This evening will be divided in two parts. First, André Lepecki will deliver a short talk where he will address four compositional and thematic elements emphatically present in Mette Ingvartsen’s recent pieces: thingness, darkness, speculation, and ekphrasis. Conversing with and through these elements, Lepecki will advance how they are not only expressive of Ingvartsen’s particular authorial concerns, but traverse and inform contemporary choreographic imagination at large. In this sense, thing, dark, speculation, and word will be seen by Lepecki as naming some of the main constitutive forces currently composing a new materiality for dance — a materiality with which dance can redefine its existence away from the perceptually consensual field of neoliberal monohumanist aesthetics.

In the second part of the evening  Ingvartsen, Bettina Knaup and Lepecki will engage in a conversation, not necessarily bound only to these topics and themes. With the audience, speculatively, feeling their way in the dark, they will see where the thing will end up.