DAMIEN JALET / KITES

Costumes / Design & Production / Client: Göteborg Opera

I conceived these costumes as a choreography of their own, merging air, body and fabric into a fluid and open moving language.

For Kites, a piece created by Damien Jalet for the GöteborgsOperans Danskompani in 2022, I designed costumes that are not just garments but active elements within the choreography.

I approached them as extensions of the dancers’ bodies, conceived to engage directly with air and velocity. Through lightweight fabrics, internal structuring and technical tricks, each piece is engineered to inflate during rapid movement. As the dancers accelerate, the silhouettes capture and hold air, expanding into transient volumes that evoke kites or wind-driven objets.

I worked with ultra-light textiles and snaps, selected for their responsiveness to airflow, their resistance, and their ability to maintain tension without collapsing. Seams, openings, and volumes are calibrated to control how air enters, circulates, and escapes. This creates a constant dialogue between body, fabric, and space.

Visually, the result leans toward a futuristic and ethereal presence. The garments shift continuously, oscillating between structure and disappearance. They never fix the body in a single form. Instead, they generate moving architectures that appear and dissolve in real time.

Movement was the core driver throughout the process. The costumes are built to fully support the physical intensity of the choreography, without restriction. They amplify motion rather than contain it, following the dancers into what feels like a vortex of gestures, always in transition.

In this project, costume becomes a kinetic system. It breathes, reacts, transforms. It makes the invisible forces of air visible, and turns choreography into a living landscape of shifting volumes.