Jefta van Dinther — Grind | Contemporary Dance

Project

Text

Visuals

GRIND
by Jefta van Dinther, Minna Tiikkainen and David Kiers

Imagine a place that defies your senses. Imagine rhythms that affect your vision. Imagine a room where the dimensions of the space appear resilient. Imagine the pressure of sound transforming a body into vibrations. Imagine light that makes you perceive darkness. GRIND offers this place – where the components of body, light and sound create binds that affect, confuse and move.

GRIND is a collaboration between choreographer and dancer Jefta van Dinther, lighting designer Minna Tiikkainen and sound designer David Kiers. Inspired by synesthesia, the performance seeks to challenge our grip on reality by suspending our senses and short-circuiting perception. Minimizing in order to maximize, GRIND forges simple elements into a full-on affective machine. Through duration and repetition the components of body, light and sound turn around and around, mixing until they start to seem foreign. With pulsating, cutting, flickering lights and the unrelenting beats of dark, loopy techno, it is a choreography of matter that GRIND generates.

Definition of grind:

verb
1: to reduce to powder or small fragments by friction
2: to wear down, polish, or sharpen by friction

noun
1: dreary, monotonous, or difficult labor, study, or routine
2: the result of grinding
3: the act of rotating the hips in an erotic manner

Credits

Concept: Jefta van Dinther and Minna Tiikkainen | Choreography and Dance: Jefta van Dinther | Lighting design: Minna Tiikkainen | Sound design: David Kiers

GRIND is a production by Jefta van Dinther and Minna Tiikkainen | Production management: Annie Schachtel – Bohm Bohm Room | Distribution: Key Performance | Administration: Interim kultur AB (svb) | Co-production: Frascati Productions (Amsterdam), Weld (Stockholm), Tanzquartier (Vienna), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Grand Theatre (Groningen) and Jardin d’Europe through Cullberg Ballet (Stockholm)| Funded by: the Swedish Arts Council, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Nordic Culture Point | Supported by: Fabrik Potsdam

Resources

Press images

Videos
Texts

Press images

↾

©ViktorGårdsäter

Videos

↾

Texts

↾

Juli 2012

Elisabeth Nehring, Tanz

GRIND

The darkness seems to breathe. Hardly visible, a flare springs up. Dirty violet. The energy spent catching the slightest glimpse of this light is reciprocated by a gradual increase in visibility. The diffused light pulsates to the rhythm of the music, makes the space move as if it were an organism of its own, perhaps sick, perhaps dangerous. It reveals a movement, but slowly. Something rearing up. But whether it is a shadow or a body remains imperceptible.

It’s a battle. Like Tintoretto’s depiction of the Archangel Michael fighting Satan, like countless paintings of Saint George stabbing the dragon with a strong, single-minded blow, Jefta van Dinther appears here, the dancing soloist, in a battle with a shadow, a puppet, or a tangible counterpart. Only later does the increasing brightness allow a brief look into the fighter’s face, into one of his vacant eyes, which could frighten were it not so far away. It seems to be a fight with a demon.

In their trio Grind, performed in Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer theater, Jefta van Dinther, Minna Tiikkainen, and David Kiers play with a precisely calculated proliferation of images somehow evocative of Baroque painting. The impact of Grind rests upon a sensitive interplay between thoroughly simple formal means. They realize their nightmarish vision by combining choreographies of dance, light, and music, employing a minimum of materials – a rod, a cable, and a body. Movement, light, and sound escalate into a whole, but each art form remains distinctly perceptible, sharply contoured, clearly demarcated. Grind, like many theater projects of its kind, aims to beguile the senses, but never to overpower them. Quite the contrary. The magic enables the viewer to engage in acute aesthetic perception and participation.

Be that as it may, this hour is filled with more guessing than recognizing. This lies less in the spare lighting than in Minna Tiikkainen’s dedication to the art of sophisticated lighting design. She drives shadows across the floor like bats, blinds us painfully with sudden flashes of strobe light, and agitates Jefta van Dinther’s shivering body into a state of high-frequency oscillation. With the tools she employs, this master of light-choreography manages literally to set the space in motion, enlivening it, and constantly making an indifferent darkness surface where we least expect it. All the while we are surrounded by David Kiers’ cacophonous sounds as they gyrate, hammer, pulsate – often in assonance, sometimes in dissonance. Jefta van Dinther crawls over the floor, whirls a cable in circles over his head like a lasso. As the space gradually becomes dark again and ultimately black, the light bulb at the end of his cable blinks in perfect synch with the sounds and leaves behind a flawless tail of light as if it were a falling star. The closing image – a slowly disappearing human being in the middle of a breathing universe, orbited by a dying sun – opens up a magically rich field of associations, one which can only be created by artists who both love and master their media.

GRIND

Die Dunkelheit scheint zu atmen. Aus ihr erhebt sich, kaum sichtbar, ein Lichtschein. Schmutziges Violett. Die Kraft, die es kostet, das überhaupt wahrzunehmen, wird mit immer mehr Sichtbahrheit belohnt. Das diffuse Licht pulsiert im Rythmus der Musik, bringt den Raum in Bewegung, als sei er ein eigener Organismus, vielleicht krank, vielleicht gefährlich. Nur langsam gibt er den Blick frei auf eine Bewegung. Nicht auszumachen, ob es ein Schatten oder ein Körper ist, der sich da aufbäumt.

Es ist ein Kampf. Wie Tintoretto den Erzengel Michael gegen den Satan kämpfen lässt, wie auf unzähligen Gemälden der Heilige Georg mit zielgerichteter Kraft auf den Drachen einsticht, erscheint hier Jefta van Dinther, der tanzende Solist, im Kampf mit einem Schatten, einer Puppe oder einem realen Gegenüber. Die zunehmende Helligkeit lässt erst spät einen Blick ins Gesicht des Kämpfers zu, ein seine stieren Augen, die Angst machen könnten, wären sie nicht so weit entfernt. Es scheint ein Kampf mit dem Dämon zu sein.

Mit genau kalkulierten Bildwuscherungen wie aus der Barockmalerei spielen Jefta van Dinther, Minna Tiikkainen und David Kiers in ihrem Trio ”Grind”, gesehen im Berliner Theater Hebbel am Ufer. Die wirkung beruht auf dem feinnervigen Zusammenspiel formaler, durchaus simpler Mittel. Aus Tanz-, Licht-, auch Musikchoreografie und aus wenigen Materialen – eine Strange, Kabel und Körper – realisieren sie ihre Albtraumvision. Bewegung, Licht und Klang steigern sich zu einem Ganzen, aber jede Kunstform bleibt deutlich sichtbar, scharf umrissen, klar abgegrenzt. ”Grind” zielt so, wie viele Bühnenprojekte dieser Art, auf ein Betören der Sinne, aber nie auf ihre Überwältigung. Im Gegenteil. Der Zauber ermöglicht dem Zuschauer eine höchst wache ästhetische Partizipation und Wahrnehmung.

Dabei ahnt man in dieser Stunde oft mehr, als man erkennt. Das liegt weniger an der sparsamen Helligkeit als an Minna Tiikkainens Hingabe an die Kunst augefeilter Lichtgestaltung. Sie jagt Schatten wie Fledermäuse über den Boden, blendet schmerzhaft mit jäh aufblitzendem Strobolicht und verzetzt den zitternden Körper Jefta van Dinthers in kurzwellenartige Schwingungen. Diese Meisterin der Licht choreografie vermag den Raum mit ihren Mitteln regelrecht im Bewegung zu setzen, belebt ihn und lässt die indifferente Dunkelheit stets dort auftauchen, wo wir es nicht erwarten. Dazu rotiert, hämmert, pulsiert der kakafonische Aound von David Kiers – oft im Gleich-, manchmal im Gegenklang. Jefta van Dinther robbt über den Boden, lässt ein Kabel wie ein Lasso über den Kopf kreisen. Im wieder dunkler werdenden, schliesslich schwarzen Raum blinkt die Lampe am Ende seines Kabels punktgenau im Takt der Töne und zieht, wie ein schnell verglühender Stern, einen perfekten Lichtschweif hinter sich her. Das Schlussbild – ein langsam verschwindender Mensch in der Motte eines atmenden Universums, von einer verglühenden Sonne umkreist – öffnet ein so zauberhaft reiches Assoziationsfeld, wie es nur Künstler hervorbringen können, die ihre Mittel lieben und beherrschen.

↾

18.12.2011

Anna Ångström, Svenska Dagbladet

Turbulent for all the senses

HARDCORE Light, sound and dance performance Grind is a strange and brutal experience for eye, ear and body, writes Anna Ångström

If you want to get really shaken up right before Christmas, a visit to Weld is recommended. Behind the innocent title Grind - in the context enigmatic, but think of the English "ware down, abrade, crush, oppress" - a black scenic hole is hidden, filled with flashing electroshock-dance, hard pulsating techno and a kind of 3D sound-effects that with low-frequency rumbling vibrations scares the wax in the ears out through their ear ducts.

The international trio behind the light, sound and dance experiment Grind is partly based in the Netherlands. Lighting designer Minna Tiikkainen and electronic sound composer David Kiers collaborate with choreographer Jefta van Dinther, who has made several exciting imprints in the Stockholm scene this autumn.

If Jefta van Dinther’s work The Blanket Dance presented at MDT and The Way Things Go for the Cullberg Ballet is characterized by a spatial and tactile playfulness, GRIND is definitely much more hardcore. Even if the work is abstract, it rouses strong physical reactions, associative images and often discomfort. On the one hand it seems to reflect dystopian violence and a totally connected contemporaneity, and on the other hand it is an attempt to ‘sensationally’ blast our habitual way of sensing and perceiving.

The dark room pulsates with light in flickering moments and only gives us a glimpse of a body wrestling with an amorphous, black mass. This volatile image transforms into a man with a bundle, and when Jefta van Dinther suddenly appears fully lit, it is in an electrified guise. He winds up an infinitely long black cable while the body bounces against the wall and casts cutting shadows on it.

It is as if the dancer is a machine or a generator. The sound drives the body into such rapid motion, that it ceases to exist. Until thebody in the next moment shuffles along in defiance of gravity, or trembles with jolts while the music sounds like a electrical power station. It is like watching an artificial ecstasy. Only the end offers some relief: a light bulb is swung around and lights up while one seems to hear sounds of birds and bumblebees.

Grind is a strange and brutal experience for eye, ear and body. The intellect is wiped out and matter is set in motion. Last chance to discover it today.

16.12.2011

Margareta Sörenson, Scenbloggen Expressen

van Dinther GRIND

The first ten minutes are a test. No doubt for the dancer and choreographer Jefta van Dinther himself, but now I thought of myself. It is almost pitch dark in the blown out concrete shaft that is Weld's stage. Night-vision is a strange thing: one starts to judge distances and proportions inaccurately. I notice it, but the eye has difficulty in keeping up and correcting. In the soft pitch-black darkness, I discern two bodies in some sort of struggle, but slowly realizes that it is in fact one human body and a dark bundle, which could be another human – in some sort of condition, in some sort of bag.

It continues and continues. Eventually, a new sequence where van Dinther is more visible: he pulls and arranges electrical cables, finally standing, letting his back bounce against the wall. Again and again, quicker, turning into a kind of jerking that pushes him further and further down until he lies jerking on the floor, closer to the audience.

GRIND means grinding, powdering, crushing, pressing to the ground. Also sharpen and hone, as well study. I look it up when I get home, and, yes, in GRIND there is grinding and crushing. The darkness is pulverized, as is my own vision. The music by David Kiers and Emptyset is choppy, somewhere between monotonous techno and alarm signals. The lighting design by Minna Tiikkainen is an interlacing of light minimalism and darkness maximalism.

But, somewhere, twenty minutes into the performance - which is about 45 minutes – I start to make associative connections: the dangers of sailing in the dark, the mechanics of the electro-torturer, Abu Graib-horrors. When one cannot find one’s way, as in a black cell. The human bundle, the electrical cords, the whiplash sounds from the beginning all fall into place.

Perhaps it is really not what Jefta van Dinther has in mind when he shakes, trembles, vibrates in a several minutes long sequence with his back towards us. The dancer/choreographer here becomes an initiator of sound- and light-images, where he himself slips out of focus in favor of the picture. In which he, nevertheless, is included. The light and darkness dances, the image lurches and I get sucked into it. As if defeated, my initial skepticism notwithstanding. Out in the rain-soaked and sparkling Christmas-street, it feels like I've been in another country. And I certainly have.

21.12.2011

Axel Andersson, Tidningen Kulturen

Folds and waves: the horizon of the membrane - Grind

A dull light pulsates against a white wall. An echoing high noise vibrates through the room. The hardly discernable man frantically struggles with something, a struggle that paints shadows on the wall. The man and the object are doubled and amplified by the waves of the sound and light. The scene is suggestive, but manages to avoid both the affected and the explanatory. An immediate materiality is created that is neither organic, nor belonging to things. The object turns out to be a piece of cloth. A black piece of cloth - the negative surface the white wall requires. It coincides with the room's darkness; its folds make it possible to discern the waves of the room.

Out of Jefta van Dinther’s frenzied movements a liberating childish association grows, in answer of resistance to the violent impressions. Isn’t it Osvaldo Cavandolis "La Linea" that reveals itself there as a shadowy figure? He, who continuously is being shaped and then dissolves, and angrily accuses the hand that draws him. The parable appears to be less far-fetched than was first suspected. The light and sound ‘draws’ the body with its waves. The body replies. The result is a sensation of "spasmics" instead of a "motorics". The body ‘draws’ the sound and light and everything appears to be linked, without reaching completion according to rehearsed patterns.

A while later the drawn line is released and turns into matter as van Dinther starts hauling in the tangles of wires. What previously was a play of dimensions, now is a system of linkages. The pile of cloth is put aside and van Dinther begins tugging at the cords, in the same way he gathered fabric. His body, constantly spastic, catches the waves. The room as surface transforms into the room as vibration. In the end, the lines lift up the surface/fabric into the ceiling where it hangs, suspended, before it falls down again, as if the cycle can continue.

The white wall on which van Dinther’s body is being doubled by the light turns out to be covered by a net-like texture. It is a membrane and the membrane becomes an image of the surface that moves toward the line, via the vibrations of the waves. The membrane is also the case of the body; whatever these bodies look like. The issue of what ‘draws’ what - the hand the figure or the figure the hand - is replaced by an image of the membranes in a continuous string towards synchronization.

In the end the title "Grind", appears as somewhat misleading. This is not about grinding, about something violently forced through the membrane. Body, sound and music are presented as frequencies, as lines and surfaces in motion. An invisible condition emerges. The most liberating in this "illustration" is that it does not release into a discharging. With precision, all the pitfalls that could lead to affect and valuation are avoided. The performance leads instead to an open pedagogy that possesses the good taste not to explain. The figure of La Linea is not even angry.

The tremendous intensity created during “Grind" can be traced back to a strong and unusually successful meeting between choreography (van Dinther), lighting design (Minna Tiikkainen) and sound (David Kiers and Emptyset). The three elements both illustrate and support each other with consistency, skill and emphasis. The show becomes a synthesis of the different art forms that make no detours to seize the viewer. Everything becomes a strangely familiar yet unknown pulse that meets and sets all the membranes of the viewer in motion.

30.12.2011

Stefanie Hessler, smallworldsproject.com

Grind – a dark and pulsating performance collaboration at Weld

I have a ticket for the dance performance Grind at the experimental dance and arts platform Weld in downtown Stockholm. It is a dark rainy winter evening and people visiting the performance don’t take off their shoes due to the cold, although shoeless feet are not uncommon in this location.

Descending into the cement cubical-shaped dance space, a minimalistic stage is awaiting the visitors. We sit down at one side of the space and soon the lights turn off. Music with elements borrowed from German industrial techno and a heavy bass starts. The knowledge of being enclosed in the small restricted space and being unable to see anything at all except complete darkness causes discomfort. Whereas I first think that this must be a dramatic intro for a different story, after a while I realise that the music style will not change, nor the set-up or general atmosphere this beginning promises. After a while, I begin to feel claustrophobic – but in an exciting way.

Faint light flashes illuminate the scene every now and then and a figure dressed in black becomes visible. This person is fighting with an entity that at times appears as human being, at times as big black monstrous obstacle. The dancer and the second being engage in an abstract encounter that at times suggests a dance and at times turns into a fight. While the light becomes stronger over the course of the first scene, the human figure starts dominating the stage and quarrel. The constant shaking and rocking body leans over the now discernible black fabric and I can’t but think of violence, rape and feel almost nauseous.

Suddenly, there is much more light, displaying a dystopic minimalist landscape of steel, something between an industrial nightclub and a high-tech fabrication hall. The dancer Jefta van Dinther, who is also the choreographer of the piece, rocks back and forth in regular movements, banging his back against the steel-resembling backdrop. He keeps pulling an electric cable, while his body moves fast and seemingly automatically, driven by an inner electricity, banging against the back wall and slowly sinking down into a crouching position.

The title of the performance Grind refers to abrasion, milling and rubbing, originating from an industrial language and entering pop culture mostly through dance and music. Whereas the industrial reference of cutting metal by slow abrasion suggests itself with the stage setting and choreography, it also makes me think of the sexualised movements in the perreo dance. This style emerged in the Caribbean in the late 1990s and is usually danced to reggaeton music, but has its roots in Brazilian lambada. With the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing, a milder form of this rubbing style had already entered North American culture and nightlife. These dance styles and the so-called grinding developed further with the Hip Hop movement in the US. The youth who first started dancing it aimed at expressing their dissatisfaction with the conservative system and wanted to provoke societal norms through their sexualised and tabooed movements.

And then there’s the hardcore punk music genre grindcore, founded by bands such as British Extreme Noise Terror and American Repulsion in the 1980s and around the time grunge became fashionable. Listening to this music makes one think of abrasive machining processes, cutting metal with a grinding wheel and a certain gloomy atmosphere. The shortest song in the Guinness Book of World Records is also a grindcore song by the band Napalm Death. You suffer is 1.3 seconds long and the lyrics consist of only one word, “why”. Especially the first part of the dance performance that resembled a rape or a stabbing, grinding of a real against a suggestive body imitated by black fabric, makes one think of a time in which melancholy and sorrow in an angrier form shaped pop culture than they do today. Even though these feelings undoubtedly still exist in music, nowadays they manifest themselves rather in the glorification of fancy rehab clinics connected to a certain glamorous chic.

In the next scene of Grind, a light spot irradiates the darkness and a figure stands in the centre of the light cone. The person’s body vibrates and twitches heavily, which misleadingly causes me to think that this effect is produced with an electronic device, due to the hard and quick movements. Engulfed in light whose effect feels like fog or water, the dancer appears in a state between birth and death. Next, an element resembling a skipping rope disrupts the intensive scene. The performer swings it through the light beam, transferring his twitching body movements to the rope and creating a playfully childlike and innocent moment. The shiny rope forming waves of light reminds me of an Anthony McCall installation and his sculpting in light. The scene is disrupted by a rapid and violent moment in which the dancer lashes about with a whip-like rope. The performer then goes back to the first prop of the electric cable. While seemingly pulling it down from the ceiling, he moves in a rhythmic way that one can see in music videos or nightclubs, with emphasis on his torso. There is an abstract sound that only after a while finds a visual source the viewer can connect it to, when the dancer starts circulating a lasso-like construct above his head. A lantern flares up at the cord’s end every now and then and the sound circulates together with the movement until the bulb is completely lit. Soon, the light goes out and a decrescendo of all elements, light, sound and movement happens until they completely cease and we are left alone in the silent dark.

The post-industrial club landscape carries one away and between the short and precise visually perceptible moments, the mind completes the emptiness with its own images. The performance does trick the viewer and darkness is a somewhat convenient tool for producing impressive effects. Although one is immersed and at times lacks calmer moments that allow escaping the affective scenes into more cognitive realms, one cannot be malcontent with the group because the piece is too well produced and does offer surprise moments. I read the work as a metaphor for contemporary life, for struggle, for pleasure and experience, feeling one’s senses and trying not to drown within all the sensations and impulses assailing us. The constant movement, shifting from being above to below, oscillation and vibration, have something monumental but at the same time show how fragile contemporary life is and always has been. If one is to speak about post-industrialism as marker of our times when we have to deal with all the goods we have produced and where ideas and services are more important and economically valuable, Grind is a statement recounting this straining condition.

The collaboration between dancer and choreographer Jefta van Dinther, lighting designer Minna Tiikkainen and sound designer David Kiers is an example of more and more interdisciplinary projects within the arts. The merging of three different areas into one piece benefits from all of the creators’ expertise and understanding of the effects they produce with the respective devices. Grind is as sharp as the abrasive metal-cutting knife and after an intensive one-hour performance I enjoy the reverberation that keeps on swinging in the mind like a tuning fork even after the dance has ended.

05.04.2012

Sara van der Kooi, Theaterkrant

Bewildering intertwinement of sound, light and movement

The sound starts in the pitch dark. First, a dark and penetrating beat, alongside some clear pling plong sounds. It is pounding, humming. You can hardly call this music. Gradually the sound gets fiercer and more violent, then uplifting, trance-like and finally whooshing. During the one hour that the dance performance GRIND by Jefta Dinther lasts, the sound is all encompassing. As if you were in the middle of a dark hurricane.

In the gloom the vision also starts – albeit limited. Against a light background a shadow is barely visible. His upper body moves back and forth violently, a pumping motion. The soft, pulsating light wanders on, the shadow disappears. When he reappears again, his movements are even more intense. Is there a human on the floor? It looks as though he is bashing someone. And still that soft pulsating light, obscuring what is actually happening on the floor and at what distance.

GRIND is a grand play with perception, in which Van Dinther’s body appears as an almost amorphous material. With shadows and strobe lights he makes the impossible possible: while he hauls in a long black cable his shadow separates from his body, and starts leading a life of its own. When Van Dinther later jolts across the floor, his head and hands seem to separate from his body. And by shaking vehemently, his body soon becomes elastic. The contours of his shoulders and hips ripple as if they are liquid. Due to the afterimages of the light flashes, the movements sometimes gain the quality of an old black and white film.

In GRIND Van Dinther arouses a variety of associations. At first you think you are looking at cartoon figure, but quickly the fear hits you at the thought of a massacre. Then suddenly you perceive a horse whip, or you walk through a tropical monsoon, or you are surrounded by racing motorcycles or a helicopter flies over head. The performance is through its intertwinement of sound, light and movement a fascinating and compelling but also terrifying experience, not suitable for people with a weak stomach. On unsteady legs, with bleary eyes and ears ringing the hurricane GRIND leaves your behind in bewilderment.

Verbijsterende vervlechting van geluid, licht en beweging

In het pikkedonker begint het: het geluid. Eerst een donkere en indringende beat, daarbij wat heldere pling-plong geluiden. Het is dreunend, zoemend. Muziek kun je dit bijna niet noemen. Geleidelijk wordt het geluid grimmiger en heftiger, daarna opzwepend, trance-achtig en uiteindelijk suizend. In het uur dat de dansvoorstelling Grind van Jefta van Dither duurt, is het geluid allesomvattend. Alsof je in het midden van een duistere oorkaan staat.

Vanuit het duister begint ook het – beperkte – zicht. Tegen een lichte achtergrond is een schim amper zichtbaar. Zijn bovenlijf beweegt heftig heen en weer, een pompende beweging. Dan dwaalt het zachte, pulserende licht verder, de schim verdwijnt. Als hij weer zichtbaar wordt, zijn zijn bewegingen nog heviger. Ligt daar een mens op de vloer? Hij lijkt wel op iemand in te slaan. Nog steeds dat pulserende zachte licht, waardoor het raden blijft wat er op de vloer gebeurt en op welke afstand.

Grind is een groot spel met de waarneming waarin Van Dinther zijn lichaam als bijna amorf materiaal presenteert. Met schaduw en stroboscoop maakt hij het onmogelijke mogelijk. Zo komt bijvoorbeeld zijn schaduw, terwijl hij aan een lange zwarte kabel trekt, los van zijn lichaam en gaat een eigen leven leiden. Als Van Dinther daarna schokkend over de vloer beweegt, bewegen zijn hoofd en handen schijnbaar los van zijn lijf. En door heftig te trillen wordt even later zijn lijf van elastiek. De contouren van zijn schouders en heupen golven alsof ze vloeibaar zijn. Door de nabeelden van de lichtflitsen krijgen de bewegingen soms het karakter van een oude zwart-wit film.

Van Dinther roept met Grind de meest uiteenlopende associaties op. Eerst denk je nog naar een tekenfilmfiguur te kijken maar al snel slaat de angst je om het hart bij de gedachte aan een slachtpartij. Dan ineens komt een paardenmenner voorbij, loop je door een tropische moesson, cirkelen racemotoren om je heen of komt er een helikopter overgevlogen. De voorstelling is door de vervlechting van geluid, licht en beweging een fascinerende, meeslepende maar ook angstaanjagende ervaring, niet geschikt voor mensen met een zwakke maag. Op onvaste benen, met wazige ogen en tuitende oren laat de oorkaan van Grind je verbijsterd weer achter.

2102.07.14

Sophia Felbermair, ORF.at

"Grind": Mehr Schatten, weniger Licht

Der Tanz ist in der Stadt: Zum 29. Mal hat das Impulstanz-Festival in Wien begonnen. Nach der Eröffnung am Donnerstag - diesmal im kleinen Rahmen des Odeon Theaters - feierte am Freitagabend mit "Grind" eine schwedisch-finnisch-niederländische Produktion ihre finstere Wien-Premiere im Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz.

Reizüberflutung und Illusion sind in der Performance Konzept:</b><br/>Jefta van Dinther, niederländischer Choreograph und Tänzer mit schwedischen Wurzeln hat gemeinsam mit der finnischen Lichtdesignerin Minna Tiikkainen und dem niederländischen Sounddesigner David Kiers mit "Grind" ein Stück entwickelt, in dem die Grenzen der Wahrnehmung verschwimmen. "Stellen wir uns einen Sound vor, dessen Druck die Körper in Vibration verwandelt, Licht, das uns Dunkelheit wahrnehmen lässt." (Jefta van Dinther)

Ein zuckender Körper im Dämmerlicht
Es ist nicht nur "laut, wirklich laut" wie das Programmheft eingangs erwähnt, sondern auch finster. Wirklich finster. Nur schemenhaft glaubt das Auge nach Minuten im monoton-harten elektronischen Beat eine zuckende Figur zu erkennen. Die Dämmerlichtmomente werden länger, ein Körper nimmt Gestalt an. Über eine Stunde verausgabt sich Van Dinther, mit der totalen Hingabe geht der Tänzer im Beat auf und lässt die Bewegung völlig mit Sound und Licht verschmelzen. In einer gefühlten Endlosschleife spielen die Künstler mit der optischen Täuschung, halten Bewegungen und Klang bewusst monoton. Man erzählt keine Geschichte an diesem Abend - "man schließt die Wahrnehmung kurz", so der Choreograph.

Mit dem Minimum ein Maximum erzeugen

"Minimieren, um zu maximieren" ist das Konzept von "Grind" - und tatsächlich funktioniert die Vermischung von einfachsten Elementen perfekt, was auch daran liegt, dass Licht, Ton und Tanz präzise aufeinander abgestimmt sind und sich gegenseitig minutiös getimed begleiten. Wer wen führt, ist dabei nicht erkennbar. "Grind" sei ein Ort, der den Sinnen trotzt, beschreibt Van Dinther seine Idee. "Stellen wir uns einen Raum vor, dessen Dimensionen unendlich dehnbar scheinen. Stellen wir uns einen Sound vor, dessen Druck die Körper in Vibration verwandelt, Licht, das uns Dunkelheit wahrnehmen lässt." All das muss sich das Publikum eigentlich nicht vorstellen, denn mit der Endlosschleife kommt der Rausch wie von selbst. “Grind" ist eine Aufführung wie eine tiefe Trance - jenseits jedes Gefühls von Zeit und Raum. "Tanz eben", sagt Van Dinther

05.08.2013

Eva-Elisabeth Fischer, Suddeutsche Zeitung

Im Ultraschall

München - Der Name Jefta van Dinther geistert schon eine ganze Weile durch die Szene. Der Mann mit dem alttestamentarischen Vornamen ist in Schweden aufgewachsen, lehrt in Stockholm Choreografie, arbeitet in Amsterdam und Berlin und war nun bei der Tanzwerkstatt Europa zu Gast in der Muffathalle. Sein München-Debüt gab er mit seinem berühmten Solo 'Grind' - ein trefflicher Titel für diese synästhetische, Akteur wie Zuschauer gleichermaßen erfassende, sehr körperliche audio-visuelle Performance. Denn deren gleichmäßig mäßiges Tempo erinnert an einen ununterbrochenen Mahlvorgang.

Was die Lichtmagierin Minna Tiikkainen weitgehend im Dunkeln, und wenn, dann nur spärlich und diesig beleuchtet, im Ungefähren lässt, gleicht einem Ultraschallbild, das, richtig gelesen, weit mehr preisgibt als die schemenhaften Vorgänge auf der Bühne: die Welt als digitale Vorstellung, der Mensch am Draht, dem ein künstlicher Puls, der Techno-Sound von David Kiers, den Lebensrhythmus vorgibt. Van Dinther ist darin erst einmal nur als beweglicher Haufen erkennbar, als ein Mollusk, der offenbar einen Kabelsalat mit sich trägt und darunter verschwindet, bis er endlich in fahlem Licht von der Vertikale an einer Wand in die Hocke rutscht und, analog zu den Techno-Loops, über seinem linken Arm Kabelschleifen aufrollt, an deren Ende ein Mikrofon hängt. Es ist das phallische Instrument, mit dem er seinen weiß behemdeten und schwarz behosten Körper bearbeitet, ein tönender Vibrator, auf und ab kreisend, knarzend und knisternd. Van Dinther bleibt konzentriert und diszipliniert, ein gleichsam meditierender Masturbator, ganz allein auf sich bezogen in einem Darkroom, der kein Du kennt, aber Mithörer, Mitfühler und Voyeure, die nach dem selben Rhythmus ticken wie das Objekt ihres Interesses. Denn der basslastige Sound bohrt sich ja nicht nur in die Ohren, sondern schleicht sich in den Bauch und in die Herzkammern als angst-lustvoller Puls.

Jefta van Dinther also macht sein Publikum zur anonymen Masse potenzieller Partner unerfüllten und deshalb süchtigen Begehrens - Routine nicht nur in einschlägigen Örtlichkeiten für gelebte Männlichkeit. Denn wie dem um sich selbst kreisenden Mann auf der Bühne die befreiende Entladung versagt bleibt, so verweigert einem die Reizflut unendlich gesteigerter Begehrlichkeiten jegliche Befriedigung. Van Dinther schleudert am Ende blendende Lichtblitze mittels einer Glühbirne am kreisenden Kabel in den Raum. Was bleibt, ist das ultimative Nichts. Eine Analyse, nachtschwarz.