My Message to Art Thieves: Make Your Own Fucking Sauce

There has been a lot of talk about copying in my immediate burlesque community lately. Copycats, concept thieves, people seeing an act or an idea or a particular creative choice and turning around with something close enough that everybody who witnessed the original can see exactly what happened. I had already been thinking about influence, theft, and what we owe one another as artists when something similar happened to me.

Someone who attended one of my workshops earlier this year announced her own feminine embodiment and burlesque movement workshop a few months later. I read the promotion and recognized my work immediately. Not burlesque. I don’t own burlesque. Not sensual movement, femininity, confidence, embodiment, or workshops. I recognized the formulation: the ideas in relationship to one another, the language around them, the explanation of what the work was for. These were things I had taught, said, written about, and shared with her directly.

And with my whole chest, I thought (same as I do whenever I see someone stealing or faking it): get you some fucking sauce.

I reached out privately and told her what I saw. She told me the work came from her own history, training, practice, and what she was currently integrating. I heard her. I still didn’t believe what I was looking at had developed independently of her contact with my work. I said so, wished her well, and disconnected.

There was also an irony I couldn’t get over: stealing the copy for a workshop about embodiment. I can hardly think of a worse concept to try to fake your way through. Embodiment is quite literally a practice of becoming more deeply situated in yourself, and here I was looking at language that appeared to have skipped that process entirely.

What made the experience particularly irritating is that I am very intentionally here to share. I believe in showing my work out loud. I dance and I write about this shit. I move and I think about sensuality, about embodiment, about what happens when we become more available to ourselves through our bodies. Then I translate what I learn through my own practice into experiences I can share with other people.

Burlesque is one layer of me. Embodiment is another. I have intentionally blended those things for a purpose. My workshops did not give me the practice. The practice gave me the workshops. That distinction matters.

I know exactly what I’m cooking because I’ve been in the kitchen. I know the questions that produced the ideas, the experiences that changed my thinking, the things I’ve studied and experimented with, and the places where movement eventually became language. Increasingly, there is also a public record of that development because I have become more rigorous about documenting my living practice.

That record matters because authorship has patterns. Over time, we learn how people talk, what they talk about, what they care enough to explain, which ideas they return to, and which things have seemingly never interested them at all. If your established pattern is three-word captions and emojis and suddenly there are paragraphs articulating a burlesque embodiment practice after encountering someone who has been publicly writing, moving, thinking, and teaching at that exact intersection, the discontinuity is visible.

Copying is clockable.

I want copycats to know that across time, distance, and the internet. Your copying is often far more clockable than you think. You can imitate an artifact, but you cannot inherit the trail that produced it.

AI only makes this distinction more apparent. And I say that as someone who absolutely uses AI in my own workflows. I know what these tools can do because I work with them. I know how easily they can take something that already exists and reproduce its language, structure, or logic. I also know how fucking dull and obvious the replica can be when you haven’t done the work of massaging your own voice, thought, and lived practice into it.

I use AI to organize thoughts I have already articulated (shoutout to thousands of hours of voice notes talking to myself about how I feel about literally everything), to help me be concise, and to give sprawling thoughts structure when I’m ready to share them. I use it to think through sequencing in my artistic process, to map what needs to happen and when, to interrogate an idea from another angle, and to check whether what I’m trying to convey is actually clear outside of my own head. Sometimes I use it simply to take everything I already know about a project and help me see the moving pieces at once.

That proximity also means I know how easily the same tool can produce language, concepts, and structures that create the appearance of developed thought where the development underneath it simply isn’t there. AI can make a replica quickly. It cannot give that replica a history. It cannot retroactively create the thinking, experimentation, movement, mistakes, study, or lived practice that supposedly produced it. It cannot manufacture provenance.

Still, I don’t want the lesson here to be hide your shit. Quite the opposite. I want my work to activate creativity in other people. I want artists studying other artists, exchanging ideas, talking about process, teaching each other things, paying one another for our expertise, and building upon what somebody else discovered. I want to participate in creative infrastructure that actually depends on our collective energy instead of everybody sitting alone guarding their little pile of ideas.

Whether we call it this or not, social media has already become a kind of open artistic commons. We witness each other constantly: movement, costumes, language, techniques, aesthetics, philosophies, business models, questions, experiments, unfinished thoughts, finished work. We are going to influence each other in that environment. I don’t want an artistic culture without influence. I want a living code for the commons.

I say living because the conditions under which we make and encounter art keep changing. Social media changed them. AI is one of the things changing them now, and whatever comes next will change them further. I’m not interested in a rigid artistic Bible for what anybody is or isn’t allowed to take in. I’m interested in practices responsive enough to those changing conditions to keep the commons open while honoring the art already here.

The first practice in my code is simple: name your influences.

Tell the truth about what inspired you. Name the artist, the work, the idea, the energy. Tell us what moved you, what it opened in you, and how you moved with that new energy. That isn’t merely credit offered out of obligation. It is one of the ways we give back to a commons we are all extracting from. It preserves lineage. It allows someone to encounter my work through yours, yours through mine, and follow the thread outward through an ecosystem of artists feeding and advancing one another’s work.

Not naming feels like stealing, especially when removing the source creates the appearance that someone else’s development originated with you. We all receive things from the commons. We study, borrow, inherit, sample, witness, and learn. The distinction I care about is what happens after we receive them: receive, name, metabolize, contribute. Not extract, obscure, and claim.

Naming alone, though, does not make something yours. Influence should have to travel through you. It should meet your life, body, history, training, questions, obsessions, technique, and particular weird little shit. When another artist’s work knocks the wind out of me, I want to know what it awakened in me that is mine to make. That is where influence becomes generative instead of reproductive.

Otherwise, what a fucking waste of artistic energy.

And this is where my problem with copying goes beyond the violation of the artist being copied. That violation is real. Somebody thought about that shit. Somebody practiced, studied, failed, lived, moved, experimented, found the words, and eventually made something from all of it. Their willingness to let you witness the result does not erase their relationship to what they made.

But there is also what you abandon in yourself when you decide to copy instead.

I believe stealing from another artist is an expression of lack. You must believe, somewhere, that what you have or what you are capable of developing is not enough if your solution to participation is to take what somebody else has already made. And that’s what pisses me off. You have ingredients. Instead of finding out what you could make with them, you took a shortcut through somebody else’s development.

You can get the language without developing the thought. You can get the aesthetic without developing the eye. You can get the choreography without developing the movement practice. You can get the workshop without developing the pedagogy. The theft doesn’t resolve the lack. It just allows you to temporarily disguise it.

And what a fucking waste.

As a Black woman, I feel particularly strongly about this when I am looking at other Black women. This is my truth: Black women are far too masterful at creating to be stealing from one another. We have too much history, invention, memory, specificity, and too many ways of seeing. There are things our bodies know that we have barely investigated, much less made art from. There are things we have not yet had the space, resources, safety, time, or permission to explore. There is too much available to us to abandon our own excavation for somebody else’s finished work.

That is also why being copied will not convince me to become smaller, quieter, more secretive, or less generous with other artists. I don’t want us guarding every unfinished thought because somebody might run away with it. That would destroy the creative ecosystem I actually want to help build.

I want the commons. I want the exchange. I want to show my work and see yours. I want my art to fuck around inside your imagination and activate something I never could have made myself. I want you to tell the truth about what fed you, honor what was already here, and then add something to the commons that could only have come through you.

You have ingredients.

Make your own fucking sauce.