An Uncanny Performance: Dancing With Tables

My provocation is to suggest that movement of the feminine body alongside seemingly familiar objects provokes especially uncanny conditions where both material subjects become unfamiliar and politically charged. I argue that this uncanny relationship offers the performer agency to trouble and deconstruct sites of gender-normativity. I discuss my methods for exploring this destabilizing strategy through a reflective narrative of my artwork Seven Tables (2016-19). I address the physical and conceptual space of the feminine homely and unhomely whilst seeking to further understand the potentiality for the aging female performer to challenge gender constructs. Concerns with overlapping public and private space seem more relevant since the outbreak of COVID-19. And perhaps these concerns are accompanied by an uncomfortable realization that the home persists as a site of gendered roles and expectations. Through working with tables, I ask how the (un)familiar object provokes an embodied somatic response, experienced through and as the phenomenological consideration of my moving body. Prompted by Freud’s The Uncanny, my research is informed by post-structural feminist theorists, particularly Sara Ahmed who draws attention to the significance of the table in constructing gender identities. My work is an improvised choreography of encounters with the everyday. Through a corporality of rhythms and task repetitions of the body, my work celebrates the familiar feminine whilst troubling persistent constructs. Thus, this article provokes a re-assessment of notions of boundaried femininity. This writing reflects thirty years of performance art practice and emerges from my practice-based PhD research at the University of Glasgow in 2020.