JR X DAMIEN JALET

In 2020, the director of dance at the Paris Opera, Aurélie Dupont, invited Damien Jalet to work on a programme called "Créer aujourd’hui" ("Create today"), initiated in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The choreographer created Brise-Lames in collaboration with Aimilios Arapoglou, a ballet based on the theme of the wave. Damien Jalet asked JR to create the set design and costumes.

Representing a cold and inert sea, the stage makes it possible for the movements of the 9 dancers to fully express themselves. The grey costumes, stripped of all superfluous elements, end up merging bodies and set, when the dancers come together to form a boat in the way of a trompe-l’oeil, a technique emblematic of JR's latest projects, thus revealing all the power of the staging. On stage, the wave does not emanate from the movement of the sea, but from the energy of the bodies, of the living.

Brise-Lames is, according to Damien Jalet, "a metaphor for the power, vulnerability and resilience of those who are on the front line".

Cancelled after the announcement of a second lockdown in November 2020, the first public performance finally took place on television on 29 January 2021, thanks to a recording that had been made a few weeks before at the Palais Garnier.

As part of the international photography festival "Kyotographie", taking place from 18 September to 17 November 2021 in Japan, JR’s photographs of the project are exhibited in a room of Nijō Castle in Kyoto.