QUESTIONS OF OWNERSHIP ECHO IN LEIPZIG.

Who owns a dance? As the recent dispute between Ron Protas and the remnants of the Martha Graham Dance organization make clear, this is a sensitive issue, with copyrights and ownership issues encroaching on what has always been the freest art form. If it's possible to own a dance, can one own gestures, single phrases, individual movements? These were some questions raised at the Moving Thoughts Dance Conference, December 1-4, 2000, at Leipzig's LOFFT, a large space that includes a cafe and theater that often seemed like a lone outpost to the more than 200 attendees in an otherwise desolate area outside the downtown area of this former East German town.

One intriguing artist to approach this issue was Martin Nachbar, who announced before his performance, "I am not going to perform the dances of Dore Hoyer. I am going to be Dore Hoyer." Never mind that Hoyer was a female choreographer who created her highly emotional, highly personal Affectos Humanos series in 1962, and that Nachbar is a male who had never even seen the dances in person--only in old films. His uncanny ability to become Hoyer while somehow maintaining his own personality perfectly encapsulated the spirit of this conference.

When Frenchman Jerome Bel wanted to "quote" other choreographers' material in his own work, he encountered a barrier he wasn't aware existed: copyright laws for dance. After receiving permission to use a Susanne Linke piece, he chose to comment upon the idea of ownership in a humorous and often mystifying work in which three dancers perform the Linke choreography one after another, to stunning and hilarious effect. In discussing this work afterwards, Bel said, "I'm just looking [to get] the actors to the smallest point of personality, to where there will still be a human being. I love it when I see something escaping that we didn't design."

Xavier Le Roy, another Frenchman whose work goes even further in erasing the identities of the performers, led a panel that focused on the idea of repetition in dance. He held a memorable, partially pre-taped interview with himself in which he discussed the constant biological change of the body, pointing out that "no one is the same person from one moment to the next"; thus, he argued, real copying is impossible.

Martin Spaangenberg, a critic and choreographer from Sweden, also figured prominently with his performances combining theory-based lectures with practical demonstrations. He closed the conference with a long discourse on Bel's piece, then in a fit of whimsy became the "first man to walk on the moon" by staging his own moonwalk in the theater, pointing out that without live witnesses, Neil Armstrong's historic walk technically never took place, according to American copyright laws.

In many ways, the most poignant statement on identity and ownership came from Nachbar, who underwent a very arduous process to get permission from Waltrand Lulev, caretaker of Dore Hoyer's legacy, to perform the series. Not only did Luley eventually give him the OK, but she worked extensively with him to get the dances just right, to the point where he says she "adopted" him as the perpetuator of the dances, even though he's impatient to get back to his own work.

During his panel, Nachbar maintained, "The original doesn't exist because I never saw it ..." and that "to find out the differences, you have to try to be the same."

Attendees appreciated the candor and enthusiasm of the artists, and Bel, in particular, expressed gratitude for what he called "the first audience to really understand his Last Performance."

LOFFT, a cooperative that alternates between dance and theater performances, is perhaps the only venue in an otherwise provincial milieu to exhibit avant-garde work. For this weekend, however, it seemed that all of Europe was paying attention to its Moving Thoughts.