By Alice Heyward
Mist
Imagine standing in a foggy field: air thick with moisture, sound dampened, vision stretching only as far as your breath. Try walking toward the edge. The mist continues, indestructible, irresistible. Each point in space, each moment in time, reveals a limitless whole.
Its centre is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere.1
In the secular, oculocentric, Western conception, the archive’s centre is the official record; its circumference marks what is excluded. It is made manageable, consumable, both dominated and dominating. Visible (yet rarely public). In institutions, archives are bordered, organised as collections—acquired and owned, exhibited with control. As scholar-critic Eunsong Kim argues, collections are not neutral accumulations but forms of property shaped by regimes of dispossession and exclusion. They are legitimised through capital, expropriation, and institutional authority, limiting art’s expansion.2 As archives, they are sites of power and desire, of memory and repression, systems that govern the sayable and thinkable.3
In an anarchive, the centre is wherever someone engages with it; its circumference dissolves into the work’s ongoing life, opening possibilities in the mist. The anarchive, most notably theorised by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi4, is a proposition for thinking-feeling in motion, illuminating formative tendencies and compositional forces as lures for further processes and form-takings. Instead of domesticating the fog’s affective mysteries, James Batchelor embraces Kurt and Gerlinde Liedtke’s commission, entangled with their family tragedy, to develop a new work connected to their daughter Tanja Liedtke (1977–2007) and her artistry, with a grounded, evolving perspective through and toward the nature of embodied knowledge. Inspired by its traces, Batchelor treats her oeuvre as a living environment for an ongoing relay of materials, practices, and people.
Orienting
The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named.5 In all this mist, we cannot see the map as separate from ourselves. Acknowledging our always-partial perspectives allows us to unlearn dominant humanist habits. These tendencies seek to see ‘objectively,’ dividing self from others, nature from culture, past from present. Donna Haraway observes that when science separates a ‘view’ of the world from how it was captured, it performs a ‘god trick’—pretending that an observer’s limited view can actually see everything from an omniscient god’s-eye perspective.6 Rather, in a state of conscientious prehension7, Resonance moves with registers of perception that are not limited to living, autonomous beings, interconnecting the observer and the observed, the visible and invisible, the here and gone through ever-evaporating boundaries. Fingers, elbows, and shoulders curve and sequence, spines spiral, we hover, fall and rebound; space swirls; coexistence gracefully gathers.
Batchelor embraces his authorship as choreographer with its inherent responsibility: to facilitate encounters that renew the presence of different bodies, minds, and spirits, weaving traces that acknowledge canons, genealogies, and lived embodiment. Resonance listens and echoes, calling softly forward and backward with the to-and-fro of accumulating, transforming knowledge. As the first law of thermodynamics reminds us, energy is never lost, only transformed or transferred. Berlin-based choreographer Alice Chauchat describes dance “as a way of offering something to someone, as a form of productive confusion, as a structure of unverified trust. Movement, speech, dance, and action belong to nobody and to everybody, and are activated by each of us.”8 It is in this spirit—complex, paradoxical—that Resonance emerges, intrinsically bound and freed within Liedtke’s anarchive.
Batchelor told me that soon after the invitation for this project, daunted by its delicate weight, he considered attempting an appropriation of Liedtke’s artistic methodologies to draw from the late artist’s creativity; he decided against this pathway, without a real connection to his own artistic desire in this process. Resonance, instead, feeds forward, receiving Liedtke’s influence as an empowering flow rather than as pre-determined forms, opening out in receptive, embodied loops. The spirit of Liedtke’s artistry lives within networks, generations and international communities as a spiralling force, toward new interpretations and aesthetics. It is accessed through felt acts of dancing and carried forward as generative, distributed, and forever unfinished.
Spirit Tracing
Lived experiences and firsthand recollections of Liedtke reside in people whom Batchelor invited into his collective, historic-speculative research. Anton, Christina Chan, Amelia McQueen, and Theo Clinkard shared their diverse memories of movement, works, and experiences, which Batchelor interpreted into new aesthetic forms and flows, grounded in his choreographic practice with long-term collaborators. Research sessions with Chan, Anton, and McQueen were powerful catalysts: their remembrances and transmissions enlivened the recreation and reinvention of images and patterns. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself.9 Batchelor’s relation to Liedtke was made possible through these dancers who knew her, with the differences between him and them fundamental to his creative approach with us in the studio, a younger generation once removed from Liedtke. They, who knew, loved, and worked closely with Liedtke, weave back into Resonance, encountering new proposals for dancing that carry the traces of her they shared. The project will be joined in Australia by a third generation of dancers, in their formative stages at dance school. For these students, Resonance is likely to be specifically meaningful: working horizontally with different, older generations of artists and their breadth of experience and knowledge, practising internationally. Looking back at my idolising, younger self, participating in a project like this while in school would have been profoundly inspiring, challenging hierarchical cultures of gatekeeping knowledge and customs so often perpetuated through nostalgic approaches to the archive.
Philosopher Rosi Braidotti calls for a form of neo-materialist appreciation of the body that moves beyond nostalgic attachments to previous states of being. This ‘passionately distant’ stance allows for a connection to the past without being bound by it, fostering a commitment to the future and ongoing processes of becoming.10 Liedtke’s significance is approached in Resonance like a spirit: subjective, fluid, infinite, unrestricted by fixed definitions. In Chinese medicine, Spirit is inseparable from Body and Mind. They transform through dynamic interconnectedness. In an anarchive, no single component—material trace, embodied memory, or live gesture—exists in isolation. Batchelor’s approach resists nostalgia while sustaining connection through movement. Resonance develops through its multiplicity of perspectives grounded in group dancing, touching—not capturing—Spirit. Material affords reinvention through ongoing relations, and each act of reinvention generously expands the anarchive it is part of.
Lack as Love
I remember, as a young dancer, fifteen years old, the news of Liedtke’s passing. My mum, a dance enthusiast, cut the newspaper article out for me. I remember the printed image of her face among the text; her scarlet hair, dazzling smile, and my (ongoing) incomprehension of life and death. How can someone, who was so resolutely, vibrantly here, alive, dancing, now be ‘gone’? What does it mean?
In Grief: A Philosophical Guide, Michael Cholbi draws a precise distinction between grief and mourning, a framework that helped me to eventually navigate my own overwhelming grief of close friends who died, separation in relationships, and my troubled emotional responses to the pain of others I don’t know personally, widespread through local and global injustice and tragedy. Grief is an individual, emotional reaction to loss, whereas mourning refers to the behaviours or cultural expressions that publicly acknowledge the loss.11 Grief and mourning are not mutually exclusive. They move into and between each other, doing and undoing us. Their specificities and distinctions shape how Resonance navigates grief collectively. This includes those who have grieved and are grieving Liedtke’s passing, as well as those who mourn in empathy, who grieve and have grieved different personal losses.
Dancing and grieving are both movements through absence and presence. Grief moves through the body like a rhythm we did not choose but learn to carry, a choreography imposed by loss. Dancing allows us to move with that rhythm—resisting or yielding to it, collapsing or contracting with it, releasing it. Dancing likewise generates celebration and joy, bound to the force of being alive together, spirited by our memories of those who have passed on, into us. Grief may sometimes draw us inward, curling into the weight of loss, while joy opens us outward into space and each other. These movements fold into one another. Deep grief has ultimately helped me rediscover, through its unstoppable throws, the ground upon which I stand and dance, and my maturing relationship to the paradoxes of life and death—not from a surveilling god’s eye, but from myself as a process. Joy is continually generated in dance from the very places where grief lives. It is contagious, a vibration that leaps between bodies, reminding us that aliveness persists within and through loss. Resonance culminates in an unfinished, open affirmation, offering the fullness of joy, encompassing the sorrows of life.
Poet Ocean Vuong views grief as the final, lifelong translation of love, a process that creates an uncanny sense of life divided into ‘today’ (without the loved one) and ‘yesterday’ (when they were alive).12 The intensity of grief can eventually bring strange freedoms, allowing us to write and dance, to create and find pleasure again, to live within loss, forever changed, not just move past it.
The varying degrees of distance from Liedtke among the different generations of dancers who meet in Resonance, and the closeness within each generation, make particular kinds of intimacy possible in the project. Distance sharpens the edges of intimacy, exposes its fragility, and allows ethical relations to move through it. In psychoanalytic terms, desire often emerges as a productive force in the play between proximity and separation. Through this negotiation, resonant dances emanate, shaped by distances, blending pre-existing and new connections. Hands clasp; we spin, separate, return, an ancient folk dance that does not exclude. Our dancing grows through knowledge and imagination of one another, in the repetition of forms. Batchelor, Morgan Hickinbotham, Bek Berger, Leah Marojević, Chloe Chignell and I are close friends and colleagues who have danced, played, worked, and discussed next to and alongside one another for decades, just as Liedtke spent many years dancing with her collaborators, who shared their stories with Batchelor. What unfolds is a complex fabric of relations—where distance and closeness, friends and new acquaintances, grief and its inherent wisdom, and empathy, intertwine to shape the ways knowledge and experience can be imagined, enacted, and felt.
Softly Holding13
In memory, transmission and practice, dance continues to expand, transform, and make intimate spaces for encounters through moving distances. Without clinging nostalgically to myths of the past, Resonance moves gently into pluralism from the understanding that for every sign or trace, “there is a transformation, a coding, between the report and the thing reported, the Ding an sich”14 (thing-in-itself). We recognise ourselves as entwined with the maps we navigate—guiding us beyond known territory—elsewhere, otherwise. Scripts are continually rewritten through our embodied relation to them, in turn, rewriting ourselves. New voices emerge as we think and feel in motion together beyond what’s known, dancing together in paradox. The persistence of performance—its recurrence, memory, and afterlives—plays with boundaries—now/then, secular/spiritual, intimate/distant, grief/joy and love—multiplying perspectives and authorship.
The radicality of Resonance lies in its commitment to remembering what we might not know, grounded in body-to-body processes, and learning. We remember together, knowing that to do so is to move and be moved. It is the act of memory which protects a thing’s, a person’s, a place’s or a moment’s existence and meanings, including life’s innate, collective will toward growth, and therefore change. An anarchive invites infinite re-entry points. Its mapping never fully contains it. Every interaction is central; there is no final edge. These mystic, spatial principles are not just metaphorical, but choreographically operational in Resonance, reflecting the anarchive’s boundlessness and decentralisation—material loops into activation, vibrating a shared field of resonance. Like mist, Resonance cannot be contained; it expands in encounters, dissolving edges into motion.
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This text was written at the invitation of James Batchelor, following my participation in rehearsals for ‘Resonance’ in Berlin in 2024 and 2025. - Alice Heyward
Alice Heyward is a Berlin- and Naarm (Melbourne)-based dancer, choreographer, writer, dramaturge and teacher. As author, co-author and interpreter, she practices and analyses the production of embodied poetics. She is currently developing Brigid, with Oisín Monaghan/Oisín Ó Manacháin, to be presented at Dancehouse Melbourne and La Trobe Art Institute in November 2025. She is a Masters by Research candidate at the University of Melbourne, writing about performance conservation. She writes regularly for tanzschreiber, Spike, and other publications.
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1 The phrase is most often attributed to Nicolas of Cusa, who used it in On Learned Ignorance (1440) to describe God’s infinite nature. It has circulated widely since, reappearing in Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature (12th c.), Pascal’s Pensées (17th c.), and later in literary form in Jorge Luis Borges’s Other Inquisitions (20th c.), among many other sources.
2 Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023), 6
3 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 129.
4 Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
5 Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Lancaster, PA: Science Press, 1933), 58.
6 Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 581–82.
7 Alfred North Whitehead introduces prehension in Process and Reality to describe the way actual entities take account of and are affected by one another, whether or not through conscious perception. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 23.
8 Alice Chauchat, Dance Gathering, in Radical Playgrounds: From Competition to Collaboration, Berliner Festspiele, 2024, accessed August 26, 2025, https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/programm/2024/radical-playgrounds/kuenstlerinnen/alice-chauchat.
9 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 115.
10 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 164–65.
11 Michael Cholbi, Grief: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 21.
12 Ocean Vuong, interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, April 5, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/04/05/1090845515/poet-ocean-vuong-sifts-through-the-aftershock-of-grief-in-time-is-a-mother.
13 A name given by Batchelor in rehearsal to a material performed in Resonance: the group gently touches their hands to each other’s shoulders and elbows, and sometimes rests their heads on one another. They circle through and around each other, joining and separating like clouds in the sky, moved by the invisible movement that holds them.
14 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (New York: Dutton, 1979), chap. II, “The Map Is Not the Territory, and the Name Is Not the Thing Named,” accessed [26/08/2025], downloaded from sympoetic.net (PDF).
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Works Cited
Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature. 1979.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952. 1964.
Chauchat, Alice. Dance Gathering. 2024.
Cholbi, Michael. Grief: A Philosophical Guide. 2022.
Cusanus, Nicholas of. On Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia). 1981.
Haraway, Donna J. “Situated Knowledges.” 1988.
Kim, Eunsong. The Politics of Collecting. 2023.
Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. Thought in the Act. 2014.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. 2003.
Vuong, Ocean. Interview, Fresh Air. 2022.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. 1978.