People Dancing

Up close and personal, Liz Aggiss opens her diary to the world to reveal the artist inside that's been screaming for space. And finally got some. This ring any bells?

Day 0...
and Liz has tied up all the loose ends, eased herself over the final hurdles and is about to embark upon a years' Fellowship journey.

Day 1...
and Liz is in the Diary Room musing on life, good fortune, guilt and the present. She has reached no conclusions since she is looking over her shoulder in expectation of something she should have done, or anticipating something that is about to be done to her. A year ago she was a finely tuned driven machine, entering life in fifth gear: all the better to get there quickly. She had rebuilt her body to include a jutting chin and an unglamorous forward slant in order to pass over the finish line first. This unattractive physique had led to a serious neck clamp and intense shoulder pain. But she shrugged it off in her quest to achieve goals and meet targets. She was in a world of much activity, much business and much busy-ness. She was and is a high achiever.

Day 4...
and Liz is going to a dinner party with some chums. It is Friday and she is, rather unusually, not knackered. She anticipates an evening whereby she will be able to concentrate and not nod off over the raspberry roulade. Where she will be able to string more than a few sentences together after Nine O'clock and still make sense. This is a first. In fact, having a weekend is a first. She cannot recall a time when she was not working at weekends in order to fit her absurd schedules. All her own doing, mind. She is beginning to imagine not just having a weekend but choosing when it might occur, a Tuesday or a Thursday perhaps. This is an enormous thought which now threatens to become a revelation. How sad is that?

Day 10...
and Liz is in the edit suite and not in state of panic. She is able to make some intelligent and healthy comments about her performance, suggest possible solutions to visuals, timing, music, and still have change for a fiver. She is working hard to settle into her newly found headspace. She can hardly believe how much she is enjoying herself. She can scarcely allow herself the space.

Day 12...
and Liz potters off to a workshop to indulge in physical play, to collaborate with other people and to have no aim or reason other than just to be there. She learns some new things about the body, about her body. She is excited and repeats them relentlessly to her husband well into the midnight hour.

Day 15
Her diary looks very empty. She feels guilty. Not the sense of having 'broken the law, or of responsibility for offences committed, but a sense of wrong doing arising out of an imagined contravention of moral or social standards.' (Penguin English Dictionary). She thinks she is doing nothing. She thinks thinking is doing nothing. She thinks nothing is unworthy.

Day 16
She has lunch with friend to discuss this dilemma.

Day 21
She is over it.

Day 23 - 25
Liz packs in a performance, an exhibition, a launch party and meets some more chums. She also manages to read the newspaper, and all this without guilt.

Day 28...
and Liz is at the computer writing her manifesto. She knew she would find something worthy to do. She is contemplating the past and writes feverishly, constructing and reconstructing herself. She knows who she is when she has a mission.

Day 30...
and Liz delivers her manifesto in London. She presents her creativity with aplomb. Her past is her present. She has had time to think this one through. She bears witness to herself. She is not desperate to complete this event. She wants to savour it. She normally needs to shift the present to one side in order to find space in her head for the future. But now she is present and she knows it.

Day 33...
and Liz is off to the smoke again. She is getting the hang of this being present lark. She has prepared her text, chosen a suitable outfit which befits her status as a presenter, and has time to get a coffee and croissant at the station. She is truly present.

Day 37...
and Liz is about to transform into an Ice Queen at Girl Heaven. She is having a make-over. She does not really need an excuse since she has always been a responsible adult, even as an adult and even more so as a child. However, she is being tracked by a documentary filmmaker for this event and so she will construct a logical, critically aware underlying concept. As a performer she has been gazing unabashed at her mirror image for so long. She has aligned herself, created a movement palette for audience consumption, checked her make up, observed her grotesqueries, tried on costumes, tried on characters, reflecting herself at her herself. She knows her face is her USP (unique selling point). However she cringes at asides revealed on film. She knows what she hates about herself. She wishes to confront that through the eye of the camera, the eye of the film maker. She wants to be the subject but not responsible for the outcome. She wants someone else to see what can be made of her. That is her intellect talking. Her emotional head is something else. This is a girl just wanting to have fun. To play. She wants to improvise. She never normally improvises - it is too risky.

Day 37...
is still going on and Liz has had a blast. She is drinking coffee in a well known shop in full Ice Queen splendour. She allowed herself to be made up by Tinkerbell from Melbourne. She chose pink and powder blue. She thinks she looked pretty. This is not a word she usually associates with herself. There was not a hint of irony because she loved it. Every girly moment. Every frothy escapist second. She even danced round the shop dressed as The Ice Queen to Sophie Ellis Bexter and was cuddled by small children who told her she looked beautiful. She thought she would become Cruella Deville. She anticipated a performance personae. She was wrong.

Day 38...
and Liz is at the computer writing. Since time has been physically implanted into her she is slowly becoming realigned to life. She created herself and now she can learn to live with it for a while, to reflect and wait for answers rather than poking them with a sharp stick and beating them into submission with a toffee hammer. Her neck no longer hurts. Her chin is back in its usual place. She has only just begun and she is hoping to write in the first person as soon as she has established her new me.

To contact Liz in the first person, or in any person you happen to be at the time call her up on Google and track her past, present and future.

Liz Aggiss was awarded a Dancers Fellowship from the Arts Council of England and started her sabbatical in September 2002.

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Animated: Winter 2003