It is always sad when a great artist is killed, but especially so when that artist is just 29 and one of the brightest stars of her generation. Such was Tanja Liedtke, dancer, choreographer and artistic director designate, who was struck down and killed by a refuse truck outside her home in Sydney.

Liedtke, who was German, but had spent much of her training and career in the UK, is perhaps most familiar to British audiences as a circus performer in the Channel4 film of DV8's The Cost of Living. I saw her most recently two months ago in Manchester, dancing in her own work - Construct. It revealed her extraordinary and unique gift for questioning and exploring ideas with a quiet and gentle humour. She had a way of focusing images to their tiniest detail (the movement of fingers, for example) before zooming out to see how it impacted upon the body at large. I admired, as I wrote at the time "the freshness of her vocabulary and the clarity with which it was presented".

She had recently moved to Australia to become artistic director of the Sydney Dance Company (an appointment she was to take up fully in October), replacing its illustrious director and founder, Graeme Murphy, following his thirty-one year tenure. She had been selected over fifty-three other candidates and had plans to take the company in new and exciting directions. Her death leaves a hole which the company's board will find difficult to fill.

Ian Palmer