Planet[wanderer]

The first collaboration between Kohei Nawa and Damien Jalet was Vessel, which premiered in 2016 at ROHM Theatre Kyoto, creating a portrait of two worlds from the Kojiki, the oldest Japanese book: Yomi (the underworld of the dead) and Takamagahara (the Plain of High Heavens where the gods dwell). Planet[wanderer]  takes place in the world in between those two: Ashihara no Nakatsukuni, the Central Land of the Reeds—the world we inhabit. The human being is but a reed, the feeblest one in nature and the performance captures that oscillation in a fragile balance between power and vulnerability, harmony and survival, evolution and destruction. The subtitle gestures toward the Greek etymological root of “planet” as meaning a wanderer. Planet[wanderer] conjures up a unique world onstage as imagined by a Japanese sculptor and European choreographer: a liminal place between the living and the dead, showcasing the constituent elements of the human body and the cosmos as well as their inseparable relationship with gravity.