2011 Tanja Liedtke Fellow, Katarzyna (Kasia) Sitarz has arrived in Melbourne to embark on her Fellowship program. She will start by seeing over a dozen performances by Australia’s front line of contemporary dance artists/companies during the Dance Massive Melbourne event. She will then start her own creative development where she will work with local artists, including multi media artist Zoe Scoglio and performer/writer Josh Tyler. Following this Kasia will go to Sydney to work on a new project for Company B Belvoir, directed by leading choreographer Lucy Guerin. We wish Kasia a very fruitful, exciting and inspiring experience in Australia.
at the opening night of Dance Massive Melbourne.
2011 Tanja Liedtke Fellowship winner: Katarzyna Sitarz
The Tanja Liedtke Foundation is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2011 Tanja Liedtke Fellowship is Katarzyna Sitarz, a Polish dancer/choreographer currently based in Holland. Twenty five year old Sitarz is a graduate of Codarts – University for the Arts in Rotterdam, and has worked as dancer and choreographer in Poland, Holland, Lithuania, Germany and most recently, has been performing in Portugal in Rui Horta’s The Tears of Saladin.
Sitarz will travel to Australia in March 2011 where she will direct a creative residency project at Arts House in Melbourne, involving local independent artists, attend the contemporary dance platform Dance Massive Melbourne, and participate in the development of a new collaboration directed by Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin.
The inaugural Tanja Liedtke Fellowship was won by Australian dancer/choreographer Antony Hamilton who conducted his residency in Berlin in 2009 where his project Black Series 1 was received with great enthusiasm and will hopefully be presented as a fully produced work for touring in the near future.
For Sitarz, the 2011 Fellowship represents the chance to create, observe, work and interact with some of the best Australian contemporary dance artists and companies. “I became very interested to apply for the Tanja Liedtke Fellowship because it offers a great opportunity to work with the renowned and fascinating Australian artist, Lucy Guerin, challenge my individual artistic growth and dive into the Australian contemporary dance world in a very supported and welcoming way based on the key platform of exchange. It is such an impressive and rich program - and it’s a great honour to be awarded the Fellowship that has been inspired by such an exciting artist as Tanja Liedtke. I’m looking forward to working in Australia because it would be for me, a drastic change of environment – both physical and mental. I think its important not to stay in one’s ‘comfort zone’. I want to test the unknown and challenge my current understandings. Travelling and exchange with other artists is a process of confrontation, adaption and change and personally I love this adventure; entering another artist’s world, sharing ideas and discovering something new. You are enriched as a person as well as an artist and things are never the same again. This is what excites me so much”.
Gerlinde Liedtke, Chair of the Foundation said, “The response to this second Fellowship program was overwhelming. We received forty-seven submissions from young artists who are based all over Europe. The Tanja Liedtke Foundation’s motto inspiring dance draws on Tanja’s own wide and unlimited vision for what dance as an art form has the power to communicate. In awarding Katarzyna, the 2011 Tanja Liedtke Fellowship, we are very pleased to be supporting a young artist with such a highly focused and generous approach to making art as well as a real desire to build creative and artistically productive bridges between Europe and Australia”.
Tanja Liedtke Foundation - November 2010
