Tanja Leidtke’s Construct

The lights are still up in the house as the three dancers of Tanja Liedtke’s Construct walk onto the stage. The two women become solid boards of wood, the man trying to keep them upright as they fall. The women are holding their position as they fall to the ground and are picked up again. The man then places them facing each other, balanced by weight, chest to chest introducing us to the triangular image we see throughout the work. The women fall again. The man leaves them, gets a drill and uses it to manipulate their movement.

The man is no longer in control and the women are able to move of their own accord. They have a sense of purpose, as if they are working on something, shown by their strong focuses and quick, direct movement. The piece moves to a duet where they are working two boards of wood each. Time slows down and movement is freer. More triangular images appear as they build them with the boards of wood they were manipulating just seconds before. These smaller images are a precursor to the larger images we see later on.

We transition and the dancers go from exploration to playful and adventurous. We start to see images and ideas that relate to a physical home over the physical beings within. The first, smaller home is a duet using fingers to represent two people interacting within their home. We move away from this light, articulate finger dance to a dance within a larger triangle of two bodies, topless, backs to us. They interweave with eachother and show us articulation through their bodies that is amplified by their bare skin.

We are set into a scene of a family. We experience birth, growth, relationships and changing emotions.  All of a sudden the family life ends and we are taken into a life of entrapment. Stuck in a physical architecture built of wood and one light by another dancer. The feelings of the trapped dancer are portrayed through the movement of  the third dancer who is struggling to free herself but is trapped and bound in her body. The lights go out and we are left, after our journey, feeling alone and trapped.