Choreography: Jefta van Dinther
Scenography: Numen + Ivana Jonke
Sound design: David Kiers
Light design: Jonathan Winbo
Mountains is the first part of On Earth I'm Done, a forthcoming "archaic-futuristic" diptych, choreographed by Jefta Van Dinther and produced by Cullberg.
Our work on the project converges around a concentrated, intense use of only one object; a colourless, endless, ever-moving, ever-reproducing fabric.
The idea is simple - to conjure up the mystery of universal production and destruction, of continuous cosmic doing and un-doing, by depicting an eternally reversible flow of energy and matter.
In the opening scenes we observe what seems like a surface of a virginal Earth illuminated by beams of a distant sun.
A very visceral rhythm drowns the audience in a wall of sound, setting the mood for the ritual to come.
As the light starts to burn bright red, the world seems birthed out of primordial furnace, from molten lava summoned by slow incantations of a priestess.
The layers of fabric are coiled in a huge placental mass covering the visible floor surface, with one umbilical thread unfolding upwards and disappearing in the darkness above.
As the ceremony of creation continues, the dancer is caught up in the folds of an emerging world, wrapped, dragged and hoisted, in constant dialogue with the ascending stream.
She switches with ease from animal to human to machine and back; a future ancestral being, both motherlike and embryonal.
With introduction of cold light, the fabric suddenly becomes very plastic, like a lunar landscape of glowing frozen silicon - fossilised but still curling with the unstoppable progress of things.
The feeling is always one of simultaneous compression and expansion, where time layers coalesce, making beginnings and ends, past and future interchangeable.
In the very final scene, as the last stretch of thread rises towards the sky, it drags with it a piece of the rubber surface of the actual floor, forming a sharp triangular ridge, which towers over the stage like the eponymous Mountain, only to finally absorb the protagonist, the fading sun, the audience and everything that ever existed.
Behind the scene
