TANJA LIEDTKE STUDIO RESIDENCIES

Amelia Watson (they/them) is an emerging independent dance artist based on Kaurna Land. Amelia has traversed creative landscapes across Europe and Australia, working and studying in contemporary dance, puppeteering, choreography, dramaturgy and dance theatre. A graduate from Adelaide College of Arts, Amelia received the 2023 Helpmann Academy Fellowship to study Interdisciplinary Arts in Bologna, Italy.

Amelia has since developed a strong multi-disciplined approach to storytelling. They are committed to exploring innovative forms of expression through the interception of movement, voice, text and anthropological research.

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Residency project - Dis

During their residency Amelia will develop a network that explores the tensions between their deep love of dance and their newly found neurological condition. Alongside dancer Caroline De Wan and Mentor Tanya Vogues, Amelia will begin work on a piece exploring the seizures they experience, giving choreographic language and voice to a different lived experience of inhabiting a body.

Dis is a stage to share how adversity can make us stronger, louder and unapologetically able.

Jacob Boehme (he/him) is a critically acclaimed artistic director, theatre maker and choreographer, from the Narungga and Kaurna Nations, creating work for stage, screen, large-scale public events and festivals.

An alumnus of NASIDA College of Dance (Dip in Dance, 2000) and the Victorian College of the Arts, (MA in Arts – Playwriting 2014, MA in Arts – Puppetry 2007), Jacob has led the artistic direction of Tanderrum (Melbourne Festival), Boon Wurrung Ngargee (Yalukit Willam Festival), Thuwathu (Cairns Indigenous Arts Fair), Geelong After Dark and was the founding Creative Director of Yirramboi Festival, recipient of the 2018 Green Room Award for Curatorial Contribution to Contemporary and Experimental Arts.

Jacob was the inaugural Director First Nations Programs for Carriageworks, Australia’s largest multi-arts venue for the development and presentation of experimental and contemporary arts. Jacob’s curatorial credits include Curator of The Original Peoples Party (Australian Performing Arts Market 2018), Yirramboi x Pulima (Pulima Festival, Taiwan 2018), First Nations Youth Arts Program (Bibu Festival 2022) and Connection to Country (Australian Museum x Vivid Ideas 2023).

Jacob is an Australia Council for the Arts Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Fellow (2018) and has been a member of International Advisory Committees for the Calouste Gulbenkian UK Inquiry into the Role of Arts Organisations, the Ministry of Culture Taiwan South East Asia Advisory Panel, the Global First Nations Advisory and Bibu Festival International First Nations Curatorial Committee.

Jacob is the writer and performer of the critically acclaimed solo work Blood on the Dance Floor, recipient of the 2017 Green Room Award Best Independent Production.

Jacob’s Wild Dog Project is the recipient of the 2023 Ruby Award for Outstanding Community Event or Project: a multi-disciplinary exhibition connecting dingo songlines across Australian and South East Asia, presented by Arts Gallery South Australia’s Tarnanthi Festival, 2022.

Jacob is the Writer, Choreographer and Artistic Director of Guuranda, a major new theatre work telling the Creation stories of the Narungga Peoples of Yorke Peninsula, commissioned by Adelaide Festival 2024.

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Residency Project – Logan Street

Jacob Boehme’s practice sits at the intersection of text and movement, connecting ancient storytelling with contemporary technique. Jacob creates works that centre community engagement, consultation and practice at the core of their development, prioritising cultural Eldership at every level of the process.

Logan Street sees two Narungga/ Kaurna sisters escape the nursing home where they live and retrace their steps to their childhood home on Logan Street, but it no longer exists. As the pair sing up to where their house once was, they transport the audience to a new era filled with the characters of the past.

During his residency, Jacob will continue development of the work, exploring movement language at the centre of the project through his Memory in Movement technique.

Together is a collaborative and co-led initiative involving four pan-indigenous dance artists: Bella Waru, Danni Cook, Amelia O’Leary and Kalia cook. An inter-cultural project grounded in the rich tapestry of kinship-based indigenous knowledge,

Together will be a cyclic and layered performance that seeks to deconstruct the linearity of time and space, building a world that exists between the past and the present, the physical and the ancestral.

Together artists:

Amelia Jean O’Leary

Amelia Jean O’Leary (she/they/yinarr) is a proud First Nations Gamilaroi Yinarr from Northen New South Wales currently living in Naarm (Melbourne). Her dance practice is about human and spiritual experiencing. Through complexity and adversity, she finds ways to tell coded and poetically rich stories. Her dances are personal and personified from her multidisciplinary skills in theatre, film and sound design. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2021, O’Leary performed and created multiple works including Yinarr (Adelaide Fringe and Dancehouse); A Certain Mumble (Darebin Arts Speakeasy) and STAUNCH ASF (Melbourne Fringe), for which she was awarded Best Emerging Indigenous Artist at Melbourne Fringe 2023, and nominated for a Green Room Award for Pioneering Artistry: Breaking Ground.

Amelia also choreographed One Day as part of Melbourne Theatre Company’s First Peoples Young Artists Program at Yirramboi Festival. O’Leary is currently developing multiple new works.

Bella Waru

Bella Waru (Ngāti Tukorehe, Taranaki Tūturu, ia/they/them) is a performer & choreographer of movement, sound, space and language, and an eternal tauira of the Māori healing, weaving & martial arts. Living and listening on sacred, unceded Woi Wurrung, Boon Wurrung country in so-called-australia, Waru creates stories and spaces founded in embodied practice, emerging from and returning to the communities, contexts, lands and peoples who have made them who they are, with reverence and acknowledgement of those that came before them, and those that will follow after.

Their practice centres the embodiment of living culture and culture making, exploring connection, legacy, healing, whakapapa, whenua and warriorhood. Works of note include RESONANCE (MAV Commission, Melbourne Museum 2023), Where We Stand (DanceOn 2018, Dancehouse 2019), Kaitiaki: Sovereign Reflections (Future Lens 2020, Bodies of Woven Code Corbans Estate AKL 2022), FAMILI (Midsumma 2020) & internationally award-winning feature documentary, Knots (2020)

Danni Cook

Danni Cook (She/Her) is a Naarm/Boorloo based movement artist of Māori (Ngāpuhi),Mā’ohi and European descent. Danni recently graduated from Western Australia Academy of the Performing Arts (WAAPA), receiving a bachelor of Arts in contemporary dance.

Danni’s practice is focussed on the energetic exchange between self, her collaborators, and the land and waters she exists on and travel between. She is interested in using movement as a vessel to interrogate how the form of our body is a manifestation of the land, delving into and listening to internal nuances that inform external aesthetic, place, and the voices of our spirits and ancestors.

Danni is currently co-developing a new work Collective Collisions which was recently platformed at ‘Out of Bounds’ presented by Lucy Guerin Inc and Temperance Hall.

Karlia Cook

Karlia Cook is a Naarm based dance artist of Māori (Ngāpuhi), Mā’ohi and European descent. Karlia is a dancer, choreographer and writer with a Masters in Dance from the Victorian College of the Arts. Her practice is grounded in the embodiment of listening and honouring the ever-evolving relationality between bodies, ancestry, lands and waters. Traversing between the physical and the ancestral, the local and the cosmological, Karlia aims to converse, unearth and dance alongside the multiplicity of voices, memories and bodies of water that her body is a meeting ground to. Since graduating from WAAPA in 2021 Karlia has worked with companies and artists such as Chunky Move, Joel Bray Dance, New Zealand Dance Company, Julie Minaai and Bella Waru. Performing in Joel Bray’s world Premier of Garabari at Arts house and choreographing a short work Oneness on New Zealand Dance Company, apart of the Matariki Hunga Nui program.