Ancestral and Authorial Voices in Lloyd Newson and DV8's Strange Fish

briefly notions relating to narrative that are particularly relevant to Strange Fish. That the creator and performers (Lloyd Newson and collaborators in the company DV8) have a narrative position is perhaps as obvious as the narrative position of the writer of this article. But there are also many other authorial and ancestral dances and sonorities that set the context. These are the dancescapes and soundscapes of the last five centuries in Christianized countries.2 There are the narratives that we inherit and absorb often without directly recognizing them, from the body of scholarly writing in dance and physical theatre. They are evident in discourses found in a range of publications and images, from popular journalism to books and journals. The voices that are audible in Strange Fish, a physical theatre work first shown in 1992 and subsequently reworked for video in 1994, are many and varied. Newson’s intentions and practices did not coincide happily with many of the existing dance voices – primarily those of abstract modern dance inherited from the US – and I articulate these positions in the first part of the paper. I make use in particular of the idea of ‘ancestral scholarly narratives’ of intertextual theory to construct an open-ended argument tracing some of the layers of analysis the work invites. Strange Fish, I argue, invites the reader to produce multiple traces, through the process of setting in play different texts and intertexts. As the reader adopts different positions, so different texts come into focus. Expressed in another way, different ‘voices’ sing at different moments. In addition to the usefulness of the idea of ‘voice’ in tracing intertextual threads, the presence of actual and ethereal voices in Strange Fish give this theme particular poignancy.3