Beyoncé v De Keersmaeker: can you copyright a dance move?

Beyoncé v De Keersmaeker: can you copyright a dance move?

To read about Beyoncé Knowles and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in the same sentence is, well, weird. Beyoncé is ... OK, you know who Beyoncé is, and De Keersmaeker is an avant garde Belgian choreographer. This week they've been brought together by De Keersmaeker's claim that the Texas-born R&B artist has plagiarised a couple of her experimental ballets, Achterland and Rosas Danst Rosas. And she may well be right. Watch Beyoncé's new Countdown video, directed by Adria Petty , and watch Thierry De Mey's 1997 film Rosas Danst Rosas (named after De Keersmaeker's company) and you can see remarkably similar moves in the two works. They're a tiny part of the whole, but they're there.

Initially, De Keersmaeker was pretty acid about the whole thing, saying that she'd seen local school kids perform her work better, and expressing amazement at the Beyoncé team's effrontery. "I'm not mad, but this is plagiarism. This is stealing," she told Studio Brussel. And up to a point you have to sympathise with her; the notion of the artist ripped off by the corporate machine is not an edifying one. Petty's attitude is certainly high-handed.

 "I brought Beyoncé a number of references and we picked some out together. Most were German modern-dance references, believe it or not," she told MTV, possibly under the impression that she was referencing the work of the late Pina Bausch, rather than that of the Belgian (and very much alive) De Keersmaeker.

Beyoncé v De Keersmaeker: can you copyright a dance move?

But has De Keersmaeker's work or career been damaged in any way? It would be a hard case to make, even if her copyright has technically been infringed. Works of art often reference other works of art. In her ballet D'un soir un jour De Keersmaeker includes part of the Vaslav Nijinsky choreography of L'Après Midi d'un Faune and a snatch of the Antonioni film Blow-Up. Beyoncé's videos almost always contain references to films or other performance artworks. Video Phone, for example, includes a Reservoir Dogs tableau. Naughty Girl was inspired by Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon. Why Don't You Love Me is a homage to actor and pin-up girl Betty Page, and Deja Vu a part-tribute to Basic Instinct.

The Countdown video gives us a three-and-a-half-minute montage of 60s and 70s pop culture, with Beyoncé channelling, among others, Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise, Jennifer Beals in Flashdance, and Diana Ross in her Supremes manifestation. It's a very slick, very new-retro piece of film-making, and borrowed imagery is absolutely the point of it. For directors such as Petty, no artwork is fixed in its original form. Everything is out there, ready to be sampled, recycled, recontextualised. But there are, as De Keersmaeker points out, "protocols and consequences to such actions, and I can't imagine that (Beyoncé) and her team are not aware of it".

De Keersmaeker is a complex woman. Shy, intense, and often spiky with journalists, she is not known for her light touch. But she is held in great affection by her dancers, and in her most recent statement she notes that Beyoncé was four months pregnant at the time of the Countdown filming, just as she was in 1996, when de Mey's film was made. So today, she generously concludes: "I can only wish her the same joy that my daughter brought me." It's a graceful reaction. But it may not be the end of the story, and dance aficionados will no doubt be parsing De Keersmaeker's famously testing work with some stringency. Was that a quote from the Bootylicious video? Was that phrase borrowed from Freakum Dress?

Reff : guardian.co.uk

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