A peek inside International Dance Day’s blockbuster Batchelor + Lea double bill

Posted on 19 April, 2023

In celebration of Australian Dance Week, a special double bill performance will take place at The Playhouse on International Dance Day, from two acclaimed homegrown dance artists.

In Batchelor + Lea, James Batchelor and Liz Lea will each present a deeply personal work informed by their unique interpretations of the artform of dance and inspired by their own research and experiences.

James’s work, Shortcuts to Familiar Places, is an exploration of his own dance journey as a student under esteemed teachers both during his childhood in Canberra and his professional career abroad. For James, who is currently based in Berlin, it’s a welcome homecoming after many years away, especially as part of an annual celebration of dance.

“Creating and performing work in Canberra is really important to me. Even though my work takes me away a lot, I believe in contributing to the cultural life here. The Playhouse is a stage I grew up performing on as well and am really familiar with. The other performer in my new work Chloe is also from Canberra, so it feels like coming home for both of us.”

“I also really appreciate the opportunity to present this work in a double bill with Liz Lea, as so much of this network is interconnected. It’s an opportunity to really dive into what contemporary dance in Canberra is today and the ripples it moves within.”

James’ co-headliner Liz Lea shares this feeling of homecoming. She explains that for Canberra artists—especially solo ones—The Playhouse is a venue to “aspire to”, especially post-pandemic.

“Bringing this work – any work – to this particular stage is such a brilliant opportunity and I am so grateful to the Canberra Theatre Centre team for supporting independent artists in this way through their New Works program,” she says, adding that while performing post-pandemic now feels “perfectly normal”, when she first performed RED to an audience of 1200 empty seats at Canberra Theatre it was “deeply emotional for a while and surreal”.

“It is important to remember the shifts that took place over the past three years, and this is our new normal which I feel we are all stepping into gently.”

Like Shortcuts to Familiar Places, Liz’s work RED focusses on a narrative of personal history.

“The work evolved over time to focus on my experiences with Endometriosis which was not the initial focus,” she explains. “It has been a fascinating experience to realise how deeply personal the work is because when creating it we just got on with the sections: films, text and movement under the expert dramaturgy of Brian Lucas. It was only on premier and then touring that the import of what we had created beyond a work of art began to seep through for me.”

RED. Credit: Amy Sinead Moran.

Aside from the personal nature of James and Liz’s shows there are other similarities. Both works feature a blend of film and live performance, both have toured internationally and both focus on narrating lived experience through movement, a particular focus of James’s career.

“I work between Australia and Europe, so my dance practice involves travelling between many different contexts,” he explains. “The work that I make therefore tends to be quite adaptable. I am very interested in what space does to movement, I find choreography to be always a process of relating to the context.”

“So through working in all kind of spaces from theatres big and small, to galleries, gardens, an abandoned mine in Finland or a castle in the Czech Republic, I have been learning a lot about movement.”

“One of the most extreme examples, was my residency on an interdisciplinary research expedition to remote Antarctic islands. Two months on a ship in the world’s roughest swells, I studied how my body would absorb and adapt to the oceanic movement.”

“With Shortcuts to Familiar Places I’ve been thinking about the interpersonal relation of movement, how it migrates between bodies and across generations. Specifically, the notion of embodied memory, what we remember in our bodies and why…I started from a very personal place, exploring a lineage through a significant teacher and mentor of mine, [Artistic Director of QL2 Dance in Canberra], Ruth Osborne.

“I would like to show through this specific lineage how movement is a shared language that flows via a network of relationships between people, in this case across several generations.”

James Batchelor.

The final similarity between these dynamic artists is, of course, their love for the celebration of dance.

“Performing this work on International Dance Day for me highlights the space and time that movement travels,” says James. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to show this work which speaks to the distance that I have traveled with dance, and where that sits in context with what has come before me.”

Liz adds that International Dance Day has always been a “special day” for her.

“I spent the bulk of my career traveling and touring with other companies and my own work. Connecting with different audiences and experiencing audience responses in different places is always a joy and learning curve…I’m excited to bring RED to the stage with James and his team.”