Be Everything, Become Nothing

TANZweb.org, October 2020 // Author: Melanie Suchy

“MOVE MORE MORPH IT!” by Anna Konjetzky was performed at the 7th Bonn Dance Solofestival at the theater in the Brotfabrik

Just a small wooden table. Sahra Huby is sitting on the ledge, scribbling. This can be heard but not seen, “krr, krr, krr, krr-krr-krr-krr”, as her back is to the audience. She is wearing a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt which trembles sometimes; this is when she seems to be drawing lines on the piece of paper in front of her with more vigor. We’ve seen her drawing before but in her famous solo “Abdrücke” (Imprints) from 2010 she had neither a table nor a stage nor, as intended for this piece from 2018, a classroom, but was locked in a glass box, and the coal lines she was drawing were like a self-assurance – numerous crumpled attempts and averted messages.

The topic of drawing, as in drawing lines, creating and crossing out shapes, is continued in this new solo. In “MOVE MORE MORPH IT!”, Munich-based choreographer Anna Konjetzky allows the soloist to outline what she is or could be or should be, but this time more by means of the body and with more space, through dance and sound.

She’s playing. “Hello, how are you”, she asks the audience, “I feel like this”: she squirms and says “uoh” and “haha””; a small microphone amplifies her voice. She goes “bang”, crumples, swings a leg, circles, twitches with her body, wobbles her knees. The movements are like lines, arcs, waves, as if she were embodying cartoon characters including sounds like, “whoosh, boing”, like in a movie. The table plays a part, sometimes acts as a support, sometimes is a danger or a pedestal, the dancer flinches, jitters, jumps up on it, taps her fingers on it as if it were a keyboard, bends over, rolls her shoulders. A constant and urgent shift between personal force and being driven, the same goes for the sounds she creates and the ones musician Sergej Maingard adds electronically from beside the stage, the difference not always being discernible. Finally, Sahra Huby seems to be stuck to the floor, tugging on her own leg. Suddenly starts walking. The thousands of lines and dashes in this scene tend to just scratch the surface rather than cut deep, a rapid browsing of possibilities between “I do” and “it does with me” remaining.

In the second half the piece becomes more difficult. And louder. The choreography creates poses for the superb dancer, at times they seem a bit coy and cute, “girlie-esque” might describe it best – there is head rolling and “wooa wooa”, hip positions with flossing-moves, once Sahra Huby lifts the table above her head like Obelix and starts barking. Or she stomps, wiggles her backside, makes a fist, rolls, kicks, stands with her legs apart, jumps. Accompanied by the surging sound, it becomes a terrible forlornness between male, female and any other identities or random phrases taken from the Internet, a struggle that could resemble the emotions of a hyperactive person. When “morphing”, changing is no longer enjoyable.

The end is wonderfully quiet, one of the most beautiful far and wide: the dancer leaves and on her way from the table to the exit she places down scraps of paper that become smaller and smaller. This will pass.

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Be a lion! Make body music!

Münchner Feuilleton, November 2018 // Author: Sabine Leucht

»explore dance«, a new, multi-city dance promotion project for a young audience, started with Anna Konjetzky’s »Move More Morph It!«.

The “wow”-effect is powerful. Pedagogical admiration radiates from the teacher who is still standing with her class in front of the gym; she explains how hard the dancer must have worked. But even the children asked Sahra Huby questions such as “Is it tiring?” or “Is it fun?”. “Both,” says Huby and uses soccer games as an example, in which you forget all efforts and setbacks when everything finally has a flow.

Huby rushes through her half-hour solo, choreographed by Anna Konjetzky, as though she had springs under all of her limbs. “Move More Morph It!” is a highly exciting meeting between her rubber ball body and a table that is equipped with a taped-on microphone, as is her face, which picks up all sounds and amplifies them. Movement from writing creates scratches; and when the dancer flexes her feet or stretches her spine, it crackles and clicks loudly.

Huby can be a lion and make her entire body roar – a robot or an inflated animal that you let the air out of. But also the most banal actions generate the strangest sounds, because Sergej Maingardt is sitting at the control desk and amplifying them with all kinds of magical effects. The result is a kind of art/sound equivalent of comic strip speech balloons. Great body music! How that works exactly is something that only the adults want to know; they were the majority at the Kösk premiere. The second to fourth graders from the primary school in the Kafkastraße swing and jump about with – and recognize – super-hero battle poses and dances from the computer game “Fortnite”. However, according to Simone Schulte­Aladag, the over one hundred ninth graders from the Wilhelm-Busch-Realschule mainly asked about the meaning. After all, the performance was a school event. And when school is on the label, then there has to be a message inside! This is how teenagers are conditioned in Bavaria.

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