Ted Shawn in Malaguena with Martha Graham from the NYPL Digital Gallery

I confess that I tend to think of copyright law and its interpretation and practice in much the same way as people reportedly think of the weather: I’m frequently complaining about it, but never actually doing anything about it. In a meeting at the Denver Public Library on Wednesday, I got a chance to do something small about fair use.

The Dance Heritage Coalition (DHC) has undertaken a fair use project, intended to clarify fair use for dance materials in library and archival collections. The stated objective of the project is “to reach a consensus on a fair and balanced approach to using presumptively copyrighted materials to meet our mandate as cultural conservators and educators.”

In so doing, the DHC intends to produce a document similar to the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. Such a document is not legally binding, but it can be used (among other occasions) when talking to people like campus legal counsel–people whose job it is to be conservative and avoid exposing the institution to risk.

As part of that project, the DHC has convened eight of these focus group discussions across the country with librarians, archivists, and others who work with dance history and scholarship. I won’t say exactly who was in attendance because we were operating under the Chatham House Rule which states:

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

It seems easiest for me to follow that rule if I just don’t identify anyone. It will also make it clearer that all the impressions and interpretations below are my own. I’ll just say that I found the group to be impressive, drawing mostly on people from Denver and Boulder institutions who have some responsibility for dance materials. Some were humanities generalists like myself, while others worked primarily with dance or performing arts collections. There were a few people with deep ties to the dance community in Colorado, either as choreographers, performers, critics, or as friends of major regional figures.

The conversation was interesting, since so many of the participants worked so closely with dancers and choreographers. There was great consideration given to how to respect the work not only of the choreographer but also the performer, the photographer, the musician, and all the creative artists who typically collaborate on the dance documentation that ends up in libraries and archives. There was a lot of talk of “stewardship” and providing context and education. In other words, while the group was keen to share their collections, they were not cavalier about the rights of artists and donors; far from it.

Here are a few more odds and ends:

• One person had the quote of the day when she was talking about copyright being the “big C” that everyone is worried about and how we needed to position Fair Use as the “big F. U.” We all burst into laughter. She didn’t mean it that way, but there’s an EFF slogan in there somewhere. “Say F. U. to copyright zealots with Fair Use!”

• We discussed those cases where an archive might have huge holdings of videos of a company’s performances; say, every single performance of a certain work over a season. Oddly, I found that I felt that making everything available online seemed more fair than just selecting certain “best” performances or videos. To cherry-pick the “best” seems more like publishing and less like fair use. (Again, that is a personal statement of what I was thinking on Wednesday, not the consensus of the group or what I expect the DHC to put forward in their document.)

• An attendee mentioned seeing a choreographer’s iPod or iPhone where he stored hours of dance clips from sources unknown and of dubious provenance: downloaded from video sharing sites, excerpted from movies of the 30s and 40s, sent to him by colleagues, etc. It sounded like it was his dance sketchbook. What a great frontier in archival collecting: the artist’s iPhone!

One more personal story, and this time I will name names. I was a theatre major at Northwestern University from 1988 to 1992, and I did some modern dance there. I know that the dance world is small, so after our fair use discussion, I asked if anyone had connections with Chicago dance and if anyone had known my teacher, Tim O’Slynne. Mary Wohl Haan, the Boulder Arts Commission’s Dance Bridge Coordinator, said “yes! I was going to ask you that when you said you had been at Northwestern! Tim and I were evil twins for years.” And this woman who I had just met a few hours before gave me a hug as we remembered Tim who had died of AIDS in 1994.

And I hope this isn’t too sentimental, but I thought that this is why this discussion is so important. Tim has been dead for almost fifteen years now, and if there is an archive that has photos or videos or other documentation of his work as a dancer and choreographer and teacher, I think we owe it to the world to get it out of the attic and make it as available as we can before he’s forgotten instead of waiting for a hundred years when all possible copyrights have expired and we’re all dead. Yes, there will be cases when it is clear that copyright concerns preclude sharing. But dance is fugitive and ephemeral in the best of circumstances, and the more libraries and archives and museums can do to make it less so, the better.