A conversation between Damien Jalet and Théo Casciani

Translated by Gabriel René Franjou



This piece, like its name suggests, is a triptych. The number three is an important one, both in your work and in many references we share, from Greek tragedy to Japanese theatre, mathematics to religion; past, present and future, body, mind and soul; matter, time and space. This number you dissect back and forth also recalls the elements that Octavio Paz summons in his poem Wind, Water, Stone. These fundamental, complementary components are gathered here around what all three of the piece’s fragments share, a literal common ground. Indeed, during each new chapter, the performers roll out carpets, on the sides then in the back of the stage, thus building a decor, or rather a portal to another dimension. The introductory capsule, your most recent creation entitled Gusts, is premiering at the Norwegian Opera & Ballet. With costumes by Craig Green, music by Bendik Giske, and drawings by Jim Hodges that turn into a scenography conceived alongside Carlos Marques da Cruz, it features what I believe to be the underlying parameter of your practice: gravity. Tension arises at the intersection of terrestrial attraction and the vital breath that animates the three dancers. Their momentums merge, clash, and drain, as they search for a centrifugal force able to join them all, to fill them up and, simply, to inspire them.

• It’s true that Gusts holds a special place in the project, since this chapter was written to echo the other two already existing parts. I was thinking about the trinity in Octavio Paz’s poem, and I wanted to focus on the element of wind. The triptych plays with different registers, genres and styles of writing, but it seemed important to begin with this vital breath. The piece owes a great debt to my meeting with Bendik Giske, whose work deals with precisely these questions. Other than my first collaborations with Fennesz, the presence of live musicians on stage is a rare thing in my work. I’ve indulged this time, perhaps because I feel a particular connection to the saxophone, which I played as a teenager, before I even began dancing. I’ve always been fascinated by the sound it produces, it brings me to a deeply visceral place. My choreographies often aspire to a kind of meditative, almost sculptural slowness, but there is always inside me a more intense, a more chaotic and violent side. I wanted to scan the physical ambiguity between the mastery of a system and a certain form of abandonment, between control and ecstasy. But in order to follow through on the purpose of this piece that animates, activates and transforms bodies, I needed to collaborate with performers talented enough to create the feeling of being crossed by higher forces.

The second chapter is a creation you have already presented multiple times; at the Louvre in 2013 when the museum had invited you to occupy its rooms with thirty or so dancers, in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake for which you penned the choreography, in Anima, a collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson and Thom Yorke, or in DuEls, a movie directed by Jonas Åkerlund based on a 2020 performance, already with Nagelhus Schia Productions, at the Vigeland Museum. Hence it has been shown under different guises and in different contexts, but never as it will be during this new piece. Its name, Médusés, is derived from a French expression meaning a shock so considerable that one becomes paralyzed, and is inspired by the myth of Medusa and its interface, the gaze, for the Gorgon sees just as much as she is seen. But here, in contact with the other two parts, in pitting rigidity against fluidity and duality against collective, the sequence takes on a new scale; terrestrial, sturdy, anchored. Octavio Paz’s poem describes in minute detail the way in which the three elements answer each other, how they tangle and adapt, how water hollows stone, wind scatters water and stone stops wind, wind carves stone, how stone's a cup of water and how water escapes and is wind. This is the story Thrice aims to tell; the dependency of all things on all others.

• Studying petrifaction led me to something sharper, denser and more abrupt. To me, this piece is mainly about borders: those that divide countries, but also those that divide genders. While the rest of the show is rooted in an aesthetic of fluidity, this chapter questions the way in which we might escape distinct and opposite states, with three men on one side and three women on the other. These statues reflect the image of fractured rigidity, of dualities we hope to surpass, of limits we want to abolish. Tension rises until rage bursts out. I have to say that although this choreography was largely inspired by the site of its creation, the Louvre’s Cour Marly, it has become a catalyst in my career, not only because it opened up doors in the world of cinema but also because it inspired many projects that followed. I consider it a key. Despite this, except for a few performances in Iceland and Norway, I hadn’t brought it to the stage before today. Going back to what you were saying on the matrix number in Thrice and thinking about theinterplay of trios accumulating and succeeding each other, I realize that the work’s general structure is a composition for nine performers, meaning both the sum and the product of three times the number three. Here we find the addition and multiplication dynamics of the piece as a whole.

For the third and last act, the paths of air currents printed on stage give way to something entirely different, more abstract and aquatic, imagined by JR. Brise-lames has a peculiar backstory, for not only it is your first partnership with the artist, it has until now only existed as a film, as it was conceived at the invitation of the Paris Opera in the context of the pandemic and back-to-back confinements. With the exception of a performance during the institution’s gala, it is the first time that the public will be able to see this piece, a dissertation inspired by the physical phenomenon of waves, performed live. A backwash sweeping the deep sea to the music of Koki Nakano, it was notably the inspiration for some sequences in Planet [wanderer], a recent creation with Kohei Nawa. As I discovered the piece, I of course thought of the Virginia Woolf novel, not only because she describes the waltz of the waves like no other, but also because in it she examines the same notions that choreography does; permanence, rhythm and resilience. But above all I thought of the Octavio Paz poem that we read together, I thought of the wind, the sea, the water, for after all, over the course of these three metaphors, is it exactly this timeless evolving language that the play suggests we speak; that of bodies attempting not to solidify.

• Brise-lame is an underwater piece. Again, there is a form of languor in the movements, like a ship carefully making its way to the shore. This project’s path has indeed been full of obstacles from the moment of its conception, so I'm all the more glad for its new life. In the context of the tour for Thrice, we’ll also be showing it at the opening of the Dance Festival in Kalamata, Greece, a land caught in the midst of the ongoing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. This is really important to me. I cannot talk about this work without mentioning my invaluable collaboration with JR and Koki Nakano, and the gestual research of Aimilios Arapoglou who played a crucial role in this adventure and will finally be able to interpret it, for the first time, on that occasion. In general, I feel like this chapter, just like the whole project, has allowed me to return to the founding principles of my work, a minimalist exploration of movement. My more recent creations have operated on a very grand scale, with scenography and apparatus of such ambition that they opened up very exciting possibilities but also brought a series of constraints and burdens. Here, the complexity lies elsewhere; I can concentrate on the essence of my practice, movements, lights and sound, and search how combination, association and repetition might generate new emotions.