A choreographic landscape where the characters speak and the body listens

In 2023, Jefta van Dinther was a success with the magnificent performance Remachine. On February 4, 2026, he returns to Norrlandsoperan in a slightly smaller format, as urgent as always and with its unmistakable design language and aesthetics. Mercury Rising premieres in Berlin on November 21, 2025.

Jefta van Dinther has become known for his distinctive aesthetics where illusion and reality are often woven together and the boundaries between them are slowly shifted. Through a conscious play with perception, he often creates dystopian sinkholes that challenge our senses and open up new, unexpected worlds.

In his new work Mercury Rising , the complexity of language and human communication is scrutinized. The performance, created in collaboration with the participating dancers Dawn Jani Birley, Rita Mazza and Lukas Malkowski, exposes a terrain of ancient as well as future non-linear languages. Together, they navigate through a landscape of communication, signs, agency and physicality.

Here, the human body becomes an unsecured discursive stage – a place where meaning is created, dissolved, and reshaped through movement. While inviting the audience to decipher an inexhaustible array of signs, the work explores the sliding nature of interpretation and ultimately frees us from the need for the literal or explanatory.

By weaving together multiple sign languages and being designed for both the deaf and the hearing – Mercury Rising tackles the complexities of human communication in a changing time. In the end, what we share is not certainty – but the impossibility of understanding, and the longing for connection after all.

Mercury Rising is a co-production with Norrlandsoperan Umeå, Dansens Hus Stockholm, Dansnät Sverige, Angers (Accueil Studio), HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin and PACT Zollverein Essen.

Premiere mingle!

Already at 18:00 you are welcome to us at Dance Mingle in the foyer. During the mingle we present the spring’s exciting program and offer snacks, non-alcoholic bubbles and a dancing surprise.

Jefta van Dinther

Jefta van Dinther is a Swedish-Dutch choreographer and dancer, active in Stockholm and Berlin. He studied at the Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK) and has since 2008 created several performances that have toured internationally. During 2019 – 2022, van Dinther was an associate choreographer with Cullberg.

Among his most acclaimed works are Plateau Effect, Protagonist, Dark Field Analysis, Unearth and REMACHINE. In 2016, Dancenet Sweden toured his work THIS IS CONCRETE, and he has also created choreography for the music video Monument by Robyn & Röyksopp.

Van Dinther has been the artistic director of the master’s program in choreography at the Stockholm School of Dance and Circus (DOCH) between 2012 and 2014 and has been awarded the Birgit Cullberg scholarship and the Swedish Theatre Critics’ Dance Prize. His work is characterized by a strong desire to explore the relationship between people, society, the environment and other life forms.

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