Still Life is a nature-infused duet with Mirai Moriyama and Daniel Proietto, exploring our fractured bond with the natural world through butoh, minimalist movement, and elemental stagecraft.
Dance as a tool for thought, without ever losing the sense of its physical expressiveness.
Still Life unfolds as a meditation on humanity’s estrangement from the natural world. Created in close collaboration with Moriyama and Proietto, the piece weaves minimal but potent gestures, evocative sound, and elemental design - inviting audiences to reflect on the blurred boundary between life and stillness.
The title itself, Still Life, or Nature Morte in French, carries a double meaning: nature as both suspended beauty and a dying tableau. Drawing on the metaphor of butoh as “living death,” the work reveals our collective conditional paralysis - alive yet decaying - amid environmental collapse and digital disconnection.
Amid the dense smoke and the gold-shimmering survival blankets there is a small but clear hope for mutual care and trust in the midst of a chaotic present.
On stage, simplicity becomes rich with resonance: a painted backdrop of ocean or forest, smoke and subtle lighting shifts, voices echoing across space. At times, silence reigns; at others, whispered words transmitted through walkie-talkies cut through the stillness. Each choice deepens the sense of longing, disruption, and fragile communication.
The images are arresting, creating a lingering impression of a world in constant decay, where people are separated from nature and from one another.
Dualities are everywhere: hard and soft, energy and stillness, silence and speech, connection and disconnection. In a final tableau, dancers and choir encased in shimmering emergency blankets evoke both decay and survival, holding the dual promise and peril of our time. In the words of Alan Lucien Øyen:
“There’s a terrible monotony in chaos. As we sit, wide awake and transfixed, trapped in a terrifying stop-motion time-lapse, a white noise trembles underneath our still lives; humming, burning and screaming behind the mask of sophistication that has become modern social interaction”
Still Life asks us to inhabit this paradox: we are part of nature, yet alienated from it; offered ceaseless connection, yet haunted by isolation. Through corporeal poetry, the piece kindles a glimmer of hope - for empathy, for reconnection, for presence.
We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.
Videos
Trailer
Behind the Scenes