THINGING
Thinging (2018) 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.
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.
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.
CREDITS
Concept and Performance: Jan Rozman
Dramaturgy: Julia Keren Turbahn
Light Design: Urška Vohar
Costume: Kiss the Future
Scenography Advisor: Dan Adlesic
Stage assistance: Dan Pikalo
Graphic Design: Matija Medved
Video Documentation: Gregor Gobec
Photo Documentation: Nada Žgank
Translation and Editing: Urban Belina
Produced by: Emanat
Executive producer: Sabina Potočki
Coproduction: Plesni Teater Ljubljana
Supported by: City Municipality of Ljubljana
photo: Nada Žgank
REVIEWS
“And the end, when performer in his mischievous clearing treats audience members as objects, is completely outlandish. When he opens the curtains, he opens together with the window also our heads to the broad object universe and turns us into small irrelevant things. In the ecosystems, humans are just one of many components and in some we are not even present at all.”Review of Performance Thinging: Choreography Of Objects, Pia Brezavscek, Dnevnik, 26.10.2018
“(…) At HAU, for example, the rather promising artist Jan Rozman, staged a great moment of futility in the fight with water bottles, hoses and stagnant sentences in his performance ‘Thinging’.
Performing Arts Festival Von Pilzen und Pornos, Patrick Wildermann, Der Tagesspiegel, 05.06.2019
... AND MORE THINGS
Find out more about the notion of the thing and the context of the creation process in the essay On How To Let ‘It’ Be written in September 2018 by a dancer and dramaturge Julia Keren Turbahn. The essay is available here.
Or you can read more about things and questions of materiality in Jan’s artistic practice from an ecological perspective in an essay Questions of Ecological Artistic Practices: The Living Things, written in March 2017 in the frame of MA SODA at HZT Berlin. The essay is available here.