British Dance edition 2010

British Dance Edition is a curated programme of performances, events, presentations and debates brought together to showcase the British dance and provide a snapshot of this ever-expanding industry. This bi-annual event will be held this year in Birmingham. David Massingham, Artistic Director, says: "It has been said that British dance has, in the past, been characterized as being about steps, not concepts. So, in this BDE, there has been a desire to programme work that is underpinned by a conceptual idea or a line of investigation that makes the dance more tangible to the viewer".

Selected from over 250 applications for just 30 performance slots, Professor Aggiss has been invited to present her Performance 'Lecture Survival Tactics' for an Anarchic Dancer at the Birmingham City Council Debating Chambers.

'Survival Tactics' contextualises Professor Aggiss’ 30 years research practice, fusing live, screen and text and asks the question: how does a mature post-modern solo female dancer originally from a bleak post war suburb in Essex, with a feverish commitment to the lost dances of Central Europe, a deep fascination with the dance past, and a rather ad hoc and irregular dance education, seek out the shadows from the past, stalk them relentlessly and embed and sustain herself within the British dance culture over 30 years? Using reconstruction, representation, demonstration, archive, fact, fiction, practice and theory, Survival Tactics pays homage to her survival kit of silent mentors and stealthy muses, who have shaped, framed and informed her research practice.

As an embodied presentation, this Performance Lecture responds to the shifting relationship between Professor Aggiss as researcher/practitioner and Liz Aggiss ‘artiste’. Taking new narratives from old forms, whilst attending to her transgressive, subversive expressive aging and fleshy body that exceeds expectations of what ‘this’, and ‘her’ particular dancing body should be doing and where she should be doing it, Professor Aggiss has developed this Performance Lecture as one of a series of routes that push boundaries of live presentation within conventional dance practice. These initiatives ask the audience to consider a fresh approach to practice within the broad contemporary dance framework.

In addition to her presentation and invitation to contribute to various discussion groups, Professor Aggiss has, with Charlotte Vincent (Artistic Director of Sheffield based Vincent Dance Theatre), been selected from 73 applications to compete for a £10,000 research award in the BDE’s Dragons Den. This initiative includes a number of key producing partnerships and organisations in Birmingham, Glasgow, London and Woking, and aims: to develop choreographic research practice, to address a perceived lack of risk taking amongst choreographers in Britain, and to highlight the research that is taking place. Entitled Blurred Vision, this research proposes to develop from Aggiss/Vincent’s 2009 successful partnership Double Vision. Should they succeed in the Dragons Den, Vincent and Aggiss (V&A Artefacts) will continue to investigate; the premise of the dancer as ‘a kinetic subject always moving, apparently without effort, always energized and never stumbling’ (Andre Lepecki): the ‘state’ of the mature menopausal female dancer: the role of women both on and off stage, and will drive into the foreground that pesky little question, ‘If we are busy creating the baby, who is going to be left (or right) holding it?’