I gave this presentation (well, a slightly modified version) at the New Forms Festival ArtCamp in September 2007.

2. Open Source Dance: Background
(1 of 3)
• Young choreographers want to see and learn from choreographic
work around the world… but airfare is expensive, planes are
environmentally-unsound, and travel/study grants are hard to come
by. Also, airline food sucks.
• Increasingly small world, global cultures, etc…
• Dance is art, choreography is intellectual property. I dare you to say
otherwise.
• There’s a site where you can download free music you can legally use
and remix (ccmixter.org). There are sites for downloading royalty-free
images and textures. Why not for dance?

3. Open Source Dance: Background
(2 of 3)
Creative Commons (“CC”)
“provides free tools that let authors, scientists,
artists, and educators easily mark their creative
work with the freedoms they want it to carry.
You can use CC to change your copyright terms
from All Rights Reserved to Some Rights
Reserved.”
http://creativecommons.org/

4. Open Source Dance: Background
(3 of 3)
• Open Source Dance is a site-in-progress where you can
license your choreography under a Creative Commons
license. The site hopes to provide tools to help you
discover existing dance works that you can legally use,
reuse, and sample.
• Open Source Dance envisions a world where dance
authors actively invite others to build upon their work.
Through this framework, the use of artistic material is
explicitly and conveniently attributed.

5. How It Works (1 of 5)
Choreographer Ramya Wong creates a dance piece, Solo X, on her friend and has it
performed in public.

6. How It Works (2 of 5)
Ramya announces through a public statement (on her website/in the program
notes/right before the piece, etc.) that she is inviting other dance artists to
build upon Solo X, and gives them a link that will explain to people how
they can do so.

7. How It Works (3 of 5)
Ramya posts Solo X on
OpenSourceDance.org by
uploading files related to the
choreography (such as her
choreographic notes and a
video of the piece)and
information about herself and
the piece. She chooses a
Creative Commons Attribution
Share-Alike 3.0 License for
her work.

8. How It Works (4 of 5)
Tadahiko McDonald is a dance-for-video artist looking for new movement vocabulary for his
upcoming dance film, Dances With Godzilla. A few days after Ramya posts her work on
OpenSourceDance.org, Tadahiko comes across Solo X while browsing through choreographies
registered on the site. He really likes what Ramya has done with the movement. Because of the
type of license Ramya has used, he is able to use entire sections of choreography from Solo X in
Dances with Godzilla.

9. How It Works (5 of 5)
After finishing the production of Dances With Godzilla, Tadahiko has the option of
registering his video with OpenSourceDance.org. When he does, he can indicate he
used Solo X for his film. By doing so, he helps build a genealogy of dances, a
historical trail that maps the influences of eachwork registered on
OpenSourceDance.org.

10. Next Steps
• Improving the interface and getting help from other
programmers (we need help!)
• Need to add: user management, searchability.
• There was an alpha version online where people
registered movement sequences but I let the domain
name (opensourcedance.org) expire!
• Currently working with students from UP Los Banos'
computer science program to help with the
programming.
thank you!