Thinging
Jan Rozman
In his new solo work, choreographer, performer and improviser Jan Rozman confronts things – objects that surround him and the sensations and ideas triggered by them. Thinging is a visceral reaction to the world of things we are living in. It thinks and it sings. The stage becomes a space of contact for the living and non-living matter; an environment where things can relate, communicate and coexist, perhaps revealing a different side.
The piece works with spaces of being in-between – between objects and subjects, between existence, speculative existence and non-existence, inaction and activity, saturation, calmness and emptiness, light, dusk and darkness, quotidian, mysterious and poetic, as well as between individual present bodies.
The creative process is rooted in a performative research on materiality, started during Jan’s study at Solo/Dance/Authorship master study program at the Inter-University Centre for Dance in Berlin. Conceptually, it leans on the ideas developed by philosophers of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO) and their understanding of things. Considered as a non-instrumental entity, things are enabled to expose their poetic potential and uncover their own choreographic force alongside and in relationship to the performer on stage.
Thinging is challenging anthropocentric thinking by searching for alternative modes of cohabitation of things in a time of threatening global ecological catastrophe and oversaturation with objects in contemporary Western life.
CREDITS
Concept and Performance: Jan Rozman
Dramaturgy: Julia Keren Turbahn
Lighting Design: Urska Vohar
Costume: Kiss the Future
Scenography Advisor: Dan Adlesic
Stage Assistance: Dan Pikalo
Graphic Design: Matija Medved
Video Documentation: Gregor Gobec
Photo Documentation: Nada Zgank
Translation and Editing: Urban Belina
Produced by: Emanat
Executive Producer: Sabina Potocki
Coproduction: Dance Theatre Ljubljana
Supported by: City Municipality of Ljubljana