Strange and beguiling, “Planet [wanderer]” is the brainchild of renowned choreographer Damien Jalet — a collaborator of Madonna, FKA Twigs and Marina Abramović, among others — and Japanese visual artist and scenographer Kohei Nawa. Presented during this year’s Singapore International Festival of the Arts (SIFA), it invites all into an intense yet meditative portal that questions our shared materiality with the planet we wander on. Men’s Folio speaks to both to better understand their journeys that led to this meeting, giving rise to a long-standing artistic relationship that only pushes us to be more mindful of how we approach art and the world.

Do you consider yourself a wanderer?
Kohei (K): The “cell,” which has been my long-standing theme, is an entity that travels throughout the world while continuously changing its form. In that sense, I myself may inevitably be a wanderer as well, endlessly drifting through the world via the act of creation.

How did you know that this is what you wanted to pursue in your life?
Damien (D): My first love was not dance, it was actually theatre. I was mostly interested in the way theatre could be used as a tool for transformation. You could shape shift in a more obvious way than with dance, because dance at the time was very academic, and I was never into that. So I think it was when I started studying at the National School of Theatre and Cinema in Belgium that I began discovering the work of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Alain Platel, Jan Fabre and Meg Stuart; people who would take dance to a more raw, visceral, intellectual and emotional place.

I started to get really interested in this contemporary dance world, not through performance, but films made with and about it. At one point, there was an entire seminary devoted to dance in cinema. That really triggered something very strongly in me. But then I was also dancing a lot in clubs during the 1990s. Clubs were, for me, an amazing space of freedom and community. I was dancing for hours. One time, a young dancer who was doing his first work saw something in me and proposed that I join. The virus was definitely doing its transformation on me then. I started to understand that whatever I was searching for in theatre, I could find in dance. I didn’t have to follow the rules; I could invent my own. Dance is the medium I keep experimenting with.

Damien was not your first encounter with dance, Kohei. What was the encounter that allowed you to come closer to this performance art, and how did it change your perspective on it?
K: It was Min Tanaka. My first encounter with him was in the summer of 1994, when I volunteered at Art Camp Hakushu. Every experience there remains memorable, but Min’s Locus Focus in particular left a profound impression on me. The continuous movements that emerged between his body and the environment each time caused dance itself to germinate within the viewer. I feel that this experience — one could call it the sharing of a “field of sensation” — deeply influenced the formation of my artistic perspective. For me, sculpture is fundamentally a question of how to choreograph materials and share the sensations they generate with viewers.

Min once said, “Every single cell in the body is dancing.” Through these 30 years of exchange, I feel I have gradually come to understand that the body is not something an individual can fully possess and control; rather, by confronting the accumulated history embedded within it, the body naturally opens itself toward expression.

Damien, you’ve done a lot of collaborative works over your career, but you’ve only co-signed with Kohei. Why?
D: I was never interested in working with Kohei as a set designer, but more as someone I can have a conversation with. I do think that collaborations were not understood for a very long time. It’s one vision, which, for me, also connects politically. It’s colonialism as well. It’s like one way of seeing things, and that’s it, what it is.

I believe that is the beauty of art. And we’re all the fruit of a meeting between two persons. I love the idea of conceiving art together. I think dance is an art that you can’t do by yourself. I mean, you can, but it’s incredibly hard. I did it once, and I don’t really want to do it again. I don’t know how some people do it. I do think it’s a collective work; that you’re mixing your talents. You need a light designer; you need sound; you need a composer; you need dancers. That’s basically the first step. You need a production manager and a stage manager. So it’s not lonely work. I love the idea that you also extend that to the vision. When you collaborate with someone, you’re constantly pushing the other in a “zone”, the zone. It’s not just you. It’s not like being a writer and just being focused on your own creative access, which I think is really equal, but it’s also very lonely.

Yes, dance is a collective endeavour. You become dependent on a lot of people, a lot of moods, a lot of restrictions, but then it implies that there’s so much richness in whatever you create.

How did this collaboration begin anyway? I heard Ryuchi Sakamoto was the bridge.
K: We first met in 2014 at the Sapporo International Art Festival, where Ryuichi Sakamoto served as director, and began discussing the idea of creating a work together. We shared many things in common, including interdisciplinary interests, but I think what was especially important as the starting point of our collaboration was our shared awareness of contemporary disasters.

Damien experienced the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake while in Japan, and my installation “Foam” (Aichi Triennale, 2013), which became the catalyst for our meeting, was likewise informed by an awareness of the memories of recurring natural disasters throughout the world. How do life and the body respond to such overwhelming forces, and how can that response be expressed? These are questions that are running throughout all of our collaborations.

Both of you have worked on “VESSEL”, “MIST”, “Planet [wanderer]” and short film MIRAGE [TRANSITORY]. What did you guys want to explore in this series of works?
D: “VESSEL”was very abstract; you would see only the face of one dancer for maybe a minute and a half. Both of us work with a kind of anatomy — he with stuffed animals and his cells, and I with the dancers’ bodies. This is where “VESSEL” began, the anatomic element of our “vessel” a common point of exploration. Then we realised it was becoming more difficult to dissociate what makes humans human. Carl Sagan was a huge inspiration to me while working on these projects. The atoms you find on Earth hardly leave Earth. They’re constantly cycled and transformed. We’re technically one with the environment. Yet we live in a time when we create conditions that will most likely lead to our own extinction. There are more and more natural catastrophes, and we’re trying to adjust and adapt. We feel we’re above nature, managing to tame it even, but it’s a complete illusion. So we wanted people to ponder about what makes us one or not with the world and other non-human beings. Maybe that’s also why our last piece is called Mirage.

How did this piece start, and did it develop in ways that you did not foresee?
K: One starting point was the word “planet.” Its ancient Greek etymology refers not only to a “planet” but also to “a wanderer.” The word inspired us to imagine across vastly different scales: a lonely celestial body drifting through space and the wandering of life unfolding upon its surface. At the same time, I drew much inspiration from the landscapes of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture, where traces of the tsunami remained vividly visible. There, a collapsed civilisation and the resilience of life coexisted.

In the context of all these collaborations, what’s Planet’s chapter about?
K: While “VESSEL” depicts “Yomi” and “Mist” depicts “Takamagahara” from the Kojiki — the underworld and the heavens — “Planet[wanderer]” takes as its stage the third world, “Ashihara-no-Nakatsukuni,” namely the earthly world in which we live. In other words, it portrays forms of life that continue to adapt while being tossed about in a harsh environment.

Mirage, our fourth collaboration, sought to depict the next development of this “wandering life.” Faced with intensifying environmental crises, what do people who have lost faith in any guiding vision hallucinate or envision? That is the question we are exploring.

D: You can say that “Planet[wanderer]” inscribes itself in this non-anthropocentric way of seeing the world; our humanity in the piece emerges only halfway. Walking through the material basically gives a portrait of humanity. And it can feel, “Oh, my God, that’s so short.” If you look at the story of the world, humanity comes in the last second of it, yeah, the whole story of the world is 24 hours. We appear literally at mid at 1159, 49 seconds.

It’s quite meditative, but it’s very intense. I think it’s an incredibly intense experience for the dancers and also for the audience. It really makes us like small, wandering souls. It’s this vast darkness where things shift and transform, and we’re drifting in this darkness, evolving. And there’s also a level of joy to be found there and absolutely a sense of struggle as well. That is, I think how the piece deals with being metaphoric and metamorphic, in the sense that the piece is constantly using a poetic language of metaphors.

What is something you’ve learnt from each other after all this time?
K: I have always been fascinated by corporeality and the possibilities of its expansion, and dancers such as Damien embody this completely: their range of motion, the way they stand, walk, and simply exist all become part of the performance, inspiring me merely through their presence. Damien captures the forms and movements of dancers’ bodies and transforms them into choreography. In response, I imagine what kind of world these choreographed bodies inhabit and how they transition from one scene to another, and I attempt to give form to those imaginings. At the same time, like me, Damien is someone whose mind overflows endlessly with images once he begins speaking. He possesses deep respect for the worlds that artists create and for the act of creation itself, as well as a passionate commitment to artistic practice. His remarkable communication skills within a highly pure creative process have allowed both dancers and staff involved in the workshops to learn a great deal from him.

This is a highly philosophical, as well as visceral work. How do you want audiences to watch it to get the most out of it?
D: I don’t want to impose any way of watching the work or say you should do it in a certain manner. But I also think that the audience needs to complete it. So audiences should be at work in a sense that it’s not a piece that’s going to give you all the tools and tell you what it’s about. I’m also very interested in hearing what people project, even if it’s something not at all or far away from the conceptual ground we established with the work. I love hearing people talk about it and reading how journalists would interpret it, because it expands my own knowledge and starts to be charged with whatever people project onto it while watching it.

But what’s this material? How did you do this? In a way, I want to say, “Who cares?” That’s very secondary. What I’m more interested in is what the performance did to you? What kind of images came into your mind? What kind of associations did you make while watching it? Where did it bring you? What kind of feelings did it evoke? Was it a sense of hope or amazement, or was it just very depressing and sad for you? I’m much more excited to hear how people relate to it emotionally or intellectually than when they just relate to it in a technical way, because when we try to do all these materials, it’s to actually fuse all these elements. So you can’t really be bothered with the technicality of how we do it. We did it.

It’s about acknowledging the state of constant transformation we are going through and the constant adaptation. I think the piece is not didactic, in a sense. It’s not telling you what to think, but it’s definitely a space for reflection, for meditation and for associations. And I think a little bit like when you go into a museum; the artworks will project something on you, but you also need to work and send energy towards it. Otherwise, it will not give you much back.

This piece has travelled to many parts of the world and will continue to do so. In your opinion, how does this affect the work?
K: Many of the materials used in this work — such as mist and slime — are what I would call “responsive materials,” substances that subtly alter their behaviour in response to minute environmental conditions. As a result, they appear differently depending on the specific characteristics of each country and theatre, feeding back into the texture of the work itself. At the same time, the relationship between nature and humanity explored in this work is, I believe, a universal question on a planetary scale. Therefore, the fact that the work is performed in countries with different cultures and conceptions of nature, and that it comes into contact with people’s sensibilities there, will itself deepen the questions posed by the piece.

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