Hey Körper?!, choreographed and performed by Sahra Huby for audiences aged eight and up, was presented at FELD Theater für junges Publikum from 13 to 16 March 2025.
My mother once told me that the ocean is blue because people give the bruises of their hearts to it. When Sahra Huby draws a small button on her chest and says that pressing it makes her feel deeply sad without knowing why, I wonder if another button could be drawn beside it—one that, when pushed, would bring in ocean waves, giving her sorrow friends to ride with.
Just as there is much more to the ocean than we can see by looking at its surface, the bruises of our hearts are also often not outwardly visible. In the opening of Hey Körper?!, Huby touches on one of the potential sources that causes the bruises we carry inside. She tells her audience of young children that we all have a body. Then, on a whiteboard, many kinds of bodies of various ethnicities, sizes, and shapes are projected—the more the bodies deviate from the “norm” of being slim, gender-normative, and abled, the louder the children laugh.
After this, Huby introduces herself as white, cis, female-read, and “normal”, which she explains as being slim and fit with two arms and legs. She adds that although she is seen as “normal”, most bodies do not look like hers. However, when she looks at representations of human anatomy, she finds only bodies that look like hers. Another performer (Quindell Orton), who sits at a desk with a laptop, projects on the whiteboard an image that appears under the Wikipedia entry for “human body”: a fit white woman without any visible physical disability—the “norm” into which white supremacist and ableist society demands we try to fit, an attempt which most of the time proves impossible and causes us pain. When Huby makes adjustments to the projected image with a black marker (body hair, fat, and pimples), some children react with sounds such as “ewwwww”, “eeeekkkk”.
Huby draws a human figure directly on the whiteboard, which turns out to be made up of detachable parts able to be separated into different pieces. “Our bodies change, and we can change our bodies if we want,” she says, then moves pieces of whiteboard containing body parts to unconventional positions as she dances. When she places a mouth on her crotch and later erases it with her hand to draw a penis and testicles, the room reacts with discomfort.
The performance further unfolds to offer glimpses into the realities and possibilities of what our bodies can be: a home for microorganisms; a reactor made up of chemical elements; a landscape with different climate zones; a record of our experiences; furniture; a musical instrument; means of communication; weight, texture, geometric forms, and more. With so much information presented briefly and densely, without a clear through-line, I find myself losing concentration. At the same time, I recognize that showing that a body can be much more than we think could be a valuable broadening of perception.
At the end, Huby states that our bodies are a family, connected to everyone and everything in this room and beyond. I think about the ocean and how, like us, water makes up the largest part of its body—binding us as family. I imagine the songs of my bruises riding the waves, being transformed into a mysterious tune that resonates through the depth of my body.
Hey Körper?! (8+), choreographed and performed by Sahra Huby, was presented at FELD Theater für junges Publikum from 13 to 16 March 2025.
