Substation, Melbourne.
1 October 2025.
We talk a lot about legacy; but what is it and how does it map out? In an ephemeral artform like dance (which is repeatable, yet never repeated), what does any of this mean?
Such musings appear front and centre in James Batchelor’s Melbourne Fringe work, Resonance. Having been approached three years ago by the Tanja Liedtke Foundation to “lead a project” that would investigate the late dancemaker’s legacy, Batchelor and his ensemble of collaborators try to wrest such ghostly vagaries from the miasma of romanticisation, and to give them physical form – if only for another hour.
What stands out amidst the layers of homage is an unmistakable porosity. Legacy – however it manifests – is a blended phenomenon. It contains private memory and public knowledge, conscious and unconscious myth. And forgetting. Through these gaps, Batchelor & co allow the present to seep. To what degree this is deliberate is unclear, but the sounds of passing trains and the sight of performers waiting for their cues in an adjacent corridor bleed beautifully into the heart of the work, somehow anchoring Liedtke’s early century heyday to 2025. Her famous tragedy is thus infused in the surviving bodies of friends and strangers; thence passed onto us.
Resonance could easily have been mawkish, merely eulogistic, but it has skirted these quicksands. This could be a testament to the beautiful inexactness of contemporary dance, or simply evidence of the years, and the banality of their passing. Either way, Batchelor and his team have walked on hallowed ground without getting bogged in it. No mean feat.
In parallel, there is also a disjointed quality to the work. The seams are visible. Some of this is about the stop/start arc, some about choreography. In one sequence, Resonance deploys a metronomic time signature, pulse-like, but the dozen strong ensemble all move slightly out of sync. Here, we see how personal takes on legacy might operate, with both broad brush consensus and idiosyncratic detail.
Deeper still, we can read this as a meditation on our subjective experience of time. Here, we not only reflect on the abrupt passing of a young artist at the peak of her powers, but on the transformative insights of Special Relativity.
Again, the motif here seems to be leakage. Through the membranes of time, memory and official myth, ghosts may travel as freely as the chug of commuter trains. All of them coalescing in the liquidity of the dancing body.
Notably, Resonance appears weighted by its defining commission. Despite – or perhaps because of – its focus on the now-legendary Australian dance heroine, and its industry insider touch points, it exhibits a patchiness bordering on hesitation. Or is it the presence of too many cooks? Too many agendas?
Although collaboration can be an antidote to the murk of monologue, it can also confer a mix of clutter and risk aversion. Nevertheless, Batchelor and his co-creators have managed to craft a paean to 21c Australian contemporary dance. There are moves here that recall much of what we know. Tanja Liedtke et al.
Ultimately, this may be the legacy. Namely, the pathways and channels that continue to inform 2020s practise — with Liedtke standing in as the blotting paper, soaking up and re-expressing the moving archive of dance art. Thus, the core resonance at play is likely morphic, memory crossfading into the hard physicality of tonight’s performance. In this way, Liedtke and Batchelor may be no more than vessels, and we their fellow travellers.
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
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