Laurie Booth, an Englishman, attended Dartington College of Art and presented his first solo, "Beyond Zero," in 1980. He danced extensively alongside Steve Paxton, the American choreographer known for "contact-dance," and performed with Paxton and Lisa Nelson in Rome. After working with various dance and theater companies, since 1982 he has focused on projects in collaboration with individual artists. Alongside designer Kate Owen, he created works such as "Crazy Daisy and the Northern Lights" and "From Ordinary Lives." In 1984, he collaborated with composer and director Plumelia Hairart to create "Animal." That same year, he worked with Phillip Jeck, his partner in "Yip Yip Mix and the Twentieth Century."
In 1982, Booth took a break from producing shows to study Capoeira, the Brazilian martial art, in San Francisco for several months, which greatly influenced his current dance style. In '84, he spent two months in Sudan working on a project aimed at exploring the relationship between theater and the conditions typical of areas experiencing significant emigration phenomena.
His most recent performance, "Mercurial States" (June '87), involved collaboration with Toby Sedgwick. The performance was inspired by a story by G.K. Chesterton about a Victorian ethnologist who, after studying African languages, returns to England and communicates exclusively through abstract movements of his own creation.
