Are there any – girls – in the house? Any good little girls? Any poppets, any princesses, any little angels? Or are there any naughty girls out there? Any tittle-tattles or trouble-makers? Well, whoever you are, all of you – let’s have a party! Mrs Mills, that’s what we need. Mrs Mills tinkling the old ivories. Let’s All Go Down the Strand (have a banana). Oh what fun we had!

Are there any – women –in the house? Any foxy ladies? Any b-itches? Any yummy mummies? Any pishy old Susans with trouble downstairs? (Jump, Motherfucker, Jump).

In her previous show, The English Channel, Liz Aggiss asked: Do I please you, or do I please myself? In Slap and Tickle, she doesn’t even bother asking the question, seeking our permission, she just goes for it, doing exactly what she wants, digging deeper into the exploration of her own place in the world as a mature female dancer, and along the way poking and prodding the memes and mores of the stifling post-war British culture that both formed her, and gave her plenty to rebel against. Housewife’s Choice. Listen With Mother. Janet and John. Doris Day.

Slap and Tickle is in three acts, these punctuated with audience participation party games (pass the parcel, and a manic balloon twisting interlude with the voice of Emma Kilbey urging us to spank and bite the balloons) that give her time to change from one extraordinary costume to another. In Act One, her Cinderella phase, she is in silver slippers and a gorgeous old-gold party dress, with a vest and breeches underneath that would do Buttons proud. Act Two sees her resplendent in a dramatic remodelling of the figure-hugging ‘little black dress’ that every grown woman ought to have in her wardrobe.  By Act Three, she’s in a red dress and no knickers, sporting a magnificent horse’s tail (platinum blonde to match her hair) that dances enticingly from her bare bottom as she struts and prances around the stage. Now tell me, is this any way for a woman in her 60s to behave?

The movement work makes use of a vocabulary that will be familiar to Aggiss aficionados. The intense, graphic shapes of early Modernist dance, the old-gold fabric extending and whirling around her a la Loie Fuller. The grotesque body distortions of German Expressionism, Hilde Holger channelled with beautiful precision. The clever (and very funny) play on concealing and revealing the body through costume, which here includes numerous unnerving and/or hilarious headless vignettes, and a marvellous moment in the red dress section when it gets pulled over her head leaving just a Burka-like slit for her eyes. Object play has it’s day, and a lot of it is pretty saucy. Ping pong balls and coins tumble from her nether regions. Cock bunting is unfurled. And there’s ventriloquism of the Ken Campbell variety (i.e. so bad it’s good), as she addresses a battered china doll with the question: What are you afraid of?

There are a lot of words: sharp, sassy spoken words that subvert and ridicule the constant naming and shaming that girls and women endure all through their lives, words that mock the platitudes that keep us under the patriarchal thumb; and sung words, as tunes such as Doris Day’s Que Sera Sera, and Ian Dury’s Reasons to Be Cheerful are deconstructed and reclaimed as (post) feminist anthems. Elsewhere, Doris Day herself also features in the soundtrack, singing A Woman’s Touch, which gives our Liz the opportunity to do a bit of stage cleaning with her trusty cock duster.

It is all totally marvellous – Slap and Tickle feels in some ways like a companion piece to The English Channel, but it also feels like a bringing together of themes, motifs and ideas from many earlier works; a referencing and re-engaging with a fantastic body of performance work by an artist who is going from strength to strength in her seventh decade.

Ultimately, this is a show about female visibility and self-determination. A fabulously funky show that on the 40th anniversary of punk reminds us that perhaps the best feminist rallying cry of all time was Oh Bondage, Up Yours. There’s a place for calm, rational argument – but this isn’t that place. This is a brash and blowsy women’s room with obscenities scrawled on the mirrors in red lipstick, discarded knickers on the floor, and a virtual strap-on waiting to be harnessed. Look John Look / See John See / Janet found her cock / Eventually.

Slideshow is Laurie Anderson on speed. I’ve seen her many times before. I’ve seen the mostly music shows, and I’ve seen the mostly storytelling with some music shows. But this is something else.

Laurie starts, as is her wont, by walking on with her customised electric violin and playing. But on this occasion, it is a short piece, and one of only very few musical interludes in the evening.

As she starts to speak, she is in an oddly naturalistic mode, chatting to us in an informal way, at a pretty fast speed, which is very different to her usual slow and measured performance mode. She tells us that she considered using this occasion to do her first-ever stand-up comedy show, her Plan A, but decided that wasn’t such a good idea as she only knows two jokes. She tells us one of them – and it’s one I’ve heard numerous times before, as it is from Homeland. An elderly couple who can’t stand the sight of each other finally divorce when in their 90s, and people say: Why did you wait so long? Well, they said, we wanted to wait until the children died. Told in a straight-up way, as a stand-up joke, it is has less impact than when delivered in the slow, deep, menacing voice you can hear on Another Day in America, but still – we laughed.

The new, perky, fast-paced Laurie continues at breakneck speed through a phenomenal number of stories. They tumble out of her, as the slides change on the back wall.

A sense of place is what this show is about. Place and places. We race around the world, and occasionally even further afield. There’s Elsinore, in Denmark, where she encounters an ominous sense of unease, and where all her equipment has technical problems, parking a reflection on the need to always have a Plan B. Images of the Egyptian pyramids go with a story of being a teacher who forgets the facts and starts to make things up. See those slits in the pyramids? They are where the sun shines in on one day a year and wakes up the mummies. A picture of Mars pops up, created not by cameras but by transposing into image sound waves bounced from the planet’s surface. There are images of space rockets that accompany a section on her time spent as artist-in-residence at NASA, where she ultimately shied away from creating some sort of technological art-sci piece and instead decided to write a poem (for those of us who saw the show that came out of that residency, we remember that it was a very beautiful poem, delivered on a stage lit by hundreds of tiny nightlights).

There’s a quaint and lovely section using what she calls a ‘pillow speaker’ in her mouth, which enables her to sing like a violin or roar like a lion; and a story of the thing getting glued onto the roof of her mouth. Yep, this is a comedy show, no doubt about it.

A riff on Aristophanes’ The Birds that she has linked in to a reflection on Donald Trump and his Mexican wall doesn’t quite work. She’s racing through it, and she ends up saying ‘go read the play for yourselves.’ Time for joke two, which is about the crucifixion – always good for a laugh. She carries this one off well.

There’s then a shift in mood and tone as we have two pre-existing pieces, familiar from last year’s Brighton Festival show and/or from the film Heart of a Dog; these presented in her hypnotic ‘poet’ voice rather than this new breakneck speed ‘stand-up comedian’ persona. A spine-chilling tale of broken ice and almost-drowned babies; and the marvellous section from the film about a childhood accident that left her in hospital for months, with a fear that she would never walk again. In both these stories, the interplay between her voice, the music, and the moving image, is totally magical.

Following another soulful violin section, played to a projection of trees in the snow, there’s another flurry of places and stories, all of which are unfamiliar to me, so possibly new material, all highly entertaining. A reflection on Thorreau’s Walden Pond (he had a cabin to hole himself up in, but it was close enough to his family house to enable him to nip over for some milk and cookies when he felt the need); a musing on the delights of London’s legendary Marks & Co bookshop (immortalised in 84 Charing Cross Road); a hilarious encounter of a Buddhist group trip down a river in Utah that tested every belief about tolerance and acceptance of other people that she held; and a great story about spending time in an Amish family who were consumed with silent rage and resentment.

A large chunk at the end of the show sees a shift again into lecturer mode, as she reports back on a major ongoing project, creating an installation that forges a direct link between a prison (or specifically, one prisoner) and a cultural centre, the most recent manifestation of which has seen her working with an ex-Guantanamo Bay prisoner called Mohammed (pictured with Laurie in the featured image, above).

The show ends, and we realise that somehow two hours have gone by in a flash. It’s difficult to give any sort of critical response to what has been witnessed. It’s a totally mixed bag of performance and lecture and, well yes – stand-up comedy. Some of it works brilliantly, some of it feels like she’s winging it, and it gets a bit messy. It is so different to her usual shows, which are scripted and honed and tweaked until they are perfectly ready for public consumption, that it is a complete surprise. On this occasion, she had notes scribbled on bits of paper; there were quite a lot of ‘ers’ and ‘ums’; and she sometimes encountered technical hitches whilst operating the slides (yes, she was alone on stage and seemed to be doing everything other than the lights herself).

We leave the auditorium with our heads reeling. So many images. So many words. So many ideas. It’ll take a long time to digest all this. I’m sure we will encounter a lot of the new material again, honed into other structures. I loved being witness to this Anderson mash-up. Look out comedy circuit, Laurie Anderson is on your case.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, and as flies they are struck down, one by one. The Richards and the Henries. Antony. Cleopatra. Romeo. Juliet. Lear. Macbeth. Hamlet. And the lesser people, them too. All of them. 23 stabbings, 12 sword fights, 5 poisonings, 12 suicides, 2 throats cut, 1 smothering, 3 natural causes, 4 deaths by wounds, 2 explosions, 2 heartbreaks, 3 mob killings, 2 beatings, 3 miscellaneous.

Oh, you’re thinking, you’re clever to have kept such a detailed tally. Not me, Tim Crouch. His catalogue is listed in the programme notes. ‘Filleting out’ the deaths was the first task he set himself as adaptor/director.

But someone is keeping a live score as well. It’s the nice lady in the neat sweater and secretarial spectacles, sat behind the table to the side of the stage. Ding! And another one bites the dust. Ding ding! Two more gone. End of round 4. The neon numbers clunk down. Gosh, we think at the start – 76! (That’s 75 onstage human deaths plus one black ill favour’d fly from Titus Andronicus.)

Spymonkey’s ‘pompous pedagogue’ Toby Park warns us at the start that we are only getting the onstage deaths. So no Mercutio (groan). No Lady Macbeth (gasp). And no Ophelia (boo). It’s a lively audience tonight. They fight back. Petra Massey is beside herself. She wants to be Ophelia. No Ophelia, Toby repeats. You can guess who gets her way, in the end. But yes – we will get all the onstage deaths, we are promised. Death will have his day.

How on earth will they fit them all in? It’s not a fair game. Some people get disposed of very quickly. Others linger at death’s door for ages. Antony’s death – by his own hand – is the longest in Shakespeare, we learn – 110 lines of it. Not that we get all of them.

Some deaths are big productions. A rollicking great Horse Meat Disco for Richard III. My kingdom for a horse, he cries – even one that looks like it’s escaped from a late-night Glastonbury turbo-rave, all gas masks and latex leggings.

Some deaths are spooky and unnerving: Petra in a nightie dragging a drip around with her, taking care of all the ‘natural causes’ in one fell swoop.

Some deaths are fabulously stupid Spymonkey set-pieces. A ‘Pina McBausch’ Macbeth in translucent kilts (choreographed by Theo Clinkard). And Cleopatra! Petra – of course, who else? – swathed in gold and jade-green lamé, unfurling her great butterfly wings, flapping around the stage with her three gentlemen friends dressed as asps undulating around her. Hats off to other choreographer Janine Fletcher for this truly eccentric dance sequence.

Some deaths come in job-lots. There’s fabulous fisticuffs between fat Spaniard Aitor Basauri (‘I’m not fat, I just look fat.’) and lanky Austrian Stephan Kreiss (‘We are all Kunst.’). Their endless combat becomes a running joke – they pop up hacking away at each other on-stage, off-stage, in the boxes, in the aisles – and as they tussle, another batch of deaths is notched up – 12 swordfights, remember.

The gore fest that is Titus Andronicus sees the clowns being fed one by one into a giant mincemeat machine. Cinna the poet (in Julius Caesar) is a poor wee papery puppet set on a table. The live-feed camera screens him super-sized. It hurts when he’s set on fire. Desdemona’s murder by husband Othello is performed as shadow theatre.

How many’s that, then? No idea, I’ve lost count. At first, I like the neon numbers and the dinging bell. Then they start to annoy me. Then I like them again. Here we all are, waiting for our number to come up. Gods, flies. Yep.

So where’s Tim Crouch in all this? He’s there in the framing, and the questioning, and the juxtaposing, and the stepping out of the action to reflect on the action. He’s there in the meticulous and clever words. More often than not, Toby is his vessel, channeling Crouch-ist reflections on the nature of art, theatre, death, whatever. The Tim Crouch influence is there in the stripped-back operating-theatre aesthetic of the stage set, in the stylised use of tables and microphones, and in the play between live and filmed action. There is a tension between the Crouch approach to theatre-making and the Spymonkey method, but it is a good tension, and it is put to use in the dramaturgy of the show.

Spymonkey seem to have really benefitted from the collaboration. Everyone is on great form, their clown selves doing justice to the challenges thrown them. Aitor in particular has a brilliant show – zipping between the clown set-pieces and a great running gag about his desire to be a proper Shakespearean actor, coached by both Toby and the Bard himself. (Stand with your legs apart! Point a lot! Roll your Rs! Spit!)  All the usual Spymonkey pluses: Toby’s brilliant multi-instrumental music, a deft mix of live and recorded; Lucy Bradbridge’s design skills, the marvellous and outrageously OTT set-piece costumes and props contrasting nicely with the minimalist set and monochrome costumes in other scenes.

It feels a little bit too long, flagging slightly here and there, but these are early days and it will no doubt bed in.

What’s great is how it manages to be simultaneously a fabulously funny clown romp, and a thought-provoking reflection on death’s place within art, and the near-impossibility of portraying death onstage. It is interesting that the one genuinely disturbing death is that of the puppet…

So here we are in the queue. Me and Ernie the pug, my doggie companion for the evening, plus his human, Eliza. Ernie makes great noises, almost like talking or singing, a kind of wild monkey-chatter yap. Next to us is Tati, a small and rather elderly lady doggie who stands with dignified poise as passing dogs sniff her bottom. A big-pawed spaniel puppy called Angus is with a human friend who has borrowed him for the evening. He’s pretty wriggly and excited by it all. We’re leafleted by a woman who is putting on an artists’ open house called The Dog Show – eleven artists showing dog-inspired art.

Behind us and in front of us are dogs of all shapes and sizes and colours. Quiet dogs and loud dogs. Jumpy dogs and sniffy dogs. Jittery dogs and calm dogs. As we file in to take our places in the tiered auditorium that is Brighton Open Air Theatre, I look around. Wow! So many dogs all together in one place. What an extraordinary thing. Someone is selling doggy treats. Owners are chatting about their dogs’ diets and habits. I overhear someone say that chihuahuas always have trouble with their teeth, so his dog has had her teeth removed.

There are interesting waves of sound. A bass note from a big dog who barks almost continuously; a mid-range mulch of intermittent barks; and peaking top notes provided by the yaps and barks of all the smaller dogs. Sometimes there’s a lull and sometimes a bark is picked up on and a chorus of barks builds. The twilight bark and then some. It’s great – a marvellous doggy symphony. And this is all before Laurie Anderson has even stepped out onto the stage.

And here she is! Just Laurie, a smile on her face, ‘tape-bow’ electric violin in hand. She moves to the mic behind the keyboard which is set up under the awning. She thanks Brighton Festival and she thanks BOAT founder Adrian Bunting, whose ashes are right there, buried in the centre of the stage area, she tells us. She welcomes all the dogs, and has a special few words for the excitable terriers in the audience. I feel slightly sorry that my grand-dog Mabel, a little terrier that I’m sure Laurie would notice and love, is not with me. Apparently she doesn’t get on with other dogs too well (she lives with four cats so maybe she thinks she’s a cat), so it was felt best not to bring her.

And so, although we’ve already had a pretty full-on immersive experience in the arrival and settling in, the concert proper starts.

Music for Dogs is very much what it says on the (dog food) can. It is music, and it is for dogs. But it is also music by dogs.  And of course it is for us humans too. A shared experience. Close to the start of the concert, Laurie repeats the story referenced in the publicity. She was backstage at one of her own concerts, looking out at the crowd, and she said to a colleague: ‘Wouldn’t it be great  if you were playing a concert and you look out and everyone’s a dog.’

Being Laurie Anderson, pioneer performance artist who loves a new idea, and a renowned dog-lover, her word became action. Or almost, maybe ideally she’d like just dogs, no humans? The first Music for Dogs concert was at Sydney Opera House in 2010, footage of which featured in Laurie’s Brighton Festival show in May 2015, and again in Heart of a Dog (the beautiful film about the later life and death of her own beloved terrier, Lolabelle, seen in Cinecity 2015). I vowed to myself then that I must get to see this concert. The second Music for Dogs was in January this year at Times Square, in her hometown of New York. The third is this appearance at Brighton Festival 2016, one of a number of shows and events curated by and/or performed by the artist (she is this year’s guest artistic director).

It lasts for twenty minutes, which feels about right. The compositions played include the regular Anderson sounds of treated violin, synth/keyboards, and vocals that fall somewhere between spoken word poetry and song, although at altered frequencies to be especially dog-friendly, with some sections featuring sounds that are only audible to the canine ear. Being human, I can’t say exactly when those occur, but there are certainly moments when most of the dogs seem to prick up their ears and stare intensely at the stage area. There is a lovely moment when she suggests that when speaking to your dog, you might like to change your voice – and demonstrates this with her trademark vocoder (or whatever technology it is these days) which brings her voice down a couple of octaves to a deep and rich growl.

Ernie has by now settled down on his human’s lap, quietly listening with ears pulled back. But Eliza and her partner are musicians, so he’s used to sitting in the corner of the rehearsal room or music studio; it’s all familiar territory for him. Nick Cave is behind us, and his dog is quiet too, so there you go. Tati is also very quiet. I’ve never seen her so attentive, says her human, Nicky – who thinks that Tati would like the other dogs to be quiet and listen to Laurie.

Occasionally we get snippets of stories familiar from other Laurie Anderson shows, or from Heart of a Dog. We hear that when Lolabelle got old, she went blind, and she found this very upsetting, until she was encouraged by Laurie and her partner Lou Reed (who is never mentioned by name, just part of a gently inclusive ‘we’ in the storytelling) to play the piano. She says this as if it’s a kind of normal thing to happen. This is the third of fourth time I’ve heard this story from Laurie Anderson’s lips, live or filmed, but I smile anew on each hearing. She has the classic storyteller’s ability to repeat a story exactly as was before, no embellishment, but as if telling it for the first time. People came round to their home to hear Lolabelle play, she says. I imagine it as a kind of Victorian salon evening.

There is also a very nice little interlude where humans who feel that they look like their dogs are invited to stand up and be recognised. A whippet-thin girl to my right stands up with her greyhound. Yep. Over the other side, a wiry white-and-grey haired woman with lots of energy leaps up with her – yes – perky white-and-grey wire-haired terrier.

At the beginning of the concert, Laurie has promised that the dogs will get a chance to really sound off and join in – and now is the moment. Big dogs, medium-sized dogs, and small dogs all get a turn. Laurie barks at the required pitch to help them out. It kind of works out, although there are a few rebels who just bark all the time, and some who just sit back and watch and listen.

Then suddenly it’s over. Humans applaud, dogs bark. A jazz trio takes to the stage to play exit music, which sounds good but perhaps a little redundant, as the evening feels complete, and no-one pays them much attention.

And off we go into the twilight, a happy bunch of creatures who have come together for a very special experience. It feels an honour to have been there.