Sharon Eyal, striking at the heart

Text by Marinella Guatterini

" I don't want to see the choreography, I want to see the magic. I want to feel and I want people to feel what I intend to give them. As far as I am concerned mental form, physical commitment and dance technique are one. When you are exhausted, when your muscles are like on fire, emotion rises to the surface and it becomes impossible to pretend or construct a speech. One can only be in the present."

And bravo to Sharon Eyal, author with Gai Behar of Into the Hairy debuting in this 66th edition of the Spoleto Festival. In her brief choreographic taxonomy one can recognize tracks of a philosophical thought hovering in these less than serene times. Let us start with the title, "Inside the Scabrous or the Hirsute," and if we wanted to be literal, "Inside the Hairy," which leads us by the hand into the salvific tunnel of those who want to subtract beauty from today's aestheticizing, polished and aseptic degenerations, especially devoid of that negativity with its attendant shadow sides necessary for the purpose. While we still dive into the arms of those who claim that theopera of art is force, is pure energy kidnapped from the narrow confines of a reduced world to meaning since only ecstatic experience exists. But we would not like to inconvenience either Byung-chul Han, the South Korean philosopher who teaches to Berlin ("The Salvation of the Beautiful," ed. Nottetempo, 2019); or the late Jean-Luc Nancy ("Ecstasy" here to arm in arm with Federico Ferrari, ed. Luca Sossella, 2022), former professor emeritus at the University of Strasbourg, whose reflections on art and aesthetics are now classics in the contemporary world.

After all, we can entertain ourselves with simplicity in a courtly choreographic milieu. What Eyal tells us, when she reveals that her works do not originate from themes chosen to table but from life, from her personal experience in the moment of creation and from her surroundings, parallels in whole or in part the legacy of Pina Bausch, the legendary Tanztheater protagonist stubbornly determined to break down the boundaries between life and dance. And it is the German choreographer again who creeps into the Israeli's words when she tells us that "dance is therapeutic; it can even heal; for it expresses everything you want: it is an exposure of the whole body, from the brain to the heart." Remember the mantra of the legendary Pina: Tanz, Tanz, sonst wir sind verloren! Let us dance, let us dance otherwise we are lost? Well there is more. Sharon, from her long experience in the Batsheva Dance Company, her country's largest company, alongside to Ohad Naharin, its most famous director, whose assistant as well as associate artistic director she was - warns that her language and movements are transmitted and often filmed by her dancers for them to memorize. Like the still very active William Forsythe, she does not aspire to see copies of herself, indeed. She prefers to witness to something so different from amaze her. "The source of the movements must necessarily come from from me, but I like to see how they are translated and transformed by my dancers. I look for something that, from choreographer, I can find new hooks with , and that I love, that inspires me."

Mixing and stirring in the magnum sea of contemporary dance masters, but not only, we could certainly discover other digested value, and methodological hierarchies. After all, the Eyal/Behar pair does not backtrack from the alleged levees - alleged since there are no more - of contemporaneity and seems to have absorbed its best criteria. Therefore, it boldly advances, with a package of choreography by Eyal alone behind it, since from when, in 2013, it decided to found the company L-E-V- (Hebrew for heart) by hymning to a vital muscle of our body - the heart, by millennia-old tradition the receptacle of love and feelings - and often by also putting it in the right place on costumes: usually as tight-fitting as fanciful rompers from the precious brand, Dior. It might just be a curiosity to find out that because of Maria Grazia Chiuri, its costume designer, L-E-V has formed a liaison with Christian Dior Couture , for which Chiuri is stylist and creative director. Not only that.

Sometimes the first woman at the head of the Maison Dior reserved the honor of bringing to the catwalk the same Eyal who has since changed theappeal of her beautiful face. Lipstick protruding from her lips, eyes smeared with disheveled ash, almost as if she had taken a hail of punches. All fashion details with which she presented herself at the "Spring- Summer 2019 Ready-to Wear Show Dior Cruise 2021 Collection" inside the Notte della Taranta in Lecce. Mixing herself, her dancers to the local amateurs celebrated as well this atavistic pagan rite reduced to larval tracks mnestic from tourism, and they presumed to know that it originated between the 10th and 9th centuries, and was fortunately captured in the field in 1959 by ethnomusicologist Ernesto De Marino in his seminal "La terra del rimorso"(to edited by Marcello Massenzio, ed. Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, 2022), even before its authentic pagan elements were fully mediated by the irruption of the ecclesiastical institution. On the occasion of her appearances in Salento, Eyal made very clear her attraction to the place, the participants, the even bare and raw nature of their interventions, a source of life, regeneration, and for her, liberation of the body and beauty. She then contributed to the packaging of the fall-winter 2021-2022 fashion show for Dior, but without making any statements. Little matter.

His fashion display, thus continued, reminds us to of a phenomenon in vogue in the 1980s, when Régine Chopinot, queen of the French " Nouvelle Danse " forged a strong bond with Jean-Paul Gaultier and from there to chain, the new tailors, called stylists, grabbed various choreographers. In Italy, too, they exploded as costume designers not only of dance, but also ofopera. The phenomenon froze in the 1990s; today it has regained a little altitude with our own Antonio Marras, with Roberto Capucci, but in sporadic ways, to hiccups, and for Capucci the best known of our couturiers also for those magnificent sculpture dresses that appeared and were worn at the Spoleto 63 Festival in Creatures of Prometheus to music, live, by Ludwig van Beethoven.

In Into the Hairy, the new creation by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, the collaboration with Maria Grazia Chiuri and consequently with Christian Dior Couture (the two, by the way, have moved to to live in France) is not interrupted, but for the first time the doors open to Koreless, a London-based electronic music musician and producer who was assigned to create an original soundtrack for the play. Fifty minutes without interruption, of which Eyal and Behar offered only a set of words:  

Deep Into the Hairy... Dirty and gentle. Broken. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Deeper. Stronger. Weaker. Sadder. More alone. Hole. Diamond shining off alone. Mustn't be night. Skies and heart. My love chapter 245. I LovE you. My Harry........

Deep inside the rough. Dirty and gentle. Broken. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. Deeper. Stronger. More fragile. Sadder. Lonelier. Hole. Diamond shines from alone. It cannot be night. Skies and heart. My love chapter 245. I love you. My Harry -- are these expressions enough to enter the secret rooms of Into the Hairy?

Hiding and not revealing is the essence of a creative act that once placed on the theatrical stage knows it is autonomous from its author. Therefore we allow ourselves which step back. In Chapter 3: The Brutal Journey of the Heart (inspired by the bestseller to Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, the conclusion of a trilogy that began with OCD Love, Damaging and Devastating Love, and Love Chapter 2, Disappearing Love) just to mention a 2022 work not far from our Italian premiere(Into the Hairy has just debuted to Montpellier Danse 2023), the group of six performers - here they are seven - appeared in whole bodies drawn to hand with a brush dipped in gray. A precious, very elegant, variety of flowers, objects, original forms was splashed with red, with extreme caution, especially on the heart of the dancer who at first arched her arms and then plunged into a wide cambré, starting the piece. Inside that empty space,-which such is also the case in Into the Hairy ,-from the single, colorful lights to rain, it was as if she and her companions, when they were grouping, had always been there.

The sense of the world was outside the world, and it was precisely in being outside from everything, without a place, that having a place was made possible: "the spacing of forms, the discarding of bodies" (Jean-Luc Nancy). That is, the recognizability of a wholly humanistic, and even spiritual quid, in which bodies seemed mostly glued together, even as they formed circles, to bent and spread legs. Following the techno rhythm, the screams, the tribal and atavistic afflatus of a successful, clubbing mix, - in Into the Hairy we move instead to dubstep, always from disco, and soulful electronica with a strongly recognizable identity - the dancers exploded in sweeping, microscopic gestures, with glee and fury, eroticism, anger and joy iridescent on the always highly expressive faces. In the group's patter there were those who touched their ears, those who touched their chests, those who looked for angles from forming with their arms, those who hips suddenly followed a flamenco sonority, while a couple detaching themselves gave a lift and a to two short and intimate step of exquisite packaging. Couple love and deep loneliness, on the other hand, in that dry male physique that eventually remained alone, immersed in his angry gestures, in his naughty outbursts, as if he understood that excessive proximity to others would threaten to electrocute them all in a new spark of desire.

Bowing was little in front of the skill of a group that did not indulge in the slightest smear; sure they had learned from the "Gaga" method, invented from Naharin, that litheness of theirs, but the choreographic input had nothing more to to do with the grand master of Batsheva. The Eyal/Behar style is something else along with its Weltanschaaung so special from having wounded us to the...heart. Will it happen again?