The Brooklyn Rail

I’m in a dance company and I don’t dance at all. I write and create live performances with Monica Bill Barnes. If you don’t know her, I’m happy to catch you up. Monica is a choreographer and dancer whose personality sits somewhere in the narrow venn diagram overlap of Martha Graham and Buster Keaton. We’ve been creating work together for something like ten years. It’s hard to say because it’s hard to know when a creative process starts. It’s been long enough that sometimes we are asked to talk to students and say things about our work. Something funny tends to happen when we do this—they write down what we are saying. Monica will play one of her hits, like “Choreography really amounts to a bunch of moves. It’s the intention that goes into the moves that make them a dance.” Then I see dancers nodding, writing, even snapping at their desks.

It’s a part of our work. We share. We give insight into our ideas to the people who are learning how to have their own. It’s part of where we even got our ideas in the first place. We sat down at those same desks and wrote down what those artists were sharing with us. Later, we’ll read what students have written or see videos of their projects that look so much like our work and it can feel weird. If you’ve ever known someone who starts dressing like you do, you know imitation can feel creepy, the way a parrot can feel creepy. A parrot can say the things you say but doesn’t mean them the way you do. They’re students though, so we mostly feel honored. But what happens when they’re not students? What happens when you find your parrot is at the Louvre?

A few weeks ago, a friend messaged me to tell me he didn’t realize that Monica and I took one of our projects (The Museum Workout) to the Louvre. We’ve been on a busy spate of touring, everywhere from Montana to Singapore over the last couple of months. It’s the most touring we’ve done since 2020. So my friend thought he missed an update from us. I replied he was wrong; we didn’t have a project at the Louvre. Then he sent me a New York Times cultural dispatch from Paris and I learned that he was maybe right. We do have a project at the Louvre; it’s just not ours anymore.

Catherine Porter, in the dispatch, described “an hourlong dance-and-exercise circuit through the building, which museum officials call Courez au Louvre—meaning both run to and run in the Louvre.” As I read the description, looked through photos and videos, and imagined the voice of Luc Bouniol-Laffont, the director of performing arts who is quoted in the article and credited for the idea, I heard a parrot, squawking.

In 2017 we made a participatory dance piece called The Museum Workout at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was commissioned by MetLiveArts. We made it in collaboration with Maira Kalman, an artist and writer. It was a guided tour of the Met, led by Monica Bill Barnes and her dance partner at that time, Anna Bass. They wore sequined dresses and sneakers. Audiences ran behind them, mirroring their movement as they looped two miles through the museum. They paused in front of a dozen of the 1.5 million artworks the Met has in its possession to perform exercise dances in sync, with their focus fixed on the artwork in front of them. While they did squats or lunges in front of Jean Antoine Houdon’s bust of Benjamin Franklin (1778) or John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (1883–84), I played audio clips from a conversation with Kalman about what she’s doing when she goes to museums. She’s an artist, but she’s not there to sketch or research or look for color inspiration. She goes to the museum to fall in love.

The original run of sixteen performances in January of 2017 were quickly extended for the entire year. It was the most visibly successful thing we’ve ever made, covered in every outlet from Fox News to Good Morning America to profiles in The New Yorker, multiple articles and videos in the New York Times, even a photo shoot for Vogue. We subsequently toured the performance, creating versions of it for museums as nearby as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and far away as the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Search the terms “museum” and “workout” together and you’ll see for yourself. But, to get back to my friend’s message, we’ve not brought it to the Louvre.

When Monica and I read about Courez au Louvre, we were dizzy from the similarities, like we walked into a hall of mirrors. The Louvre commissioned a choreographer, just like us. It happens before the museum is open, just like ours. They reference disco movement, like we did. Soon, the comparison revealed more than resemblances, some elements were carbon copies. They begin their program with Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” the same way we began ours in Melbourne. They end their piece in shavasana staring up at the glass ceiling of the Louvre, ours ended in shavasana under the glass ceiling of the Engelhard Court at the Met. Even the writers covering Courez au Louvre were hitting replay on some of the same themes that writers hit on seven years ago. In 2017, Alexis Cheung wrote for the New York Times about the “pleasure derive[d] from its illicitness … like having done jumping jacks before the marble statue of a nude Perseus.” And in 2024 at Courez au Louvre, Catherine Porter writes for the New York Times that she “giggled” when her pointing dance pose landed at “the stone penis of Apollo.”

Dizziness turned into nausea as I started asking around about how this happened. Via a publicist from the Louvre and communication with Catherine Porter, Bouniol-Laffont shared he was “inspired by” The Museum Workout and acknowledged “the huge success of the Met’s program.” He called the Met for advice on how to create a version for the Louvre. According to the Met, they advised he get in touch with us. I asked if he had considered that. He dismissed the idea saying, “For obvious practical, financial, and also environmental reasons we could only achieve this project with a Paris-based choreographer and a Paris-based company.” We were a problem, so we were left behind as our idea was traded across the Atlantic.

We’re not in love with our originality. A grant panel rejected us from funding The Museum Workout by explaining (as is often the case in our work) that it wasn’t enough of a dance. They went one step further in the rejection and reminded us that we didn’t invent the jumping jack. I want to be clear that Courez Au Louvre is not the same as our piece. They’re not even the first to replicate it. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis did a version too, though they at least publicly cited the Met’s program as their inspiration. Notice I said, “the Met’s program,” not ours. In 2016 the Met’s curator for performance, Limor Tomer, commissioned us to make a piece for the museum. They often have performances in their galleries. We counteroffered The Museum Workout, a much larger, harder to pull off idea that created some intentional friction against the staid culture of the museum itself. The Met didn’t bring the idea to us. We pitched it, developed it, and auditioned it for them for a year before they said yes. Now, some of the ideas, images, themes, movements, and organizing principles of our work continue without our names. The New York Times article makes no mention of our performance at the Met in 2017 and turned down each of my three entreaties to make an amendment. 61,000 people liked the New York Times Instagram post of the Courez au Louvre article, many of whom likely have no idea who we are. We’ve been erased and replaced by the big bold capital letters of the institutions. But how many people have eaten a cronut and have no idea who Dominique Ansel is?

One common response shouted from friends in our corner is, “You guys should sue!” We are grateful for their clarity in this situation that has mostly left us confused. We did consult with an intellectual property lawyer and two things became clear. One: to pursue any kind of legal action was going to take a lot of our time and focus. Two: it would be really hard to prove. The first thing a lawyer wanted to see was a side-by-side video comparison of The Museum Workout and Courez au Louvre. That is how many of us watched Beyoncé’s music video for “Countdown” in 2011, side-by-side with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas danst Rosas from 1997. But that was a case of choreography copied on film. Our work happens in person. And for us, it wasn’t just about the dance moves; the Louvre took our concepts and passed them off as their own. They acted more like AT&T in 2010, during the phone company’s World Cup commercial campaign in which they dropped sheets of orange fabric around cities to represent their network coverage. AT&T swiped that image from Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s world-renowned installation, The Gates (1979–2005). Eventually the company added a disclaimer to the commercial, saying Christo and Jeanne-Claude were not involved in the commercial. Still, AT&T could lift the idea from the artists because in the US copyright doesn’t cover ideas.

From a US legal perspective, we could not make a case that the Louvre has done something wrong, but that doesn’t mean what they’ve done is right. When I look at the Courez au Louvre pictures, I see a kind of fast fashion version of our work. They replicated what they saw from the outside. But the experience of The Museum Workout was not just a cool, controversial exercise class. There was a narrative element (which the Louvre has not reproduced) that made The Museum Workout a physical metaphor for why museums exist at all. The Museum Workout was a kind of memento mori. Our sweaty, struggling bodies confronted the preserved art of the ages and we were reminded to live. But the Louvre’s version feels different in the same way that The Starry Night (1889) looks different when you see it on a coaster. The difference is that van Gogh is famous enough that everyone knows that’s his work. More importantly, under US law, his work is in the public domain. You can reproduce it, riff on it, and replicate it at no cost and with the confidence that van Gogh’s estate is not worrying about how to afford a pre-K program for their two year old next year or whether they can bring in another person to help care for their aging parent one more day a week.

Why did it feel okay to reproduce our ideas without us? To give him the most credit possible, maybe Mr. Bouniol-Laffont didn’t think our performance amounted to art. We didn’t invent the jumping jack, so it felt okay. That’s one of the hardest things about your work being copied—it makes you wonder what you’re worth. Our ideas are our livelihood. Maybe there are plenty of wealthy artists for whom that is not true, but we are solidly middle class. We work to keep working.

You’ve heard—it’s an incredibly hard time for the arts. But I’m worried that story is overly focused on the institutions. As budgets are slashed, programs cut, staffs downsized, our arts institutions look like ships with slack sails, becalmed and desperate to catch some wind. We are a microscopic performing arts company with about 0.15 of a percent of the Louvre’s operating budget. We can’t downsize; if we did, we’d disappear. And yet, artists, the people who make things, are the ones who give the big ships their wind.

There’s a famous Oscar Wilde quote that people in the arts love: “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Few people hold on to the second part of that quote though: “…that mediocrity pays to greatness.” I’m not confident enough to say The Museum Workout amounted to greatness, but it has an imitation running through the Louvre right now. Maybe the best part of that quote though: there’s no clear record of Oscar Wilde saying it at all.

What is flattery anyway? Insincere praise, employed to further one’s self interests. Maybe imitation is a low-risk way to fast track your success. And the economics behind imitation should matter. If you’re writing your first poems from the common room of your dorm and you can’t resist spacing your lines like E.E. Cummings, it’s okay. But if you have the resources of a great institution behind you, maybe you owe more to the people who inspire you.

I’m from New Jersey. I grew up working on the boardwalk, with prize hawkers and psychics and claw machines all trying to pull a fast one on you. I worked on Point Pleasant Beach. Almost every weekend of every summer, The Nerds came to play. The Nerds are a band, but they’re not just any band. The Nerds are the greatest cover band in the world. They cover it all—R&B, hair bands, funk, punk, classic rock, even Engelbert Humperdinck. Seeing The Nerds is euphoric. They play the absolute hell out of other artists’ songs. Seeing The Nerds is also honest. They never pretend they’re playing originals. You leave their show sweaty, head ringing, singing “Sweet Caroline” and even if you don’t know Neil Diamond, you know someone else wrote the song.

Maybe that’s the best-case scenario for The Museum Workout now as iterations of our idea pop up around the globe without us. We can’t stop you, but at least admit that you’re playing a cover. If you did that, there’s a chance we might even end up feeling flattered, just like Oscar Wilde said.