Dance Solo Festival Bonn 2023

Manifesto of indignation

www.tanzweb.org, 05.03.2023 // Author: Elisabeth Einecke-Klövekorn

“On Rage” by Anna Konjetzky at the Tanzsolofestival Bonn

There are countless reasons to be angry. Especially as a woman. Anger is a feeling that takes hold of the whole body: Teeth grinding, muscle tension, increase in pulse and adrenaline. But anger also makes you strong. The Belgian-born dancer Sahra Huby shows this with self-confident energy in the dance installation “Über die Wut” by Anna Konjetzky (choreography and stage), which premiered at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2021. In 2022 she was nominated for it in the category Darsteller:in Tanz for the German Theater Award “Faust”. On March 4, this impressive performance could be experienced at the Bonn International Dance Solo Festival on the Brotfabrik stage.

“WUT” is written in large illuminated letters between the white paper panels hanging from the ceiling, which serve as a projection screen for images of outrage arousing grievances and for calls for protest. “Stop,” Huby calls into the microphone, which multiplies her voice. She sits down, stands up again, jumps up, staggers, rages, stomps, gasps, screams, strikes invisible opponents. The whole angry vocabulary of movement is deconstructed up to the masculinely connoted display of muscular biceps, proud chest drumming and snarling. The raised up clenched fist, the extended middle finger: many symbolic gestures of resistance are tried out. It calls up the witnesses of centuries of female rage from Medea and Joan of Arc to Clara Zetkin and Audre Lorde. Greta Thunberg’s “How dare you” is also heard.

Every now and then, the dancer almost seems to drown in the flood of video projections. The optical overkill, meanwhile, intensifies the feeling of impotent rage. All this is accompanied acoustically by the electronic music of Brendan Dougherty, which carries the performance along, sometimes very loud, but also full of sensitive sound moments. At times Huby parodies the aggressive gestures to the point of grotesque contortions and also dares to appear comical. At one point she clenches a sheet of paper into a lump, which she holds in front of her face like a mask and then pulls upwards as if it were a cloud, where a distorted mouth is projected onto it. But talking alone does not help against all the threats, injuries and injustices.

Anger, of course, also exhausts itself. Towards the end, the dancer gets rid of her gray overalls, opens her strict topknot and dances naked across the stage with a flowing mane. Quite lightly and as if freed from the frantic rush and tension. It is a call to self-determination. Anna Konjetzky’s great production sets against the clichés of the angry woman as a hysterical bitch, a female rage that aims at the concrete changeability of circumstances. This rage is not just an emotion, it is an energy that is downright electrifying. After 75 minutes, long enthusiastic applause from the sold-out theater hall. Afterwards, the team invited the audience to the mediation format “Physical Traces” and to explore their own energies of rage.

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