 The struggle with the angel: a poetics of Lloyd Newson's 'Strange Fish'.
Author: Adshead-Lansdale, Janet Published: 2007 In The Struggle with the Angel Janet Adshead-Lansdale makes two major contributions to research in dance. Firstly, she takes forward arguments about interpretive strategies based on post-structuralist debate, extending those in her much used book Dance Analysis: theory and practice. These arguments place the analysis of movement, the articulation of structures employed to create form, the identification of subject matter and consideration of its treatment, within a meaning-making framework which locates Lloyd Newson's Strange Fish, created for DV8 Physical Theatre, in the cultural frame of dance and art in the late twentieth century in Europe, bringing the spectator's role to the forefront. Secondly, she shows the depth that it is possible to achieve through a sustained and extended analysis of a particular work, extending the chapter-length examples in her Dancing Texts. Intertextuality in Interpretation to a full length account. Her own intertextual and creative engagement with the work is balanced by a sense of the uniqueness and integrity of Strange Fish. Drawing on texts related to Greek and Christian histories, to psychoanalytic thinking of recent times and to feminism and queer theory, Lansdale presents cogent interpretations which are critical of, yet in sympathy with, the work. This text shows how dance research can aspire to, and equal, the much longer-standing analytic accounts of individual works in music, theatre and the visual arts, to penetrate the many layers of meaning that interpreters construct. Janet Adshead-Lansdale is a Distinguished Professor of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey. | 
