Performance lecture: survival tactics

Abstract

This embodied presentations is a response to the relationship between archive and repertoire, researcher and performer. Investigating the shifting nature of live practice, this research takes new narratives from old forms, attends to the transgressive, subversive expressive aging and fleshy body that exceeds expectations of what ‘this’ particular dancing body should be doing and where she should be doing it, whilst developing live routes that push boundaries of presentation within conventional dance practice. This initiative demonstrates the relationship between fact and fiction, and ask the audience to consider a fresh approach to contextualising practice within a broad contemporary dance framework. 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? 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?