Jamie Lee & Sooraj Subramaniam - Movement Research

This movement research investigates emotional landscapes shaped by experiences of displacement, shifting identities, and cultural transitions. Dancers Jamie Lee and Sooraj Subramaniam—who share Australian, Malaysian, and Asian heritage and are currently based in Belgium—will explore how personal memories and histories manifest somatically, and how movement can serve as a tool for processing and transforming these deeply held experiences.

Through a series of improvised physical tasks, Jamie and Sooraj use their parallel migratory journeys as a foundation for a deeply embodied exploration of memory, identity, and belonging. Their individual movement vocabularies periodically intertwine, generating a layered and dynamic dialogue between two lives shaped by shared histories and cultural intersections.

Rejecting fixed genres and cultural stereotypes, the research embraces both traditional and contemporary compositional frameworks to create an honest, hybrid approach to movement. Through collaboration with Echo Collective, the Brussels-based violin duo Neil Leiter and Margaret Hermant, the research will be enriched by sonic textures that will enrich the emotional and physical textures being explored. This residency marks a space for embodied inquiry—where memory meets motion, and where healing, connection, and new artistic expressions can emerge.

TEAM / CREDITS

Jamie Lee & Sooraj Subramaniam in collaboration with Echo Collective

Sooraj Subramaniam is an Australian-Belgian dance artist of Malaysian-Indian heritage, fluent in the Indian classical dances styles of Bharatanatyam and Odissi, and also ballet and contemporary forms. He situates his work in hyphenated identities, drawing heavily on poetic styles and choreographic templates from Indian dance. Whilst not expressly political, his work attempts to defy narrow labels such as classical or urban, traditional or contemporary, and sits somewhere in the middle of them all.

Jamie Lee is a versatile artist born in Canada, raised in Boorloo Australia, with Malaysian heritage. As a dancer, director, choreographer, and cultural workers, her work revolves around the themes of world-making, identity, and decolonisation. Lee is Director and co-founder of Motionhouse, a non-profit organisation that creates interdisciplinary dance creations for all types of spaces spanning from site-specific works, theatre performances, installations, films and more.