Hetty Blades
Moving Online explores the ontology and ownership of dance online. But what do I mean by ontology and how does it relate to ownership?
Over the course of four blog posts, I am going to explore this question by examining a recent legal case brought against Epic Games by choreographer Kyle Hanagami for the alleged copying of his choreography in the “It’s complicated” emote (see Gover 2023, Kansal and Boruah 2024). The case related to a section of Hanagami’s 5 minute choreography to Charlie Puth’s How Long song, a video of which was posted on YouTube in 2017 (Gover 2023). The case was originally dismissed but Hanagami appealed and the dismissal was reversed in November 2023 (Gover 2023).
This video, posted on YouTube by Orantsix Pays, shows Hanagami’s choreography and the emote side-by-side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYSoyscd1rk
What does this have to do with ontology? The term ‘ontology’ seems to mean slightly different things in different contexts (Pakes 2020: 8). My approach to ontology primarily arises from the way the term is used in analytic philosophy, as concerned with understanding the nature of things – in my case – dances (Pakes 2020). This strand of ontological enquiry focuses on questions such as ‘what kind of thing is a dance’? ‘What is the relationship between a dance and performances of that dance’ and ‘Does a dance exist outside of performance and if so, in what way?’. Importantly for Hanagami’s case, ontology overlaps with issues of work identity, such as, when does one dance become another? These kinds of questions have been widely explored in relation to dance (see Pakes 2020, 2013; Pouillaude 2017; McFee 1993, 2011, 2018; Davies 2011, 2024; Van Camp 2006, 2019, 1998; Carroll 2019; Conroy 2013, 2019; Meskin 1999 amongst others) as well as other ‘multiple’ art forms such as music and theatre (see Davies 2009, 2024).
One perspective that has been widely discussed in relation to dance, is the type/token framework (eg. McFee 1992, 2011; Pakes 2020). Under this view a dance is an abstract type and each performance is a token of that type. Types are abstract entities and their tokens are physical instances of that entity. Types are commonly understood to have features or properties that need to be present in an correct instance in order for it to qualify as a token of that particular type. In relation to Hanagami’s case then, we might ask whether the Fortnite emote’s dance is a token of the same type as Hanagami’s dance. There are many different ways of understanding types and not all people in the field adopt this view. For example, alternatives explored by Pakes (2020) include: nominalism: the view that works are a collection of their performances; 3) perdurantism: which sees works as having different spatial parts and extending through time; and 4) fictionalism: the view that works are fictional, rather than real objects.
I have recently been exploring the relevance of fictionalism for dance and will share more on that soon. In the meantime, the next blog post in this series will start to explain what I mean by ‘ownership’ in this project.
