Through sand, slime, fog and light, Jalet and Nawa test limits of human body

The word “planet” traces its roots to the ancient Greek “planetes,” meaning wanderer. To ancient astronomers, planets appeared as wandering lights drifting across the night sky.

This image of perpetual wandering through unfamiliar landscapes, uncertain futures and forces beyond one’s control became the starting point for Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet and Japanese visual artist Kohei Nawa’s “Planet [Wanderer]” (2021), one of the defining works of their decadelong artistic partnership.

This week, the work returns to the spotlight as GS Arts Center’s flagship “Artists” series explores the duo’s artistic world through three of their collaborative works: “Planet [Wanderer],” which runs Wednesday to Friday; the dance film “Mist” and the world premiere showcase of “Prism” on Sunday.

“Humans have always wandered, been displaced and had a quest to go beyond, even to understand the world beyond the world,” Jalet said during a press conference held Monday in Seoul. “We wanted to create a tale that is both metaphoric and metamorphic. The piece is about humanity’s constant transformation, adaptation and resilience.”

Across four chapters that unfold almost like “a sequence of living installations,” dancers move through shifting landscapes of black sand, potato starch, slime and dense fog, undergoing radical transformations along the way.

The materials are not just scenic elements but active forces that continually reshape the dancers’ movements and the conditions under which they perform. Some sequences require dancers to move across carefully calibrated non-Newtonian fluids, creating the sensation of altered gravity. At times, Jalet said, the dancers seem to emerge from the landscape itself; at others, their movements transform the environment around them.

“We talked a lot about what people were experiencing in the world — environmental crises, refugees and, later, the uncertainty brought by COVID,” Nawa added. “We wanted to portray people wandering through a harsh environment, trying to endure and overcome it.”

Jalet said, “In the end, we like to question the elementary aspects of the body. The body is not something that can be taken for granted. It is the result of millions of years of evolution and adaptation.”

The “Artists” series also includes the Korean premiere of “Mist.” The dance film created with Netherlands Dance Theater emerged from the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally conceived as a live performance, the project was transformed into a film after theater closures made staging impossible.

Drawing on the motif of fog, the work depicts nature’s cycle of creation and dissolution, imagining bodies moving through shifting layers between life and death and otherworldly realms.

To create the film’s atmospheric environment, Nawa said the team spent nearly 18 months experimenting at his Kyoto-based studio Sandwich, adjusting the temperature, droplet size and composition of the fog while calculating airflow patterns to achieve precise visual effects.

Sunday also brings the world premiere of “Prism.” The duo’s new and immersive work invites audiences to move freely around the performance space in a 360-degree environment.

Jalet described the showcase as a work in progress and a continuation of the duo’s long-running fascination with perception.

“It’s a piece that challenges our perception of the body by dividing light into different directions and completely changing the way we see a body,” he said.

“I think it’s something that we love to explore: what we see is always an interpretation of reality, and that reality can always be re-questioned.”

hwangdh@heraldcorp.com