In the article I challenge the prevalent usage of phenomenology in dance scholarship that explores the dancer’s experience of her body when dancing. The approach often implies the problematic assumption that the dancers’ experience is immediately transferred to spectators who are in turn universally ‘moved’ by the dancing bodies. Instead of acknowledging dance as a product of historically and culturally specific circumstances, such an analytical perspective ultimately mystifies dance. The article proposes a different usage of analytical tools in dance scholarship: I employ phenomenological reduction and epoché to focus on how dancing bodies appear in a stage context. To test these tools’ ability to explore dancing bodies from a third-person perspective, I analyse the Danish choreographer Kitt Johnson’s solo performance Drift (2011) - focussing on her shifting physical appearance. While phenomenology helps me to describe the multiple and radically different guises that Johnson assumes in her piece, my analysis, ultimately, does not aim to distil a truer, more real being from her appearances as is often the case in phenomenological philosophy. I complement my analytical approach with the Deleuzian notion of becoming animal and suggest that Johnson stages what could, in Judith Butler’s terms, be called a critical contingency of bodily appearance.