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.