K-BALLET Opto: Plastic
The project began with a stubborn question: could a discarded plastic bottle—the most ordinary waste there is—hold its own on a ballet stage? The intent was never to deliver an environmental message, but to find what beauty this everyday rubbish might carry once it was taken seriously as a material.
The design is built from four movable walls, at 2.5 × 5 m and 2.5 × 2.5 m. Rather than work against the bottle, it uses what the bottle already gives—its lightness and natural give—binding the units together with wire and stacking them in both directions into a honeycomb that is stable and transparent at once. Across the whole production, some fifteen thousand bottles were drawn back from waste into structure.
Performance Dates: January 8–9, 2023
Venue: KAAT Kanagawa Arts Theatre (Hall), Yokohama
Organized by: Bunkamura / K-BALLET
Choreography: Alessio Silvestrin
Project Team: Sakata Naoya, Yufan Lu (studio AME)
The way of binding came from traditional Japanese kayabuki—from the otokomusubi, the knots used to lash straw to a bamboo frame in thatched roofing. That same logic is carried here into wire. It holds firmly, though the making revealed its own lesson: a wire twisted one turn too many begins to weaken rather than hold. Working that edge—between tight and overworked—became the discipline of the piece.
From structure to workshop to installation, the work was followed the whole way through, standing safely and reading clearly under the theatre's light and machinery. It was built largely by hand, with many friends joining the making. That, finally, is what the project is about: not only the second life of a discarded thing, but the way an architect's eye can enter the stage, and the way a structure made together can draw people into its making.
