Damien Jalet / Kohei Nawa
MIRAGE
With Mirage, the fourth chapter of their collaboration after VESSEL (2016), Mist (2022) and Planet[wanderer](2021), choreographer Damien Jalet and visual artist Kohei Nawa continue their exploration of the constantly shape-shifting nature of life, by fusing their respective disciplines and confronting the human body to different materials.
Departing from the phenomena of mirages and Fata Morganas, these optical illusions connected to specific weather conditions where light is bent by passing through different layers of air of different temperatures, they portray here a humanity meandering in a metaphorical desert, in search for itself.
Through a series of unpredictable transformations, inspired by mythology, climatology, botany , entomology as well as the Hayagawari (a kabuki technique in which actors transform suddenly through a performance) the piece peels the performers layer by layer.
Mirage explores an infinite variety of physical and emotional states. Sometimes evoking the spectres of a civilisation on the edge of a dry well, or traversed by the sensuality and exploding colors of nature found under tropical conditions, “Mirage” is performed like a waking dream, fluctuating and moving like atmospheric phenomena.
With this new creation, Jalet and Nawa, together with the dancers of the ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, propose a hallucinatory, sensual, meditative yet visceral quest for a human essence, beyond the veil of appearance.
