South Africa has passed a law that allows the country to take legal action against the foreign use of indigenous traditional medicinal plants in order to recognize and protect the indigenous medicinal knowledge. No country can apply for a patent on a plant, but it can on the discovered effect of certain plant substances. This is an important signal in the global process of searching for virgin forests, a race to discover natural active ingredients. It shows an awareness of what cultural heritage is and how to protect it from exploitation by global agents. It is a matter of the moment.

Now the dance world is also facing it, but only with regard to so-called modern dance. The “Global Groove” show at the Folkwang Museum in Essen shows a juxtaposition of aesthetic positions, ordered according to political criteria, in which intercultural influences, influences between West and East, play a role. “Art, Dance, Performance, Protest” is the list in the subtitle, and it spins on one of the most famous narratives, that of modern dance as a movement of progress, liberation, and enlightenment.

The catalog discusses various cases of one-sided or reciprocal west-east aesthetic influence. Some of the white artists are under suspicion of cultural appropriation. In the pop world, singers like Shirin David or Arianna Grande have recently been accused of blackfishing. There are various methods of tinting your skin darker in order to look more like a person of color. One could say that being black is currently considered unsurpassably attractive in the pop world, it is a cultural capital. Those convicted of blackfishing are only partially believed to have admired the imitated, as the commercial motives are likely to predominate.

The show “Global Groove” applies these research questions to dance: What are acceptable or welcome ways of dealing with influences from other cultures, what is cheap, reflex-triggering imitation of attractive foreignness? Susan Manning, for example, in her article on Mary Wigman in the catalog refers to the American cultural scientist Eric Lott and his formulation of “Love and Theft”, a concept according to which forms of cultural appropriation can arise out of admiration and affection that can go up to cultural thefts are enough.

In the case of the German expressive dancer Mary Wigman, it was probably just a crush.

In the 1920s she saw a performance by the modern Javanese dancer Raden Mas Jodjana, who was touring Europe, and wrote that the performance took her soul to a distant dreamland.

Manning calls this “orientalist rhetoric”, but states that Wigman's famous “witch's dance” contains gestures and turns that could be inspired by Raden Mas Jodjana, but do not represent an “appropriation” of his aesthetic.

The boundaries are fluid

Since the turn of the twentieth century there were some non-European dancers who performed their traditionally rooted, but modified and modern concepts of solo podium dancing on extensive tours in the United States and Europe. These modern movements were often inspired by the West. The Japanese Butoh, which was developed as a modern dance in the middle of the twentieth century, was essentially created by the solo dancer Kazuo Ohno (1906-2010), a sports student who was influenced by guest performances by the flamenco dancer “La Argentina” and the German expressive dancer Harald Kreutzberg (1902–1968) began to pursue a dance career.

Would you now want to posthumously reproach Ohno for cultural appropriation?

Or is this discussion more about accusing the white protagonists of the art of dance of culturally inappropriate behavior, of dance aesthetic appropriation?

It stands to reason that Wigman, whose charisma as a solo dancer had something high priestly, emphasized the closeness of dance to ritual.