Riffing off intellectual property in contemporary dance

Abstract Dance disappears the moment it becomes visible, the complexity of its ontology matching that of its production and of its intellectual property status. Its creative process is both collaborative and hierarchical, involving the transmission of knowledge from one body to another, remembering steps, recognizing moves, mimicking, and improvising gestures as well as coordinating the roles of dancers, choreographers, and studios. Matthias Sperling’s Riff (2007) directly addresses many of these issues, which inform the specific content of the piece as well as its conceptualization, development, and the copyright licenses that underpin it. Sperling’s performance is clearly conceived as a rite of passage, a dance through which a dancer becomes a choreographer, going from “riffing off” other choreographers’ work to developing dance movements and phrases that, while tied to those of his predecessors, he can claim as his own. As such, Riff makes explicit and rearticulates the rearrangement of professional relations and roles, the difference between reperforming and innovating, between learning from bodies or from media, as well as how the property status of the work intersects with community norms and expectations of attribution.