Recalling the research-intensive exhibitions of the 1990s, a gallery of Xeroxes and gray-scale photographs evokes a radical conjuncture in UK dance history. In one vitrine, a 1978 magazine cover depicts the classical ballerina Alicia Markova swathed in tulle with a bloodred speech bubble smeared across the space around her head. This detournement of the ballerina as “debased commercial image of woman” is typical of X6, a group of dancers who, responding to the as-they-saw-it competitive narrowness of London’s dance world of the 1970s, with its rigorous standards and dysmorphic sex politics, ran an independent space for radical movement experimentation and produced New Dance magazine from 1977 to 1988.

In July of 1976, the collective—Emilyn Claid, Maedée Duprès, Fergus Early, Jacky Lansley, and Mary Prestidge—celebrated the now-unthinkable find of a disused building at Butler’s Wharf Pier with the performance event By River and Wharf. A photographic sequence on view here shows the dancers playing with municipal objects as they guide a guerilla audience as if on a treasure hunt. The scene’s photographer, Geoff White, gifted the exhibition’s curator, Rachael Davies, with this trove of contact sheets, from which selected images have been blown up for exhibition. Indeed, all that materially remains of these performances—barring a single video document—is a print-heavy archive. “Liberation Notes” attests to an embodied countercultural politics mediated by dance criticism, handwritten advertisements for feminist workshops, and event scores that double as manifesto statements. 

A double-breasted blazer hangs in one corner, an exception to this archival logic, its pockets stuffed with, among other things, a toy gun and a copy of Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate (1971) tempting reactivation. This ensemble, first deployed by Lansley in Dance Object, 1977, tested the limits of performance; a scheduled live program featuring X6 members may just reprise the group’s politics for dancers (and viewers) navigating the same old problems today.

— Tom Hastings