The Deer

The Deer is a multidisciplinary performance work in progress exploring themes of eroticism, vulnerability, control, and the politics of the gaze. Incorporating pole dance, heels, and digital technologies, the piece stages a continuous oscillation between prey and predator, submission and agency.

The Deer is currently in development through a series of live trials and studio-based experiments. The work has been tested in front of small audiences, allowing the relationship between performer and spectator to be continuously reworked.

Abstract

The Deer is an autobiographical, multidisciplinary solo performance exploring themes of eroticism, vulnerability, and control within the politics of the gaze. The work stages a continuous oscillation between prey and predator, innocence and corruption, submission and agency.

Through practices of disidentification and becoming-animal, the performance destabilises fixed identities, collapsing boundaries between human and nonhuman, subject and object. Incorporating pole dance, heels, and digital technologies, it reconfigures eroticised vocabularies of display into gestures of tension, resistance, and exposure.

Developed through cycles of repetition, exhaustion, and live testing, The Deer interrogates self-presentation as labour within contemporary economies of visibility. Positioned between seduction and collapse, the work asks where agency can exist when the body is simultaneously performer, product, and site of consumption.

Lighting design, projection visuals, sound design and choreography by Teo Ruffini.

Process and Methodology

The Deer is developed through an ongoing process of embodied and theoretical research, combining movement experimentation, writing, and live testing with small audiences. The work operates through a multidisciplinary approach, integrating performance, pole dance, sound, lighting, and digital technologies as active agents.

The process is driven by tensions between control and surrender, eroticism and risk, ritual and collapse. Movement is generated through repetition pushed to exhaustion, allowing gestures to destabilise and shift meaning over time.

Central to the methodology is the manipulation of erotic legibility: exuberant and sexualised gestures are exaggerated to the point of rupture, functioning as critical mimicry.

Objectification is not rejected but used as material, exposing its structures and implicating the spectator.

The pole will act as both support and constraint, structuring a push-and-pull dynamic that produces oscillations between seduction, fear, aggression, and breakdown. Through this process, vulnerability and failure operate as compositional tools and forms of resistance.

The Deer is currently in development through a series of live trials and studio-based experiments.