'What we see is only an interpretation of reality'

GS Arts Center 'Artists' series

Damien Jalet × Kohei Nawa: 'Prism'

Asking what it means to be human — through earth, mist and light

"Prism," the world premiere collaboration between choreographer Damien Jalet and contemporary artist Kohei Nawa, presented for the first time in Korea at GS Arts Center. [GS Arts Center]

It was 7 p.m. on a Sunday. The theater doors — which at any ordinary performance would have been firmly shut by now — stood wide open, with the audience still filing in single file.

"Please follow the guide carefully. Mind the steps — it's dark."

Staff issued instructions to each audience member one by one before the last group of about 10 made their way into the main hall of GS Arts Center. They crossed through roughly 1,000 empty seats toward the theater's hidden heart: the backstage. The traditional proscenium stage had vanished entirely.

Stepping into a space enclosed by blackout curtains, visitors found two enormous rectangular structures standing on either side — each well over twice the height of an adult. The lower sections were opaque. At eye level, sheets of transparent prismatic glass cut across the line of sight, casting faint rainbow hues across the dark surfaces. In a space where nothing seemed to move, the audience began to wander between the two towering structures, exploring.

Then the lights went out. As darkness swallowed the backstage, four legs rose from inside the left structure like a sculpture coming to life. The two structures belonged to another world entirely. A woman on the left and a man on the right moved with extreme slowness — performing dynamic, Greek-sculpture poses in near-still motion, as if time itself had slowed to a crawl. As they twisted their bodies in unison, the precise contraction of muscle revealed something unmistakably human.

Choreographer Damien Jalet (right) and contemporary artist Kohei Nawa. [GS Arts Center]

The performance's twist begins with just a few steps. Walking 360 degrees around the structures, viewers experience a distortion of perception. The body that appeared sharp from the front blurs as the angle shifts, refracted through the prism sheets. One body becomes two, two become three, then four — until the figure multiplies into ghostly afterimages too numerous to count. The physical body dissolves; an illusory labyrinth takes over.

What, then, was real? "None of the images the audience sees is the actual body," Jalet said. "The real body exists between those images." This is "Prism," the world premiere collaboration between choreographer Damien Jalet and sculptor Kohei Nawa.

The Belgian star choreographer and the Japanese contemporary art master came to Korea together. From June 24 through June 28, the two presented their landmark works "Planet" (subtitled "Wanderer") and "Mist," alongside the new piece "Prism" — created in collaboration with GS Arts Center — producing a series of remarkable moments in contemporary art.

The choreographer who sculpts bodies vs. the sculptor who choreographs materials

Damien Jalet and Kohei Nawa have been building a shared avant-garde artistic world for the past decade. Their relationship began at the 2013 Aichi Triennale in Japan, where Jalet saw Nawa's installation "Foam" and was immediately captivated. The persistent outreach that followed gave rise to their partnership.

"At the time I had no idea what ideas Kohei had, but I wanted to collaborate with him so badly that I kept contacting his assistant in a very stubborn, pushy way," Jalet recalled. The work that emerged from that persistence was "Vessel" (2016) — a piece he describes as "in some sense an utterly inhuman stage."

"Vessel" (2016), the first collaboration between Damien Jalet and Kohei Nawa. [GS Arts Center]

"Vessel" was a radical work. The dancers performed on a wet stage with their faces completely concealed. "At the center of the stage stood a sculpture evoking a boat and a female sex organ — a place of origin where all life begins," Jalet said. "Seven dancers showed no faces, erased all traces of where they came from, their age, background, even their gender, and moved between the states of solid and liquid, experimenting with abstraction."

After the success of that first collaboration, Nawa reached out in turn. He proposed that they press on: "There is greater potential in the world we've opened together — let's not stop, let's start a new project." Nawa said the two share a particular creative temperament. "Once an image comes to mind, Damien and I are the type who can't stop — ideas just keep pouring out," he said. "The process of stitching these fragments together into a stage performance gives an enormous sense of tension and dramatic thrill right up to the last moment. I became convinced that my creativity expands far wider and deeper when working with him than when I make an exhibition alone."

The work that confirmed their status as natural artistic partners was "Planet," also presented in Korea. Taking up Nawa's proposal, Jalet began by exploring the etymology of the word itself — discovering in the process that it derives from the ancient Greek "planom," meaning "wanderer" or "to wander."

"We all live under the influence of gravity, yet we are constantly moving, traveling," Jalet said. "Planets do that. So do humans." In his view, the deep wandering instinct that drives humanity to explore beyond the limits of any planet is the essence shared by all people.

For Jalet, "Planet" is not a celestial body — it is the human being: a creature that never stops moving and adapting. The work features eight dancers from vastly different backgrounds, each finding their own way through the same movement in the same environment.

"Planet" by Damien Jalet and Kohei Nawa, presented in Korea. [GS Arts Center]

From cosmic dust to consciousness — a history of life on stage

The works of Jalet and Nawa are defined by the presence of unusual materials on stage: sand, mist, slime and prisms. These are not mere set dressing — they function as performers in their own right, ecosystems with as much weight as the dancers themselves. In "Planet," black sand and slime alter the sensation of gravity; in "Mist," fog dissolves the boundary between body and space; in "Prism," light fractures a single body into multiple images.

Nawa conceived "Planet" not as a dance performance but as an imaginary planet — one where life begins in minerals and stone, acquires movement, becomes plant and animal, and finally becomes human, gaining intelligence. "I wanted to construct the overall image as a kind of evolutionary process of consciousness," he said.

The cosmic narrative is grounded in the Kojiki, Japan's ancient mythological chronicle. The Kojiki divides the world into three realms: Yomi, the underworld beneath the earth; the celestial realm above the clouds; and the middle land of reed plains where human life unfolds. Their first work, "Vessel," explored the underworld of Yomi; the dance film "Mist" journeyed through the celestial realm above the clouds; and "Planet" summons the middle land of reed plains — the place where life resists and wanders.

The process of creating a "journey of the body" through unfamiliar material worlds differs fundamentally from conventional choreography. "I have absolutely no interest in dancers who simply memorize set steps and follow them," Jalet said. "What fascinates me is giving every dancer the same physical constraints and extreme limitations, and watching each one break through those limits in a different way, discovering infinite possibilities."

He added that the dancers had to develop entirely new muscles to absorb the language of that harsh environment, and that whether movement is taken fast or slow, it is all part of the process of perfectly attuning the dancers' bodies to the work's purpose and worldview.

Nawa, too, pushes physicality to its limits through the materials he brings to the stage. The substances he proposes — clay, slime, mist — combine with the dancers' bodies to generate new visual images.

Scene by scene, "Planet" reads like a painting, or a film. Microscopic particles resembling interstellar medium shimmer above the darkness; from above, an uncontrollable rain of slime pours down in torrents. Eight dancers sink their feet and knees deep into a swamp of plant-based non-Newtonian fluid made from potato starch, tracing surreal, gravity-defying arcs like balloons swelling toward the sky. The strangely beautiful spectacle mirrors the image of human beings who survive no matter how brutal the conditions.

Human life is changing faster than ever before. In a world where the real and the virtual are in constant flux, the line between reality and illusion grows harder to draw. The questions the two artists first posed a decade ago — born from the shock of earthquakes and natural disasters — have arrived at a new destination, in the middle of an AI era in which everything is being converted into digital data.

"This is an age of confusion in which people carry a deep anxiety within them — not only because of environmental problems, but because of the evolution of AI and computers," Nawa said. "In a society where all the world's information, and even human identity itself, is being digitized and virtualized, we wanted to use the dancers' bodies to bring back and reconsider what truly physical sensation feels like." "Prism" is the two artists' answer to that new world.

"The reality we see is ultimately only an interpretation of reality," Jalet said. "As virtual technology becomes ever more sophisticated, I wanted to ask again how labyrinthine the identity that humans project onto others can become."

shee@heraldcorp.com