I have never seen Liedtke’s work performed live. I know it through the 2011 documentary Life in Movement, directed by Sophie Hyde and Bryan Mason, which features “Twelfth Floor” (2004) and “Construct” (2007). Snippets from both feature, as McQueen raises her index finger to her lower cheek and in the application of pressure, rotates her head accordingly, and Chan fluidly modulates her height. Dance leaves an impression on the audience, and, it transpires, “a lasting imprint in the bodies and minds of artists.”[4] McQueen and Chan, together with Anton, have also written Memory Palace: A Woven Text, which weaves on the page akin to their steps on the stage. Words wend their way, reminiscent of a rivulet of water or a loose question mark anchored by the lines: “It makes me think about loss. It makes me think about what is enough.”[5] In reading, and hearing their words spoken on stage, it is impossible not to fasten them to their movements. Words hover the way movements do. The dancers loop together in sequence, and ponder: “maybe I have been dancing the same steps for thirty years.” The words are “repeated over and over” like steps, and convey a sense of tenderness for the past and a wish to “continue for the next thirty years if I am lucky.” Anton, on the balls of his feet, is euphoria about to bubble over.

Clinkard pas de bourrées past me, suspended by a memory of what was and is, following a consistently shifting map of trace lines. I am reminded of the beginning of Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night where the narrator recounts a dream in which “I was pure looking, pure sight, without a body or name. I was suspended high above a valley at some undefined point from which I could see everything, or almost everything. I could move around my field of vision, yet remain in the same place.”[6] Moving through time, under trees set deep into the earth, capable of changing viewpoints, Clinkard is memory in motion. The notes read: “Expand into and slip through time.” Elsewhere Batchelor, Chloe Chignell, and Leah Marojević, in a central huddle, make graceful body builder poses that echo both the footage of Liedtke working through her ideas and her choreography. To Morgan Hickinbotham’s score, and the rhythmical chug-chug of the nearby train wrapping around them in the now dimmed space, the intimacy of the moment is palpable.