Martha Graham Dance Center Wins Custody Battle

A U.S. District Court judge on Friday awarded ownership of the bulk of the choreography by modern dance icon Martha Graham to the Martha Graham Dance Center, rather than to her heir, Ron Protas.

Until 2000, Protas served on the board of the center and as artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, one of the institutions the center administered. After Protas was voted off the board and removed as artistic director, the center voted to close the school and company, citing financial difficulties. Protas sued to prevent the center’s use of the Graham name as they planned to rebuild. That suit was decided against Protas, a decision that was upheld in July by an appeals court.

In the meantime, Protas filed a second suit, claiming sole ownership of Graham’s dances, as well as the sets and costumes needed to produce them. The ruling Friday by U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum held that from 1956 to her death in 1991, Graham was an employee of the center and that works created by her during that period constituted work-for-hire and thus belonged to her employers. Cedarbaum ruled that earlier works had been assigned by Graham to the center after its creation.

Protas, who had been Graham’s assistant and confidant at the end of her life, had argued that, as heir to her estate, the dances belonged to him.

Instead, the ruling gives Protas rights to only the 1955 masterpiece “Seraphic Dialogue,” a dance drama about Joan of Arc, and awards the Graham Center rights to 45 works, including such milestones of modern dance as “Primitive Mysteries” (1931), “El Penitente” (1940), “Letter to the World” (1941) and “Embattled Garden” (1958).

However, Cedarbaum also found that in the case of 24 other works “neither side has shown whether any of those dances were published with adequate notice of copyright.”

This category includes some of the most celebrated Graham creations: “Lamentation” (1930), “Appalachian Spring” (1944), “Cave of the Heart” (1946) and the full-evening epic “Clytemnestra” (1958) among them. Cedarbaum’s ruling placed 10 in the public domain, ruled that five belonged to the people or institutions who commissioned them and left nine others in legal limbo, their ownership undetermined.

“We believe these nine works are presumptively ours,” center lawyer Katherine Forrest said Friday. “There are complicated legal issues relating to the law of publication, and there’s a question of whether those works might end up in the public domain, but there’s not enough evidence to determine that as yet.”

Ownership of sets designed for works that had their premieres after 1957 also went to neither side, but the center got rights to those created earlier.

In addition, Cedarbaum ruled that “Protas profited improperly at [the center’s] expense” and ordered him to pay the center $92,973 for licensing of Graham works he didn’t own and $87,000 for selling center property to the Library of Congress.

“We are overjoyed that, with the exception of one dance, we anticipate unconstrained access and use of all Martha Graham’s dances,” said Marvin Preston, executive director of the dance center. “And we are optimistic we can arrange for access and use of the other dance.”

Neither Protas nor his attorneys could be reached for comment.