Cardiographic School – Newspaper Kommersant No. 188 (7389) dated 10/11/2022

The Theater Chaillot hosted the Paris premiere of Sharon Eyal’s Brutal Journey of the Heart, co-produced with Guy Behar for their LEV troupe. This is the final part of the love triptych, a program work by the former dancer Batsheva Dance Company, which brought her worldwide fame. Tells Maria Sidelnikova.

Sharon Eyal began her “Love Cycle” in 2015, two years after the founding of LEV, her brainchild with Guy Behar. Approximately at the same time, after the company’s sensational tour in Moscow, the Moscow public spoke about it for the first time. The starting point of the performance was the poetry of the American Neil Hilborn, who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and unrequited love. He combined two ailments into one poem. Its ragged rhythm, erratic movement of words, their obsessive repetition for Eyal immediately resulted in the choreographic text of her first chapter “OCD Love”. It was a dark journey through the backstreets of the obsessed subconscious, told with extreme frankness and physiology to the pulsating music of Ori Lihtik, the troupe’s permanent composer. The world of modern dance has not seen such a fierce exposure – physical and mental – for a long time, playing mind games. In the second chapter (“Love chapter 2”), Sharon Eyal consolidated the success of the found formula: the same artists are linked into a single organism, from which solos and duets drop out every now and then; no decorations, just light. And the same androgyny, emphasized by the swimsuits and the universal dance language, which squeezes all the juices of desires, passions, fears out of the bodies in an hour – Eyal loves to weave his performances with existential nominatives. On stage, they take expressive forms of emotional self-disclosure, often placing the viewer in the awkward position of a voyeur.

As the epigraph to Brutal Journey of the Heart, the choreographer chose an encouraging quote from the hopeless Little Life by the American novelist Hanya Yanagihara that, no matter how fate beats and breaks, in the end it arranges everything in such a way as to compensate for losses, sometimes with the most wonderful way. For the miraculous, Eyal has fewer instruments, yet her language grows out of dissatisfaction and pain, so manifestations of simple human sensitivity, such as enthusiastic whirling in support of a “log” or jubilant prancing with throwing out ballet ambuates, look awkward and form looseness in the body of the performance.

Costumes also add naive sentimentality. Dior art director Maria-Grazia Chiuri painted red flaming hearts on body suits, and in the labyrinths of graphic drawings that look like tattoos from the audience, she hid the words that reveal the alter ego of the dancers: one of them is “desire”, someone is “ pleasure”, who is “earth”, who is “flower”. On their brutal journey, they are accompanied by passionate Latin American rhythms and tunes – hence the cha-cha-cha with excessive wiggling of the buttocks and orthopedic bulging of the hips instead of Eyal’s signature trampling on high half-toes. The hands either soar like swan wings, or clench into boxing fists, or into the paralyzed stumps of the insane, desperately scraping their hearts. Bodies pulsate excitedly, throb in vomiting convulsions, stretch in languid snake waves, and legs, closely shifting, as if pinching the crotch, now and then crawl with satisfaction into a wide second position. This is Eyal’s favorite choreographic antithesis: here are suppressed emotions, but now they are already whipping over the edge. It is still curious to follow these desperate bodily tortures and read their meanings. But the notorious chemistry, which used to make it possible to turn a blind eye both to a composition assembled according to a template and to links that repeat from performance to performance, does not appear in Brutal Journey of the Heart. Love, it seems, really does not live for more than three years.