Research Residency Anja Müller at Uferstudios

In the frame of the Creative Crossroad activity, Anja Müller was selected by Uferstudios Berlin to receive a 2 years structural support by the LLB network to work on several projects. She is receiving a residency at Workshop Foundation, a workshop participation at ICI-CCN de Montpellier and a presentation possibility at STUK Leuven.

Anja Müller is a choreographer, performer and musician based in Berlin. During the last years Anjas focus has been on the physicality of live-music making and the transformation and evolution of artificial characters. She is interested in using the structures of different disciplines, like animation, concerts or film art, in order to redefine them and highlight their surprisingly absurd potential in a theatrical frame. Playfully she experiments with the idea of genre- transformation: a concert setting suddenly becomes a dance piece, a drum solo turns into poetry and a megalomanic one-woman HipHop musical exposes its fragile sides. Anja also does frequently work in collaboration with other artists. As a performer she worked such as with Meg Stuart and Alma Söderberg and in that very moment she is working with Kate McIntosh on her new creation. As a musician she is part of the performance band John The Houseband and also drummer of the Psychedalic*Noise*Pop Trio Kala Brisella, with whom she just recorded their third
album.
Anjas current obsession is the pure voice. A voice as sound and rhythm in space but also as a symbolic tool. The voice as a body of sound as well as a political organ - lifting up your voice, get lifted by your voice and others. How can a single voice in all its fragility and singularity multiply, not in contradiction but in
combination. During her creative crossroad cycle she would like to explore the interdependence of bodies, sound and space.

Research Residency Anja Müller at Uferstudios

Anja Müller used the local Creative Crossroads residency at Uferstudios to develop her initial research towards her long term project VOICES, in collaboration with dramaturge and performer Dennis Deter. Seen that due to Covid-restriction rehearsal time in the studio was very limited, and seen that the research also involved a lot of sound studies, Anja Müller adapted this first phase of her research into the observation, production and alteration of sounds, coming from the outside animals, from objects. They particularly shifted the focus on a) recorded voice and b) towards the voices of animals. Both “mediums” were to be analyzed and understood as sounds and rhythms in space but also as symbolic tools. Elaborating on the idea of voice as a body of sound as well as a political organ, they were searching for voices that might be forgotten – or not understood - , because not belonging to our time or not coming from our species, reflecting on the differentiation of voices being expressed from the center of society or from marginalized borders of our society. 

The project itself will steer towards a work that features choirs that might not only consist of different people, but maybe even different species, playing on the idea of post- anthropocentic identity politics by the tools of DIY aesthetic. 

This was an initial state of the research and the once to follow production, planned for 2022. Seen that working conditions at the time were very limited, also exluding the involvement of a greater number of people, or doing physical and voice work in studios, Anja Müller and Dennis Deter used this initial research phase to set and prepare on more experimental, theoretical, observing and listening methods, rather than going straight into physicalities. 

Anja Müller will proceed working on this project by a upcoming residency with workshopfoundation Budapest in summer 2021 and hopefully a presentation at STUK in 2022. 

Read her experience report on the research residency in Berlin in the upper right column.