The Struggle with the Angel: A Poetics of Lloyd Newson’s Strange Fish (review)

In The Struggle with the Angel Janet Adshead-Lansdale has attempted a book-length analysis of a single work of physical theater: DV8 choreographer Lloyd Newson’s 1992 Strange Fish, which was first performed onstage and later reworked for video. Adshead-Lansdale’s project, as she describes it, is as much about presenting a method of dance analysis as it is about analyzing Strange Fish (29). The book can thus be neatly split in two, with the first three chapters focused on the articulation of a methodological approach with very spare introductions to Strange Fish, and the second three chapters engaged in the sort of intertextual analysis Adshead-Lansdale proposes for dance research.

The final chapter, “An Elegy,” functions both as conclusion and as the absent introduction, wherein the author makes her theoretical and political agendas explicit. She argues, “The body, dance, and music occupy a peculiar place in many critical writings . . . as rich analogical or metaphorical material, not as subjects of study” (235). In analyzing Strange Fish and what she calls the “intertextual traces” that surround the work, Adshead-Lansdale argues that dance merits “serious” consideration. She also reveals her position that “The ‘gay male aesthetic’ . . . has for some years dominated the British dance landscape” (242), and that the shift toward androgynous or campy portrayals of gendered identities, accompanied by an imbalance of male choreographers, is politically disadvantageous for women and their representation. She quotes the feminist and queer theorist Theresa de Lauretis: “If Nietzsche and Derrida can occupy and speak from the position of woman, it is because that position is vacant, and what is more, cannot be claimed by women” (242). Adshead-Lansdale’s analyses of Strange Fish are thus strongly informed by a gender critique, and throughout the book she takes Lloyd Newson to task for what she sees as his disappointing refusal to destabilize the gendered social order by portraying more equitable subject positions (243).

The first three chapters, as I mentioned, are primarily concerned with Adshead-Lansdale’s analytic method. In chapter 1 she situates Newson and DV8 Physical Theatre within a larger terrain of British dance in the 1980s and 1990s and pulls together a number of critics’ responses to Strange Fish, sometimes reproducing entire reviews. After laying out the artistic scene and sorting critical responses by thematic orientation (religious parable, dramatic expression, psychoanalysis, and sexual politics), the author proceeds in chapter 2 to break the work down into its constitutive parts: choreography, process, music, and environments. Following the scenes as identified on the DVD of Strange Fish, Adshead-Lansdale describes the actions undertaken “in a relatively uninflected and rather straight forward manner” (37), giving little indication of the importance of these gestures or how she interprets them. She discusses the uneasy process of collaboration, the lament and plainsong musical forms that weave throughout Strange Fish, and the psychology of the spaces in which the work unfolds: churches, bars, corridors, etc. Though the author is outlining an intertextual analytic method, which she eventually defines in chapter 3, she defers all sustained analysis of Strange Fish until later in the book. As a result, many assertions made in the first half of the book go unsubstantiated by textual or choreographic evidence until the second half. Incidentally, in the absence of photographs or video stills, the author’s early references to Strange Fish are almost incomprehensible without the reader’s prior familiarity with the performance or video.

Adshead-Lansdale’s approach of tracking her analytic method before actualizing that method for readers is instructive for those who are in need of research tools. The author offers her own take on intertextual critique, which would seem to incorporate critical theoretical approaches while providing an antidote to post-structural obscurantism (77). Intertextual readings, according to the framework she suggests, are able to consider the “inter-relationships of actual people” behind a work or text, point...