Magnitude is a solo that opens simply: dancer Annabel Koel sits cross-legged, casually strums an electric guitar, and meets the audience with a calm, steady gaze. The tone is intimate without feeling staged.
Legs lifted and stretched out, Koel’s feet and toes begin to twitch with prickly precision. The movements mirror the intricate and detailed fingerplaying, drawing attention to the body as an instrument. Rolling and twisting while still playing, she eventually sets the guitar aside. From there, her body pauses in more distorted shapes, before crawling towards the audience, long limbs stretching forward like a spider. Head hidden, top sliding down to reveal linear paintmarks encircling her back, she reaches a hand towards an audience member. Immediately after contact, she recoils.
A spoken monologue combined with fragmented movements follows. Artificial, and overly performative, the delivery of random lines disrupts the work’s initially intriguing physicality. Magnitude is most convincing in its simplicity. When Koele returns to the guitar and begins to sing a soothing melody, a sense of sincerity briefly returns before it retreats again.
Annabel Koele’s MAGNITUDE needs someone to listen. The piece’s opening is genuinely engaging yet short-lived – Koele moves with the intuitive shapeshifting quality of an amoeba, strumming an electric guitar while folding her origami body into headless configurations. Inversions are MAGNITUDE’s most striking motif, a nod to Koele’s interest in Surrealism and abstraction. An arm becomes a tail, snaking behind a folded torso. Legs fork into a wishbone. Toes wave like a million antennae articulating.
As the piece progresses, Koele abandons this fluid inner world to shift her attention toward the audience. First confidently aware, then brazenly confrontational, she cuts the silence with a series of cryptic declarations. ‘We’ are ‘angry’; ‘very, very, very… beautiful’; and ‘not asking the question.’ One could guess that the ‘we’ refers to artists, and that Koele is demanding greater respect for their craft. Who is the intended receiver? We are left to fill in the blank.