ABSTRACT
This essay investigates the relationship between innovative dance performance and some of the problematics of the corporeal nature of identity and identification. It does so through an examination of the Berlin-based choreographer Felix Ruckert’s deconstruction of the performer-audience relationship, and Lea Anderson’s uncanny uses of ironic citations that disrupt the normal and familiar. Focusing on Ruckert’s Hautnah and Anderson’s two pieces based on the drawings of Egon Schiele, it argues that dance performances which re-stage scenes of spatial projection and identification can sometimes discover inconsistencies and contradictions within the processes of identity formation. By doing so it thus draws attention to those aspects of experience and possibilities for identification that elude the compulsion to conform with the visible, the normative, and the same. It argues that these dance works have adopted strategies which deliberately draw attention to these aspects of experience in order to trouble and disturb normalizing discourses and processes and thus create new spaces for resistant or alternative identities.
