Love Chapter 2, Sadler's Wells, London, review: Sharon Eyal's endurance test for the audience as well as the dancers
Sharon Eyal’s Love Chapter 2 is exhausting. Six dancers shuffle and sway their way through an hour of dance, never leaving the stage, never letting up. It’s deliberately, relentlessly one-note, an endurance test for the audience as well as the dancers.
Born in Jerusalem, Eyal has a rising international profile. Her company L-E-V, founded with producer Gai Behar, is known for club-influenced dancing and music. Love Chapter 2 is a sequel to OCD Love; both will be performed at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival.
This time, Eyal’s subject is isolation after the end of love. Her dancers are blank-faced and disconnected. Whether moving in unison or contorting themselves into twists and tilting backbends, they don’t engage. Sometimes they caress themselves, stroking at hips and stomachs or kissing their own shoulders. The gestures might suggest loneliness or longing, but the performances are drained of expression.
Eyal’s style has obvious parallels with that of Hofesh Shechter, another Israeli choreographer whose performances have a club or rock gig atmosphere. For Love Chapter 2, composer and DJ Ori Lichtik performs his own score live. It’s full of steady, inexorable beats, adding a folk-tinged vocal very late in the show. If that suggests a softening mood, the dancers don’t respond to it, staying remote.
In other works, such as Used To Be Blonde for England’s National Youth Dance Company, Eyal sets soloists against group sequences, giving them moments of individuality. Love Chapter 2 flat-out refuses to humanise its dancers. Eyal dresses them in socks and saggy leotards in a sock-left-in-the-wash shade of grey, their bodies both exposed and de-glamorised.
Punching the air together, they’re robotic rather than explosive. Fluid and strong, they dip into acrobatic poses without missing a beat or showing a hint of strain. The work is a feat of stamina, but one that they all seem to take for granted. Even if they smile, they’re looking past each other.
The disengaged style may be deliberate, a point about loss, but it becomes boring to watch. There’s little variety in the dancing, and none at all in the performance style. Eyal’s choreography is repetitive and finally flat.
Touring to Edinburgh International Festival, 9-12 August (eif.co.uk)
