Damien Jalet

I grew up in the center of Brussels, on a street between three parks. Three beautiful parks, actually, though they were manmade. I would often play in Parc de Bruxelles, just in front of the palace where the Belgian Revolution was fought. I lived under the roof, and from my window I could see buildings and the Belgian sky, which is often gray and dull.

I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother in the suburbs of Paris, in the Vallée de Chevreuse. It’s a lush, beautiful valley where I would go on hikes with her. And my parents often brought me to Brittany on the Atlantic Ocean, so I was in contact with the ocean from a very young age—not the sea but the ocean, with its storms, its constant changes of weather, and all the dangers associated with it.

I was born in 1976, so I was a child of the '80s. We had no internet, no virtual connection, so I read a lot and played games in real life with my friends. Today, I think kids are subjected to much more isolation, though that depends on where you’re born and where you live. When I was a kid, we’d drive somewhere in my parents’ car and the windshield would be covered with insects when we arrived. That doesn’t happen anymore.

They held this brutal energy. Not violence—just that everything feels like your first time. They had been chosen from all these different places, and what connected them was a desire to dance. There was a sense of immediacy, and I didn’t have to push too many buttons to get them going 300-percent. I think that tendency gets lost later on as dancers become more self-conscious, more aware of the competition and the technical differences.

There was something quite beautiful about this raw desire, this innocence. They wanted to give it all, to do their best with whatever was given to them, and they connected to each other through the process. They had each previously been isolated in their passion, and through Tarantiseismic they were able to share it collectively. That is precious because it isn’t a feeling you can easily keep, especially in dance where there’s so much “don’t do this, do that” and “you’re not good enough.” I didn't need to equalize them or make them look like each other. I'm not interested in that at all. I just wanted to see them each be as much themselves as they could. At the time, I was working on a film with very professional dancers in a much more competitive and ego-driven environment, so this was very refreshing.

In dance you are always called. It’s something you have within you, and you can be very passionate about it. But it’s very easy to lose that passion, too, through this desire to fit in or from losing auditions. You open your heart, give it all, and then you’re judged on your technique, your extensions, and the way you look. Even your body can become a source of refusal, of rejection. I learned so much from working with these teens because they still had the fire in their eyes, the precious energy of the first time. Because they’re newer to the world and haven’t been fully indoctrinated into the standard ways of doing things, children and young people can better access this more primal, primordial way of dancing.

From a very young age, I was obsessed with theater. I loved that you could transform, change your identity, become someone else entirely. I think that was always my motive. It began when my parents brought me to see a puppet show, Faust, and a man dressed as the devil in all red came in. That was a complete revelation for me. Then at age 11, I watched a Madonna concert and was entranced by her energy, by the way she embodied the music. She gave me a mirror to connect to my own body, and from there I started learning her choreography.

But I continued studying theater, and I went to the National Institute of the Performing Arts for theater direction. In those studies, I came across contemporary dance films, which is when I thought: “Dance can be violent, dance can be raw, dance can be theatrical, but it holds one energy that holds through those states. That is amazing.” It coincided with a time when I felt I needed fewer and fewer words—maybe because I was in a school teaching technique, seeing actors saying words without any feeling behind them, learning how to lie in a very unconvincing way. I felt there was a certain laziness in acting, and I was much more attracted to the rigor of dance, its virtuosity. The sense of wilderness it could create.

Theater, especially in Belgium, felt stuck in a very small territory. It’s a small country, divided further into three language communities. Because theater is tied to language, you could perform in maybe 10 cities and that would be the full life of your show. Whereas dance is the universal language. I realized I could cross any border with dance, and my career since then has been a demonstration of that unboundedness. Dance transgresses not only geopolitical boundaries, but also artistic mediums; I’ve collaborated across cinema, classical music, pop, fashion, visual art. In that sense, it’s a mind-expanding medium. It trusts a subconscious logic. Beckett said: “Dance first, think later. It’s the natural order.” There have been so many moments when I understood what I truly wanted to say only by letting my body react to impulses that felt intuitive. Dance is a very difficult medium, but also an incredibly free one. It is ephemeral, yet it can create moments you never forget. All of that contradiction is what I find so attractive.

I never feel the brain is in the head and the body is separate. Your nervous system goes to your toe and is connected to your brain; your brain is all of that. It's insane how much memory, how much intelligence the body has. It's like a physical sudoku you need to keep training. I wish it were taught at school—not just how to play volleyball, how to use the body functionally, but how to use the body as a sensor, something that can help you understand things you can't necessarily comprehend rationally. You can feel when something's not right, but often we let the mind override that. Your body can sense the truth. That's why I'm so interested in people's body language—it usually betrays their intentions, whatever they want to pretend.

The more I work with the body, the more I understand it holds a memory coming from millions of years of evolution. We still have reflexes. Bruce Chatwin says that babies likely kick their legs when they cry because of the time when we lived in forests, to keep predators from eating them. I find it fascinating how much we share with nonhuman species; the Cartesian human boundary is simply propaganda. It’s not real. So much is shared between us and other organisms. We’re composed of water, we need air. We’re made of the same texture.

The more you work with your body, the more you understand your physical memory. During a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency on Captiva Island back in 2013, I developed a practice based on strangler trees. Stranglers find a host and grow on it, squeezing it so much that the host dies, and then they hold the absence of the tree that was once there. In my practice, you do something similar: feeling the whole negative space of your partner’s position with your body, creating a spiral and a twist. Then the other body leaves, and you are left with gravity. When you stay with it long enough, you let go of your mind and start listening to your instincts. You find yourself in positions you’d never get into by yourself. It’s a way to reconnect to your instinctive self and to the memory of another body—another kind of knowledge that goes way beyond whatever discourse you can have. It was that place, the nature of Captiva, that inspired me to develop this technique, and I still use it now. It’s one of the most elementary tools in my practice.

Working with the body makes you understand the laws of gravity. You understand how much of life is truly about surrender, rather than fighting against. You understand how the world functions, through your cycles and the way you sleep. I believe the body is like a root, rooting our consciousness in the world—though people forget this is a condition of our existence and treat it badly, thinking that it can be dominated by the mind. I think a happier life comes from listening to your body more closely, understanding its limits and its powers. Though sometimes you can do much more than you think.

Gravity is the basic law of the universe. Living in a time when people are sent to space and experience zero gravity, we understand exactly what gravity allows. People think gravity sucks, but it creates connection and binding. Apparently it’s very difficult to have sex in zero gravity. Without it, it’s very difficult to achieve anything. The more I develop my work, the more I try to alter, use, or change the perception of gravity, because I think it's an incredibly poetic tool. It's one of the most visceral things we relate to. If you see someone tripping, falling, dropping an object, or more dramatically, falling from a height, your mirror neurons immediately engage. We have very strong empathy with it because we deal with it constantly.

As my work developed, I became more and more obsessed with universal laws, elements, and forces of nature, with what overwhelms us. Hiroshi Sugimoto said the human body is an anti-gravitational structure—we only reached verticality through millions of years of evolution. I made a piece called Gravity Fatigue with Hussein Chalayan, who made me understand that gravity is like a currency. You rarely think of it, but it binds everything together constantly. Gravity is relative to the planet you're from; if we were on a bigger planet it would be stronger, and our bodies would be different. When you see gravity acting on a body, you see our inescapable collaboration with Earth.

Dance is often seen as a gravity-defying tool. Ballet teaches you to resist it, to pretend it’s not there. But very early in my career, I would be on the floor, as close as possible to the core of the earth, and develop from that place. When you do floor work, you can shift your weight across many more body parts than when you're on your feet. Using knees, shoulders, chest, belly, the possibilities become much wider. From a young age, I began developing techniques that engage gravity partly out of necessity; when you are doing very physical shows every night, sometimes up to 160 performances, you need tools to survive. I worked as a dancer with Wim Vandekeybus—very physical, athletic, dangerous work, finding extreme velocity by connecting to gravity. So I began working with centrifugal force, and then I studied release technique in New York, connected to Trisha Brown, dancing in a way that's more anatomical—less demonstrative, much more gravity-bound.

It’s kind of sexy to really understand the laws of the universe in your body. What is truly arresting in a dancer is effortlessness, not struggle. We all relate to struggle, but effortlessness is the true bewilderment, the true magic. When I made Skid, on a 34-degree angle matching Earth’s gravitational acceleration, it was to show the beauty in bodies moving without moving, just because gravity acts on them. They can move extremely slowly or extremely quickly in ways impossible on flat ground. Once you change the perspective on gravity, you change the perspective on our condition in the world. In Skid, you see people falling like they're falling asleep, like drops in a waterfall. Gravity reminds you to be humble. It shows how insignificant a life is, in a way—every entrance is a birth, and in five, six, ten seconds they disappear.

I see centrifugal force as the idea of giving your weight to the ground—not extracting yourself, resisting gravity, but investing in gravity to get the energy back. It’s a lot like riding a bike downhill, gaining momentum so the climb takes less effort afterward. It's a tool of effortlessness and a tool of magic. In Planet[wanderer], I talk to the dancers as if they're moving underwater. Their feet are grounded in a very thick mass almost like honey: a non-Newtonian fluid. They need to work with their core and their bones to convey a feeling of altered gravity that doesn't actually exist. The audience immediately feels they are not on Earth anymore, so the dancers work against gravity in a sense—but they still work with it. It's the same physical work, but metaphorically the dancing makes the audience feel they're in a different density. I love this kind of research, because once you play with the perception of gravity, we become decontextualized. You start understanding the invisible forces acting on us.

That's basically what I try to do in most of my work: to change perspective. The same goes for breath, for anatomy, for the body itself. I want the audience to look at the body not just as a human body but, as in Vessel, as an entity where you no longer see a human—you see an animal, an insect, a plant, because we’re made of all of that. More than half our cells aren’t even human. If you change the light, if you use water to reflect the body, suddenly the body becomes alien. And I think that’s how it should be perceived. What we label as humanity isn’t definitive; we’re in constant transition, constantly morphing and transforming. Yet we hold to this definition of ourselves as human, even as our survival depends fundamentally on our relationship to other forms of life. I think it’s time we understand the importance of the nonhuman in our own survival.

In Onbashira, hundreds of men cut 16 tree trunks in the mountains, sit on them, and let themselves slide down at the risk of their lives. In the end, those trunks become the protective pillars of the four shrines of the area. There's a sense of sacrifice—people nearly give their lives for those pillars to become protective. I like this double-edged quality. There's a duality in everything.

It is one of the projects that’s always difficult to speak about, because it was produced during the time I witnessed the November 2015 terrorist attack in Paris. It's connected to a period that was very hard to go through—that's probably why the piece is called Thr(o)ugh. I was in Paris that day to talk about the four-month residency I did at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto. I had just made a film called The Ferryman with Gilles Delmas, following a Yamabushi monk through the sacred mountains of Tōhoku. I wanted to show how those rituals influenced my work, so we spent about 10 days there, and I did the practice with them for a few of those days. It's very intense. You hardly speak to each other. You eat only one bowl of rice, two pickles, and miso soup in one minute, so you don't even have time to enjoy it, and you walk for hours in the mountains. There's a sense of presence that comes from it, because it's an ascetic practice—you eat very little, sleep very little, walk at night, get cold because you wear the same clothing the whole time. It's very military in that sense.

I think that awareness truly saved my life that night in Paris. I stood next to the shooter, maybe two-and-a-half or three meters away. It was a physical instinct that got me running before I understood what was happening. I have often been in the wrong place at the wrong time—I was in Japan in 2011 during the big earthquake, which taught me how contagious panic is. But calm is contagious too. The shooters were extremely calm, and no one screamed. Something pushed me to run, and I always felt I was somehow doomed to be there at that exact moment, but also incredibly protected.

Around that time, there had also been attacks in my hometown, including one in the Brussels metro that my brother responded to as a fireman. This context ultimately defined the creation of Thr(o)ugh. I was creating by letting my subconscious talk; I could only follow my instincts. It was only two weeks before completing the process that I understood what I was saying: I realized that they were all ghosts. I had the instinct to bring in some silver costumes from a friend of mine, Jean-Paul Lespagnard—they were a kind of rain poncho made of survival-blanket material. The dancers constantly danced with this tube turning in on itself, reenacting a moment where something had happened without closure. I understood suddenly that they were souls passing.

When someone dies, you say “rest in peace.” This insinuates that you can also not be at peace. I don’t think my mind had found any peace then, and those souls were taken so violently that they could not possibly be at peace either. So somehow, the piece became a way for us to find that peace together. A year after the attacks, I asked my brother how he was processing what we had seen. I had only seen the beginning, but he had seen the violent aftermath. He told me he had gone to a medium because he had the same instinct I did; he wanted to understand if the souls had passed or if they remained among us.

My practice has taught me that by working, by creating collective ritual, a piece could help me. I can use the cathartic power of art to make something both spiritual and physical. Funnily enough, it wasn’t deliberate; I had to make the piece first, and only then did I understand it. It helped me let go of something that had been pressing on my chest every single day. I’m not trying to forget the event or pretend it didn’t happen—by contrast, the performance is an acknowledgement. It was a way to try to create beauty out of something extremely dark. I don’t know what we need to learn from violence, but my career completely took its direction from that moment. I began to frantically throw myself into making lots of things, one after the other, as a way to transform that kind of radioactive energy into something that could bring light—that could shift the frequencies.

Humanity has been incredibly spiritual for most of history. Every culture has always had a way of praising the dead, worshipping them, keeping them in our lives through ritual and procession. Then came this agnosticism of modernity, maybe as a reaction to all the dark sides of religion. But we’re living in an interesting time now where scientists are talking about our own disappearance—I think it’s the first time that discourse has been scientific rather than theological or prophetic. That’s a very strong reset.

Working in Japan, in Indonesia, in Iceland, I have often found stronger belief systems in places where nature is very intense. I have always wanted to understand what life would be like if we’d kept some of these ancient belief systems. Japan is an incredibly generous land—dangerous, volcanic, but generous. So a religion connected to the belief that mountains are gods, as I explored in Yama, makes sense as a spiritual connection to the land. In Jerusalem, you can see the most important symbols of all three monotheistic religions across the same four square kilometers, surrounded by arid desert. They place God somewhere “up there,” disconnected from the land, which made it possible for them to spread all over the world as a unifying belief system for everyone. Even in Japan, it is no longer fully present, but there remains a consciousness that nature is a gate to the land of the gods. I think we’d be in a very different situation if we kept that spiritual connection to nature and place.

The piece was influenced by Tim Hecker’s album Konoyo, which means “this world”: a mix of heaven and hell, entwined, where even standing shouldn’t be taken for granted. The place where you’re born and where you will also one day vanish, in a kind of cycle. But the piece also provides a cosmic perspective. Planet[wanderer] was fed by Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light and by footage of the Apollo landings set to music by Brian Eno. I was fascinated by this idea that when men went to the moon, they looked back at the pale blue dot and became completely overwhelmed with nostalgia. They understood that everything they knew was in that dot. It gave us perspective on the planet we’re from—on its limits and its finitude. We’re very good at thinking of ourselves as infinite, eternal. And though modernity wants us to be rational, we really believe this mythology. We can’t listen to the science. We want to believe in our own infinity, that we’re literally gods on two legs. I find those contradictions tiring, and Planet[wanderer] was an attempt to sit with that.

I made a piece before that was way more directly political, Black Marrow with Erna Ómarsdóttir. It was set in Australia, connecting a geological end-of-the-world myth to our dependency on fossil energy. It wasn’t understood at all. A big part of the audience rejected it, feeling it was too dark to watch in a dance show. That traumatized me a bit, so I’ve been trying to find tools to be more ambivalent—or at least to allow multiple levels of interpretation. There is a lot of abstraction in Planet[wanderer], but deep in it, what it says is that we're made of this planet. There's a sense of wandering, because the etymology of “planet” is wanderer—planomai in Greek—and that connects to something we are, profoundly, as humans. We have that desire to constantly change, to discover, to go beyond.

Why is the earth so scary and so soothing at the same time? Why have humans fought for centuries against the force of nature, to try to feel above it? That is the moment in which you wake up all the devils, like we’re witnessing with the heat this summer. Like you say in this series, nature made us to be conscious of ourselves, and we are nature. When I practiced with the monks, they told me the term for “nature” changed when Westerners came to Japan. It had been closed off for centuries until the Meiji era, and the word jinen encompassed humans as part of nature. At the time of industrialization, it transformed into shizen, which is nature as something outside of us, and therefore subject to exploitation and domination. It fascinates me that one word can change the world—that your consciousness can be altered in a way that extracts you from something, or that connects you to it. I believe that as artists we can connect to the subconscious of the world, and that those rituals and practices come from a place that is incredibly organic.

I’m obsessed with circles—with channels and circular waves. You can see them all over my works. I think this cyclical aspect aligns with the universal laws of nature, the constant movement of rotation we experience on everyday and annual levels alike. Everything seems to be circular. I’m also fascinated with how we break patterns. Buddhism has that particular belief that what you try to do is escape the circular patterns of time to reach a certain verticality—transcending the currents of the cycle in order to extract yourself from it, to reach a higher standpoint. I’m interested in trying to find an escape.

I particularly love the idea of an ascending spiral. It is in this way that we may rise, or that we may get caught into rabbit holes. Through spirals, we can get caught by a force that literally makes us vanish, which is how Yama ends. Those spirals form a sort of vortex, like when the water gets flushed down the drain. Ascension is the result of desire and hard work, pushing against gravity to extract yourself from the centrifugal pattern. It’s almost like being caught in the orbit of a planet: If you escape it, you suddenly have a vantage point.

For a long time I just wanted to be buried in the ground. As a kid, I imagined death and thought burial was the only way. But as I’ve grown older, I am more drawn to fire. I got to witness these cremation rituals in Bali, where they literally put the body in a bull they’ve paid for their whole life, and their body becomes one with the world again. The smoke escapes from the bull like an ascension, and it frees your soul. As much as I see us connected to water, flames are a great metaphor for life. The fact of turning into smoke, of having your ashes eventually nourish a root, nourish a tree, nourish other elements. That's an idea I've started cherishing more and more.