“Expand into and slip through time.”
Resonance
James Batchelor & Collaborators
Melbourne Fringe Festival
Wednesday 1st October, 2025
The Substation
Lead Artist, Choreographer, Producer: James Batchelor
Dramaturg, Producer: Bek Berger
Composer: Morgan Hickinbotham
Performed and realised by: James Batchelor, Chloe Chignell, Leah Marojević with Amelia McQueen, Anton, Kristina Chan, Alice Heyward, Charlotte Macarthur, Emma Batchelor and dancers from Sydney Dance Company PPY, Victorian College of the Arts and QL2 Dance
Light Designer: Katie Sfetkidis
Costume Designer: Theo Clinkard
Moving Memory, my response to James Batchelor’s Resonance, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
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 on-stage, 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”[i].
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 Tanja Liedtke’s death in 2007. Supported by the Tanja Liedtke Foundation, over a three-year period, 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.”[ii] At 29-years-young, Liedtke “left an indelible mark on the dance community, and this work responds to that resonance”[iii], 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, her sense of, 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, photographed by Sarah Walker
As per ‘Swimming Score’, the dancers’ step “with smooth and gradual weight transference” as they travel the length of the room. “Walking narrowly as if in a swimming pool lane”, they are “sensitive to the smallest shift in weight”. They draw slow, circular movements overhead. Sometimes they curve backwards, as if in back stroke, twisting their torso on “the horizontal plane. The spine … either upright or sometimes soften[ed] into the forward stroke and extend[ed] slightly into an arch” on the return, creating a tranquil sensation of preserving and letting go. And while each dancer moves in accordance with each other, there is a sense that they are all deep in their own recollections as they “expand into and slip through time. …Turning around 180 degrees within [their] lane is [made] possible with [an] arm passing up and over head or down under past pelvis.”[iv] Sometimes their gaze follows the movement of their arms, and at other times it is fixed on the horizon. From my seat just off centre, they swim past me, up and back. A school of hybrid fish, they are so close. In costumes by Clinkard, their movements invite reflection.
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”[v]. 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.”[vi] 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.
James Batchelor, Chloe Chignell, and Leah Marojević, in Resonance, photographed by Sarah Walker
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.”[vii] Moving through time, under trees set deep into the earth, capable of changing viewpoints, Clinkard is memory in motion. Just like the notes to ‘Swimming Score’ 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.
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.
Kristina Chan and Anton in Resonance, photographed by Sarah Walker
[i] James Batchelor and Collaborators, Resonance synopsis, Resonance programme edited by James Batchelor and Chloe Chignell, September 2025.
[ii] “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 2nd October, 2025.
[iii] James Batchelor and Collaborators, Resonance synopsis, Resonance programme, 2025.
[iv] ‘Swimming Score’, Resonance programme, 2025, p. 15.
[v] Shane Carroll, ‘A Living Legacy: Note from the Tanja Liedtke Foundation’, Resonance programme, 2025, p. 25.
[vi] Kristina Chan, Amelia McQueen, Anton, ‘Memory Palace: A Woven Text’, Resonance programme, 2025, p. 45.
[vii] Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2002), p. 1.
Image credit: James Batchelor and collaborators in Resonance, by Sarah Walker
