Moving Memory

I make my way up the stairs at the Substation. Along all four sides of the large room, rows of seats are arranged. Event warning: sudden loud noises. Content warning: death. I find a seat along the long side wall, with my back to the window. With the red curtains open and the night sky at my shoulders, I wait. Also sitting and waiting, several of the performers. They are dotted about the room, in pairs, sitting cross-legged on the floor. They are onstage, but not quite yet. They are waiting. Identifiable by the translucent fabric that cloaks their forms, they scan the room. Make eye contact. And set the tone for the celebration, the reason I am here and, I am guessing, others too. To celebrate “dance as a vital language of friendship, community and continual transformation.”[1]

Performance

James Batchelor & collaborators: “Resonance”

Place

The Substation, Melbourne, Australia, October 1, 2025

Words

Gracia Haby

James Batchelor and collaborators in “Resonance” at Sydney Dance Company. Photograph by Wendell Levi Teodoro

Presented as part of Melbourne Fringe, after premiering in Sydney as part of Idea ’25, and next Canberra bound, James Batchelor’s “Resonance” is a “living tribute that connects past, present, and future dancers” in light of choreographer Tanja Liedtke’s death in 2007. Supported by the Tanja Liedtke Foundation, together with Dramaturg Bek Berger, Batchelor connected with “the people that knew Tanja’s work best. Through listening, tracing, and gathering an archive embodied as a network in the form of collaborators, conspirators, partners, friends: Sol Ulbrich, Sophie Travers, Fenn Gordon, Shane Carroll, Kristina Chan, Paul White, Anton, Amelia McQueen, Julian Crotti, Josh Tyler, Craig Bary and many more.”[2] At 29-years-young, Liedtke “left an indelible mark on the dance community, and this work responds to that resonance,”[3] for the body is a vehicle for memory.

As befits an elegiac transmission, the night begins with words about Liedtke. Words that are spoken and also danced. Quietly addressed in conversation with Liedtke, her presence, and to the audience, assembled. With a microphone in hand, which is passed from dancer to dancer, they introduce themselves, and recount something of Liedtke, from a memory of seeing her run the length of the theatre to the edge of the orchestra pit so as to lob a congratulatory red bouquet of flowers onto the stage for Theo Clinkard to Batchelor reading from a small notebook about what lead to the making of this work, this conversation with another choreographer’s archive and the opportunity to do so with many of Liedtke’s friends. Together Batchelor and the Collaborators have ensured she is very much still in the room, some 18 years after she was killed in a tragic accident before she could take on her newly appointed role as artistic director of Sydney Dance Company.

James Batchelor and collaborators in “Resonance.” Photograph by Sarah Walker

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.

James Batchelor and collaborators in “Resonance.” Photograph by Sarah Walker

Joined by dancers from the Victorian Collage of the Arts (and from Sydney Dance Company Pre-Professional Year in Sydney, and QL2 Dance’s Quantum Leap Ensemble in Canberra), as they cast off their diaphanous outer layers and bundle them up, they pass them to various people in the audience to mind for them. These soft skins folded on the laps of audience members like legacy markers make a beautiful, casual visual. Most pronounced when, in noting, towards the end, that the dancers one by one are returning to collect and put on their respective costumes once more, an audience member unfurls the ghost-like costume to make it easier for Chignell to dive into.

On the empty seat to my right, Marojević leaps. She asks me and the fellow audience member to her right to take her hands. Standing on the chair, she rises onto the balls of her feet, tethered by the two of us. In the unexpected encounter, I grip her hand tightly before she threads off. Later, Marojević takes a seat between another two people, and resting her back comfortably on the chair and crossing her legs, assumes the position of an audience member. These fleeting conversations with the audience, these present tense moments, lay a veil of tenderness on the earlier memories. There is grief, but there is also joy. There is tracing a line backward and forward, and moving from the inward self to connecting to a larger whole, a constellation of multi-generational, multi-dimensionality.

Gracia Haby

Using an armoury of play and poetry as a lure, Gracia Haby is an artist besotted with paper. Her limited edition artists’ books, and other works hard to pin down, are often made collaboratively with fellow artist, Louise Jennison. Their work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and state libraries throughout Australia to the Tate (UK). Gracia Haby is known to collage with words as well as paper.

footnotes

James Batchelor and Collaborators, “Resonance” synopsis, “Resonance” programme edited by James Batchelor and Chloe Chignell, September 2025.
“Developing and nurturing these relationships was at times challenging and non-linear. The weight of Tanja’s memory and the complexity of grief were an inextricable part of the process. Yet so was the joy in remembering.” James Batchelor, ‘Fates Intertwined: Transforming Liedtke’s Archive’, James Batchelor website, https://www.james-batchelor.com.au/writing/fates-intertwined-transforming-liedtkes-archive, accessed October 2, 2025.
James Batchelor and Collaborators, “Resonance” synopsis, “Resonance” programme, 2025.
Shane Carroll, “A Living Legacy: Note from the Tanja Liedtke Foundation,” “Resonance” programme, 2025, 25
Kristina Chan, Amelia McQueen, Anton, “Memory Palace: A Woven Text,” “Resonance” programme, 2025, 45
Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2002), 1

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