Liz Aggiss

6. Say what you have to say and then stop. If you have nothing to say don’t even start.

In her review, Dorothy Max Prior described the show as 'a marriage of choreography and scenography. Live art. Moving sculpture....Clothing isn’t merely decorative, it changes the body’s movement, it informs the choreography. Often, the performer’s body is deconstructed or distorted or extended by what she is wearing: a black penitent’s shroud covers her head, but exposes her legs, making her look like a mini-skirted Klu-Klux-Klan member; an enormous metal claw with excessively long fingers weaves through the air, both menacing and mesmeric (referencing Kay Lynn’s Finger Dance); her Max Wall bulging bottom channels the Bouffon, looking down at the world and laughing. At times, she seems to be almost puppeteering herself in a complex animation of body and object or clothing.' The costumes were made by Holly Murray, who has worked on every Aggiss show since 2000.

Laura Irvine called Slap and Tickle 'a wilfully raucous, often unnerving meditation on the reductive labels that limit the development and growth of girls. It’s also an impassioned plea for visibility, a space for recognising the sexuality and agency of older women.'. Mary Brennan described it as a 'glorious broadside against the social mores that pigeon-hole women of all ages....The hilarious tickle never undermines the serious slap in this solo.'. For Lyn Gardner, the show was a 'pointed and bawdily funny exploration of what it means to refuse to act your age' Sarah Kent argued that the piece was 'more personal, more pertinent and far more potent' than The English Channel.

Head in My Bag (2019) was a commission for Dance Six-O, the elder performance company. It was a piece which 'dumps age centre stage and kicks preconceptions into the long grass....Her performers, with handbags on their heads, become a radical army of spirited individuals calling for the overturn of institutional myopia.'

In a 2018 interview, Aggiss described her motivation for making new stage shows: 'I'd been making a lot of films and then I thought, I want to go back on the stage. I want to be the visible older woman. I want to reclaim the stage space for the older woman.'

Slap and Tickle was structured in three acts, 'using a visual and aural collage of movement, text, props, costumes (Holly Murray), sound (Joe Murray) and cover versions (Alan Boorman/Wevie)'. The first act explored the world of the girl-child and 'the insidious nature of the fairy tales and nursery rhymes than reify societal mores'. Referencing Cinderella, Aggiss wore silver slippers and a gorgeous old-gold party dress.' The second act, on the adult woman, began with her wearing 'a chic New Vogue black-and-white dress, striking high fashion poses' and ended with 'a genuinely disturbing turn with a misshapen puppet, which Aggiss dangles from a noose over her shoulder as she describes the journey of a woman who experiences pregnancy, abortion, childbirth and bad motherhood.' The third act, on the older woman, ended with her 'crawling on all fours to ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, bare-arsed with a pony tail waving over her bum, a faint sly smile playing over her lips.'. Dorothy Max Prior described the ending as 'a fabulous moment of emancipation and celebration of the older female body.'

Dorothy Max Prior, in a 2017 interview with Aggiss, looked at the connection between her film and live work: 'Whether live or on film, creating moving pictures is at the heart of the work. Big, bold pictures. ’I don’t have an ounce of lyricism in me' she says, explaining why she turned to kohl-eyed, grotesquely-costumed Expressionism at a time (the 1980s) when most other contemporary dancers were dressed in grey sweatpants and exploring Somatic Practice or Contact Improvisation. ‘I’ve always hated jumping and rolling on the floor’ she says ‘I like the jarring, the angular, the distorted...I like to make a stop-frame animation live performance.'

Slap and Tickle toured internationally, and won the 2017 Total Theatre award at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Aggiss followed The English Channel in 2016 with Slap and Tickle, a dark and disturbing piece on the forces that shape and constrain female lives, from childhood to old age. In an interview she described it as 'a show of opposites; slap and tickle, punishment reward, push and pull' Aggiss alternately 'slapped' the audience, taking them into dark areas, and then 'tickled' them with comic material ('Come on everybody! Let’s have a party!')

In 2016, Aggiss made a third show for MapDance, History Repeating..., which reconstructed Bounce Dance from Grotesque Dancer, Hilde Holger's Die Forelle (The Trout) and Wilson Keppel and Betty's Sand Dance.

Aggiss's second work for MapDance, Cut with the Kitchen Knife (2014), referenced the photomontages of Hannah Hoch, the stop frame animations of Edweard Muybridge, Gertrud Bodenwieser's Demon Machine, and the 1933 Hollywood musical Roman Scandals. Aggiss described the show: 'A troupe of oddball performers is hell-bent on recovering bodies from the library....This performance pays homage to past dance artists of the past, drags them into the present and reflects on the challenges still facing contemporary dance audiences.'

For Nora Invites (Eleanor Sikorski and Flora Wellesley Wesley), in 2014, Aggiss created Bloody Nora! which Sarah Veale described as 'a smart and searing send-up of the infuriating 'Is it that time of the month?' questions so often levied at women who dare express an impassioned opinion.'

Like Grotesque Dancer, Divas drew a hostile reaction from mainstream dance critics. John Percival in The Times, wrote, 'Liz Aggiss...has thought up a perfectly ripping wheeze of getting five of her chums...to perform in a group called Divas. They have already mastered – no that is too sexist a word for a group of young ladies – they have acquired such advanced performance skills as walking on and off stage.' Mary Clarke in The Guardian described the performers as 'determinedly ugly in dress and in movement...as untrained as they are unattractive.'

Motion Control features 'a glammed up Aggiss, fixed to the spot in nameless, enclosed space, and the camera diving and circling around here. The camera lunges at speed towards the centre of her body like a ravenous carniverous plant, and Aggiss battles against it with all the wiles of a performer....Playing out basic issues of feminist understanding – this woman is limited in movement, trapped in her physical body, a figure of constructed glamour and limitless fascination, but bursting with energy and self-assertion, playing the game as hard and wilfuly as she can.'

Aggiss's next stage show, The English Channel was a reflection on mortality, created in 2013 in response to reaching the age of 60. It opened with Aggiss 'shrouded in a black cape and dancing with a skull perched atop her head....The skull, cradled like a baby and placed gently onstage, becomes witness to everything that follows.'

In 2011, Aggiss and Murray made Beach Party Animal, combining footage of real Brighton beach life with staged Guerilla style interventions. Dorothy Max Prior in Total Theatre described the film as 'a very artful and cunning mix of staged set-pieces and real-life action, so deftly edited that unless you are in the know and spot the performers, it is hard to distinguish the plants from the real-live city folk.... in tandem with Joe Murray, she moves away from Expressionism into a crisper and sharper Hyperrealism. Aggiss and Murray apparently spent many, many weeks filming on Brighton beach at all hours of the day and night. Hours and hours of footage are distilled down into a 20-minute film that is an homage to the city that never sleeps (unless it’s face down on a sodden handbag, or comatose and sun-bleached like a beached whale on the pebbles).'

Aggiss returned to the stage in 2010 with a full length performance lecture, Survival Tactics, originally called Survival Tactics for the Anarchic Dancer. In 'a refreshingly unabashed 'this is my life' she paid homage to herself and to her factual and fictional mentors, from Max Wall to Marjorie Irvine. The lecture brought together her Guerilla dances with earlier works, including Heidi Djinkowska's dance commandments from Hi Jinx and the 'my my' section of Absurditties. Mary Brennan reviewed a performance at the National Review of Live Art: 'Liz Aggiss wowed us with her Survival Tactics, a bravura volley of agile mischief with ideas and limbs flying in brilliantly ridiculous directions.'

Aggiss continued to make films, now working with the filmmaker Joe Murray. Their first film was Diva (2009), in which Aggiss played a jaded diva, performing a reconstruction of a 1927 dance in St Nicholas's churchyard, Brighton. it was shown on Channel 4 in the UK, ArteTV in France and Germany, and ABC in Australia.

Aggiss's first solo work following the split with Cowie was Guerilla Dances, performed in 2008-9 at dance festivals. This was a set of 18 short sharp dance 'reconstructions' of European Ausdruckstanz solo performances from between 1917 – 1945. Artists reconstructed included Hilde Holger, Mary Wigman, Valeska Gert, Dore Hoyer, Bronislava Nijinska and Isi-te-Jeu. Some of the dances, such as Hilde Holger's were genuine reconstructions, while others mixed fact with fiction, or were wholly invented. For Mary Wigman's 1920 Lament for the Dead No.2, Aggiss, wearing a long black gown, slowly revolved to reveal her bare buttocks.

Alongside her own shows, Aggiss has written, choreographed and directed work for other companies. In 2008, she made Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage for MapDance, the University of Chichester's student company. It featured a chorus line-up of dancers and paid 'homage to early twentieth-century dance in its styling and aesthetic...maintaining the syncopation of a classic showgirl line-up.'

In 2006, Routledge published Anarchic Dance, an academic retrospective of Aggiss and Cowie's twenty-five year collaboration, which they edited with Ian Bramley. It included essays by Aggiss, Cowie, Donald Hutera, Sondra Fraleigh, Sherril Dodds, Claudia Kappenberg, Marion Kant, Valeria A.Briginshaw, Deborah Levy and Carol Brown. The essays discussed Divas' work 'in terms of feminism, hybridity, Expressionism, the "grotesque", abstraction and narrative, linguistic play and (addressed) the multiple and playful textures that define it: sound, space, shape, language.' The book also included a DVD of their works.

Aggiss and Cowie's final collaboration was Men in the Wall (2003), a 3D film installation piece which premiered at the ICA. It comprised 'four square holes cut into a wall each containing a man – projected life size or a little bigger – of cutely exaggerated different nationalities. In over-the-top German accent Thomas Kampe rants and rails, munches on a sausage and sweetly sings. Sebastian Gonzales recalls beloved Spanish customs with tension and flair, Anglo-Asian Jeddi Bassan wimpers and pompously prattles while American Scott Smith is casual and crumpled – a soft and sensitive post-beatnik. Changing background scenery places the men in different settings....Affected by the 3D imaging, the wall becomes a fragile, vulnerable mid-space, in which the men are locked between the viewer and the distant background scenery.'

in 2001, Aggiss performed the piece at an academic symposium on the legacy of Tanztheater at the University of Surrey. Philip Beaven, in his report on the symposium, confessed, 'It took me a while to realise that this was a beautifully fabricated parody of our desire to create icons from the past (complete with original film clips from 1904!)'

The original Wild Wigglers were Liz Aggiss, Ian Smith and Eva Zambicki. Later members were Jane Bassett, Neil Butler, Billy Cowie, Ralf Higgins, Simon Hedger and Patrick Lee. In 1999, Aggiss, Smith and Butler reunited to perform the act once more in Brighton's Zap club, where the Wigglers originally premiered.

The show was reconstructed at the Purcell Room on London's South Bank, on 9 April 1999, with live musical accompaniment from Cowie (piano) and Gerard McChrystal (saxophone).

Absurditties, first performed at the Zap in 1994, was described by Aggiss as 'stand-up dance'. She performed alone on stage without lighting, music or special effects. It was a piece 'about language about the playfulness of words....(comprising) 11 short scenes of grammatical curiosities.' The piece opened with Aggiss, in a silver minidress, saying the word 'my' 79 times in different ways. It was also a comic striptease, in which Aggiss, punning on 'bear' and 'bare', removed a series of pairs of knickers, each time revealing another pair underneath. Deborah Levy wrote that 'Cowie's extremely skilled text works with Aggiss's dynamic performing presence with complete synergy; in fact, Absurditties is a small masterpiece that resonates long after the show has finished.'

In May 1994, Aggiss won a commissioning award from the Bonnie Bird choreography fund. Aggiss and Cowie used this to create Hi Jinx (1995), a dance lecture performance about Heidi Dzinkowska, an invented choreographer, inspired by Hilde Holger.

Aggiss and Cowie began to work in film in 1994, with Beethoven in Love, shown on BBC2, in which Aggiss played a 'granite jawed singer who is both muse and demon, seducer and Tormentor to Ludwig Van (Tommy Bayley).' In 2002, they made the multi-award winning Motion Control, shown on BBC2, Anarchic Variations which premiered at the Place in London, and Scripted to Within an Inch of Her Life, a live performance and four-screen installation deconstruction of Motion Control, which premiered at Kettles Yard, Cambridge, in 2004.

Aggiss's 40th birthday in 1993 inspired her first work on the theme of the ageing fleshy body. Commissioned by the Gardner Arts Centre, Falling Apart at the Seams featured a duet for Aggiss and opera singer Naomi Itami. The writer/comedienne Louise Rennison co-directed and the artist Gary Goodman painted cardboard cut-out costumes and set. Billy Cowie provided the poetic text, on topics such as falling apart, dead friends, ageing and babies. Judith Mackrell in The Independent wrote, 'Gaunt faced and neurotic limbed, Aggiss parodies her own long-term fascination with the dark and grotesque. She is a woman afraid of ageing, obsessed with disintegration and pain, while Itami, smooth-skinned, practical and at ease, winds her up with some funny and often painfully personal cracks about her vanity and artistic insecurity.'

Following Grotesque Dancer Aggiss was introduced to Hilde Holger, the Viennese expressionist dancer who, then in her 80s, was still teaching dance in a Camden basement. Aggiss studied with Holger until the latter's death in 2001, and later said, 'Meeting her was like coming home.' In 1992, Holger revived four dances for Aggiss from her repertoire: Die Forelle (The Trout) (1923), Le Martyre de San Sebastien (1923), Mechaniches Ballett (1926) and Golem (1937). These were first performed, as Vier Tanze, at the Manchester Festival of Expressionism on 29 February 1992. Sophie Constanti wrote that 'Together all four pieces danced with great sensitivity and aplomb by Aggiss accompanied by Cowie on piano provided a fascinating insight into the lost Ausdruckstanz of central Europe.'

In July 1992, three days before a sold-out performance of Vier Tanze at the ICA, Aggiss broke her Achilles tendon. Her leg was in plaster for six months, and she was unable to walk properly for a further six. With her leg in plaster, Aggiss performed Cafeteria for a Sit Down Meal, at the Zap on 6 November 1992. Remaining seated throughout, she played the role of 'the world's greatest classical pianist going through his daily dysfunctional functions.' The piece had 'shades of Hilde in the choreographic vocabulary and the make-up.'

Commissioned by Zap Arts, Drool and Drivel They Care! (1990) was a satirical portrait of Margaret Thatcher, using phrases, such as 'This government keeps its promises' from her speeches and interviews. The title was from a 1987 interview with David Dimbleby, in which the Prime Minister criticised people who 'just drool and drivel they care.' Aggiss and four dancers, one male, performed as five Thatchers, dressed identically in twin-sets, pearls, handbags and wigs. For Moaning Minnes, two of the Thatchers performed en pointe a choreographed rubbish distribution and collection scheme, inspired by a Thatcher photo opportunity where she picked up litter which had been deliberately scattered before her arrival. The work premiered on 22 November 1990, the very evening Thatcher resigned. The final section was 'swiftly reworked with a wall of Maggies transforming into five John Majors still intoning relentlessly from Thatcher's speeches.' The show was then taken to France, where it was reviewed by Sylvie Sueron: 'Margaret Thatcher is minced up; her gestures, her sayings are deconstructed in self contained sections....Five dancers in strict suits and black stillettos bring to life the authentic stroboscopic qualities of a grating English prime minister.'

In the original student production the dancers wore the white vests and black knickers of school gym classes. In the second production, by Divas, they were dressed in red lederhosen. Parts of Die Orchidee appeared in a 1989 corporate film about Canon photocopiers, co-starring Rik Mayall in green lederhosen. In 1990, the Divas show toured to Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, where a reviewer wrote that 'Liz Aggiss, the post modern primadonna from Brighton puts her finger exactly on the nerve of the spirit of the times with her androgynous show Die Orchidee a send up of the rigid thoroughness of German bourgeois values.' The piece was reconstructed in 1999 at the Purcell Room London, with four male dancers and Aggiss, as school 'mistress', in power suit, stockings and stilettos, carrying a cane.

In 1989, Aggiss and Cowie began working with the Brighton based Carousel Dance Company (known as High Spin from 1993) in which the majority of performers had learning disabilities. They created Banda Banda, which was performed at the ICA in London in December 1989, and went on to win the 1990 Time Out/Dance Umbrella Award. Annette Stapleton described Banda Banda as 'a challenging, lively, original and entertaining performance.' Aggiss and Cowie created three more shows with the company: La Soupe (1990), The Surgeon's Waltz (2000) and Rice Rain (2001).

In 1988, Aggiss and Cowie created Die Orchidee im Plastik Karton, premiered by 13 dance students at the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education (now University College Chichester), and later performed by Divas, at the Zap in 1989. It took the form of a German language lesson, in which gender-based phrases, spoken by a sampled female voice, revealed sexism in the language and the patriarchal nature of the culture. The phrases included 'InterCity is the train for men,' and 'The orchid in the plastic carton is the flower for ladies' Julia Pascal in her Guardian review wrote that 'Movement is staccato, grotesque and funny. Dann Geht sie Einkaufen – Hausfrau und Mutter (then she goes shopping housewife and mother) is a woman in a crab position walking backwards and forwards on palms and feet; the endless repetitive work action delivered dead pan was answered with female laughs of recognition.'

Aggiss and Cowie's first commission for another company was Dead Steps, made in 1988 for London's Extemporary Dance Theatre. This was a bridal dance performed, on the front apron of the stage, by seven androgenous brides dressed in slate grey satin, who become 'a nightmare anarchic anti-chorus line.' Allen Robertson in Time Out wrote, 'Your response to the bitter, bizarre bridal dance ‘Dead Steps’ will depend on your tolerance for deliberately ugly cabaret pastiche with an S&M undercurrent. Alienation and humilation are Aggiss’ watchwords. Clad in metallic floor length gowns with kohl eyes, white faces and mouths like red scars, the dancers perform either in unison distortions or anti-erotic displays of the flesh. It’s a sometimes fascinating, ultimately dissatisfying work, and not nearly as powerful as Aggiss’s’ solo Grotesque Dancer

In 1986, Brighton's Zap Arts commissioned Aggiss and Cowie to create a solo piece to be performed in the single arch of the Zap Club. The work Grotesque Dancer was inspired by Aggiss's discovery of Valeska Gert, the most extreme and subversive of the German expressionist dancers. Wearing the uniform of a German gymnast, Aggiss, in a single spotlight, performed a series of short expressionist vignettes accompanied by cabaret-style songs, instrumentals and poems.

In 1986, Aggiss and Cowie created a dance company, Divas, originally all women without formal dance training. Aggiss later said, 'We were always interested in working with performers with personality. In our auditions we interviewed people to find out what they were like. That was what came out on stage. In our first performance, one dancer was pregnant. If you wore glasses normally, you wore them on stage as well.' For dancers, the Divas had what critics described as 'non-standard bodies', causing Aggiss to ask, 'But what is a standard body?'

Divas' first piece wasTorei en Vern Veta Arnold!, which premiered at the Chisenhale Dance Space London on 4 October 1986. In the show, eight dancers, in suits and high heels, used pedestrian, habitual and repetitive gestures. Looking back in 1993, Sophie Constanti described Divas as a 'crew of besuited, stiletto wearing Brighton women, whose otherwise unconventional appearance was intensified by the scowling, hard-edge non-conformity of Aggiss’s brand of movement theatre.' Constanti also reviewed the show at the time: 'Jaunty, hypnotic, silently provocative and defiant, Divas are a refreshing assault on mainstream dance.'

From 1982 to 2003, Aggiss collaborated with the composer, writer and choreographer, Billy Cowie, making live shows and films under the name Divas Dance Theatre. After their partnership ended, due to artistic differences, she made a series of films and solo live works, Survival Tactics for the Anarchic Dancer, The English Channel, Slap and Tickle and Crone Alone.

On her return to the UK in 1982, Aggiss began to teach visual performance at the University of Brighton (then Brighton Polytechnic). Here she met the Scottish composer and writer Billy Cowie, a fellow teacher. They began working together in order to get the student dancers to collaborate with the musicians. 'When the dancers didn't know how to, Liz got up and showed them. Billy directed from the sidelines.' In their book, Anarchic Dance, Aggiss and Cowie described how they worked together: 'All our work is truly collaborative....After the first few productions, whichever of us was feeling most inspired would take up the choreographic baton and run with it until we were floored by the other's barbed, critical and caustic comments. Latterly we pragmatically sliced up the works into manageable chunks and negotiated who would do which aspects of the 'steps' as we like to call them. Strangely the Yin/Yang combination of Aggiss, the 'stand up dancer' who can actually perform the movements, and Cowie the 'armchair choreographer' who can only dream them, works surprisingly well.'

In 1982, Aggiss and Cowie created The Wild Wigglers, a cabaret act inspired by the punk pogo dance and Wilson, Keppel and Betty's Sand Dance. Three dancers, wearing spiralling yellow and black leotards and tall pointy hats, performed a twenty-minute set of short visually connected dances: 'These simple animated gestures – hopping, jumping, scuttling, rummaging, blobbing, slugging – were grasped and choreographically 'worried to death' in succinct three-minute visual performance wonders'. Two Wild Wiggler dances, Weird Wiggle and Hop on Pops, can be seen on YouTube.

From 1982 to 2000, Aggiss taught visual performance at the University of Brighton. The course produced several 'fascinating independent artists', including Ian Smith, Louise Rennison, Ralf D'Arcy Higgins, Virginia Farman, Marisa Carnesky and Miriam King, who all performed in Aggiss and Cowie's shows, and Anne Seagrave, Lizzy Le Quesne, Silke Mansholt, Michael Pinsky, Nikki Ward, Esther Rollinson, Miranda Henderson, Marc Rees, George Chakravarthi, Chris Umney and Magali Charrier. After 2000, she switched to research at the same institution. Yet she continues to teach, offering 'Mistress classes, workshops and residencies.'

Aggiss's first experience of dance was in 1970, when she studied Rudolph von Laban's modern educational dance in the UK. After a teacher training course in Keele, she 'had various jobs teaching PE teachers how to teach dance.' In 1980, she went to New York to study contemporary dance. After a summer ‘studio hopping’ from Graham to Cunningham to whatever else she fancied' she found the Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Theatre Lab, where she felt she belonged. Until 1982, Aggiss trained with the Lab's lead teacher, the German expressionist Hanya Holm, in New York and in Colorado Springs. Back in the UK, Aggiss studied eccentric dance with Joan and Barry Grantham, 'possibly the last remaining living link with the early twentieth century UK Music Hall and Variety world.'

Liz Aggiss (born 28 May 1953) is a British live artist, dance performer, choreographer and film maker. Her work is inspired by early 20th century Ausdruckstanz (Expressionist dance), in particular the Grotesque dance of Valeska Gert, and by British Music Hall and Variety acts such as the eccentric dance performers, Max Wall and Wilson, Keppel and Betty. She is often described as the 'grand dame of anarchic dance'.

The three parts were interspersed with audience games of pass-the-parcel and balloon twisting, overseen by the voice of a 1950s BBC Listen with Mother radio announcer, voiced by Emma Kilbey.