ABSTRACT
When Liz Aggiss was 17 years old, she had a profound realization while watching the smash hit TV series, The Good Old Days. This famous family show was filmed at The City Varieties in Leeds. Britain’s longest running music hall, it featured a programme of Victorian acts performed in full costume to a live audience. On this occasion a mezzo soprano made her way onto the stage, opened her arms, sang a fulsome C so powerfully the floorboards trembled and then shouted to the audience: ‘All together now!’ Aggiss thought, ‘Well YES, why not?’ The moment in which a skill was delivered with a sliver of self-mockery stuck with her forever. In a few years’ time, she would train with Hanya Holm in Colorado and then Hilde Holger in the UK – but that chance TV moment would become a major ingredient in the aesthetic of what later became Divas. Liz Aggiss was going to have to find a collaborator who would savour that moment in the same way she did and have a grip on how to translate it in performance; someone who would share her love affair with German expressionism, her admiration for Max Wall (glimpsed by Aggiss at a gig actually dressed as a wall), the grotesque and startling dances of Valeska Gert, the sexiness of Weimar cabaret, the spectacle of Marlene Dietrich maliciously seducing her way through the Blue Angel – all somehow wrapped up in that ‘All together now!’ atmosphere of British music hall.
