Jefta van Dinther's divine retrospective

For 18 years, choreographer Jefta van Dinther has built a body of work that positions him among Europe’s most distinctive voices. Based between Berlin and Stockholm, he works at the intersection of body, light and sound, creating performances embedded in charged sensory ecologies that disrupt perception and expand our sense of form. From the intensity of his award-winning work, GRIND (2011) to the intimacy of his film, Dark Field Analysis (2020), van Dinther has persistently asked: what is the body in relation to the invisible, the uncanny, the otherworldly?

This November, HAU presents A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction, a retrospective gathering stage works, film and conversations. Early landmarks, such as Kneeding (2010), Dark Field Analysis and GRIND are revisited, alongside the premiere of Mercury Rising, which engages with sign language. Together, the retrospective traces not only what van Dinther has made, but how his modes of seeing, sensing and moving continue to transform the way we experience the body in society.

What inspired you to call the retrospective A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction?

The passage the quote comes from was a conversation between modern dancer Martha Graham and a fellow artist. It essentially talks about the unrest we can have as artists. I very much feel like I have a kind of gnawing, almost itchy restlessness that needs out.

How do you relate your work to the notion of the queer divine?

Well, the quote comes from a time when ‘queer’ was used differently. When we were choosing this title, I realised that a lot of people will interpret this as queer, as in gay, or have a sexual perspective on it. I had to ask myself, “Is that fine? Is that what I want?” I also had to say to myself, “Yes, there’s queerness in my work.” I link it more to strangeness, or the uncanny or the unfamiliar, but I think it’s also super interesting in a context of sexuality or identity, because it’s not the case that it’s not in my work.

Does it feel a little premature to have a retrospective at this stage of your career?

On one hand, yes, it feels too early. People are like, “You have a retrospective? You’re only 45!” But it’s interesting, because HAU do retrospectives regularly with people who aren’t necessarily at the end of their career. They choose to do that as a way to highlight somebody’s body of work. And I mean, I do have a body of work. I started making work when I was quite young and I’ve been making it now for 18 years – basically one piece per year.

I think of the body as always something that’s speaking, not something that’s just moving.

What was your process for deciding which performances you wanted to include in the programme like?

There were long discussions with many people. I basically asked people, “What are my strong works? Which are my seminal works? Which are the works that opened up something new, brought in a new aspect or that reopened my practice, my aesthetics, my world?” So all that and the budget. We were forced to scrap the big works for budget reasons. The oldest pieces we’ll show are Kneeding and GRIND.

How does it feel to revisit those early pieces within the context of the retrospective?

So I think, for example, Kneeding is super important to me, and has been super important to my practice. That’s where my physicality, which has carried me through all these years, comes from, because it’s a studio work, actually. It has no light and very simple sound. It’s three bodies moving with the audience seated around them, so it’s almost like a study. It’s one of my first pieces, so I think an audience watching Kneeding could really trace the genealogy of my work.

How do you reactivate the memory of those early pieces within your own body today?

I would say the reactivation of these works in my body hasn’t been so difficult, because I think the physical practice that I’ve developed has taken its form so strongly through these works. At the beginning of my career, I thought that every piece was such a different body, that very piece proposes something and conditions the body anew in a very fundamentally different way. Now I don’t think that’s true. I think the bodies that are in my work, over time they do change, but they also have something very strongly in common. And those things that they have in common are sourced very much from Kneeding. So putting myself in that body is proving to be not so difficult, actually. It’s really the source of something. Maybe the question is more about stamina and the shape I’m in. You know, GRIND is fucking hardcore, and I just need to be in really good shape to do it, because it’s a relentless piece.

GRIND was the first work with your long-term collaborators, Minna Tiikkainen (lighting) and David Kiers (sound). How would you describe those relationships and what they bring to your work?

GRIND was conceived by all three of us. We are all co-authors of the work. You know, the usual way of working in dance is that the choreographer or dancer makes material, and then basically, you get together in the last week and you put light on it. You’ve probably worked with the sound before, but the light is very much something that’s often added later. I would say, that’s when the method that I’ve carried through since then was born, in that I work with lighting, sound, set and costume designers as integral to the creation process from the beginning.

The Moving Image will transform the studio above HAU2 into a cinema, presenting a programme of art films, music videos and performance documentation. Why is it important for you to include these elements?

When I think about my work, I think of the cinematic experience of a screen. It’s strongly audio/visual. Many choreographers or performing artists think of the video or the film as a kind of poor documentation of the work, and of course, I can see that. But I love to watch my work through the camera lens, because for me, maybe it already has something of it in its making. We’re showing the full documentation of AUSLAND (2024), which is 165 minutes long. It’s a film that moves between four screens, so an audience actually has to choose where to look. We didn’t plan to film it like that, but we realised we have to do it as a split screen, because you get a very immersive perspective. In the case of Dark Field Analysis, the camera gets really close up to the performers, seemingly getting under their skin. This is a perspective you can very rarely experience in a performance, and somehow this informs me, and reveals something that the show might not.

You’ll also premiere Mercury Rising. How does this new performance fit in with the older pieces?

I think it will show how little my work has changed. Mercury Rising is a super interesting project, in the sense that I’m putting myself in relation to and in the context of people, culture and a language I absolutely do not know. For the performance, we’re working with sign language, and these aspects tie together really beautifully into my approach of dance and choreography. I think of the body as something that’s always speaking, not something that’s just moving or that’s just, let’s say, existing abstractly in relation to movement – a body is always inscribing itself socially and politically through what it wants to do, say and communicate. So for me, aspects of language, meaning and narrative are always there in bodies, no matter which piece we’re working on. But here it’s also put very clearly in relation to an existing language – in relation to sign language, or actually, multiple sign languages. So Mercury Rising, I think, is a work that deals strongly with codes, symbols, gestures, body language, language and sign language. But it also does so in a way that we can’t understand. It’s not made to be understood. That’s, I think, the power of that work. Each audience will have a partial understanding, and that’s not necessarily a lack; it’s something to be with, and to be in.