How do dance and performance studies imagine property — a thing which belongs to someone (a possession), and an inherent or essential quality (an attribute) — as made and reproduced? Examining key texts across disciplines including critical race theory, contract law, gender studies, and decolonial critique, we will develop multiple overlapping challenges to property and situate them within histories of performed and embodied art. Together, we will contextualize changes in dance and performance economies – such as acquiring and reperforming choreography, preserving and selling ephemera, and authorizing and training representatives – within the raced, sexed, and colonial politics of property’s maintenance and control. What is property’s relationship to labor, occupation, law, and natural right, and how does dance rely upon or potentially rework notions of the juridical person and self-directing individual on which these logics are premised? What alternative methodologies for the transmission of cultural material does performance maintain in order to resist rendering expression and/or artwork into property? Students will develop a series of writing projects over the course of the semester and acquire a critical vocabulary to approach and write with dance and performance art. We will meet synchronously via Zoom with the option to meet asynchronously as desired.