Automation versus intervention – how much do we really control our choices?

REMACHINE explores the interplay between humans and an inescapable hyper-mechanised environment. At the mercy of their own technology, the dancers navigate unstable ground, and the performance unravels as a chain of cause and effect. In a cascade of both worldly and otherworldly forces, a dance between constraint and liberty, labour and ritual, emerges as a contradictory state of the present day.

Featuring powerful vocal and physical performances, including a new collaboration with composer Anna von Hausswolff, REMACHINE draws its viewer into a meditation on discipline, endurance, insatiability, and the power of the mind over the body.

Jefta van Dinther is a Swedish-Dutch choreographer and dancer living and working in Berlin. His work is characterized by a rigorous physical approach and always implies a staged research of movement itself. The moving body is the core of his practice but belongs to and interacts with a body of light, sound and materials.

Central in his work is the question of what it means to be human, examined through its relation to society, community and environment but also to animal and other non-human entities. Jefta’s performances reach out into metaphysical or otherworldly realms and deal with notions of illusion, the visible and the invisible, darkness, labour, sex, the uncanny, affect, voice and image.

REMACHINE is a Sadler’s Wells co-production.

Header image description: Five dancers lie on a raised circular platform. They are all in various poses as if they’ve fallen down, and they are looking toward a light source that out of the frame. The dancers wear long sleeve tops, textured long pants and sneakers. The circular platform looks like it’s made of a silver brushed metal, and the background fades into black.

Header image © Jubal Battisti