Jefta van Dinther / Cullberg: On Earth I’m Done: Islands

"With Islands, we are heading into a place where humanity can no longer be taken for granted. The life existing here thinks and acts and speaks through the vector of human emotion, but their feelings are synthetic. Their social interaction is hacked, their sexual reproduction is an interface, the care for their planet is automated." – Jefta van Dinther.

In "Islands", the audience is transported to a place torn out of the conventional space-time continuum. Orbiting the conflicts of beauty and danger, existence must be rebuilt from scratch and living learnt anew. Elementary logics and irregular intelligences are being reborn; life passes between mineral, vegetal, animal, human and machinic forms. Islands is a performance which imagines an alternate order of organisation, a state of exception, quarantined from the natural world. Here, replication becomes a mode of survival and dancing a weapon.

Jefta van Dinther returned as an associated choreographer to Cullberg in 2019 and has since created two new works for the company. In the archaic-futuristic diptych "On Earth I’m Done", the audience is transported to a place torn out of the conventional space-time continuum. The first part of the diptych, the solo "Mountains", confronted culture and nature and was shown at TQW in January 2022. The second part, a group piece for 13 dancers, explores the dualism between culture and technology.