“Who needs the Butterfly Effect when you’ve got me? – Godzilla of the performance art world!,” says Liz Aggiss in hilariously accurate self-mockery, of a Barbie doll in red evening gown, seared onto a toy globe. As the doll bends in the middle, the whole world moves up on the ends of her feet. This prop is one of many in Aggiss’ splendid performance lectures in which she, with humour and incisiveness, outlined the essence of her craft. Talking about framing, seeing in 2 and 3 dimensions, special effects (“neither special nor effective”), live and screen presence, Liz Aggiss “gave people the license to think sideways in the context of the conference.” Performer/choreographer/film maker, and long time citizen of Brighton, Aggiss has stamped an indelible mark on the local and international dance film scenes. Together with composer and co-director Billy Cowie she makes fiercely idiosyncratic dance-based work for live performance, film and multi-media.
Aggiss and Cowie’s work has always had an overtly theatrical tone, and a forceful punk aesthetic which reaches out and grabs you. Making her name in the mid 1980’s with the solo “Grotesque Dancer,” Aggiss became labelled as an Expressionist, for the hyper drama and the forcefully brutal yet elegant aesthetic in her work. “I see the grotesque as quite a beautiful aesthetic, but the critics and audiences were horrified. Women in 1986 weren’t looking or behaving like that.” And the reaction was a misnomer – blinded by the heartfelt urgency, the immodest truthfulness, and the references to German or Central European culture, the label misses the buoyant and volatile absurdity and humour (perhaps Britishness) equally at the heart of her work and the personas she creates. As the partnership of Cowie and Aggiss has progressed, the work has become refined, simplified, abstracted, and the essential elements enrichened. And their work for the screen is a natural progression, maintaining and playfully exploring the qualities in the work. “Our language was always quite intimate on stage, quite direct with the audience, and the camera is a powerful way to enhance those ideas. It’s not about doing something in front of a camera, but about forming a relationship with it. The camera also has a presence – as confidante, voyeur, observer …,” Aggiss explained.
In “Motion Control” (made under UK Channel 4’s Capture scheme) this notion is most vivid – with a vicious, hungry, compulsive and competitive relationship developing between a glammed up Aggiss, fixed to the spot in nameless, enclosed space, and the camera, diving and circling around her. The camera lunges at speed towards the centre of her body like a ravenous carnivorous plant, and Aggiss battles back against it with all the wiles of a performer, luring its look deep into her eyes, flashing her teeth and twisting her body as she approaches and recedes. This is the archetypal power struggle between the looker and the looked upon. They are well matched. 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 willfully as she can. The film is a superb abstraction and exploration of qualities at the heart of Cowie and Aggiss’ work. It speaks of performativity, of human “packaging,” of the essential loneliness and impotence, yet ferocious colour and drive of embodied existence. It speaks of hunger, ambition, fury and silliness.
With uncomplicated ingredients – one performer, tight sets (a plastic coated white room, a gothic Victorian bedroom), a fixed body and a roving eye (the camera) – the relationship between body and camera is revealed in colour and depth. Speaking of her and Cowie’s work to develop a “texture” on screen, Aggiss explained how they also use sound to support this. “‘Motion Control’ blends sounds of the camera, my ambient sound of the movement, my body sound and music into a massive aural scape alongside a textural, dramatic visuality.”