This talk rehearses the major arguments that Kraut makes in her recently published Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (Oxford University Press, 2016).  In the book, Kraut traces the history of efforts to assert copyright protection for choreography in the United States and teases apart their raced and gendered politics.  The talk will highlight the stories of some of the major and minor players involved in those efforts.  It will also underscore the importance of choreographic copyright for thinking through questions about dance’s reproducibility and for confronting the ways whiteness has functioned as a property-like right in the U.S.

This event is free, but please register by emailing rcarrico@stanford.edu.

The Stanford Colloquium on Dance Studies is sponsored by the Mellon “Dance Studies in/and the Humanities” initiative and is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It receives administrative support from Stanford’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS), and additional funding from Stanford’s Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity.