The erotic reduction
crossed flesh in Lea Anderson's the featherstonehaughs draw on the sketchbooks of egon schiele
pp. 237-260
in: Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie, Matthew Wagner (eds), Performance phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 2019Abstract
This chapter presents a case study of The Featherstonehaughs Draw on The Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele, a key work by leading British choreographer Lea Anderson (b. 1959). I consider the ways in which Anderson's choreographic techniques re-frame the artworks of the great Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890–1918), including his apparently "pornographic" depictions of himself and young Viennese women. Anderson's techniques seem to re-present those depictions with a brutal detachment, suggesting that the physical body is constituted as such through the ways in which it is measured and specularised. However, with reference to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1895–1938), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and particularly Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946), I argue that those techniques effect an "erotic reduction", opening up a radically different kind of corporeal experience in which the spectator crosses flesh with the dancer.
