We will never know what impact Tanja Liedtke would have had on the arts, but this documentary film makes her promise achingly clear. There is no doubting the singularity of her vision. The young choreographer was obsessive, passionate, funny and boundlessly imaginative. Moreover she had the strength of personality and ability to inspire that would have made her a terrific leader. If anyone doubted she wasn’t capable of taking on the job of artistic director at Sydney Dance Company, this film surely proves them wrong.
Life in Movement follows the international and Australian tours of Liedtke’s only two full-length works _ Construct and The 12th Floor, which her dancers decided to continue with despite the choreographer’s death. The tours became a kind of travelling memorial, a posthumous sharing of her enormous talent. The film interweaves excerpts of her works with interviews with dancers, friends, family and her partner Sol Ulbrich, who is also an executive producer.
Liedtke used the camera to document herself performing her own choreographic ideas, and the film includes snippets from these recordings. There are also snippets of her clowning around as an impish young student and the road with Australian Dance Theatre. By the end of the film we are all too aware of the terrible vacuum her death has left in the lives of peers, some of whom were preparing to join her at SDC.
While Life in Movement is a bitter-sweet pleasure, it is also a precious documentation of a talented choreographer’s work.
The DVD of Life in Movement comes with an additional disc of scenes omitted from the final cut. In one of these Ullbrich takes us to the place where she was hit by a garbage truck. He says she wasn’t listening to an ipod, as has been widely reported – more likely she just couldn’t see because she wasn’t wearing her glasses.
So ended the life of an extraordinary woman.
- KAREN VAN ULZEN
'Dance Australia', courtesy of Antidote Films, has 10 copies of this DVD to give away!
Just send an email, with “Tanja Liedtke DVD” as your subject, to here. Please include a phone number and your address for easy contact.
OFFER CLOSES COB Wednesday August 8. BE QUICK!
