Twelfth Floor (1 Min) Tanja Liedtke Video

Winner of the 2006 Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choregraphy, Twelfth Floor was described as "brilliantly incisive and perceptive... disturbing, laugh-aloud funny and tragic," (Jill Sykes, Sydney Morning Herald).
Twelfth Floor is a landscape in which we become confined observers. Sometimes searching for exits, sometimes happy to remain. Tanja Liedtke.

Characters emerge and unravel in this darkly funny physical exploration of human interactions in confinement, set in a mysterious institution.

As the house lights go down, we see a stark insitutional space, with green walls and broken furniture. Two bored men play one contest after another, searching out the limits of the space confining them and of their own bodies, in a powerful display of muscularity and masculinity. A third quietly creeps from shadow to shadow, chalking messages of escape, hope and desperation.

A door opens. Enter a new arrival, a timid young woman escorted by a uniformed figure, her movements as absurdly controlled as the regime she enforces. For the next hour, five extraordinary dancers unleash virtuousic performances, as powerful as they are precise, playing out shifting relationships of desire and power, of hope and despair.

A rich texture of dance, theatre, movement, video and DJ Tr!ps moody electronica make a sophisticated and original work, shifting effortlessly from tender, lyrical moments to brooding menace to explosive physicality.

A lot of Australian dance is very nice, but thats not enough. I want to get to the underbelly, to see people as complex — affection and hostility are such great physical premises for dance. Tanja Liedtke

Its a fresh and powerful work from one of the most exciting new voices in Australian contemporary dance. The ensemble features some of the hottest young artists around, with an impressive and diverse body of work with all the major contemporary dance companies, as well as in classical dance, theatre, and circus.