Does hope help us to shape a different future, or does it block us and leave us hanging in an inactive waiting loop? Hope, as an emotion directed toward the future, is something we know as individuals as well as a society. It can be a motor for change, a kind of tool for developing utopias; without hope, no change, no demands on the future, no thinking about what is possible. But hope can also be a state of passivity, a waiting, a stagnation and abdication of responsibility.
Anna Konjetzky’s new work “hope/less” moves between these two pools. Prior, she and her team conducted a series of interviews as a basis for the production; about hope, about its absence, about new starts, personal expectations, about the future and fears.
After my last piece “Über die Wut” I would like to deal with another social condition and currently hope and also its reverse hopelessness seems to me to be a present element in our society which is in upheaval. But what can hope do, where does it exist, where not, and where should it be turned into hopelessness? Or can radical hope mean radical change? (Anna Konjetzky)
Four dancers move in “hope/less” in a space divided by a net made of safety belts. This enables a vertical and horizontal space of movement on and under the net; the dancers can hang on the net, lie on it, pull themselves up, but also fall through the net – a fragile, floating physical condition. The German word hoffen (hope) comes from the Middle Low German word ‘hopen’, which means ‘to hop’. Translated physically into our stage setting, it could mean a springing, a slight tremor of foreboding, a waiting see-saw, but also a flipping, a tipping, a losing of balance. (Anna Konjetzky)
“hope/less” uses four bodies in a stretchable and malleable space to think about the potential of hope/ hopelessness as a visionary, future-shaping force, understanding choreography as a dialogical and utopian practice. The production follows on from Anna Konjetzky’s solo ” Über die Wut” (2021), which was specifically dedicated to female anger as a constructive force, a tool for change. Both works explore emotion as an individual feeling and as a social condition with a view to change’s ability to initiate fundamental and radical change.
