Dance History
Loneliness and Isolation in a Materialistic World
The anxiety to conform to contemporary expectations
Tanja Liedtke a contemporary young choreographer in Australia made her mark with her penultimate but first full-length work ‘Twelfth Floor’. Due to become the artistic director of the Sydney Dance Company, her life was cut short when she was killed in a road accident at the age of just 29.
Twelfth Floor deals with themes of “state-sanctioned repression on those who fail to conform politically”. (Jennings, 2009, online) Set in a gloomy institutional space with broken furniture and green walls it examines the displacement and segregation of individuals in a state establishment.
Through virtuosic performance, the dancers convey changing relationships between hope, despair, desire, and power. Closing with a female dancer jumping from the roof, it has been likened to the self hanging of playwright Sarah Kane.
Sarah Kane was a playwright born in 1971, whose plays dealt with themes of sexual desire, redemption, love, and torture, she suffered from acute attacks of depression and after one failed suicide attempt from an overdose, she hanged herself with her shoelaces in a toilet at the age of 28.
The similarity of her hanging with Twelfth floor is Kane had recently checked out of the Maudsley Hospital in South London for her depression, like the dancer throwing herself from the roof, Kane hanged herself to find freedom from her conflict. (Bardell, 2009, [online])
Liedtke’s Twelfth Floor was not about political war; however, it can be viewed as a war between society. It conveys the anxiety to conform to contemporary expectations of gender and socialisation and the confinement imposed by those who failed to conform politically.
In this way the repressed dancers in her piece can be likened to prisoners of war, each acting out their pathologies and how they react to their situation and each other. Liedtke’s piece communicated the loneliness and isolation brought about by living in a materialistic world where perfection is constantly sought.
If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content. ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Article written by Drama Llama | Educator | Writer | Academic | Consultant
