My last post about ownership made me think further about the issue of ownership in a competitive context, where the notion of a step “belonging” to someone comes up often. I was writing about the ownership of culture or tradition more broadly, but certainly the question as to who owns specific dance material in a traditional context is an important one.
The question came up pointedly during a recent rehearsal for an upcoming performance, when I asked each dancer to choose a solo to dance down the line—a “step about,” the classic Irish dance showcase format. The dancers in my group come from a variety of backgrounds, many of them having danced with various schools and teachers for a decade or more. One of them replied, “I have a ton of steps, but I don’t know if I’m allowed to do any of them.” That is, all the steps she knows “belong” to the schools or teachers who taught them to her, and she isn’t sure if she can do them in a performance with my group’s name on it. For background, in the competitive sphere, steps are regulated. They should only be danced for the school it came from, and when a dancer switches schools, they are subject to a 3- to 6-month transfer ban, which means that they cannot compete for a period of time so that they can learn all new material (and apparently forget the old material?). The reasoning is that these rules protect a teacher’s material and style, maintaining the school’s edge in competition.*
I think this makes sense in the competitive context. However, at what point does a step become one’s own? Does it have to stay with the school forever? I find it to be quite an intimate, full-body process to learn a step. Think about the neurons that form in your brain and organize the entire nervous system, from head to toe, to be able to do that step. Emotions and memories form around it, and my body feels imprinted by the steps I’ve learned. And then, not only can you do the step, but you can do it from muscle memory, decades after you first learned it. It’s like a smell that inspires a poignant memory or a rush of nostalgia. A familiar tune starts playing, and those neurons begin to fire. The step is in your body.
At the rehearsal in question, I explained to the group that I trust each of them, as adults, to make their own decisions about what they can dance in a performance with my name on it. I respect the need to protect a teacher’s material and also not to present something as though it belongs to someone else. I myself don’t mind if they dance my steps elsewhere, but I’m not running a competitive school, so my attitude shouldn’t be taken as the norm. I do have a lot of questions. Do these strict rules only apply if you learned a step in a competitive context? What if you learned it for competition but then danced it years later, outside of competition? Is it enough to simply swap out one move for another, or does that just make it a variation of the same step? Who would ever know, or would you sit with a guilty conscience, knowing that you only tweaked something slightly to make it your own?
I still dance some of the steps I was taught 25 years ago for competition. I’ve changed a couple of them, either intentionally or just through the natural process of adaptation as I forget and relearn things. Should I have removed them from my repertoire after I retired from competition and left the school? I continued dancing them, in large part, because my dance teacher encouraged me to “always practice all my steps.” She said I would regret forgetting them later on, and I took that to heart. (I wrote about my ensuing obsession for documenting my steps in an essay for Jean Butler’s “Our Steps, Our Stories” dialogue series.) I never competed those steps for another school, but I have danced them many times for performances, for a quick solo “down the line.” Is that a mistake? Or can I say that I have now absorbed them into my body’s own dance history and so now they are mine to perform as I please?
It’s important to know and acknowledge where a step comes from. Each one tells the story of who created it, what their style was, who they taught it to, and down the line, until it was taught to you. Musicians often do this when they introduce a set of tunes, and it’s a crucial part of their stage banter. But, besides the very real fact that dancers are often not even given a chance to speak at performances (another grievance of mine), it is also rarely feasible to name the creator of each dancer’s solo steps down a line of 8-10 performers.
I have written before about how I have heard modern dancers express disdain for “traditional” forms like Irish dance because our steps are “meaningless.” They say that their choreography is “always meaningful” because it is driven by an intentional and intellectual creative process. While I would argue that our steps actually are intentional and intellectual, if you can accept that our creative process is simply different, I would agree that, as movement phrases, they are largely meaningless. That is, I couldn’t describe a narrative arc for my hornpipe lead, but I could tell you who taught it to me and what it was like learning it with my friends during one of our notoriously difficult summer dance intensives. In addition, our steps must not be meaningless if they are so protected—clearly, someone cares enough about this material to put a ban on it or to make us all afraid of dancing a step without a chance to give proper attribution, even 20 years after learning it!
Listening to interviews with countless Irish dancers from across generations, it becomes clear that we never forget who we learned a step from. The people behind our steps are what make them meaningful. It might be safest to just make up all our own material or commit to improvising as much as possible, but then where would our community be? The community survives through the steps, so too many limits and too many bans cut off the continuity that the tradition needs.
I don’t have answers today, but we should consider more deeply what it means to “own” a step. Arguably, storing it in our body through rote practice is a kind of ownership. Knowing that many bodies share that same step makes us part of a community—the steps themselves make up the substance that binds us together. Can we attribute a step to an individual and still acknowledge that it belongs to the community at large?
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* We don’t have copyright in traditional Irish dance, and copyright for dance in general is a sticky issue. I don’t think going down this path is right for our community, but understanding the process could provide some good food for thought.
