Jefta van Dinther

In Unearth, Jefta van Dinther brings together ten dancers in a bold and stripped-down choreography of body and voice. In his characteristic cross-disciplinary style, which catalogues his extensive repertoire on human behaviour and its linked ecologies, van Dinther breaks down our impetus to feel anew — time and again.

Centered around our human drive to revive and yearning to relive, Unearth lays bare the body’s boundless mental and physical resourcefulness. 

In this durational work, the audience is summoned into the intensity of repetition and to linger in the sweetness of introspection. Unearth digs into the body as material, whilst exposing both social and spiritual constructs of kinship, purpose and mortality.

Kinship and transience, revival and recovery of what has already vanished: the Dominican Church in the heart of Krems is perfect for the elegiac, three-and-a-half-hour performance Unearth. A celebration of becoming and fading away, the concentration and dissolution of movements, sounds and voices loud and silent, pregnant images that appear and slip away once again. Faced with the fleeting nature of human existence, the performers seek to fasten, to nail their bodies to the floor, while others desperately try to extract malignant ulcers from their sagging colleagues. Mouths form mantras, make contact with other mouths and other body parts.

After about 90 minutes, subtle shifts herald a second cycle in this durational choreography. Again, the entangled bodies approach close, perhaps too close – and open our eyes to the emptiness, to the alien within: life in Unearth is a song about death.