Tanja Liedtke, “a dancer of sinuous grace and elegant line” and a gifted choreographer, had just been selected from 54 candidates to be the new artistic director of the Sydney Dance Company, when she was hit by a truck outside her home in August 2007.

She was only 29.

Liedtke was born in Germany, but trained mainly in this country — first at the Elmhurst Ballet School, and later graduating from the Rambert Dance School in London.

She moved to Australia in 1997, and became a leading dancer with the Australian Dance Theatre.

I saw her dancing in this country, on tour with DV8 — a striking presence — but I asked Sol Ulbrich what she was like as a person and at work.

“She was astoundingly vivacious, clever and determined, and a committed artist, and also a fabulous dancer. When she was creating she would have all the artists present working together in a collaborative manner.

“She was absolutely the genesis of the work and had a very close, tight knowledge of where she was going, but everyone else was on board to make it happen right then and there.

“Sometimes it would be exactly the movement she wanted, and at other times she went through a range of different processes to draw the material out of the artists she was working with; and that included the sound designers and the dramaturges and the set designers and the lighting designers also, so it was a very focussed and extremely exciting crucible.

“Twelfth Floor is a full-length work and was made in about ten weeks on a rather limited budget, which most people think is incredibly tight!”

Twelfth Floor is a rich mix of dance, theatre, movement, video and electronic soundtrack.

While the choreography of the work is the same wherever they go, there are no sets; the dancers perform against the structure of the theatre itself, which, of course, varies considerably from venue to venue, so the company responds and adapts to the space in which the performance is taking place.

“Because the work is somewhat contextual, a lot of my job as remount director is to maintain this aspect of the work and make sure it’s specific to each venue in how we place it and set it, and how the performers fine-tune their performance to the setting we’re in.

“It only changes very slightly in what the actual performers are doing directly, we try to keep the same feeling in their relationships, but there is a lot of fine-tuning of how they relate to the external space around them.

“In Newcastle recently, where they rebuilt the theatre three years ago but took great care to retain all the original brickwork, ours was a show that actually stripped the stage area out, so that you could see the construction of the building.

“The theatre director was absolutely thrilled.

“When you come to see our show you get an amazing experience of what it’s like working in that particular space.”

Liedtke described the work as “a landscape in which we become confined observers, sometimes searching for exits, sometimes happy to remain”.

Sol Ulbrich went into greater detail.

“It takes place in an institutional space, and so we have two large walls to create the sense of an institution, and the five characters play out a whole scope of scenarios.

“If you confine any five people in one room over a long period of time it just magnifies and brings into sharp focus how individuals relate to each other.

“They move through tender, funny, lyrical, humour, and the natural instinct towards game and play and joy; it also shows how quickly that can veer to conflict and prejudice.

“I just want to say to people who may think, ‘oh, it’ll be a nice ballet, let’s bring the children to see it’, that really it’s for people aged 15 or so upwards.

“It deals with the full scale of the human condition, and there are elements in it that can be dark and provocative, and definitely of an adult nature, and I think it’s only fair to give people that awareness.

“But young people have seen much more these days, and there’s nothing that’s completely horrific. It’s nice to see that breadth in the work, and at one moment to have the audience on the edge of their seats.”

It’s three years since Twelfth Floor was last mounted, for a national tour of Australia.

I asked Sol whether reviving it had been a difficult process.

“One of the reasons I was able to remount the work is that we have the whole original cast who are all so passionate and committed.

“They wanted to see the work up again, and they still held all the nuances and detail from having created the work with Tanja in their bodies and in their memories, and we worked very well together to maintain the integrity of the production.

lTwelfth Floor is at the Oxford Playhouse on March 27.