The Tanja Liedtke Foundation has announced Gabrielle Nankivell as the winner of the 2015 Tanja Liedtke Fellowship. Based in South Australia, Nankivell is well-established as a dancer and is now gaining a national reputation as a choreographer as well. Her work Wildebeest was presented by Sydney Dance Company in 2014 as part of the “New Breed” season. She has just finished performing a self-devised solo, Suite Secret as part of STRUT dance’s “Mi Casa es Su Casa” in Perth.
The Tanja Liedtke Fellowship was established in 2009 to honour the late Tanja Liedtke, an exceptional dancer and choreographer who, at the time of her death, was about to become the director of Sydney Dance Company. The fellowship includes a three-week creative residency at adaStudio in Berlin, which will see Nankivell work with two European-based dance artists to create a work which she will present to an invited audience. She will then head to Frankfurt where she will participate in the Summer Dance Lab at Tanzlabor_21, Frankfurt’s central hub for contemporary dance theatre.
Nankivell was inspired to apply for the award because it honours Tanja Liedtke and because she has been impressed by the work of past recipients, Antony Hamilton (2009), Katarzyna Sitarz (2011) and Joseph Simons (2013). “The legacy associated with the award, that of Tanja Liedtke, and the creative work that has evolved as a result of past fellowships, and also the relevance of the fellowship activities to my current creative interests are what drew me to apply,” she remarks. “I am delighted to receive the 2015 Tanja Liedtke Fellowship and feel energised by the potential it holds. I can’t wait to see the effect it has on both my personal practice and in dialogue with the diverse creative community that inspires my work here in Australia.”
As well as administrating the Tanja Liedtke Fellowship, the Foundation has been busy in recent years. A three-year partnership with NAISDA has been set up to deliver the Inspiring Dance workshop program, based on the ideas that inspired Tanja’s construct and delivered by the artists who work to create the piece with Tanja. NAISDA has now taken this program into their course curriculum. The foundation is also a sponsor of the annual Internationales Solo-Tanz-Theater Festival in Stuttgart, and provides various scholarships and support for presentations and creative developments. For more information about the activities of the Tanja Liedtke Foundation, head to the organisation's website.
You can read about Joseph Simons’s experiences as the 2013 recipient of the Tanja Liedtke Fellowship, and the resulting work, First Things First, in the April/May edition of Dance Australia… out soon!