The aim of this special issue is the investigation and contextualization of specific arts practices for what they can show us about the transmission and ownership of knowledge. Our authors make explicit the modes of sharing that are part of the creative process in contemporary dance and in Irish traditional music and examine the principles of transmission and social mores that allow ideas to move between practitioners. This introduction sets out some context for the issue and our approach, which is to work alongside practitioners to understand and reveal the social principles and expectations of ownership that are part of the process of producing these art forms.

Drawing on the contributions to this special issue, this article offers a synthetic description of the principles of ownership, sharing, and reward that guide and stimulate the creative practices of contemporary dance. Irish traditional music is also considered. The article aims to contextualize creative practices within a series of concerns around the protection and perpetuation of valuable cultural and artistic practices. This contextualization establishes the relevance and interest of the contemporary dance for other domains and attends to the contemporary conditions of cultural production, including those of intellectual property law, commercialization, and community/commons formation. I show how this work offers an illuminating model of social process in which value created in common is linked – through reputation, attribution, recognition, and innovation – to people, without private property becoming the dominant mode of ownership.

This article considers the “commons” in relationship to contemporary dance in the United Kingdom. I highlight the norms and expectations that shape the sharing of dance in this context by outlining four implicit rules that govern circulation and ownership. I go on to highlight how dance’s circulation outside of legal structures is in part due to its ontology through the examination of choreographer and visual artist Florence Peake’s work RITE (2018) and its relationship to choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913).

In this transcript of an extended interview, Dame Siobhan Davies discusses her biography and oeuvre in the context of an enquiry into aspects of learning, transmission, and claims to ownership over the material that makes modern dance. The creative practice of contemporary dance makers offers an opportunity to describe the “coming into being” of both knowledge and persons in a unique domain, but one also connected to other areas of the arts and collaborative practice. Davies describes an approach to making dance that explicitly rejects two key notions: that the body merely performs what the mind creates and, thus, that the choreographer and the dancer are in a hierarchical relationship of control mirroring the control of mind over matter. She then describes how her creative processes with others have been increasingly shaped to allow non-proprietorial and non-hierarchical outcomes that are substantive to the art works themselves.

This article explores the possibility that dance is a field of expert knowledge that can be studied from the perspective of documents created by dancers and choreographers whose anticipated viewers/readers are mainly other practitioners. These documents include written texts and annotated video recordings created with the aim of sharing processes, techniques and ideas. These documents seek, in a variety of ways, to partially transform experiential knowledge from the tacit/ implicit to the explicit. As such, they suggest a form of trade literature that circulates dance knowledge within its professional network, but with the potential to generate productive exchanges with others outside of this network. By drawing on a number of examples of this trade literature and discussing their methods of circulating dance knowledge, this article makes a link to the theme of this special issue which is dance as a vehicle to discuss and debate ownership and cultural property.

This article discusses the implications of recording and digitizing a variety of cultural and contemporary dance performance practices, core to a European project known as WhoLoDancE, which focused on issues of reuse, ownership, property, and responsibility. The recordings and subsequent processing of dance material into digital data raised questions about the responsibilities to the dancers who have contributed their material to the project, particularly when it is transformed into data visualizations that can be accessed and reused by others. The article not only focuses on how value accrues in these kinds of resources and sometimes in unexpected ways but also draws attention to how dance remains bound to the communities in which it is performed and tends to resist its abstraction from the body to be commodified as a form of cultural property. This then points to how dance, as intangible cultural heritage, is self-regulating in terms of principles of ownership and attribution.

Dance has rarely been accepted as the subject of copyright protection because works of dance and choreography have lacked commodified property-object status in intellectual property law. If dance is “haunted by its own ephemerality” and, thus, rarely embodied as property, then what of dance music? Music composed, performed, and recorded with a dance audience in mind has formed, on many occasions, the subject matter of intellectual property law claims, as the rancorous recent litigation over the nightclub (and online-streaming) hit “Blurred Lines” demonstrates. In this article, I utilize the case study of traditional Irish dance music to explore how traditional music occupies a space somewhat outside the formal legal system, defined by informal social norms such as reciprocity, sharing, and acknowledgment (attribution). I consider how Irish traditional music can be represented as heritage and as property, reflecting on the type of ownership at play in the Irish traditional music community. I observe that Irish traditional dance music provides an example of “heritage as resistance” – a mode of cultural and social practice that continues to thrive as a living tradition, even in the contemporary market-oriented world of the global North.

Dance disappears the moment it becomes visible, the complexity of its ontology matching that of its production and of its intellectual property status. Its creative process is both collaborative and hierarchical, involving the transmission of knowledge from one body to another, remembering steps, recognizing moves, mimicking, and improvising gestures as well as coordinating the roles of dancers, choreographers, and studios. Matthias Sperling’s Riff (2007) directly addresses many of these issues, which inform the specific content of the piece as well as its conceptualization, development, and the copyright licenses that underpin it. Sperling’s performance is clearly conceived as a rite of passage, a dance through which a dancer becomes a choreographer, going from “riffing off” other choreographers’ work to developing dance movements and phrases that, while tied to those of his predecessors, he can claim as his own. As such, Riff makes explicit and rearticulates the rearrangement of professional relations and roles, the difference between reperforming and innovating, between learning from bodies or from media, as well as how the property status of the work intersects with community norms and expectations of attribution.