|
SOME CRITICAL THOUGHTS ON JANEZ JANŠA’S “FAKE IT!” AT TANZQUARTIER WIEN
By Katherina Zakravsky
The autonomy of a free author subject which possesses the pure nominal power to define everything it produces as a work of art, once seemed to protect the sphere of art from the grasp of authoritarian economical, political and judicial systems.
Ironically, though, in the age of information as the new lead currency of commodity production it was exactly authorship which became the battlefield of massive economical and legal discourses and practices. Thus, the good old free and brilliant author subject of middle-class art in the 19th century sense involuntarily became the blueprint of the name as branded goods. Only its market value is all but free and brilliant, which is proven by the fact that everyone who secures an “intellectual property” – and it doesn’t have to be its author – can collect royalties for it. One need only think of the immense ecological and economical problems of seed patenting by certain companies and the suffocating effect of privatising large image archives in order to see copyright as a last and downright demonic struggle of the capitalist concept of private property as the highest value.
The double handicap of choreography
So we can only hope that Janez Janša’s narration of a resourceful man’s brilliant coup, who secured copyright on the phrase “freedom of expression” so as to get his cut every time someone uses it, is only one of those hyperbolic myths to which Janša, erstwhile Emil Hrvatin, as a master of conceptual culmination has always been partial. However, things are different with choreography compared to text, image and score: it is very difficult and at times was virtually impossible to have the copyright of a choreography protected under the author’s name. This is due to the fact that only that can be protected of which there is a lasting and generally binding readable recording. Since owing to our culture we have a conventional notation system in music, legal suits have already been won over a few bars of music – a double-edged sword at least in pop music, as a musical genre relying on so few elementary structures often quite involuntarily produces plagiarism without any wilful criminal intent.
In dance, however, the curiously abstract and complex Labanotation – until today the most ambitious attempt at dance notation – has never become universally accepted. Therefore, hardly anyone will ever try to protect a sequence, a simple succession of movements. The case is more complex with a whole choreography. Even in the 19th century, a dance which contained no narrative, no “dramatic composition”, was not legally protected as its author’s property. Moreover, disputes between orderer and paid choreographer were often decided in favour of the orderer, because a piece not only consists of movement, but also of light, costume and set design, which were all paid by the orderer. As remarked often before, choreography with its double handicap of being bound to the body as well as to fleetingness, turns out to be the weakest link in the chain of authorship. Still, there are choreographers with an unmistakable “hand” – e.g., Merce Cunningham who was clever enough to secure his legacy by a foundation.[*]
A number of such great names are now invoked and presented with all didactic pomp in Janša’s piece. The somewhat coquettish background narrative describes Ljubljana as a poor and marginal place where these great choreographers never put in an appearance. Therefore, some young local creative dancers decided to perform sequences from famous works by Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, William Forsythe, Tatsumi Hijikata and Pina Bausch themselves, each one showing the choreographer of his/her choice.
A celebration of authorship
Now, Janša puts the definitely professional and independent performance of those partly famous sequences into a framework of such massive information overkill, and contrary to his masterwork “Pupilija” leaves so little air in and between chapters that his coquettish self-estimation of being the only amateur in the piece this time – diametrically opposed to his profound experience as borderliner between “concept dance” and quite classical staging of intensities – becomes true. It almost seems as if he didn’t trust his performers; as if he considered this installation, originally planned for a single performance with free admission, merely as an object lesson, an “awareness raiser” for the political problem of copyright as new economic vampirism. Janša may have had “open source” at the back of his mind, but the piece doesn’t show any of that. Rather, the celebration of the great name including the whole Wikipedia of things worth knowing, in connection with movement languages of great recognition value nothing else but the great, traditional celebration of authorship, entirely in the sense of the 19th century and its afterlife in the copyright under private law.
There is no fake here either, just simply interpreted, as is wont with fleeting stage arts. Often quite well interpreted. The subversion lies in the fact – but you can’t see that on the stage – that there is no legal permission to perform these pieces. In the case of Bausch that may be precarious, because she only had her piece performed by members of her company who had been drilled to her style for years. That it is exactly the reconstructed sequence – embracing, kissing, falling – from Café Müller which becomes the object of merely the first of a long series of play-along sequences, leaves one with a melancholy feeling and almost could reconcile one with the right to exclusive property. But it goes without saying that it is highly paradoxical if one treats a certain version of Paxton’s famous Goldberg Variations improvisation recorded on video as a fixed choreography, and teaching it to the jigging audience; luckily, a man like Paxton obviously has never striven to have his frequently copied style protected by law. If this were possible, he’d probably get his cut for every third performance and today would be swimming in money.
Footnote
[*] Cf. Kim Maynard’s case histories http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1121 and http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1129 .
(5.12.2009)
|
