it's in the air

choreography & performance: Jefta van Dinther & Mette Ingvartsen | light & set design: Minna Tiikkainen | sound design & photography: Peter Lenaerts | dramaturgy: Bojana Cvejic | production management: Kerstin Schroth

Co-production: PACT Zollverein (Essen), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Kaaitheater
(Brussels). Funded by: Haupstadtkulturfonds (Berlin, Germany) and Kunstradet, Danish Arts
Council (Denmark). Supported by: Eurotramp (Germany), Les Brigittines (Brussels), Charleroi/Danses, Centre Chorégraphique de la Communauté Francaise de Belgique (Brussels),
Ballhaus Naunynstraße (Berlin) and sommer.bar 2007 a project of Tanz im August
(Berlin). A production of Mette Ingvartsen/Great Investment and Jefta van Dinther/Sure Basic

We are perpetually haunted by the question of re-inventing the body, of what it can
do, or what it is capable of. Mette Ingvartsen and Jefta van Dinther give the question
a more modest, and yet finer re-tuning: how can we perceive the body as body, and
movement insofar as it is only movement? IT’S IN THE AIR unravels the body in the
nexus between the human-cultural and the natural-physical, between will, effort and
desire and mechanical laws and conditions. A female and a male body organically
growing onto a technical set-up, a body-machine, natural yet against nature as habit.
Everything that happens there can be expressed in verbs: jumping, bouncing,
flipping, flopping, rippling, sliding, levitating, reverberating, shivering, rubbing, ticking,
exploding... The spectator is caught in the pleasure of sensing the physical
limitations of bodies stretching from the sheer laws of motion and rest, the joy in
muscles being moved without moving themselves. Watching what occurs in midair,
the audience is confronted with intricate modulations of qualities of rhythm, density,
texture, tactility of movement, in virtuosity which elicits pure joy.