PERFORMANCE IN MUSEUM

My Spring 2025 essay on The Ferryman by Gilles Delmas and Damien Jalet is a bridge between visual/cinematic research and CPPM practice.

Central proposition: the real subject was and will always be the body.

The film explores animistic ritual, dance, sculpture, material transformation, death/rebirth and ancestral ritual structures. A half-deer/half-hunter ascends a mountain through six stages understood as birth-place, death-place, mother, grave and ritual threshold. Directed by Gilles Delmas; choreography, performance and text by Damien Jalet; voice by Marina Abramović; music by Ryuichi Sakamoto; scenography by Kohei Nawa and Jim Hodges.

The collaboration between Jalet and Nawa, developing after a 2015 Villa Kujoyama residency in Kyoto, creates a shared language between choreographic body and sculptural matter. The body is not narrator but vessel of passage, disintegration, transformation and becoming. This prefigures body of clay, non-human body, material as co-composer, physiological dramaturgy, Naiad and Nymph/Phantasmata.

The research contains six stations, ritual/temple questions, active material, and dissolution of human/non-human, form/process, body/sculpture, ephemeral/permanent, material/spiritual and individual/collective boundaries. It remains in dialogue with trance through exhaustion, Marina, Troubleyn and non-sacrificial intensity.