Professor of anarchy

Dancer Liz Aggiss. Photo / Matthew Andrews.

Liz Aggiss, performer, choreographer, film-maker, artiste and Professor of Visual Performance at the University of Brighton in England, classifies herself as unclassifiable, cross-genre.

This week she presents her very alternative, one-woman "dance lecture" Hijinx on Tempo's stage. Promising to be an event of great hilarity that gives vent to Aggiss' "voice of cynicism" as she explores the realms of fictional choreographer Heidi Dzinkowska, and our tendency to accept history as it is presented to us, it was first given as a professorial contribution at a university conference. Some people took notes.

A few days later she'll introduce Forward Motion, the British Council's innovative dance film festival, again under Tempo's eclectic umbrella.

She's also guest teaching at the University of Auckland and checking in as external examiner with her masters student, Carol Brown.

But at 57, Aggiss is an accomplished mistress of the double life. Her performance career began with cabaret-style dance routines in the punk clubs of the 80s where the stage was most likely a minute space in front of the drum kit, and she would be "on at midnight".

"Back then if there was a space somewhere, anywhere - you just filled it."

She was already teaching by day. Eventually her dance troupe The Wild Wigglers progressed to support act for famous punk rock band The Stranglers at Wembley, before an audience of 10,000.

"The roadies would come out before us and sweep the rubbish that had pelted the stage into the front row, and away we'd go," she says. "It was a pretty tough background."

But even she's a little surprised to look back on her journey from punk to professor and how it all happened.

Aggiss came to dance at the "geriatric" age of 28, having fled the "ghastly" suburbs of post-war provincial England at 18. Driven by the twin impulses to move and to create, she undertook formal dance training with Hanya Holm in New York, then Hilde Holger in Britain.

"At 28 you have a different attitude to an 18-year-old," she says. "You're too old to ever be a technical dancer and you can't compete with the 19-year-olds so you develop your own aesthetic."

Two words have been associated with Aggiss' style: "grotesque" and "anarchic". Her first solo work, in 1986, was titled Grotesque Dancer. It presented to a totally unprepared dance world the female body in an entirely new and unexpected form: sharp, angular and, says Aggiss, "a bit like my face really - beaky".

"I was happy to hunch my shoulders, get rid of my neck, use my face to express the meaning, to fit my body appropriately to the ideas - and to strut and slug and shout," she says. "I thought it was quite beautiful. You're born with a body that moves in a certain way, with its own sort of energy, its own kind of grace. But most dance is about striving to make the body beautiful in a specific aesthetic. I work against that."

The work polarised the critics. Some, mostly male, were incensed, repulsed. Others, predominantly female, were thrilled to see this female dance body that broke with the stereotype, she says. The "grotesque" label stuck.

And the "anarchic" tag? The professor has "paid her dues" to bureaucracy carrying a huge administrative burden in the university world, so is no anarchist.

"But as a performer I've always sat outside the mainstream. I've never adapted my work to fit in."

Just how outside the mainstream is indicated by one of her latest projects - a dance for radio. Whatever Aggiss' definition of dance, it certainly defies the idea of dance as an arena solely for the young.

"Here I am," she says, in antithesis of self-flattery, "in my ageing, post-menopausal, fleshy body, because it's important for mature women to have a voice. For the dance world to develop it needs an alternative voice to that of youth."

And if that voice is rather strange, direct and challenging, all the better.

Performance

What: Hijinx, with Liz Aggiss

Where and when: Tapac, Western Springs, October 7 at 6pm, October 8 at 8pm

What: Forward Motion, Film Festival from the British Council

Where and when: Tapac, October 9-10; see www.tempo.co.nz for screening times; freeConvention- buster Liz Aggiss makes no bones about dancing in her ageing body, the antithesis of the youth-obsessed dance world.