【Performance canceled】Kohei Nawa + Damien Jalet Planet

After their first opus, Vessel, Damien Jalet and Kohei Nawa pursue their research of a mutual way to fuse, cross, and transcend their respective media. Between moving sculpture and sculptural performance, “Planet ”is responding and echoing to “Vessel” like the second part of a diptych. “Vessel” concealed the face and head of the nearly naked dancers, letting their bodies depict a constant ambivalence through a series of morphing figures: between human and non-human, solid and liquid, sculpture and dance. In the wake of “Vessel”, which created another world out of the anatomy of the dancers, “Planet” is performed in a middle ground, in between science and mythology. “Vessel” abstractly depicted two levels of the “Kojiki”, the oldest Japanese book, narrating the creation of the world: Yomi (the Underworld) and “Takamaga-hara” (the Plain of High Heavens). Planet takes place in the third and last level, “Ashihara-no-Nakatsukuni”, literally “the Central Land of the Reeds”—the world we inhabit. In Planet, the reeds are humans, as Blaise Pascal famously said, oscillating in a fragile balance between power and vulnerability, harmony and survival, destruction, and evolution. The dark waters of Vessel echo with the dry landscape of black shiny sand in “Planet”, a kind of contemporary reinterpretation of Kyoto’s Zen gardens, transforming radically during the piece through the actions of the dancers. From the human body as the continuity of landscape to the landscape perceived as a continuity of the human body, “Planet” abstractly explores different phases of connection and disconnection, harmony and fragility, violence and devastation. Through the physical confrontation of the human body and different experimental materials, elements, and gravity, “Planet” sets in motion the visceral and tragic love tale between humans and the “planet” to which they are bound.