The Body’s Forgotten Dance: Rethinking Movement with the Varier ThatSit Chair

Do you remember being a child, squirming in a hard classroom chair, unable to keep your feet still? A teacher’s voice, sharp and tired, cutting through the haze: “Sit still! Pay attention!” We learned the lesson well. We trained our bodies to be quiet, to fold neatly into the 90-degree angles of acceptable posture. We learned that stillness equals focus. But what if that lesson was wrong? What if our bodies, in their infinite wisdom, were trying to tell us something important with every fidget and sway? What if the problem wasn’t our restless nature, but the very design of the box we were trying to fit into?

The Cast We Call a Chair
For the better part of a century, the pursuit of the “perfect” office chair has been a quest for the perfect cast. We’ve been given lumbar supports that push into our spine, armrests that dictate the position of our shoulders, and seat pans that lock our pelvis in place. The underlying philosophy was one of passive support, treating the human body as a fragile structure that needed to be propped up and immobilized to prevent collapse. In this view, the ideal chair is a static, rigid exoskeleton. It’s a well-intentioned prison, designed to hold us in a single, supposedly optimal position for hours on end.

The cost of this confinement is now tallied in clinics and therapy rooms across the continent. Chronic back pain, stiff necks, and compressed spines are the silent epidemic of the modern workplace. Our bodies, designed for dynamic movement, atrophy in these static molds. The very tools meant to support us are, in fact, teaching us to forget how to support ourselves.

The Rebel with a Sketchbook
But while this orthodoxy of stillness reigned, a different idea was taking root in the cold, clear air of Norway. It was an idea championed by a designer named Peter Opsvik, a man who looked at the rigid chairs of his time and saw not a solution, but the problem itself. Opsvik was a student of the body in motion. He watched how people naturally sat—perching, leaning, kneeling, slouching—and came to a revolutionary conclusion that became his life’s motto: “The best posture is always the next one.”

This wasn’t just a clever phrase; it was a declaration of war on the static ideal. Steeped in the Scandinavian design tradition that weds form to humanistic function, Opsvik believed our tools should adapt to us, not the other way around. He envisioned furniture that didn’t just permit movement but actively encouraged it. He wanted to design not a cast, but a dance partner.

Teaching Wood to Dance
The Varier ThatSit Balans is the mature evolution of that vision. It doesn’t look like a traditional chair because it refuses to ask traditional questions. It doesn’t ask how to hold you still; it asks how to set you free. It achieves this through two simple, yet profound, strokes of design genius that effectively teach a piece of wood to dance with your body.

First are the curved runners. They are the chair’s soul. By replacing static feet with a gentle, sled-like base, the chair is in a state of constant, subtle instability. This isn’t a flaw; it’s the feature. Your body, without any conscious thought, must make infinitesimal adjustments to maintain equilibrium. This process awakens a deep, primal sense within us called proprioception—our body’s internal GPS. It’s the silent sense that allows you to touch your nose with your eyes closed. The ThatSit turns sitting into a low-grade, continuous proprioceptive exercise, keeping your core muscles awake and engaged, preventing them from falling into the slumber that leads to slouching.

Second is the open posture. The forward-sloping seat and the shin pads work in concert to gently tilt your pelvis forward, allowing your spine to effortlessly float into its natural, healthy S-curve—the same strong, stable curve it holds when you stand. Your hips are “unfolded,” your diaphragm is free, and your lungs can expand fully. It’s a posture of poised readiness, not slumped submission.

Finding Your Rhythm
Herein lies the chair’s brilliant, and often misunderstood, pact with its user. The ThatSit is an incomplete object. It is only half of the equation; your body is the other half. It is a dance partner, and like any new partnership, there is a learning curve. This is where the polarized user reviews, from ecstatic praise to bitter disappointment, find their source.

For those who find the rhythm, the experience is transformative. As one long-term user beautifully put it, “I find myself utilizing the various positions available in this chair without even thinking about it. At the end of the day I realize I feel great. I have no aches and pains.” This is the feeling of a successful duet, where the chair’s movements and the body’s responses become a single, fluid expression of comfort.

But for others, the dance is awkward, even painful. The initial engagement of long-dormant core muscles can feel like strain. Some users, particularly those with specific pre-existing injuries, find the constant motion aggravating, as noted by a reviewer whose family member found that “each movement caused pain in her back.” Furthermore, the chair’s commitment to natural materials comes with a trade-off. The elegant, laminated beech and ash wood provides a lively flex but has, for some users, proven less durable than cold, hard steel. Reports of the chair feeling “flimsy” or, in rare cases, breaking, are a stark reminder that this $899.00 investment is not just in a product, but in a philosophy—one that occasionally prioritizes organic form over absolute brute strength. It demands a user willing to engage in the learning process and accept the nature of the materials.

An Invitation to Move
In the end, the quest for the perfect chair is a fool’s errand. The very idea of a single object solving our sedentary crisis is flawed. What we need is not a static solution, but a dynamic shift in our mindset. We need to grant ourselves permission to move.

The Varier ThatSit Balans isn’t a panacea. It’s not a medical device. It is, however, one of the most eloquent and powerful invitations to move that has ever been crafted from wood and fabric. It’s a tool designed to reawaken your body’s forgotten dance, to remind you of that restless child who knew, instinctively, that life is movement. The real question this remarkable chair asks is not whether it is the right partner for you, but whether you are ready to get up and join the dance.