRAPHY, COPYRIGHTABILITY IN AMERICAN DANCE .................... 116 5 Preliminary Remarks: Establishing an Aesthetic of Whiteness ............................. 116 Balanchine’s Will: Converting Choreographic Works into Financial Assets .......... 125 Horgan v. MacMillan: Choreography and Copyright Infringement ........................ 132 Horgan I: The Reproducibility Test ................................................................. 134 Horgan II: The “Substantial Similarity” Test .................................................... 135 Fuller and Balanchine and the Evolution of Whiteness as Status Property in Choreography .................................................................................................... 144 V MARTHA GRAHAM, “PICASSO OF AMERICAN DANCE,” AND KATHERINE DUNHAM, “MATRIARCH OF BLACK DANCE”: EXOTICISM AND NON- WHITENESS IN AMERICAN DANCE ................................................................... 149 Graham’s Artistic Immortality ................................................................................ 149 Preliminary Remarks ...................................................................................... 149 Graham’s “Exotic” Whiteness ......................................................................... 150 Martha Graham School and Dance Foundation, Inc. v. Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc.: The Work for Hire Doctrine .............. 158 Graham’s dilemma: Funding creativity ..................................................... 158 The effect of Graham’s death: The battle over ownership of Graham’s choreographic works ............................................................................. 160 Katherine Dunham: Matriarch of Black Dance ...................................................... 166 An Anthropologist with Hips ............................................................................ 166 Dunham’s Liminalities .................................................................................... 182 Graham and Dunham: A Brief Sketch of Comparisons and Cross-Currents ......... 192 VI CONCLUSIONS: QUO VADIS? ............................................................................ 201 Summary of Findings ............................................................................................ 201 Quo Vadis: A Postscript ........................................................................................ 216 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 222 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 236 6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 3-1 Loíe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance. ......................................................................... 83 3-2 Josephine Baker, circa 1938. ............................................................................. 96 4-1 George Balanchine. .......................................................................................... 116 5-1 Martha Graham and Bertram Ross. .................................................................. 150 5-2 Katherine Dunham. ........................................................................................... 168 7 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts CRITICAL RACE THEORY, GENDER, AMERICAN MODERN DANCE AND COPYRIGHT: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF CHOREOGRAPHY AS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY By Caroline Joan S. Picart May 2013 Chair: Anita Anantharam Major: Women’s Studies I begin by examining the conditions of possibility within which a “white” and “non- white” aesthetic in relation to American dance may be characterized, not to totalize these analytic categories, but as a rough heuristic in order to do a genealogy of how one particular white aesthetic – Balanchine’s vision of ballet – becomes enshrined as the paradigmatic case for full copyright protection. But more significantly, the central argument of this thesis is that the effort to win federal copyright protection for dance choreography in the United States was a simultaneously racialized and gendered contest. Copyright and choreography, particularly as tied with whiteness, have a refractory history. Unlike Loïe Fuller and Martha Graham, also both pioneers of American modern dance, George Balanchine, a Russian émigré (and his estate), succeeded in gaining and maintaining full control of his choreographic creations. A hyperwhitened aesthetic