Choreographer Sharon Eyal: ‘I don’t like it when a dancer is comfortable – I want to see the struggle’

Her latest work is built on dark, minimal beats and groups of dancers moving in unison. It’s sensual, visceral and, she says, totally intuitiveA 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”). Continue reading...

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