ABSTRACT
This chapter analysis of "identitarian" issues in contemporary dance orienting the studies devoted to performances and representations of identity in selected works. The history of theories of identity is a succession of analyses of relationships between the ruler and the ruled, be it through feminism, post-colonial, gender, or cultural studies. It confers primacy to predominantly visible and discursive signs of identity. The field of the contemporary dance seems to pose different issues than those of more or less distant historical periods. Nonetheless, the questions raised about contemporary dance and the relationships between theory and experience seem to be the same regardless of the period in question. The dancers produce signs or traverse a culturally engrained experience of gravity, and the spectators decode them, all within a meta-structure of conventions. Yet, even if it has become a thematic of recent works, it remains nonetheless at the core of every choreographic performance that is "modern and historical" "classical", "contemporary and neo-classical".
