THE WORK OF CHOREOGRAPHER ANNA KONJETZKYBREATHING
Since the award-winning Munich-based choreographer Anna Konjetzky began creating dance works and dance installations in 2005, she has achieved renown as an architect of spaces.
Anna Konjetzky | © Anna KonjetzkyInspired by the feeling of space and
the passage of time, her pieces appear to be always questioning the
body and the organization of the space and, further, rising to the
challenge of creating intimacy within the choreographic settings.
Mediated images expand her spatial inquires, and as her website states,
she is apt to “watch the world through the body. Thinking possibilities.
Taking risks. Looking for fragility.”
Like many contemporary
choreographers, Konjetzky demonstrates how radically perceptions are
affected by changes in space, lighting, and sound. Never does she tell
an audience what to think, but she does show them where to look. In a
piece like Lighting (2014), she guides the audience’s eye to
her company of ten dancers. On a bare stage, the dense cluster of bodies
pulsates with intensity, and is reflective of the boisterous nature of
mass protest movements and demonstrations, but also their sometimes
tenuous pressurized tipping points toward uncontrollable tension and
violence. Konjetzky talks about those combustible properties: “If I set
something on fire, the action does not stay under my control but creates
a ‘burning’ object that continues on its own, independent from my
control.”
BREATHING
The late Canadian choreographer
Jean-Pierre Perreault once commented that “human beings are sensitive to
two things: to others and to the space they live in and that pervades
them.” The ways in which Konjetzky plays with space and movement, it is
not a matter of just using space, but reacting to the space the work
exists within. She speaks about her “constant research with the body in
relation to space, to architecture and the research around perception.”
In her project Breathing (2017),
Konjetzky indicates in interviews, “I am interested in breathing as a
very simple action that links everybody. I am interested in the very
intimate aspect of it. I am interested in the transcendental experience
of deep breathing. I am interested in the two big emotions or states
that push breathing to an extreme: passion and fear.” Guided by this
insistence, Breathing directs our attention to this often-missed
liminality of experience. It prompts questions about the nature of
something so common, yet potentially mysterious, and even the potential
for physical and mental strength and endurance. Konjetzky forces
dialogue about the navigation of the ambiguous path between the
recognizable and the unexpected.
What’s implicit in Konjetzky’s
oeuvre is the reinvented sense of communitas, a reorientation in terms
of group dynamics and shared intentions, of people coming together for
the journey. Her astute awareness and understanding of living
architecture results in a fundamental altering of the dance experience:
the primacy of the individual on the path of transformation, as well as
the complementary spectatorship and the kinesthetic empathy fostered in
regard to the performer in passage and those moments of transcendence.
The
choreographer’s innovative, experimental dance is part of a movement in
art that stresses the conceptual and the importance of ideas. As writer
Susanne Traub describes, “Central to her work is her active input of
sensory information into a space, to the effect that she abandons the
classical stage area in favour of installation spaces.”
THE PARTICIPANT IS NEVER A BENIGN SPECTATOR
Konjetzky
crafts environments for her performers; for the spectator, the
engagement with spaces outside a traditional stage setting is intimately
linked to reformative experience, in which the viewer realigns their
perception, strategizing their degree of control, the zone of
knowingness, and a certain sort of readiness needed for navigating the
trajectory.
The powerful meaning of Konjetsky’s performance
emerges from a mastery that acknowledges challenges and the restraints
required to embark on the journey, as well as opening to new
understandings of the ways in which the experience and engagement on the
part of the dancers and the choreographer, and ultimately the
spectator, mediates encoded meaning through concept-driven changes in
emotional expression, visual perception, and physical embodiment.
Ivar
G. Hagendoorn, in his article “Some Speculative Hypotheses About the
Nature and Perception of Dance and Choreography,” describes audience
members as “virtually dancing along,” often feeling a discernable
perceptual shift as they gaze in excitement or exhaustion. From a
spectator’s perspective, for example, viewers can contemplate the
strength and the demands of the dance, but they will also, almost
certainly, understand or realize something about, or become aware of,
their own interpretation of the dance piece.
A key element of
Konjetzky’s installation work, in constructing her architectural
environment, is to forge a unique role for the visitor to the space,
particularly their connection into what unfolds before them. The
participant is never a benign spectator. In Imprints (2015),
viewers hear breathing sounds, and see a figure locked into a reflective
unadorned glass cube, the intimacy or claustrophobia of the microworld
is heightened. There is a sensation of individual identification in
watching the performer as a person scribbling on paper, bent over,
crouched in confinement. The viewer can indulge in a voyeuristic fantasy
that the performance exists for them alone. That immersive quality
associated with the dance is intimately linked to one’s own absorption
of what’s presented, which can be both disorienting and transformative
for both dancer and viewer.
Konjetzky’s work is wholly based on how we relate to space. She is an observer of how we live and how we order things in life. In Chipping (2014), she lays bare the possibilities of bodies moving in space, through the exploration of a space that seems to evolve. The set elements in the piece are a series of moving wooden cubes or boxes, plus associated drives, pulleys and cables, which shift incrementally or at other times are engaged in faster, more propulsive movements.
At the centre of all this activity and immensity is a hooded dancer who must navigate this implicitly challenging environment. In his tanecniaktuality.cz review, Ian Biscoe, details the onstage action: “The body must adjust to new situations constantly, finding its way through the oscillating space: each step is a new balancing act; every movement newly devised; newly counterbalanced; and each way newly found. Even the passive body cannot rest on this stage: the moving space encroaches, deforms and swallows it.”
Konjetzky comments about the forces at play in Chipping: “Restlessness is a very exiting aspect for the research of the body and movements. Yet, also the society seems to become faster and faster. Inundated by information, always reachable and available, seemingly limitless self-determination and the dictum of being permanently productive are a societal space that constantly forces—or enables—us to do certain “steps.”
While Konjetzky choreographs with an uncompromising honesty that expresses her personal vision, the human experience is fundamentally at the heart of her work. Throughout her catalogue of works, the choreographer emphasizes the importance of the individual on the path of transformation, as well as the complementary relationship and kinesthetic empathy between the audience and performers, fostering a shared passage toward a moment of transcendence.
Link zum Artikel: https://www.goethe.de/ins/ca/de/kul/mag/21224000.html
