‘Meta-Choreographies’ Between The Desktop And The Stage

How does one re-use pre-existing material in order to form an expanded choreographic practice of relating to audio-visual archive without being considered of stealing or lacking originality? Copying, re-using and appropriation, not innocent from copyright implications but often entrapped in the modernist myth of originality, are practices that have been enhanced by the growth of the digital archive available on the internet and the expansion of the online public space. In light of this surge that challenges the body-to-body dance transmission, this text analyzes copying, re-use and appropriation as forms of citation, both audio-visually and corporeally, through the work of the Italian choreographer, performer, educator and flmmaker Jacopo Jenna who connects fragments of pre existing works to create unexpected visual and corporeal associations that prompt us to re-think the dance canon. His work, based on a meta-choreographic and meta(dance)cinematic technique, moves between screen and stage, two-dimensional and three-dimensional space and brings into dialogue immaterial bodies and gestures stored in our collective memory with fesh bodies on stage. But, what issues and possibilities does this practice of disembodied transmission from screen-to-body entail?


Introduction
Since the burgeoning of appropriation art in the 1980s, mixing and recontextualization of existing objects, images, and sounds have gained recognition as a legitimate practice with the potential to produce counter-narratives, institutional critique, political and cultural subversions. Furthermore, the advent of the internet around the 1990s, besides radically changing communication and information sharing processes, had a profound impact on the culture of distribution, archiving, accessing and often appropriating the content of preexisting audio-visual material through free online circulation or even pirate techniques. In the performing arts, social media and video sharing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo ofer storage for audio-visual artefacts, changing how dance can circulate, be promoted and travel across time and distant geographic locations. Archival footage, trailers, full-length and excerpts of dance performances, choreographies adapted for the screen or dance flms, documentaries and music videos, all inhabit public online space. Dance classes, choreographic routines, dance and movement tutorials found on the internet further trouble the body-tobody transmission of dance by circulating dance from the screen to dancing bodies and vice versa. This digital library 1 of audio-visual material is the toolbox and the point of reference for a number of artists including the Italian choreographer, performer, educator and flmmaker Jacopo Jenna, who engages with it through a practice of creative and playful appropriation.
I frst came across Jenna's work towards the end of the frst quarantine back in 2020 through an online viewing dedicated to the outcome of the educational workshop Lo Spettacolo Più Bello del Mondo 2 . I immediately appreciated his skills in creatively assembling into an uninterrupted audio-visual conversation fragments of existing discourses as well as found footage, movement material purposely made or adapted in response to it, and excerpts from the workshop that took place entirely through the video communication software Zoom. The choreographic thinking and the research process that are exposed in Lo Spettacolo Più Bello del Mondo have been refned in Some Choreographies (2020) 3 , a two-part solo performance in which contemporary dancer Ramona Caia builds a dialogue with audio-visual material of found choreography and footage projected on a large screen. A section of the screened work may also stand alone under the name Found Choreographies 4 and together with Some Choreographies that exposes issues of choreographic authoriality, as I will analyze later in the text, are the main works I will focus on.
Image 1: Ramona Caia re-producing a tutting sequence from a tutorial in Some Choreographies. Credit: Photo by courtesy of Jacopo Jenna.

Kinetic Experiments: Found Choreographies And Some Choreographies
The creative technique behind Found Choreographies lies in the association of fragments from found moving images of diferent dance styles and genres, movement "languages" and movement-based practices, that are linked into a continuity of movement; into a "kinetic matter" as Jenna claims 5 . The footage is composed of excerpts that derive from early modern dance pioneers (for instance, Loie Fuller, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn) and several postmodern choreographers. It is combined with ballet, ethnic and popular dance forms, and it expands into emblematic scenes from cinema and recent footage from the pandemic. These moving images are juxtaposed through association and continuity and build up to a visual escalation that begins with a hand gesture from Ingmar Bergman's flm Persona, gradually and fuidly passing into the primordial collective pattern of circularity and human sculptings before reaching an energetic sequence of movements. It ends symbolically through the transportation of the lying body in the savasana pose and the rituals of death (mourning, procession and cremation).
The well-organized bricolage of Found Choreographies highlights striking similarities between diferent dance genres or choreographies. This quasi universality of movements, evocative of Alan Lomax's controversial ethnographic flm Dance and Human History (1974), may be considered a result of both the limitations and the richness of the imagination and the moving body, as well as a repercussion of the body techniques 6 that are unconsciously inherited through social, cultural and digital interactions and that are nowadays enabled and expanded through social media. In Found Choreographies, the movement progresses from one clip to another and from one body type and identity to another -identities of gender, race and ethnicity, and bodies with diferent levels of acquisition of a dance technique. As a consequence, cross-cultural and crossgenre infuences are revealed between aesthetically distant dance genres that are usually considered in friction (theatrical dance versus commercial dance or ritual practices). This becomes more evident, for instance, through the sequential and almost provocative association between Vaslav Nijinsky's L'Après-midi d'un Faune and voguing through the connection of fexed hands and angular arms. As Jenna claims, in the editing process, there is also an ethical side that questions "how to build associations without ofending a culture, a community or an individual by the very act of association?" 7 .
Technically speaking, the editing process is a reminder of Maya Deren's choreographic editing based on movement continuity between diferent locations, as exemplifed in A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), which is also included as a fragment in Found Choreographies. Following this paradigm, the editing takes advantage of shared gestures among diferent dance styles and the continuity that may emerge in terms of the fow of dynamics, energy, space transitions, foor patterns and group formations. Jenna does not merely place diferent clips one after the other, but he probes an inquiry into the uninterrupted fow of movement both visually and corporeally. Creating continuities between video fragments enables him to compose a choreography for the stage that is afterwards given to the dancer to be embodied; much like Merce Cunningham used to do with the Lifeforms software or the 16th-century choreographers in France, who were using signs to write movement on paper that dancers had to consequently interpret 8 . In Jenna's choreographic process for Some Choreographies, which constitutes a performative approach to Found Choreographies, the dancer verifes kinetically the feasibility of the choreographic sequence, initially composed on his desktop, by transforming a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional spatial experience, and if necessary the editing is updated.
In Some Choreographies, video excerpts on the projected screen and their incorporation by the single dancer interplay with each other. The screen provides information; it is the mirror to reproduce and embody a form, a movement or a gesture that is inscribed on its surface. In this process, the projected material stands as a reminder to the expert eye and at the same time as a source of information to the lay spectator. Both recognize the moving images stored in our collective memory, and the continuity and the connection of the fesh body on stage with the immaterial bodies on the screen as the solo dancer embodies and transforms in (an uninterrupted) choreographic sequence the information depicted on the screen. The dancer becomes the site of fusion between diferent dance traditions, cultures and visual landscapes. She reenacts them by transgressing spatio-temporal limits and gender binaries while the screen reveals a type of exquisite corpse 9 in the form of a kinetic sequence of discrete clips that becomes materialized through uncompleted gestures that gradually build into a whole. The dance performer with her back to the screen ofers a neutral interpretation of a nevertheless challenging process that entails failure and success in the practice of imitation that, in turn, reveals the human side of not being able to reproduce with precision what is depicted on the screen.
Although both Found Choreographies and Some Choreographies exhibit creativity in choreographic association and motion, as well as aesthetic and cultural values, the work, as I will analyze next, may introduce legal issues when seen through the lens of copyright protection laws.

Just A Second! Are We Talking About 'Stealing'?
Copyright protection laws usually shape a legislative framework for the arts to operate within and, inevitably, inhibit and complicate the practice of appropriation art, especially in view of economic proft and visibility. Found Choreographies and Some Choreographies involve risks up to a certain degree related to author-and owner-ship. Jenna's work, based on 'stealing' -to put it bluntly -of other artists' choreography and its documentation as intellectual property, is enabled by the availability, circulation and accessibility of the digitized material. Besides this, the 'stolen' or the 'borrowed' fragments are extracted from a cohesive whole and they are disarticulated from their original context. They are also embodied by a professional contemporary dancer who nevertheless has a limited afnity to most popular and entertainment dance genres and styles depicted on the screen. Therefore, at a closer look, issues both in relation to performance as well as dance and flmmaking become evident as the artist extracts (cuts-and-pastes), manipulates and detaches a part and an instance of a whole choreography reproduced on flm 10 . In other words, the choreography fxed on flm or video enables the copyright law protection to be applied, and through this lens, Jenna's creative approach raises issues of appropriation in the practice of appropriation as art-making.  (2012) by György Pálf -all works that are entirely based on flms directed by others 11 . For those who have the possibility to watch the Italian state TV (RAI 3), Blob is another infuential example of audio-visual and satire-based appropriation that depends on the re-use (re-editing) of fragments from TV news, broadcasts and footage found on the web. Since 1989, it has been a daily part of Italian TV, and its founders are a group of well-known cinema critics, including Enrico Ghezzi and Marco Giusti.
As these examples point out, the meta art (author's emphasis), the art that comes after, "depends upon some previous work of art -and thereby implicitly or explicitly stands in a citational relationship to that earlier work" 12 . Without disregarding that the flm industry holds strict copyright rules, metacinema and metatelevision -audio-visual genres that gradually gain visibility as theoretical discourses -, are dependent on the appropriation of pre-existing material.
In dance, however, the long history of cultural appropriation 13 -that has benefted the already privileged and has marginalized invisible and traumatized communities and individuals -, and the push of the market for originality and innovation have created contradictory connotations to appropriation as both a phenomenon and as a conscious, yet rare, artistic practice in conceptual dance 14 . Furthermore, the embodied transmission in dance creates specifc hierarchies and restrictions, and to a certain degree, can ofer advantages in the process of acquiring a style, a technique or a practice that are omitted when a movement is reproduced through the screen. The corporeal transmission through the body-asarchive has enabled dance forms to survive across time both ontologically and economically. In addition, the institutionalization of the repertory by dance companies, choreographers and their trustees who can aford to operate within the economy of protection as possessing, imposes various degrees of control over who is eligible to embody past works and under which circumstances. Although there are notable diferences in the licensing of the embodiment of the choreographic archive in cases such as the Pina Bausch Foundation, Martha Graham and Trisha Brown dance companies and the Merce Cunningham Trustwhose materials have been included in Some Choreographies -, the corporeal transmission from dancers with frst-hand experience in dancing and working closely with a company choreographer remains predominant. Considering this frame that strives for originality and lineage and where the video archive serves mostly as an aide-memoire, Jenna challenges in Some Choreographies the hierarchical ways of knowledge transmission that are based on inter-corporeality, thus the physical exchange and interaction between bodies. In this way, he destabilizes the foundations of corporeal dance transmission by promoting an unauthorized screen-to-body transmission.

Let's Be Honest: We All 'Steal' From Each Other
Dance is usually transmitted by a master to a pupil even in its most exploratory or commercial forms, and repetition through imitation is a fundamental way of learning through the activation of mirror neurons. Nevertheless, rupturing the corporeal transmission by the body-as-archive 15 and taking advantage of dance transmission through the screen, thus learning through copying and imitating a rather intangible body, is part of a growing practice that aims to democratize contemporary dance and its archive(s). For instance, the fABULEUS Rosas Remix Project 16 , as well as the NELKEN-Line project, promote re-interpretations of key moments from Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker's Rosas Danst Rosas (1983) and Pina Bausch's Nelken (1982) by encouraging the embodiment of the choreographic material by anyone through copying from the screen. Some Choreographies also builds on the accumulated experience of Jenna in facilitating the educational project Désir Mimétique (2017-2020), which explores imitation as a practice of building knowledge.
The tendency in contemporary dance of copying through the screen also grew during the recent pandemic with the shift of dance from physical sites to online social spaces. On these occasions, the screen served as a medium to support choreographic transmission from a distance through imitation as a point of departure. However, this practice that gradually gains popularity and dominates the visual experience while minimizing sensorial and most importantly tacit ways of learning dance, is not entirely new. Historical reconstructions promote a dance like the one portrayed in the video archive and not long ago, frst VHS cassettes and later DVDs served as a means for watching performances at home and with some practice, to even learn and perform a dance by imitation from the classical repertoire. The music channel MTV, established in the United States in 1981, was also crucial in assisting in the learning of choreographic sequences from music videos. Last but not least, the act of mimicry has been predominant in the culture of video games in which the video players reproduce the movement depicted on screen.
Jenna, both a flmmaker and choreographer, exposes the existing tendency of copying through the screen by placing video fragments as citations and their embodiments at the center of his practice 17 and in particular in Some Choreographies. As noticed by Isabelle Launay in speaking about the inherent paradox in the disassociation of the reference from its origin, the citation in dance "is both a site at which a transmission takes place and the site of transmission's impossibility" 18 since the inter-corporeal relation is absent. This paradox in the citation as a fragment with an explicit origin, is, therefore, what allows the transformation of the original source and the pre-existing material, which also enhances its evolution, relevance and adaptation to the present. I understand the use of citations as a network of (movement) thoughts that serve as points of entrance to the intellectual universe of others and remind us that we do not operate inside a vacuum; thoughts and ideas are recycled, expanded, disappear and re-emerge. The citation is what allows a discourse to be enriched and grow and, in the case of Jenna's accumulative citation technique, it deprives the work of copyright implications or at least it places it in a discourse of fair use and metaart, as it suggests a creative and playful bricolage where the origins of the work are traceable. As suggested by David LaRocca in his introduction to Metacinema (2021), Instead of encountering a stand-alone work of art, meta-art opens up a museum; rather than reading a novel, metafction insists on a library; quite apart from watching a single flm, an audience for metacinema is directed to consider the full expanse of cinematic history.
Through this lens, Jenna encourages the viewer to recall the various references that comprise his work and to trace the threads of his meta-choreographic work (author's emphasis) into the history of dance and cinema. Therefore, the point of his meta-choreography becomes that movement material is recycled and recontextualized against modernist beliefs that aim to confne creativity in the myth of originality.

Final Thoughts Instead Of Conclusion
Closing this brief analysis that has attempted to place Jenna's practice into the lineage of appropriation art and to free his (meta-)choreographic bricolages from potential copyright and ethical implications, it is important to make a few fnal observations by posing the following questions:  What kind of artistic, cultural and aesthetic values did the moving images in Found Choreographies have before becoming connected to each other, specifcally referring to distinctions of "high" and "low" art in dance?  What values do they gain when placed one after the other through kinetic continuity on the screen, as a performance, and as a meta-choreography?  What values do these fragments give back to the original works (author's emphasis) and the individual artists?  What values do these fragments obtain when we re-view them in their full context, either live or in documented form? Do the fragments of the metachoreographic prompt us to re-discover their original context?
The contribution of the specifc artist, as well as the practice of re-choreographing the archive lies in the potential subversion or re-evaluation of the canon in dance history. As the Greek dance artist-scholar Stella Dimitrakopoulou afrms, "contemporary choreographers [...] through remix take the writing of history in their own hands and thus become curators of dance and dance history" 19 . Through this lens, the practice of appropriation art has the potential to shift conventions taken for granted and power dynamics that are implied in the archive as a fxed entity. Exploring, choreographing and performing the archive, both as an educational and artistic practice, helps to increase the value of the invisible or the marginalized through a network of new continuities and afnities that re-attribute new values as long as they operate from a perspective of respect and care. As Jenna reminds us, through the title of one of his recent works, "imitation is the sincerest form of fattery" 20 ; copying, using and citing existing material is an honest way to express admiration and honor an artist. Dancing with the archive ofers a model of building knowledge of dance as a cultural manifestation both for the doer and the viewer who attest to an existing pedagogical and performance practice that is based on the reconfguration, re-use and embodiment of the archive.

Biography
Ariadne Mikou is a Greek dance artist-scholar based in Italy. With a background as an architect and choreographer, her research is focused on the social forms that emerge from the crossover between corporeal, spatial and screen-based arts. She publishes interviews and reviews; contributes to academic journals and book anthologies that explore screendance issues and expanded choreographic practices, community making and site interventions and she also creates choreographic scores. She is co-founder of futuremellon/NOT YET ART, an art collective that enables her to expand her choreographic and curatorial explorations. She also holds a PhD in interdisciplinary choreographic research that was fully funded by the University of Roehampton (London) and 6 Mauss. These cross-cultural interactions have also been shaped through migration, slavery, cultural appropriation and colonialism. 7 Jenna, personal communication. 8 Lepecki, 2004. 9 A game and a collaborative technique adapted by surrealist artists. As a choreographic tool, it works as a kind of game telephone for receiving and transmitting a movement message. As a compositional device for the screen, it guides the editing in a sequence in which the beginning of each clip is based on the end of the previous one. 10 Speaking about the trace of choreographic work, Frederic Pouillaude claims that "it is important to remember that video does not document the work as such but only one of its instances (its performance on a given evening, on a given date, on a particular tour, and so on)" (Pouillaude,241). 11 Particularly in screendance, the lineage of appropriation begins with David Hinton who is considered the father of found choreography (Delpeut online) and continues with the work of Miranda Pennell and Becky Edmunds among others. In the feld of mixed media performance and video installation, independent choreographer Arkadi Zaides created Capture Practice and Archive, two works in which he reenacts the violent movements of Israelis who are depicted on the video archives of B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in The Occupied Territories. Also, Dying on Stage (2022) by Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou is a performance that employs approximately fve hours of visual archival material on screen to explore the notion of death. Another example worth mentioning is the split-screen project All She Likes is Popping Bubble Wrap (2021) in which Greek dancer Ioanna Paraskevopoulou is seen performing the sound score for a 15-minute compilation of archival flm excerpts. 12 David LaRocca, introduction. 13 The meaning of cultural appropriation may be summarized as the borrowing or copying of movements and dance styles without grasping knowledge of the culture, the history and the context from which they derive and operate. Plenty of examples ranges from 19th-century exotic ballets to early modern dance pioneers and choreographers of music videos. Cultural appropriation is characterized by superfcial and aesthetic imitation that spices the narrative or a movement vocabulary usually of a privileged individual or institution, and it often involves a lack of engagement with or giving back to the community who 'owns' a specifc dance form and it usually remains marginalized. 14 Examples of circulation of choreographic material within the culture of contemporary dance include: The Last Performance (1998)