Things That Surround Us | Every Day Objects As Fellow Players

We tend to ignore the objects that surround us in our every day grind. We only acknowledge most furniture, home appliances and technical equipment when they're broken and fail to fulfill their purpose. Clément Layes has reaped artistic fruits of this phenomenon, leading to his dance performance "Things That Surround Us" that premiered yesterday at the Sophiensäle.

Clément Layes is a young performer and choreographer that already addressed the human perspective on the world in his debut, "Allege". "Things That Surround Us" takes things one step further by adapting Sartre's principle of objects looking back on the other as a subject.

Things and objects develop a life of their own, refuse their original purpose and force the performers to interact with them in Layes' piece. And in a way, that is exactly what we do in everyday situations, where objects define our actions, from our coffee machine to the hair dryer - they demand a choreography from us, "a complex choreography of everyday life", as Sophiensäle press spokesperson Gesa Rindermann puts it. Layes has turned objects into acteurs among human performers. The result: Utter unpredictability.

(azi)