Anarchic dance

Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie, known collectively as Divas Dance Theatre, are renowned for their highly visual, interdisciplinary brand of dance performance that incorporates elements of theatre, film, opera, poetry and vaudevillian humour. Anarchic Dance, consisting of a book and DVD-Rom, is a visual and textual record of their boundary-shattering performance work. The DVD-Rom features extracts from Aggiss and Cowie's work, including the highly-acclaimed dance film Motion Control (premiered on BBC2 in 2002), rare video footage of their punk-comic live performances as The Wild Wigglers and reconstructions of Aggiss's solo performance in Grotesque Dancer.

These films are cross-referenced in the book, allowing readers to match performance and commentary as Aggiss and Cowie invite a broad range of writers to examine their live performance and dance screen practice through analysis, theory, discussion and personal response. Extensively illustrated with black and white and colour photographs Anarchic Dance, provides a comprehensive investigation into Cowie and Aggiss's collaborative partnership and demonstrates a range of exciting approaches through which dance performance can be engaged critically.

Donald HuteraLiz Aggiss and Billy CowieCarol BrownDeborah LevyMarion KantBilly CowieLiz AggissValerie A. BriginshawLiz Aggiss and Claudia KappenbergBilly CowieIan BramleySondra FraleighBilly CowieSherril DoddsLiz AggissBilly CowieLiz Aggiss and Billy Cowie

List of illustrations	p. ix
Notes on contributors	p. xi
Foreword	p. xvi
Acknowledgements	p. xxi
1 Introduction: Navigating the known	p. 1
2 The aesthetics of smash and grab	p. 5
3 Writing dance	p. 15
4 Liz Aggiss and 'Authentick' grotesque expressionism	p. 22
5 Choreographic vocabulary 1: Visual metaphor	p. 37
6 Outsider performance: A raw vision: Dance and learning difficulties	p. 48
7 Deconstruction in Die Orchidee: Mischievous plays in the spaces between language and meanings	p. 61
8 Hilde Holger, spirit and maracas	p. 72
9 Choreographic vocabulary 2: Time and rhythm	p. 85
10 The impossibility of the review in the mind of the critic	p. 95
11 Deconstructing Heidi	p. 106
12 Choreographic vocabulary 3: Space	p. 118
13 Screen Divas: A filmic expression of the grotesque aesthetic	p. 127
14 Reconstruction: Or why you can never step into the same river twice	p. 142
15 Anarchic Dance	p. 156
Afterword	p. 170
List of works	p. 173
Bibliography	p. 185
Index	p. 191

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