DAMIEN JALET / YAMA

Costumes / Design & Production / Client: Scotland Dundee Opera

My costumes for Yama grew from the piece’s exploration of transformation and mountain rituals. Blending goat hair from Balinese theatre with fringed cotton piqué, they create shifting figures that move between vegetal, animal and human states. This play on perception became central to the work and to the atmosphere that surrounds the choreography.

The costumes I created for Yama, choreographed by Damien Jalet for Scottish Dance Theatre, emerged from a close dialogue with the piece’s core imagery.

Yama invokes the mountain as a place of passage and transcendence, drawing on pagan and animistic rituals, including those practiced by the Yamabushi in the Tōhoku region of Japan. Their understanding of the mountain as a living force shaped the visual direction that guided my approach.

I wanted the performers to move through shifting states rather than fixed identities. The costumes suggest human, animal and vegetal presences without ever settling into one. This takes shape through two very concrete materials. The first is original goat hair traditionally used in Balinese theatre, whose texture responds immediately to the dancers’ impulses. The second is a cotton piqué with navy and cream stripes, sourced from leftover fabrics from my collection. Cut into long fringes, this textile creates the illusion of feathers, even though no feathers appear in the piece.

That misreading has become part of the story of Yama, and speaks to the play on perception that runs through the design.

These layered surfaces produce shifting densities and a tactile vibration that aligns with Jim Hodges’ sculptural set and Winter Family’s score.

On stage, the garments extend the performers’ bodies, amplifying their movements and reinforcing the sense of collective ascent at the centre of the work. The intention was to let the costumes breathe with the choreography, as if the mountain’s force was circulating through them.