ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between innovative dance performance and some of the problematics of the corporeal nature of identity and identification. It argues that the dance works have adopted strategies which deliberately draw attention to the aspects of experience in order to trouble and disturb normalizing discourses and processes and thus create new spaces for resistant or alternative identities. While Anderson and Ruckert would have been aware of issues concerning identity and identification when they made the works, it was not their primary concern. Nevertheless, because Anderson specifically chose key works by Schiele that themselves staged processes of identification, the resulting dance pieces exploited inconsistencies and contradictions within the processes and were thus able to suggest possibilities for resistant identities. These were restaged in a different way in Hautnah where the spectator participant found themselves sitting on a chair in a relationship with a dancer that was both disturbingly intimate and yet demonstrably inhibited.
