Objectification

In his new performance, choreographer, performer and improviser Jan Rozman confronts things – the objects that surround him, as well as the feelings and ideas that these objects evoke. Objectification is a visceral response to the world of things in which we live. The theatrical stage becomes a space of contact between living and non-living matter; an environment in which things can build relationships, communicate and coexist – and perhaps reveal their other side.

The performance builds in intermediate spaces: between object and subject, between existence, speculative existence and non-existence, inactivity and action, saturation, calmness and emptiness, light, twilight and darkness, between everyday, mysterious and poetic, as well as between individual bodies present. The creative process is based on the staging research of materiality that Jan began during his master’s studies at MA SODA at the Inter-University Center for Dance in Berlin.

Conceptually, the performance relies on ideas developed by philosophers of speculative realism – object-oriented ontologies (OOO) and their understanding of the concept of things. The latter are understood as non-instrumental entities that can reveal their poetic potential and activate their own choreographic power in addition to and in relation to the performer on stage. Objectification challenges the anthropocentric perception of reality by finding alternative possibilities for the coexistence of things in a time of impending global ecological catastrophe and oversaturation with objects that is part of the Western lifestyle.