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A couple of summers ago I was in a club in Manchester, dancing alone in the dark, when bodies suddenly flooded the dancefloor. Androgynous men and women all dressed in skin-tight, skin-coloured lace. Their lithe limbs and torsos flinched and flickered; they slithered and strutted. They were alluring and unhuman, sexy and weird. I was in the middle of ROSE, an immersive dance collaboration between record label Young and Sharon Eyal, an Israeli choreographer now based in France, who has become one of the most in-demand on the contemporary dance scene over the last decade. In her works that have come to the UK – Killer Pig, OCD Love, Saaba and more – Eyal’s strangely intoxicating choreography taps into the sensibility of nightclubs and catwalks, as well as something much more primal in the gathering of bodies to move as one together.
There is something intimidating about these dancers and their distorted bodies, gorgeously confident and coolly aloof; I wondered whether Eyal herself would be intimidating, too. She doesn’t do a lot of interviews. But on video call from her home outside Paris she smiles. She’s a little guarded, enigmatic, hard to get a handle on. Not the kind of artist who wants to explain her work (like Margot Fonteyn, who when once asked about something she’d performed, said: “I told you when I danced it”).
“What does it mean to you?” Eyal counters, when I ask about the title of the piece she’s about to bring to London, Into the Hairy. I garble something about textures and murkiness and monsters and creatures (Chewbacca springs to mind, though I don’t mention that). “Amazing, beautiful. You have it all,” she says. Clearly, every answer would be the right answer.
The root of it all, really, is music (especially dark, minimal, ravey beats), and all the choreography originates in Eyal’s own body. Born in Jerusalem in 1971, Eyal has been dancing for as long as she can remember, and started lessons at four. “I was a very hyperactive girl. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat. It was problematic. And the moment that my parents found dancing, I was much more calm and a better person, maybe,” she smiles. I ask her how dancing made her feel. “I don’t know how to answer this question,” she says. “It’s just, I’m more me. I can be more myself when I’m dancing and creating. I’m not thinking about what it means, just that I have to do it.”
Eyal danced with Tel Aviv-based company Batsheva for 18 years, but she was always creating her own movement, always a choreographer. She set up her own company in 2013. Everything you see on the stage starts with Eyal herself improvising, which is then mapped on to the dancers. “I love to give my movement to the dancers and feel their interpretation,” she says. Each movement idea could be slowed down, reversed or repeated – there is a lot of repetition – just as a composer might do with a musical motif. From a small amount of source material, Eyal will play with composition and timing and layering up movement. “The most, most important, is timing,” she says. “For me, timing is everything. It’s almost like a movie for me,” she says, and I picture her in the studio like a director in an edit suite, getting the cuts just right.
Caius Pawson, the founder of record label Young, who worked with Eyal on ROSE, told me over email about witnessing her process. “I’ve never experienced anything like it,” he wrote. “No thinking, no rationale, no explanation. It all seems to come from within. Pure heart. She’s open to everything, yet totally sure of what she loves. Precise in her choices but always tender.”
Pawson wanted to put Eyal’s dancers into a club setting to bring dance’s visceral impact to audiences up close. The company has also performed at Bold Tendencies, the south London arts organisation based in a multistorey car park turned performance space. Eyal’s works are co-credited with her husband and creative partner Gai Behar, who is a former producer of parties and multimedia events on the Tel Aviv club scene. You can tell the couple have spent some time on dancefloors by the worlds they create on stage (Eyal is often pictured with dramatic eyeliner and blurred lipstick, which is a kind of 3am-on-the-dancefloor look), though the dance itself is as disciplined and highly technical as classical ballet.
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On the wall behind where Eyal is sitting there’s a large canvas of two figures entwined in an embrace. It’s Eyal and Behar, given to them as a wedding gift. “It’s beautiful, no?” she beams, like someone still very much in love. The couple have worked together for 22 years but it’s unusual for Behar, who isn’t a choreographer, to be co-credited as a dance creator. Yet it sounds as if he’s essential to the work. “His eyes are very different to mine but he has very good taste,” says Eyal. She calls him “the cleaner” because he helps finesse the choreography and focus her ideas, honing the finished dances.
Behar is half French, which is partly why they moved here, nearly four years ago. Eyal has also renamed the company, formerly L-E-V, now Sharon Eyal Dance, or S-E-D. The new works, Into the Hairy and Delay the Sadness, which premiered in Germany in September, are different to the pieces I’ve seen before, she tells me. Something’s shifted. “It’s becoming more precise, more clean, more pure, more minimalistic,” she says, all in order to intensify the emotion. “For me, less is much, much more.” It’s a different chapter, Eyal says. Why, I ask, what has changed? “Life,” she says, and smiles, Mona Lisa-ish.
Eyal has talked about the aim of her choreography being “total feeling”. “Total feeling is to be 100% in the moment,” she says, the physical, the emotional, all in. “I think I’m a person like that: when I’m doing something, it’s all my heart.” It’s not just being in your element, she says, it’s becoming the element, the dancer is the music, is the movement.
But that total feeling isn’t only a pleasurable one. “I don’t like it when a dancer feels very comfortable,” says Eyal. “It’s just not interesting for me. I want to see the struggle, I like to see the fragility, I love to see the challenge.” She wants them to delve into their own darkness. “In the end, I want them to enjoy, and suffer a bit also.” She gives a little laugh. “When you’re going through a deep feeling in yourself, I believe people can connect to it.” When Eyal raves about the music of electronic producer Koreless, AKA Welshman Lewis Roberts, who worked on Into the Hairy, she singles out “the disturbing feeling” of his music alongside its texture, nuance and melody. A comment under one of Koreless’s tracks on YouTube describes his music as being like having a brain massage, and Eyal is very happy with that idea.
Eyal often harnesses the power of unison in her works, a couple of dozen bodies moving tightly in sync. “The power of unison is the power of loneliness,” she says, perhaps counterintuitively. “As much as you are in a big group, you become even more alone.” She coaches her dancers not just to dance together, “but really to feel together”. “A lot of times I’m saying to the dancers: you have to feel like you’re looking to the same star, or you’re from the same planet.”
Is she thinking about the outside world when she’s in the studio, with these ideas of togetherness and loneliness? “I’m thinking about everything, all the time,” she says. “My creation is not outside my life. But I’m not talking about society and stuff like that. I’m talking about human feeling and physicality and sensitivity. I’m not such a philosophical person,” says Eyal. “I’m intuitive. That’s why it’s very hard for me to describe. It’s really something that’s coming from my urge.”
That’s the thing about Eyal. It’s about the doing, not just directing others what to do. “For me it’s also about the dancing itself. I need to move to do it,” she says. And so does that mean as you get older and you change, the movement changes with you? “Yeah. And when I cannot do it any more, maybe I can’t create any more.”
Or maybe you’ll be 90 and developing a whole new way of moving? “Let’s see,” she says, happily. “I hope so.”
Into the Hairy is at Sadler’s Wells, London, 13 to 15 November; Delay the Sadness is touring to Azerbaijan, Austria and France in November.
