page_title: Liz Aggiss
section_title: The Wild Wigglers
hierarchical_section_title: Liz Aggiss / The Wild Wigglers
caption_attribution_description: A page from the booklet Survival Tactics for the Anarchic Dancer, produced as a theatre programme for Liz Aggiss in 2008. The illustrations by Peter Chrisp show Aggiss as a Wild Wiggler and the Golem in Vier Tanze.
context_page_description: Liz Aggiss is a British live artist, dance performer, choreographer and film maker. Her work is inspired by early 20th century Ausdruckstanz, in particular the Grotesque dance of Valeska Gert, and by British Music Hall and Variety acts such as the eccentric dance performers, Max Wall and Wilson, Keppel and Betty. She is often described as the 'grand dame of anarchic dance'.
  From 1982 to 2003, Aggiss collaborated with the composer, writer and choreographer, Billy Cowie, making live shows and films under the name Divas Dance Theatre. After their partnership ended, due to artistic differences, she made a series of films and solo live works, Survival Tactics for the Anarchic Dancer, The English Channel, Slap and Tickle and Crone Alone.
  From her earliest works, Aggiss has challenged conventional ideas of female sexuality and beauty and questioned 'the social mores that pigeon-hole women of all ages.' She describes her later live shows as a project to 'reclaim the stage space for the older woman.'
  Aggiss is Emeritus Professor in Visual Performance at the University of Brighton, where she taught for many years, and an Honorary Doctor at the Universities of Gothenburg and Chichester.
context_section_description: In 1982, Aggiss and Cowie created The Wild Wigglers, a cabaret act inspired by the punk pogo dance and Wilson, Keppel and Betty's Sand Dance. Three dancers, wearing spiralling yellow and black leotards and tall pointy hats, performed a twenty-minute set of short visually connected dances: 'These simple animated gestures – hopping, jumping, scuttling, rummaging, blobbing, slugging – were grasped and choreographically 'worried to death' in succinct three-minute visual performance wonders'. Two Wild Wiggler dances, Weird Wiggle and Hop on Pops, can be seen on YouTube.
  The Wigglers performed on the Saturday morning television show, No. 73, where they met The Stranglers, who booked them as a support act. This led to appearances in Wembley Arena, Oxford Apollo, Brighton Centre and Zenith Paris. J King in the Morning Star wondered 'whether or not all that hilarious jumping and swaying with feet tied together really qualifies as dance....It was certainly movement of a highly entertaining kind, to be remembered with gratitude by a critic so often threatened with drowning in a sea of self-indulgence, pretentiousness and insipidity.'
  The original Wild Wigglers were Liz Aggiss, Ian Smith and Eva Zambicki. Later members were Jane Bassett, Neil Butler, Billy Cowie, Ralf Higgins, Simon Hedger and Patrick Lee.  In 1999, Aggiss, Smith and Butler reunited to perform the act once more in Brighton's Zap club, where the Wigglers originally premiered.
caption: A page from the 2008 programme for Survival Tactics, illus. Peter Chrisp
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