Artist · Author · Choreographer
Selected Visual Practice3-D
Selected 3-D visual practice
Making the unseen
inhabitable.
Navaji David Nava creates physical worlds in which image becomes object, costume becomes architecture, and environment becomes an active participant.
Across scenic design, wearable form, fabrication, and installation, drawings and inner images move outward into spaces that bodies can enter, wear, rearrange, and move through. The 3-D work is the spatial counterpart to Navaji's 2-D practice: what begins as perception becomes material encounter.
Nominated in both 2-D and 3-D categories.
KOMOREBI at KMFA Draylen Mason Music Studio, Austin.
CTX Live Theatre separately noted Navaji's costume and highly detailed scenic design.
Living trees joined wood, bamboo, and stone inside the performance environment.
01 · KOMOREBI · Austin
Drawing becomes
world.
KOMOREBI is the clearest early example of Navaji's practice operating as a complete spatial system.
He developed the choreographic world alongside its costume, scenic environment, circular veiled headgear, digital backdrop, sound journey, and visual identity. Rather than treating design as decoration around choreography, each physical element was built to carry meaning and to shape how bodies moved through the work.
The production's title refers to sunlight filtering through trees. That phenomenon became an organizing principle for material, light, movement, shelter, weather, and renewal.
Design development
Before the body enters,
the world is drawn.
Drawing → object
Costume as
moving architecture.
Costume is designed in relation to the body's line, weight, range, and movement. In KOMOREBI, the circular veiled forms were not passive accessories: they extended the figure and participated in the production's larger visual system.
The dancers could wear, carry, hang, and rearrange the circular forms. Suspended from bamboo, they also became scenic objects used to suggest the rising and setting of the sun.
Drawing → body
Designed to be
inhabited.
The costume drawings establish shape, rhythm, drape, and symbolic function before the garments enter rehearsal. Fabrication then has to accommodate a moving body rather than a static display.
The finished forms were tested in studio and performance, where material behavior became part of the choreography itself.
02 · Environment / installation
Bringing the
outside in.
The environment is not backdrop. It is a material condition that bodies must negotiate.
For KOMOREBI, Navaji designed a scenic world using wood, bamboo, rocks, and living trees. CTX Live Theatre independently described the set as highly detailed and noted that the living trees were supplied through Austin reforestation organization TreeFolks.
Natural material, canopy, verticality, light, and the density of the space altered how dancers occupied the room. The work asks the human body to exist inside an ecology rather than in front of an image of one.
Public ecological relationship
TreeFolks
The collaboration extended beyond sourcing living trees for the production. A performer from KOMOREBI also appeared in costume at a TreeFolks fundraising event, placing the work in direct relationship with an Austin organization devoted to reforestation.
Read the independent review ↗03 · Costume / wearable form
The body becomes
architecture.
Years inside dance give Navaji's constructed work a specific problem: form must remain alive while moving.
Costume is therefore considered spatially and kinetically—how a shape extends a silhouette, redirects attention, changes proportion, alters gesture, or becomes another object entirely once removed from the body.
The following works show this practice moving across productions rather than remaining isolated to KOMOREBI.
04 · Constructed worlds across productions
Not one set.
A spatial practice.
KOMOREBI is the most fully documented example, but the impulse continues across theatrical worlds.
Across productions, Navaji's responsibilities have included scenic conception, costume, fabrication, visual identity, photography, projection, and production development. The through-line is not genre; it is the construction of a coherent world around the body.
Professional dance informs line, weight, scale, balance, gesture, and what a constructed form must permit physically.
Fabric, bamboo, wood, stone, living plants, and built objects are selected for what they do—not merely what they symbolize.
The room is treated as a field of relationships: body to object, object to light, human presence to nonhuman material.
A drawing can become costume; costume can become installation; installation can reorganize movement and audience perception.
05 · Current research · work in progress
What Makes
Wings
The image is beginning to acquire a body.
What Makes Wings extends from Navaji's painting The Powers and from the red-crowned parrot at the center of the project's symbolic research. The developing costume study asks how the idea of wings can move from image and mythology into structure, proportion, weight, body, and eventual performance.
The rendering is shown as current design research—not as a finished constructed object. Its inclusion demonstrates continuity between the two nominations: a painted image becomes a spatial problem.
06 · Selected record
The work
in public.
The strongest 3-D evidence is not self-description; it is the trail from drawing to object to occupied space, accompanied by public presentation and independent criticism.
KOMOREBI received a five-performance run at KMFA Draylen Mason Music Studio. CTX Live Theatre independently documented Navaji's costume design, circular veiled headgear, and scenic environment using wood, bamboo, rocks, and living trees.
Five performances at KMFA Draylen Mason Music Studio in Austin, with the visual world integrated directly into the performance space.
The review identifies Navaji as costume designer and describes the set as a highly detailed environment built to evoke nature indoors.
Read review ↗Living trees used within the environment were provided through the Austin reforestation organization; the work also appeared at a TreeFolks fundraising event.
Across years of artistic leadership, Navaji's work extended beyond choreography into costume, scenic design, fabrication, photography, projection, graphic design, and production development.
Spatial formation
Years of professional dance developed an unusually physical understanding of line, balance, weight, timing, and architecture around the moving body.
Additional visual, scenic, and fabrication study at UT/Texas Performing Arts expanded the practice into constructed theatrical space.
Costume, environment, sound, image, choreography, and staging are developed in relation rather than as isolated departments.
An ongoing written and embodied methodology treats color, material, sound, costume, image, movement, and environment as consequential parts of artistic experience.
Selected visual practice · 3-D
The image becomes object.
The object becomes world.
Navaji's 3-D practice is built around transformation: drawing into material, material into wearable form, wearable form into environment, and environment into lived encounter.
The work is inseparable from the body's presence within it. Rooted in an embodied artistic life and in a broader inquiry into perception, land, spirit, and belonging, these physical worlds make visible ideas that cannot remain on a flat plane.
All design drawings, constructed works, photographs, and visual materials © Navaji David Nava unless otherwise credited. No reproduction or derivative use without written permission.