The concept of this collaboration with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was to allow the dancers to interact with clay: both as earth, the surface on which we walk, and as a mutable element that can become anything. I was interested in using the animated bodies of the dancers in relation to clay as inertia, as a resistant medium or as a mass without form but with the potential to become many things.

 dealt with the power of the graven image. Our ability to make effigies or equivalents of the body is a kind of theft: from evolution or from a divine power. I wanted some of this to become evident in the creation of mass from surface, and the moving from mass to image and then from image to entropy or disintegration. The tension between iconography and iconoclasm is one that will never leave us.

Creation by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, scenography by Antony Gormley, a co-production between GöteborgsOperans Danskompani and Eastman. Photograph by Mats Bäcker

, creation by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, scenography by Antony Gormley, a co-production between GöteborgsOperans Danskompani and Eastman. Photograph by Mats Bäcker

, 2016, creation by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, scenography by Antony Gormley, a co-production between GöteborgsOperans Danskompani and Eastman. Photograph by Tilo Stengel