Jan Rozman participated in the Artists Encounter at Spring Forward 2025

Where and how does your flesh meet the world? Perhaps you’re reading this as your forearms droop onto a plastic table, your feet idle on rough carpet, and your bulk is supported by a nautically striped chair. Or maybe you’re strewn across a single bed, half-clothed half-not, fixated on a computer plugged into the charging outlet on your left. Yet again, you might be on a bus or a plane or another large machine, moving through the world. Across all sleeping and waking hours, your body is intimately connected to the world of objects. Our enmeshment with silicone, polyester, and data circuitry is a kind of choreography, and it is here that the work of Slovenian choreographer Jan Rozman begins.

What role do objects play in your work?

Early on, I discovered that objects are a way for me to expand the capacity of my body. Objects and bodies together form cyborgs: they have a certain potential that we can access, and in doing so become merged. If you ride a bike, you’re able to move faster. It’s a way of working that immediately felt like home; that kept on drawing me back.

During my masters studies in Berlin, I stumbled upon Timothy Morton’s book Realist Magic, which led me to a way of looking at objects as autonomous and full of their own forms of agency. This opened up a lot of potential for working with objects in performance. It was like when you’re a kid and you discover an existing part of the plot you somehow always knew to be true.

In Thinging (2018), you work with objects that populate our lives in unassuming ways: a crumpled ball of aluminum foil, a spray bottle, a folding chair. How do you choose the objects that dance with you onstage? What does your wider process look like?

In Berlin, I discovered certain practices that I still use as a starting point. Now, I often begin with familiar territory – I don’t need to rediscover the world from scratch again and again. Maybe I can recycle.

I integrate the object into my perception and my movement as a body part. Of course, it’s different whether you work with a knife, or you work with fries.

So you’re working with the object as it exists culturally, as well as its physicality?

There’s a material aspect, which plays into my sense of my own body as an object. All things have bodies, but bodies are things too. Then there’s the associative field and all the images and ideas we connect objects with. I don’t see a reason to avoid that process of identification: we are a culturally wired species.

I think we are in a moment of both abundance and complete scarcity – a void of sensation and an overload of information. These are two extremes that I’m drawn to in my work.

Abundance and lack are natural forms for choreography. They hold distinct relationships to time and space.

Exactly. Yet I don’t believe in having a binary relationship to these ideas. I’m more interested in the space between the extremes. How can we work within these materials, in all their richness? I build structured situations with a general outline, but I always leave some things open to the moment. I believe that working with the here and now allows the audience to enter further. I am not who I was yesterday, even if the change is microscopic. Working in this way is a skill, and of course there’s space for failure, but I think in live performance, that’s the juice.

The space for failure?

The space for failure, and the space for the present. I want to include the here and now, because that’s what makes us alive.