Survival Tactics
A live solo Performancce Lecture

Survival Tactics contextualises Professor Aggiss’ 30 years research practice within a performance lecture, fusing live, screen and text based work and asks the question: how does a mature post-modern solo female dancer originally from a bleak post war suburb in Essex, with a feverish commitment to the lost dances of Central Europe, a deep fascination with the dance past, and a rather ad hoc and irregular dance education, seek out the shadows from the past, stalk them relentlessly and embed and sustain herself within the British dance culture for the past 30 years?

Born on Nanny Goats Common, Dagenham, Essex, a post war baby in a repressive era in the suburbs, where parents were truly in charge and children were seen and not heard, Liz Aggiss never had a clue who she was or what she wanted to do, she just knew she would like to be seen and heard. After cantering into the sunset, as soon as was decently possible, she accidentally stumbled into the arts and started moving in a mysterious manner and shouting…rather a lot.

Using reconstruction, representation, demonstration, archive, fact and fiction, practice and theory, Survival Tactics pays homage to all factual and fictional mentors who have shaped, framed and informed practice and raises the question: where does a dance education begin and end and how does the artist secure a future within the current climate of British contemporary dance?

2009 Michaelis Theatre Roehampton University

2010 at British Dance Edition Birmingham, Rich Mix London, NRLA Glasgow


Reviews
Liz Aggiss is a performer worth seeing. Thankfully key examples of her work have been captured on film but this can’t compensate for the live experience of her peculiar expressionistic humour, which is often satirical, sometimes slapstick, and always surprising. Her work is routinely described as anarchic but this suggests disorder, and there is methodical clarity in both structure of her choreography and the comic timing of her own spoken expressiveness.


G r a h a m W a t t s / / w w w . b a l l e t . c o . u k 2009

National Review of Live Art

This, after a 30-year span, was the last National Review of Live Art. This final programme positively embraced the past: everyone in its lists had been here before. At every turn, history met itself. It could have been a cocktail of navel-gazing nostalgia. Instead, the five-day event emerged as a celebration of performance in all its shape-shifting aspects and a salute to artists who continue to be both an honest mirror and a probing searchlight in society worldwide. Liz Aggiss wowed us with her Survival Tactics, a bravura volley of agile mischief with ideas and limbs flying in brilliantly ridiculous directions.


Mary Brennan Glasgow Herald 23rd March 2100

British Dance Edition Birmingham

Liz Aggiss stood out for a number of reasons. Her practice rejects something which seems to be an unquestioned aspect of most other dance work I have seen, and embraces a humour which seems elsewhere to be missing. The thing she rejects is beauty for its own sake.

With this Performance Lecture, delivered through numerous costume changes, video homages to her dance mentors (real and imagined), amidst spoken sections and guerrilla dances which re-create ‘mercifully short’ dance works from the early twentieth century, Liz Aggiss rejects both superficial beauty and the gaze which consumes and cheapens. Instead she opts for the playful savagery of the true bouffon who embraces faults, failures and discordance, and whose aim is to make her audience laugh until they realize that they have been lying to themselves. With a litany of injuries, grimaces, awkward poses, alternating between self-aggrandisement and self-deprecation, she is pointing towards the hollowness of the work and the audience which seeks only beauty without truth – and to the true power of dance, to embody and communicate.


Ed Rapley Total Theatre Spring 2010 Vol. 22 Issue 01