The international premiere of Vessel by French-based choreographer Damien Jalet and Japanese sculptor Kohei Nawa attracted a large and curious audience to the State Theatre Centre. The fusion of dance and installation was unlike anything else in the Perth Festival program.

Vessel. Photograph supplied

By the end of the performance I was convinced it was unlike anything else in the world. Jalet and Nawa drew inspiration from the Japanese ‘Yomi’ or world of the dead and the Buddhist concept of life returning to the earth in death. A white clay substance, part liquid, part solid (just like the human body) was also central to the collaboration. The slow-paced 60-minute work involved seven dancers moving across a water-covered stage with a crater of bubbling white clay in the centre. The stage acted as a kind of vessel holding water, land and the life cycle.

The dancers began in the water as lumps of rock, dimly lit and accompanied by subliminal rumblings from Marihiko Hara and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s electronic score. As the sound world became more industrial the feet and torso of a body emerged, born into the water and wriggling like a worm. More near-naked...