Newsletter – Tanja Liedtke Foundation
October 2022

BAD LUCK - short dance film with Tanzbar_Bremen from Jan Eilhard

Tanja Liedtke Foundation is proud to support this dance film.

Synopsis
It is the chance of life for a director with trisomy 21 and his ensemble. With their dance musical, they are the focus of a larger dance festival with a high public interest. But one day before the performance, one of the main actors sprained his leg. The disappointment of the ensemble is great. Feverishly, a replacement is sought. But does the very heterogeneous group, whose members sometimes struggle with feelings of hurt love, anarchic renitence and lack of self-confidence, manage to make a joint decision here? A dramatic day, poetically danced, in the midst of a diverse group dynamic that says something about the status 'disabled' and at the same time tells something about each of us.

Jan said: Dance and inclusion play an essential role in the artistic work of Tanja Liedtke, who has sustainably impressed me through films such as "Tanja - Life in Movement" or "Cost of Living" and whose choreographies served as a source of inspiration when working on Bad Luck. Dance theatre is predestined for the artistic focus on the body and its special physical movements. People with disabilities can be an enormous enrichment and contribute to innovations in contemporary dance …..

danceweb Vienna, two scholarships 2022

1. Caner Taker, report 

With the support of the Tanja Liedtke Stiftung, i spent five weeks at Impulstanz Vienna being part of the danceWEB scholarship program. For that i am grateful. i entered the festival with a closed mindset and opened up during the weeks much more to my peers and my teachers. It was wonderful having an intensity of workshops, performances and social gatherings in a row and working as a filter and input. At the Aerial Silk Workshop i discovered how somatic entanglements can interact with two silks. At the Pole Intensive, i learned about sassyness and the image from outside, the coldness of the metal of the pole, but also being together in shyness. Ghost Dancer opened up my world to music production, while Trajal Harrel was the first person that made me cry in the theater (thank you for that). Seeing vulnerability on stage, in the studio, among my peers and the staff is a quality of life that i started to appreciate and want to continue to follow. For now i’m focussing on the output, digesting all the sensations, inventorizing thoughts, archiving material. I wouldn’t have the ability to dig into this state of mind without the support of the Tanja Liedtke Stiftung, which i’m forever thankful for.

2. Mariia Bakalo report

ImpulsTanz festival has become one of the most efficient and rich source of my dance studies in terms of qualified and diverse practice and interaction with many approaches to understand and build art. Over my stay in Vienna and due to the ImpusTanz festival I had a chance to see 27 highly decent and exceptionally interesting performances, to try out my best with 17 teachers and their dance practices/research projects/workshops, to visit 6 museums. Overall, my critical mind undergone through a specific kind of trail with having such an extensive program of performances to be seen. Geography of the represented companies and flexibility of the program structure gave the massive block of observations and insights. Artists from New-York (Robin Orlyn with her “in a the sky surrenders”), from Eastern Europe (Michael Turinsky with his “Precarious Moves”), Africa (Tiran Willemse), Asia (Geumhyung Jeong) and, of course Europe, brought up the values and issues that were being at stake for them. As a Ukrainian artist I experience a certain desire to contribute to the diversity of topics and flavors that were being boiling in the festival’s pot on the stage or at the training program either. I hope that for the foreseeable future the program will be even more diverse and inclusive, so that the Ukrainian artists will become part of the program with their teaching, performing and discussion.

My exposure to such a variety of dance performances, international colleagues and trainings enabled broadening of the creative strategies I used to utilize in my work as a choreographer or teacher. Incredibly interesting approach in art-creation of Ceumhyung Jeong gave me a chance to reconsider the role and function of objects in performance. Soundscape of the works made by Simon Mayer / Kopf Hoch also become a wonderful source of new ideas, which I would like to try once. Rhythm and vocalizing in the Mathilde Monnier’s “RECORDS” left me amused with its discrete and tactful role in the choreography, though were not new tools in a dance composition for me. “Dances for an actress” by Jerome Bel and production of Jan Lauwers / Needcompany helped me to build up some new ways of thinking about art and the purpose of presence at the stage.

More...