Liz Aggiss
UK, Research Practitioner / Performer
Liz Aggiss is a performer, choreographer, film-maker, writer, artiste and Professor of Visual Performance at the University of Brighton. She makes live performances, dance films and screen dance installations. From cabaret, vaudeville, opera, live art, dance theatre, her work is eclectic, borrowing from a range of performance styles and is inherently cross-genre, unclassifiable, dodging categorization. Existing on both stage and screen it blurs the boundaries between high art and popular culture. In 1994 she received the Bonnie Bird Choreography Award and in 2003 an Arts Council Dance Fellowship Award.
She collaborated from 1980 to 2006 with Billy Cowie creating over thirty live works and toured nationally and internationally as a solo artist and with her company Divas Dance Theatre. In 1986, together with collaborator Cowie, she choreographed and performed Grotesque Dancer. This visually arresting solo work raised the debate on feminist work, polarised critics and became their successful signature piece, written about as an important contribution to UK contemporary dance history.
She has guested with British experimental company Lumiere & Son in a reconstruction of The Blue Duck, in Performing Clothes (Gale, Morris, Bergese) and Off The Rails (Tarascas, Rubin), created commissioned work for Extemporary, Intoto and Transitions Dance Companies, worked with special needs dance groups High Spin and Carousel, sat on national, regional, local committees and advisory panels, been Artist in Residence at the Duncan Centre Prague and L’Opera Montpellier France, spoken at conferences and debates, written for magazines including Dance Theatre Journal and Animated, appeared on Children’s TV, corporate videos, Radio 4, performed on the alternative cabaret circuit, and toured rock stadiums supporting The Stranglers with her dance trio The Wild Wigglers.
In 2008 Liz Aggiss and Charlotte Vincent created Double Vision (original titled Radio Play). Liz is based in Brighton.