A moving life
April 2012
With Life in Movement about to open in cinemas nation-wide, co-directors Bryan Mason and Sophie Hyde talk about their inspiring documentary on the short career and life of dancer Tanja Liedtke.
When 29-year-old dancer and choreographer Tanja Liedtke was appointed artistic director of the Sydney Dance Company (SDC) in 2007 it was a cornerstone moment for the arts community in Australia; signaling that the new guard was about to take over.
Unfortunately Liedtke never started at SDC. The former Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) and DV8 dancer was killed when hit by a garbage truck while walking in the early hours of an August morning in Sydney’s North Shore. Her life, career and influence are captured magnificently in the Adelaide-made documentary Life in Movement, directed by Sophie Hyde and Bryan Mason, who run Closer Productions with fellow filmmakers Matthew Bate (director, Shut Up Little Man!) and Rebecca Summerton.
Mason, who won Best Editing at this year’s AACTAs (formerly AFI Awards) for his work on Shut Up Little Man!, began filming Tanja Liedtke and her company in 2004 for Liedtke’s debut show as a choreographer – 12th Floor. Although not a connoisseur of contemporary dance, Mason knew he was watching a special show from a unique talent.
“As far as dance goes it was easily the most engaging show I’d seen,” Mason said. “I completed interviews with Tanja, Sol (Solon Ulbrich, Liedtke’s creative partner and boyfriend) and everyone involved. Then Sophie and I thought, ‘lets try and make a film about this’. It didn’t pan out but we had all that footage, and Tanja, luckily, had an amazing personal archive, as she used a video camera as part of her dance process to create work. There were hours and hours of this amazing footage. After the accident it was, ‘okay, we definitely need to make this film’.”
Hyde said they decided to make the film the day she died.
“We were at the pub with Josh Tyler (dance director) and Tyson (Hoprich a.k.a DJ TR!P) who was the composer for Tanja, and Julian Crotti, who’s another dancer. Bryan just said, ‘we’ve got to make a film – straight away!”
The pair was disillusioned with the media coverage concerning Liedtke’s death, which reported about never knowing what she could have been instead of what she had and would achieve.
“Everyone who had seen Tanja’s work, had worked with her, or knew her, had a strong sense of what could have been,” Mason said. “It wasn’t like she was starting out, she had only made two full-length shows, but they were both really interesting and multi-award winning, and toured the world. With all this media coverage reporting, ‘we’ll never know if she would be any good’, I was a bit outraged. She was good. She was already doing great stuff. Let’s make a film and show the world.”
Life in Movement not only showcases Liedtke’s brief career; it also shows her troupe dealing with the loss of their leader, as they tour her shows in Europe under Sol’s supervision.
“Bryan was very determined to tell the story of her life and what she’d done,” Hyde explained. “I was more interested in how everyone was going to cope with this, the grief. We were exploring Tanja’s life and then these guys were touring. We were thinking, ‘we should really film this’ but we still weren’t sure what the film was as we were making it. Those two things came together by filming everything and being out on the road, and more so in the edit suite – going through it and trying to tell a story for an audience that wasn’t hagiography. It was that constant pull back of don’t say someone’s amazing – show it.”
Given that Liedtke used a video camera as part of her creative process, one of the diamonds Life in Movement struck was catching the genesis of Liedtke’s ideas in hotel rooms and rehearsal spaces, which eventually ended up in her productions 12th Floor and Construct.
“I think there were 80 to 90 hours worth of archival material,” Mason explained. “In the process of whittling that massive archive down, we started seeing all those links, ‘wow that moment from when Tanja was a child at school is in the show’. You started seeing all the journeys of movement and how much of Tanja’s life and experience she put into her work, how layered her work is. That’s when the film opened up.”
Since Mason and Hyde started Closer Productions in 2004, it has grown to be a company with seven employees and 13 films completed or in production. Located at the South Australian Film Corporation’s new hub in Glenside – Adelaide Studios – Closer completed three important films in 2011: Shut Up Little Man!, Stunt Love and Life in Movement. Collectively these films screened at Sundance, won and/or were nominated for AACTAs, gained critical acclaim in US titles such as The New York Times, Variety and AV Club, screened on the ABC and, in Life in Movement’s case, won a multitude of festival awards. Up next for Closer, and Hyde and Mason, is the still-filming feature-length drama 52 Tuesdays, a story about a girl becoming a woman and her mother becoming a man, which requires Hyde and Mason to shoot every Tuesday for a year.
“All we want to do is make exciting, unusual and interesting work,” Hyde says. “52 Tuesdays is pure fiction, it’s a drama. For us it’s not about the form, it’s about great stories, interesting processes, and being able to work independently. Who gets to do that? We’re lucky.”
“So many people I know from school, or skateboarding or wherever, a lot of people work jobs they don’t care about or like,” Mason continues. “I just think, ‘how privileged are we?’ We are working our butts off all the time, yes, but it is doing stuff we love.”
Life in Movement opens nationally on April 12.
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