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The End of Dance is a series of texts that examines endings in dance. It offers a reflective space and platform for people to evaluate, digest and see how things have settled for them.

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We often see writing and content that focuses on the before, the new and the next - this isn't a space for that. This is somewhere that looks at the aftermaths, the impacts and what happened in those end moments. The End of Dance will feature long form interviews with people alongside other features pieces that have a specific relationship to the end / endings.​​

Liz Aggiss

Liz is a Brighton-based, award-winning performer, director, choreographer and writer. For the past 45 years she has been re(de)fining her own brand of contemporary dance performance, dodging categorisation and being classified as unclassifiable. Blurring the boundaries between high art and popular culture, she makes uncompromising, challenging, feminist work.

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www.lizaggiss.com

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: Luke Waddington

IA: Could you introduce yourself and describe what it is that you do?

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LA: OK. My name is Liz Aggiss. I am a performer, choreographer, filmmaker. And I call myself an artist actually because I work predominantly with interdisciplinary practices. I make, I write and direct myself in my own solo shows. My work is very visual and it uses a lot of text. I work through the autobiographical self and that's where the hub of the research comes from mainly. I'm classified, classifiably unclassifiable I guess, in as much as I don't fit into any particular discipline, which suits me very well. I call myself an undisciplined artist for that very reason and I'm also a mature artist now, obviously, if you can see my face, you know I also had a party last night, so I'm feeling a bit tired. I've been making, performing and engaged with this practice since 1980. It's a long time and I'm still apparently in the picture and doing it.

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IA: What is your relationship to endings?

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LA: I've got quite a lot to say about that. Having not thought about it, then suddenly I'm thinking about it. Interestingly enough, in my career, I've had a sort of double career as an academic and an artist performer and both those things have sat in parallel, side by side. When I ended my academic life, I was 58 and I began a new life performing full-time. Up to that moment, I'd been side by side and it seems logical to then spend the next 10 years as a high-energy adrenaline-fuelled international touring package. I'd made a couple of solos that were picked up by the British Council with a lot of touring and they were very successful. That was a very brilliant and interesting beginning from an ending. Who knew that was going to happen? It turned out extremely well, I guess, I hadn't realized actually what was possible...and then it ended with COVID. So I experienced an ending that I hadn't plotted or planned and was not in control of that. It was 2020 and all the international work and touring and all the UK touring work ended and there was nothing I could do about it. It appeared to me that the landscape, as well of dance and performance at the small and middle scale, had found another kind of ending or changed in a way that there's nothing I could do to imagine where I was going to enter it again, if I was indeed going to re-enter. I spent a couple of years, strangely enough, understanding that this kind of ending that had been imposed upon me was quite useful because I hadn't stopped since 1980 and I hadn't realized how exhausted I was. So I went into a fertile void, as I like to call it, where I was full of creativity, but it seemed like a place to swing around in with not much or maybe no beginnings that were possible for me. I contemplated during those years to not continue. I was nearly 70 by then and I thought, have I made my best last show? Is there another one in me? Is it possible for me to imagine doing more of the same?

 

All of these questions came to me in this moment and I lay down for two years, realising how tired I was and I thought about all these things. After those two years I was actually quite committed to going back into performance. In fact, I felt very bereft. It felt like an early bereavement not to be able to do it. But I had no work and had no new work that I had finished. I'd begun some work, but I wasn't convinced about it, so I had to start a new project and at that point, I realised the end of my next life was going to be put on hold again because my hip just gave out. I hadn't realised the endless wear and tear that my body had taken over 40 years. I had grade four osteoarthritis in my hip and I was kidding myself that I could carry on and make it better through alternative medicine and God knows what else that I tried. So it was another two-year period where I wasn't really able to move and I had the hip replacement operation and then the recovery. So I was out of action. Again, not a fault of my own, just circumstances. But in that time, I really realised that I couldn't not. I just couldn't not make work. So I had to start all over again.

 

I had a piece of work that I hadmade a couple of scratch presentations of, neither of them I particularly was happy with. They were 20-minute scratches of a work called Crone Alone. It's odd to do something so public when it's a scratch and you're not sure. Interestingly enough, the audience and the critics seemed to like it, but I wasn't 100% convinced. So I began reworking it and I have spent the last year, where are we now, the end of 2025? I spent the last year pretty much working on the piece and then I presented it as a new beginning at The Tute in November and that felt like another place to start. It has definitely made me want to start again. Everything about the undertaking of working with the extraordinary couple of people who run this space, and their whole ethos, ethics and their creativity. Their commitment is just extraordinary. I knew that it was the right place to go in to start my career again at 72.

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IA: The decision to end the academic Liz, looking back now, what contributed to that decision? Why that way? Why not stop performing and go fully into academia?

 

LA: For me I had been working within an institution for a very long period of time and the whole educational system had changed so much, and was still changing, and the kind of the creativity and opportunity that students had in the past had changed to where it was when I left. I didn't feel so committed to it. I'd written a course called Dance and Visual Practice, which was about connecting the disciplines and it worked within the School of Art at the University of Brighton. I was able to challenge students and present a way of looking at dance through different lenses in a way that had some affiliation to what I knew was happening outside in the real world. But I just kept hitting institutional stumbling blocks and felt it wasn't for me. There’s something about letting younger people come into an institution and I had been for a very long time. That was an important thing to happen, but what happened was I left and the course closed and it was turned into a MA instead. I had really enjoyed my life working with undergraduates in that rather anarchic creative place and trying to guide them into finding their better selves in terms of their own creativity and choices and how they wanted to perceive that and if they wanted to perceive it as a future. Institutionally, I was done with institutions. I was done with line managers and I was done with the overarching issues that you have to face within institutions. I left with an emeritus professor tucked under my belt and that made me very happy because it was some form of recognition. I don't really use my title except in performance as a sort of strange irony. But, it's there for me to understand that I did make some impact in academic practice.
 

IA: You mentioned The Tute and the Rude Health festival and how that was the instigation behind Crone Alone coming back. On reflection now, you performed almost a month ago, what are your reflections? What was it like to be up in that community and watch the other parts of the festival?

LA: Well, I read the article written in The Guardian, which had interviewed Esther and her partner Alex from The Tute, I think it was two years ago, and they were talking about how they were setting it up and I felt so inspired by this thing that was happening in the most unlikely place in Blythe, Northumberland, which is the home of Reform and it's just a wasteland in many ways because it’s full of data centres and there's no kind of community arts venue. They weren't stepping on anybody's toes. It's an empty space. But I was so curious about it because I loved the way they talked about it. It reminded me of my early days when I first started out performing in the 80s with a visual performance group I had called The Wild Wigglers, which was me and two lofty men. We performed these tight little series of two to three minute pieces, which made up a set and we used to perform them as a support for other acts. We weren't headlining often, although sometimes we did, but on the whole, we worked with punk bands and other performance artists. The venues we performed in were very unlikely venues, similar to The Tute, they were working men's clubs, grubby little pubs and clubs and filthy dives all over London. We performed in odd places as well, like Heaven and in Richard Strange's club in London. It was not black box theatre and it was definitely outside of the regular. So I grew up understanding performance not from entering the mainstream, but from entering through alternative means. I never really lost sight of that's why I make the kind of performance I make, which is often very raw and very intimate in terms of its relationship with the audience. That's what interests me, that relationship that you get in smaller spaces where they're so raw and often there's only one light on a brick and it barely works. You know, you're lucky if they give you more than a three-minute tech. I was used to that way of presenting my work to audiences who were completely unsuspecting and hadn't come to see me because they'd come to see the punk ban or the headline act. So when I made contact with Esther and Alex, I thought, this is like going back to these early beginnings. This is where I started and I'd been in increasingly more palava-driven black box theatre spaces and complicated festivals all around the world, which are wonderful, don't get me wrong. I've had a blast, but they're very different. The expectation is very different and that's what interested me. How would an audience who knows nothing about me, has no real connection with an arts practice, how would this new work, Crone Alone, fit into this environment, which has limited technical set up and they hadn't used the spaces in a stage presentation before and I wanted to go on the stage. They usually worked on the floor area, but it just felt like a wonderful place to reinvent myself and begin all over again with this kind of openness. It just felt so open to me. It was run by two people who really cared about me as an artist and have, you know, in all the early conversations, sort of nurtured me towards the moment when I would arrive in Northumberland. It's just a very different experience from an artistic perspective when you work with festivals, you work with teams of people, all around the world. You're working with marketing teams and endless producing teams, it's a whole different ballgame. This was two people, in a former miners welfare centre who were trying to make something exciting happen for their community. And I just thought, come on, that's where I want to be. I really relished it and I had the most fantastic experience performing to this audience who were just with me all the way. It was so interesting as an artist and performer who feels the connection with an audience. It was just brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Stress-free, palava-free, and sort of strangely comfortable. I was backstage. There was no dressing room and you've got no private loo or anything like that. I was backstage - there's no proper backstage - it was just like a hallway with stuff in it and I was so happy. It was like, oh look, I'm sitting in here with a fridge and a bicycle and I had made myself a little comfy space. Alex came backstage to see how I was doing and he said, “How are you?” “Oh, you're very comfortable here.” And I was. I just felt just at home. And that's having done, having been treated in the most wonderful way with theatres and festivals in venues around the world, this was really going back to this early, early beginning and I found it fascinating.

IA: You mentioned the live audience response. Can you go further into that? What did you feel from them?

LA: The thing is, I make this very visually anarchic work, which I consider so normal. It's really normal for me to do the things I do on stage and use the kind of text and words that I use, which others might see as provocative and political. I had no doubts about the audience, actually, because I'd met some of them when I delivered a mistress class a couple of days before to Esther's group of about 15 people. Their response had been absolutely phenomenal. It was so amazing because it was a group of mature people with little experience of dance, but a great deal of enthusiasm and engagement and curiosity. That's the key for me. Curiosity. They were in the audience, but from the moment I came on stage, you know I always like to make an entrance, from the moment I came on stage, that audience practically joined in. You could hear their verbal response, they laughed, they shouted and did exactly what I wanted to happen. Their presence was linked to my presentation. It's wonderful when you get to the end of a piece of work and you take a bow and the whole audience was just standing. You know you've hit the spot. You just know. And the audience didn’t want to leave. They won't let you leave and you know that you've made a connection when the questions they asked in the Q&A really have meaning for them. I hadn't made a piece of work that was high-faluting or overly complicated. They got it. They got its rawness. They got its passion. They got its intimacy. They got the politics. They were horrified by some of the things I said, as I am often, and delighted also at the same time.
 

IA: How did you craft the end of Crone Alone?

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LA: The ending is always so interesting because...you know, I write a script. How I work is I work out of the studio for months in research, creating the text and pulling together the threads of visuality, music and thought processes. I don't go into the studio till I'm absolutely sure I want to be in there. I work at home because I have a studio in my house. It's a small room with nothing in it but books, music and an empty space. It means I can leave my crap around and make a mess. I like to make a mess. And it was just, you know, that moment when you start crafting and writing and the ending is the place that you really get to at the right time. It's very interesting. It happened with Slap and Tickle. It happened with The English Channel. You always seem to start at the beginning and because you need flow and dynamics and form and structure, you need to be able to feel that. You have to always start at the beginning of the work when you're rehearsing and creating. And the end bit, for Crone Alone, it was definitely very last minute. In fact, I'm still not convinced I've got the right ending. I've got an ending that makes a perfect dynamic sense and structural sense. It pulls together all the threads of the ideas that I'm talking about in terms of value and worth of the creative self, the self and us as human beings. But I haven't quite cracked the best way to do it. To perform it. But I know I'm on the right track. I need the audience because...it's like when a band plays their best number at the end and the whole audience goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I want the audience to always be uplifted at the end. So you have to get that bit right. They were. I achieved that and what I set out to do, but it's not as refined as I want it to be, even in its rawness.
 

IA: What has 2025 been like for you in dance?

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LA: Well pretty much I've been working on creating Crone Alone because when I started that, the research bit, I was barking up the wrong tree. I thought I was going to make a piece about female hysteria and since I've been hysterical much of my life, I thought it seemed appropriate. But I had to revise it and that actually took quite some time, thinking about which direction I was going in. I'd done a lot of research and it's always hard to let go of it. You get very connected to what it is and you feel kind of insecure if you let it go, but I let it go. I have spent much of the year considering this piece of work. It's funny when you make work. That's what you have to be careful of. This was the thing about going back into performance. I knew if I was going to go back in, it's actually a 24-hour, 365-day, 24-7 commitment for me. It never leaves my head, even when I'm performing it or even when it's made. But when I'm making it, I know I'm working towards something. So you live it, eat it and sleep it. I never leave it alone. I knew I was in it for the long haul. And then once I knew I was going to do a performance, you're definitely in it all the time. There's no moment where it's not somehow nagging away in the background. But in 2025 I've been to see a few pieces of work, as I always do. I try to see work that might please me and work that won't please me, mainly from...not always from dance actually. I like to look at work across the spectrum of performance from live art through to theatre and I go to as many exhibitions as I can. I have travelled quite a lot in Europe this year. I've done years and years of long haul touring but my partner and I decided we were going to spend a bit more time bumbling around Europe because it's so close. It's easy to get to and I'm still part of Europe even if nobody else around me is. It's been a lot of looking and absorbing and generally keeping myself active, fizzing, fizzing and active in my brain and thought processes.

IA: How do you consider your archive?

LA: Oh God, that's such a complicated question because I've just...I was actually away with some mates recently in Kent and we were talking - we're all artists and practitioners - about archiving, that very issue. How I used to think about it was I was creating a legacy, then I went out and thought that was a bit bold really, considering that anybody might care. But on the other hand much of what I've done has been inspired by tiny fragments and past histories which I found so interesting from the lost generation of dancers from the interwar years. For example the kind of fabric of the archive which is so fragmented, lots of tiny clips and bits of photographic material alongside small critical assessments of those practices. That has fuelled my interest in other people's works. I am aware that some people do actually look at my practice at universities and I had decided that I had better up my ante before it's too late and get as much out there on YouTube - I guess as is the way forward – and I have to look at my website again. My Wikipedia page, somebody manages and keeps that to date so that's great, but it's true that there is something important about pulling the archive together which is definitely in my process. But on top of that conversation I had recently with friends, which was about how it would ever be possible that somebody else could take on my work my mantle, be Slap and Tickle, be the grotesque dancer, be The English Channel, be Crone Alone. I'm planning on staying within it for the next five or eight years or whatever, until I'm 80, and then I make my...who knows? I'd like to imagine it's not a number but it's a knowledge of when it all ends. I have been pondering that very question. How might you transfer your knowledge and experience to another body? The trouble is the work I make is so autobiographically driven, so it would have to be the right person, and I don't know who that right person would be. It's a mature voice that speaks, it's a mature body that performs and so it's a big tricky question. Does it matter?

IA: I look at other people's work all the time and I don't mind if it's just fragmented. I understand that trailers and clips from shows don't tell the full story but they do give you a flavour and they do give a certain understanding of a person's practice for sure. For me there's something in the thing that is never archived, you may have the video or the photo, but what I'm trying to do with these interviews is trying to get under the bonnet and understand what's going on in the mind of the people because that's rarely seen or heard. I'm interested in the process.

LA: I do have one more piece in me, strangely enough. It is probably going to be a book which will hold the place of this archive, this is where the scripts from the work will go, the research information that has supported it and a visual way of looking at it. Maybe another aspect will be another piece of work which will a text. A document of the last 40 years, breaking down the unglamorous side of the performing self. I'm thinking that that is a more sedentary direction rather than you know performing, but it’s a way of still being present, still delivering yourself in that way. The truth of the matter is I do spend a lot of time outside of a studio. I'm very sure when I go into a studio about what it is and what I'm going to be doing. I have very limited capacity to be by myself. I love watching people, I love watching dancers in studios. I don't know how they can spend so much time actually in a studio without a kind of boundaried...improvising without the boundaries that I place around myself. I set the boundaries and the levels of boundaries before I go into the studio and interestingly enough I have been teaching Three Score here in Brighton (a mature company) and the way I teach is the way I work. They are absolutely fascinated by the boundaries that I place on everything. For me, discipline gives me freedom. Rather than just endlessly doing, holding or rolling about and fiddling in space. Everything has to have a purpose for me. That's how I work with myself and that's how I teach and those two things have really come together for me. I've understood my practice much better now through doing the teaching and being away from the institution. Teaching to curious, mature artists.
 

IA: What's the best ending you've ever experienced in dance?

LA: What a weird and complicated question. The best endings are always...I cannot tell a lie. There's nothing greater than a pint of lager hitting the back of your throat while being surrounded by people who want to cheer you on into the future. I've had so many wonderful endings. I can remember moments in The English Channel when I reverse the ending of the performance and I go into the audience. I invite the audience onto stage to dance their final dance and I orchestrate them from the audience. It's such a joyous moment to see 200 people scrambling to get on stage and to throw themselves into this, into the light. I am just egging them on into their best performing self. That's a fabulous image for me to remember. But there’s so many endings, so many commentaries that you receive. They're not necessarily endings, but in Limerick, it was the day after a performance and I was walking down the street and a woman shouted from the other side of the road, “Stop, stop.” She rushed over said, “Thank God, there's people like you in the world.” She was talking because she'd seen the show, not because she was off her trolley. Or the woman in the Q&A after performing Slap and Tickle at In Den Bosch Festival in the Netherlands, who said, “I have no question, I just want to tell you, I have no reason ever to be frightened again.” I was like, oh my God. Those are compelling endings in themselves.

IA: We're in the end times. It's your last dance. Two people. Who are you dancing with?

LA: I'd have to have Hilde Holger in the room with me. She sits on my shoulder as a silent mentor and muse since the moment I met her all those years ago. Her presence has been so inspirational. Her thinking, her thoughts and her voice, I still feel it and hear it. Her nagging insistence of being bolder and more expressive is a permanent reminder of what is possible and what is great about creativity. I'd have Hilde in the room and I'd have my younger self actually. I'd like my younger self in there. I'd like my younger self who was so good at what she did but didn't realise it. She was so intuitive and worked in a really unprompted way, was so insecure and strangely enough, didn't quite know how good she actually was. I'd like that. Yes. An old woman and a younger me. How about that?

IA: Is there anything else to do with endings that you want to talk about?

LA: I suppose one's own end is something that when you're 72 you do think about. Oddly enough I was talking with my 92 year old friend last night about assisted assisted dying. We're at my party and she and I ended up talking about assisted dying. I think I seem to have been surrounded by quite a lot of death and demise recently and that makes you consider your own mortality. I did think about this much more when I was 60 when I thought I wouldn't make any more work. I thought that was the end then and now I'm 72 I'm not thinking about not making work. I'm hoping to be a bit more like how Hilda was, she was such an icon for me, she carried on to the end. She was amazing and even when she was in hospital and on her final day and we were sitting around the bed, she was still tapping out rhythms on her hands and clutching us and talking dance. I think one's own mortality is less forefrontal for me now, but it makes me feel this sense of urgency that I've got stuff I need to. I definitely want to carry on and carry on going back to the beginning of what we were talking about. Carry on doing what I want to do my way, not to dance to other people's tunes. It's so nice to have worked with The Tute because that was me deciding I wanted to go there and us making a pact that it would happen, which is very different to how it has been. Normally you're an artist and you wait for somebody to tell you, we want you and pull you in and you don't have the same levels of control. But with The Tute, it felt so personal and so important for both sides, for me as an artist and for them delivering the arts. That's where I want to be. I want to be in more of those places and with those people if I'm going to carry on. I want to do the work I want to do and where I want to do it.