liz aggiss is a Brighton based performer, choreographer, film-maker, writer, artiste and Professor of Visual Performance at the University of Brighton . She makes live performances, dance films and screen dance installations. From cabaret, vaudeville, opera, live art, dance theatre, her work is eclectic, borrowing from a range of performance styles and is inherently cross-genre, unclassifiable, dodging categorization. Existing on both stage and screen it blurs the boundaries between high art and popular culture. In 1994 she received the Bonnie Bird Choreography Award and in 2003 an Arts Council Dance Fellowship Award.

She collaborated from 1980 to 2006 with Billy Cowie creating over thirty live works commissioned by The Zap, Gardner Arts Centre Brighton, University of Surrey and The South Bank, and toured nationally and internationally as a solo artist and with her company Divas Dance Theatre. From 2007 liz aggiss will be making new work independently including a dance for radio, and a new solo live show.

The work has been driven by content and explored body politics, commentaries on language and wordplay, age, death, power, post feminist aesthetics and the artifice of performance. It has been described as; expressionistic, uncompromising, funny, challenging, absurd Dadaist dance, entertaining, provocative and characterized by a trademark grotesque, stylized performance vocabulary. liz has been described as the Vivienne Westwood of the dance film world, fearless, satirical, funny, powerfully disturbing, dominant and yet vulnerable.

She has guested with British experimental company Lumiere & Son in a reconstruction of The Blue Duck , in Performing Clothes (Gale, Morris, Bergese) and Off The Rails (Tarascas, Rubin), created commissioned work for Extemporary, Intoto and Transitions Dance Companies, worked with special needs dance groups High Spin and Carousel, sat on national, regional, local committees and advisory panels, been Artist in Residence at the Duncan Centre Prague and L'Opera Montpellier France, spoken at conferences and debates, written for magazines including Dance Theatre Journal and Animated, appeared on Children's TV, corporate videos, Radio 4, performed on the alternative cabaret circuit, and toured rock stadiums supporting The Stranglers with her dance trio The Wild Wigglers .

In 1986, together with collaborator Cowie, she choreographed and performed Grotesque Dancer . This visually arresting solo work raised the debate on feminist work, polarised critics and became their successful signature piece, written about as an important contribution to UK contemporary dance history in the publications Dancers Sylphs and Sirens by Christy Adair and Dance Space and Subjectivity by Valerie Briginshaw.

She created with Cowie many successful solo and group works which toured and exhibited throughout the UK and worldwide at major art galleries, theatres, dance, film and performance festivals including: Brighton, National Review of Live Art Glasgow, New Moves Nottingham, Woking Dance Umbrella, New Art Gallery Walsall, Baltic Gallery Gateshead, ICA etc and was supported internationally by The British Council at Bagnolet Paris, Eurodanse, Budapest, Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Prague, Canada, Holland, Sweden, Russia.

Her commissioned screen dance work with Cowie includes for the BBC Dance for Camera Awards Motion Control (2000) and Beethoven in Love (1994), for the Arts Council of England and Capture Award, Anarchic Variations (2002) and for Channel 4 Dance4 season Break (2005). Her screen dance installations for the Arts Council of England and Capture Award includes: Men in the Wall (2003) and Doppelganger (2004). The screen dance work has received numerous international awards including: for Motion Control the Czech Crystal Prague Golden Film Festival (2002), Honourable Mention Paula Citron Award Toronto 2002, Special Jury Golden Award Houston (2003) and Best Woman Film Media Waves Hungary (2003): and for Anarchic Variations The Romanian National Office of Cinematography Award (2003) and the Special Jury Mention "Il Coreografo Elettronico-2004" at Napolidanza 2004.

Aggiss and Cowie's book Anarchic Dance published 2006 by Routledge for Taylor and Francis, comprises a book and three hour DVD-Rom that is a visual and textual record of the live and screen dance work.

Reference Material
See list of reference material