Icon. Religious leaders, politicians, pop stars, role models. We create them, reproduce them, and worship them. All until the next regime, culture or trend takes over and replaces them with new ones. This idea is Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s leitmotif for Icon, his second creation for the GöteborgsOperans Danskompani. For this production Cherkaoui decided to both break new ground, and so he commissioned the young Antwerp-based fashion designer Jan-Jan Van Essche to create the costumes, as to pursue his lasting and fruitful collaboration with visual artist Antony Gormley, who joined Cherkaoui for the first time in 2005 for Zero degrees. In Icon the set consists of 3,5 tons of clay, a malleable substance with a huge ephemeral quality.