ABSTRACT
Goddesses, witches, and sirens, all closely linked in Western thinking and dangerous to the male in their capacity to “bewitch” or even to castrate, drive the sensual and imaginative landscape of Lloyd Newson's Strange Fish. Dance and music share a history of association with these particular types of women, capable of evoking madness, death, excess, and sensory fragmentation. However, even if desire, eroticism, and sensual pleasure are the lifeblood of both arts, they each construct them in different ways and both shift as genres and times change. The collision of these ideas in the detailed formal constructions of movement and sound in Strange Fish offers an intoxicating feast for the “reader.” My analysis starts from, and remains with, the dance/act of theatre/performance and its music, rather than pursuing theory, valid as that might be for other purposes. I recognize a “mosaic” of theoretical positions on the notion of the “text” and “intertext” and draw on them where they seem most pertinent. These chosen texts and intertexts, while to some extent shared by the choreographer, film director, and performers as well as other readers, are also peculiarly my own. 1
