Moving Content Old to New Domain Viable?

A website we have has recently been tanked during the December Algo update by 90-95%. Long story short, it seems most of the advice we have received thus far is to wait until the next May update to see any reversal, if not, abandon ship.

Although that's a hard pill to swallow, i have become accustomed to the idea a bit more.

My question is this:

1. When moving content from my current domain to a new domain name that I buy, will google just recognize it as being content from the old domain? And spank me again?
2. If I do 301 redirects from the old to the new, or simply deindex the old, and republish on the new, without redirecting, would this make me be seen as a 'new fresh site'.

Thanks all for your input in advance.