5–4–3–2–1! Con-fused? Be-mused? Don’t be! It’ll be alright on the night… Liz is here – whether to meet and raise expectations or lower the barre we don’t yet know. Will she please us – or will she please herself? We wait with baited breath: ‘Don’t move a muscle!’
Ta-rum! Here she comes! Liz Aggiss IS the English Channel: a go-go dancing vessel for the spirits of a splendid array of cultural icons, from Cheeky Chappie Max Miller’s saucy innuendo to Pat Simmonds’ plumy-toned Speaking Clock, via the theme tune to The Adventures of Robin Hood; a medium conjuring the ghosts of dance past, present and future, who all remind us that death is just around the corner. Dance past includes a lovingly created homage to German tanztheater guru Kurt Joos and his Dance of Death. Dance present sees Liz twerking like there’s no tomorrow, do or die, as she sings ‘Too tired to fuck’, an anthem to the eternal entwining of Eros and Thanatos. Dance future is a grinning skull, beckoning – but not now, not yet. There’s life in the old girl yet… ‘You stay there!’ she demands of it.
For anyone familiar with Liz Aggiss’ work, her latest show is reassuringly packed with familiar subjects, themes, motifs. Popular dance (twist! disco!); vaudeville and variety (Max Miller’s cheeky chappie innuendo, Lily Morris’s comic music hall songs); and mockery (sometimes self-mockery) of the concerns of women about body image, as she rearranges her bosom, flexes her biceps, hoists her tight green lurex skirt up to her arse. She’s the queen of postmodern performance – and there sure is a lot of that about, but the difference between Queen Liz and so many of those who followed in her footsteps is the skill and the love – her work is chock-full of allusions, a pick-n-mix from a hundred years of high and low art and popular culture, and there is certainly irony and humour, but we feel the respect, note the knowledge, admire the very clever interweaving of references. More than the sum of its parts, is this.
Liz Aggiss is a groundbreaking choreographer and dance-theatre performer, but also a pioneer of ‘dance film’. Here, film is an integral part of the piece, the whole of the back wall one big screen on which found footage (the first woman Channel swimmer Gertrude Ederle; eccentric dancers The Ganjou Brothers & Juanita) is lovingly edited together (by Joe Murray) with specially-made vignettes mocked-up to look like found footage. These include a tribute to the fabulous Florence Foster Jenkins, who resolutely followed a career as an opera-singing soprano, despite a complete lack of pitch or rhythm, brought to life magnificently by Emma Kilby; to androgynous German cabaret singer Claire Waldoff, played with perfect pitch by Lisa Wolfe; and to grotesque dancer Isi Te Je, brought to life by contemporary dancer Antonia Gove.
As is the case in much of Liz Aggiss’ work, film, costume, and props all contribute to a piece that is driven by a marriage of choreography and scenography. Live art. Moving sculpture. Objects are important. Clothing isn’t merely decorative, it changes the body’s movement, it informs the choreography. Often, the performer’s body is deconstructed or distorted or extended by what she is wearing: a black penitent’s shroud covers her head, but exposes her legs, making her look like a mini-skirted Klu-Klux-Klan member; an enormous metal claw with excessively long fingers weaves through the air, both menacing and mesmeric (referencing Kay Lynn’s Finger Dance); her Max Wall bulging bottom channels the Bouffon, looking down at the world and laughing. At times, she seems to be almost puppeteering herself in a complex animation of body and object or clothing.
Sound design must be mentioned too: Alan Boorman (aka Wevie, as in legendary alternative music combo Wevie Stonder) does a brilliant job, weaving together his own quirky compositions with a whole raft of found sound, classical piano (featuring long-term collaborator Billy Cowie) and pop classics that ricochet from music hall to psychedelia via Klaus Nomi and The Dead Kennedys.
Made as she hits the big 6-0, Liz Aggiss is The English Channel reflects on the conundrum of being a dancing OAP, and offers us a kind of clownish mockery of the approach of death, less whispering in the wings than calling mawkishly from centrestage. A poignant scene towards the end sees the stage detritus gathered up rhythmically and methodically into brown paper bags as the Speaking Clock announces: ‘At the third stroke…’ and Liz adds: ‘Paralysis… a blinding headache…’
But not yet, not yet! There’s more dancing to be done! Cue a wild punk-inspired anthem, expunging the devilish monotony of a rote-learning, seen-but-not-heard childhood littered with requests to sit up straight, hands on head. ‘Have you calmed down yet, Elizabeth?’ our headbanging PVC-clad veteran punkette screeches in mockery of that long-gone but not forgotten 1960s childhood. No, she hasn’t. Thank goodness for that.
Go wild in the country! A reflection on artistic escape from the bright lights, big city – and a tale of two Feasts An ensemble of actors are gathered together to research the basic components of their craft in a workshop setting. The director gains inspiration from Japanese Noh Theatre and Commedia Dell’Arte. He expresses a desire to work with a bare stage, free from the trappings of cumbersome naturalistic stage sets. He views his work as a spiritual process that re-establishes theatre as a sacred space, and he is feeling increasingly frustrated with the demands of making work in a cosmopolitan setting. He longs to escape from the city…. The scene described above would not be too unusual today, but far from the usual expectations and practices of the theatre of its day, for this is Paris 1913. The director is Jacques Copeau, and the company is the Vieux-Colombier, which he has set up as a research project with the intention of restoring theatre to a purer art form of poetry and vision, based on the actor’s skill and inner strength. His influence on the physical and devised theatres of the twentieth century is phenomenal: from Copeau we can trace the line of influence through Antonin Artaud, who worked with Jean-Louis Barrault, one of Copeau’s dedicated pupils. Another of the dedicated troupe was a young working-class man called Etienne Decroux, who was to become known as the father of modern mime. Copeau’s daughter Marie-Helene befriended a young gymnast called Jacques Lecoq and through her, Lecoq had his introduction to theatre. The most radical phase of Copeau’s work took place when he decided in 1924 to leave the Parisian theatre world; to turn his back on the venues and producers and set-builders and first nights in the quest to find a different sort of theatre. Taking members of both the Vieux-Colombier company and its school he moved to Burgundy to create a theatre community that lived and worked together, celebrating birthdays with ritual, growing their own organic food and creating theatre pieces which were toured in the commedia dell’ arte tradition – playing outdoors in village squares, an integral part of the rural life that they had embraced. 
A man spins round and round: a whirling dervish with one arm raised; a Mensch-Maschine; a clockwork toy. His image is reflected in the Spiegeltent mirrors all around him, so that the lone figure seems to have a ghostly chorus of identical automata. Shadows are cast onto the roof of the tent, another chorus of echoes. A woman enters the space, standing at the other end of the narrow runway that divides the space in two – a witness watching him and watching us, the audience, who are sat in traverse. We are close enough to hear her breathe; to see her eyelids flicker; to note the muscles of her body tightening and relaxing. And then there are four, who burst into a sequence of acrobatic tumbles, twists and turns using the whole length of the ‘catwalk’ staging, the contact mics attached relaying the percussive thuds of feet that hit the heartbeats of the soundtrack. And so we’re off and running into the second ensemble show by young Australian circus company Casus, whose first show Knee Deep has toured extensively worldwide with phenomenal success. In Finding the Silence, the company build on the key qualities of the first piece – top-notch core skills, complicity, tender relationships, a desire to approach equipment and objects on their own terms, without seeking to establish unnecessary or fussy theatrical metaphors – and yet strive to continue the artistic investigation, to step out into brave new worlds. The first radical and brave decision is to play the show on this narrow runway, the audience on both sides breathtakingly close to the leaping, stretching, climbing bodies. I’m astonished to learn afterwards that this, the European premiere of the show, is actually the first time they’ve performed it in traverse – it was presented end-on when premiered earlier this year in Australia. I’m here in Canterbury on the opening night, and the atmosphere is electric – every move seems to be set on a precipice. I’d urge Casus to keep the traverse, terrifying though it is – it feels so wonderfully challenging, so radically different. And there are many great and wonderful risks taken on this precarious performance space – not least a duet between two blindfolded men, aided and abetted by their seeing seconds… Feel the fear and do it anyway could be the leitmotif of this show. The intense physical action throughout is given an oddly dreamlike quality by the show’s soundtrack, a great, organic ocean of sound which pulses with subdued beats and riffs mixed with samples of at-times almost subliminal voices and sounds. Having seen Jerk, the solo show by Casus’ only female member and co-founder, Emma Sarjeant, I can appreciate some affinity between these very different shows: both seem to be playing out the internal conversation and/or subconscious perceptions and emotions of the performers who, despite the intense, visceral earthiness of the work, often have an air of other-worldliness about them. Sometimes we seem to be in the realms of the gods, and at other times firmly on earth. There are recurring images of cradling and supporting – as, for example, in a gorgeous duet between Jesse Scott (who also directs this show) and Lachlan McAulay. Acrobatics, handstands/shoulder stands, and balances or counter-balances of one sort or another are the company’s core skills and there’s plenty of dazzling examples on show here, all thrillingly close so we really feel the force as well as see the fabulous shapes created – for example, in towering three-high stands, walks across heads, and perpetual-motion cartwheels. The piece conjures up associations with Meyerhold’s Biodynamics, the team creating images with their bodies of turning cogs or machine parts that arise and dissolve fluidly. Planks and benches are dragged onto the runway, the human bodies interacting with the objects in ways that seem to make them all one harmonious whole. At one point, the heaped-up pile of wooden junk surprisingly turns itself into a teeterboard. At another, there’s a particularly beautiful handstand-on-a-bench sequence by Emma Serjeant and Casus’ new boy Vincent Van Berkel, who has stepped into the shoes of injured founder member Natano Fa’anano magnificently. Far more than a stand-in, he has carved a niche for himself in the company, and contributed magnificently to Finding the Silence. It’s not all acro – there’s aerial too, including some perfectly fine solo trapeze, and (more interestingly) some imaginative foot-sling work from Jesse. But the best is an ensemble corde lisse sequence that plays on the company’s strengths – the soft and tender gender-challenging relationships between the four of them played out, as bases and flyers merge and swap in a gorgeous tangle of rope, limbs and torsos. What a beautiful meeting of very different bodies these four performers create! There are some wobbles and failed moves – although, perhaps perversely, I love the humanity of these moments. In a show that sets itself up to investigate individual vulnerabilities and inner fears, such moments feel poignant – emotional successes rather than physical failures. I’m pretty sure the circus-savvy audience here at the Spiegeltent agree: they are as quiet as mice throughout, still and attentive, rather than cheering the tricks – there’s almost a collective holding of breath let out in a tumultuous round of applause at the end. (And a nod of appreciation here to the Canterbury Festival, who programmed not only Finding the Silence, but also two other shows by Casus: Emma’s Jerk, and the three-man piece for young audiences, Tolu. Great to see a circus company really embraced and supported in this way.) So, so much to like and admire – yet it is early days. It is stating the obvious to say that a complex circus show this young needs to bed in – particularly if the staging is changed so dramatically. Although in saying this, I’m hoping that it loses none of its dynamism and risk in its settling-in process. There are criticisms, but they are minor. The odd, jodhpur-style patched costumes are a distraction. There are a few transitions that need reworking, and the general frame and shaping of the piece needs a bit of dramaturgical carpentry here and there. But that’s all to be expected at this stage of the process: Casus have a corking new show launched, and the world is their oyster.
