Jefta van Dinther 2025

Mercury Rising

A choreographic landscape in which the signs speaks and the body listens

Mercury Rising emerges from a phenomenological excavation of language. Created in collaboration with and performed by Dawn Jani Birley, Rita Mazza, and Lukas Malkowski, the performance charts both ancient and future non-linear languages, navigating the terrain between communication, gesture, agency, and physicality.

Mercury Rising positions the body as a volatile site of discourse—a place where meaning is made, unmade, and transformed through movement.

While inviting its audience to decipher an abundance of signs, the work also explores the slippery nature of interpretation and ultimately releases us from the need for the literal or the explanatory. Incorporating multiple sign languages, and created for all audiences—including Deaf and hearing audiences—Mercury Rising addresses the complexity of human communication on the brink of a paradigm shift. What we share, in the end, is not certainty—but the impossibility of full understanding, and the urge to connect nonetheless.

Jefta van Dinther

Choreographer

Jefta van Dinther (SE/DE) is a choreographer and dancer. 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 other forms of life such as the 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, synaesthesia, darkness,
labour, sex, the uncanny, affect, voice and image.

Credits

Choreography: Jefta van Dinther
Created and performed by: Rita Mazza, Dawn Jani Birley, Lukas Malkowski
Costumes and stage: Cristina Nyffeler
Lighting design: Jonatan Winbo
Sound design: David Kiers
Backdrop surface: Gonçalo Sena
Dramaturgy: Gabriel Smeets
Artistic advice: Maja Zimmermann
Technical direction: Andrea Parolin and Fabian Bleisch
Light: Fabian Bleisch
Sound: Andrea Parolin
Management: Sven Neumann
Distribution: Sarah De Ganck, ART HAPPENS
Production management: Uta Engel and Romy Hansford-Gerber
Financial management: transmissions GmbH (DE) and Interim kultur AB (SE)

Mercury Rising is produced by Jefta van Dinther
Co-production: Norrlandsoperan Umeå, Dansens Hus Stockholm, Dansnät Sverige, HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, PACT Zollverein Essen and CNDC Angers
Funded by: Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion and Fonds Darstellende Künste
Photo: Adam Munnings & Rhys Powell

In 2025 Jefta van Dinther was funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion and Swedish Arts Council

Tours with Dansnät Sverige, spring 2026

Tour dates

4 February
Norrlandsoperan, Umeå

8 February
Rum för dans/Kungsbacka teater

10 February
Hjalmar Bergmanteatern, Örebro

13 February
Centrum för idrott & kultur, Knivsta

15 February
Spira kulturhus, Jönköping

17 February
Dansstationen c/o Skånes dansteater, Malmö