Free speech and the notion of private property, as fundamental, natural, human rights, have emerged throughout the evolution of western civilization thinking as the bedrocks of freedom and individual sovereignty.
Whenever societies have come to respect and protect these two by law, they have seen unprecedented flourishing, innovation and progress.
Free speech, or the right to free expression, involves the right to exercise one’s ideas and identity without infringement and is intrinsically tied to the notion of property rights. The two go hand in hand and whenever one of those is limited, controlled or banned, the other cannot be sustained.
The practice of using dancers as “empty vessels” who execute a choreographers’ vision, can be seen as a form of creative censorship, an infringement upon their personal “property” suppressing their creative capital and undermining their freedom of expression, resulting in curbing personal initiative, stifling both creative capital and free speech, while transforming dancers into tools rather than sovereign contributors.
Much as private property rights fosters political, social and economic freedoms, dancers’ creative autonomy, enhances artistic freedom and nurtures authentic expression.
The choreographic process should be approached as a dynamic exchange, a marketplace of creative ideas, enriched by the interplay of voices. Instead of a top-down imposition; it can become an open-ended dialogue, an expressive, adaptive and human-centered process.
A choreographer’s willingness to allow dancers to retain their “property” and free speech within the process, promotes a more authentic, living choreography, rooted in respect for individual creativity as an essential form of personal property.
For that to happen, makers need to look upon the choreographic medium, not as a finite product aimed at harnessing the creative process as a vehicle for telling specific stories (their own or others), promoting agendas, expressing specific messages or enslaving it to esthetic ideals, but rather, as an organic, free market like system, which optimizes the quality of the exchanges it enables, while remaining inherently indifferent to their content.
In that sense, equality of outcome and freedom, are mutually exclusive.
Whenever dancers in a specific work all seem to follow a similar external authority, be it in their vocabulary, movement style, performative strategies, or even the manner in which they approach decision making, it is always the result of censorship on both their artistic property and free speech.
Great art is always about nothing in particular, which is what allows it to be of and about everyone and everything. But for this to exist within a choreographic context, the notions of private property and free speech must be embedded deeply into the fabric of the choreographic process.
“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.”
Friedrich August von Hayek
