Sharon Eyal is one of the most startlingly inventive choreographers working today. In 2016, London audiences saw her strange and intense OCD Love, an exploration of the obsessive compulsive state, and in March this year Ballet British Columbia brought us Eyal’s weird, mesmerising Bill. Love Chapter 2 is a continuation of OCD Love, and like that work is presented by L-E-V, the Israeli dance company of which Eyal was one of the co-founders in 2013 (her partners in the venture are co-artistic director Gai Behar and sound artist Ori Lichtik).
Love Chapter 2 is, Eyal informs us, “post illness, after all was lost”. Love has died, but the memory of love, and its physical impression, linger. L-E-V’s six dancers, oddly costumed in grey leotards and black mid-calf socks, are wraith-like in the dim, smoky light. They seem trapped in some other-dimensional interzone, condemned to whirl through time and space for all eternity, possessed by the fraying vestiges of rapture. We see fragments of formal dances: a foxtrot sway here, a tango glide there. The dancers preen, roll their hips, ripple their backs, strut like flamingos, and essay quirky, off-classical motifs. They’re at once the tautest of ensembles, and a collection of utterly alienated and isolated beings.
Eyal’s choreography is characterised by extreme technical precision and subtle, stringent musicality. As her choreography melds with Lichtik’s reverberant beats, we are led into an imaginative landscape of haunting vastness. It’s as if the dancers are present on stage, but coming to us from an immense distance. Love Chapter 2 is in large part mystifying, and Eyal’s pronouncements about it are elliptical. “I’m a living, loving, functional being, broken into crumbs of love, giving myself to the blast,” she informs us in the programme notes. The piece itself, however, is unwavering in its confidence. Like all Eyal’s work, it knows exactly what it’s setting out to do, and it’s a very particular pleasure to deliver yourself up to its resonant intricacies and its grand, sad momentum.
• Love Chapter 2 is at King’s theatre as part of the Edinburgh international festival, 10–12 August
