Sharon Eyal & Gai Behar Soul Chain
Kraftwerk, Berlin 11–12 December
Writing about the Italian-born, Amsterdambased artist and choreographer Michelle Rizzo’s performance , at Institute in Berlin last October, I drew the conclusion that Rizzo’s techno-inspired choreography was the perfect post- -19 love letter to club culture, one that recast raving as a holistic, healing and collective activity.
Yet while contemporary dance exhibitions drawing on the nightlife scene do feel timely as the global pandemic continues (especially for those of us currently facing the induced tanzverbot, or dance ban, in Berlin), they are, in fact, not a result of the crisis. Rizzo’s rave explorations began before the phrases ‘lockdown’ and ‘social distancing’ became second nature, and world-renowned Israeli choreographer Sharon Eyal has also been exploring the intersection of club and ‘high’ culture for many years. Working with Gai Behar – well known for having shaped Tel Aviv’s techno scene – and setting her idiosyncratic, raw, physically demanding choreography to pulsating beats by long-term collaborator Ori Lichtik, Eyal’s work has been performed in a multitude of spaces, from fashion runways to opera-house stages and even nightclubs themselves.
The last is true of Soul Chain (created for dance company tanzmainz), which, last December, was adapted for a site-specific performance at Kraftwerk, a former East Berlin power-plant turned brutalist music and underground-culture venue. The work was presented as part of This Is Not A Love Show
– a series of Eyal’s works, each of which explores themes relating to love, longing, discipline, devotion, closeness, confinement, ecstasy and loneliness – curated by the Light Art Space art foundation.
Despite the amorous framing, there was nothing romantic about Soul Chain. Soon after the audience took their seats on three sides of an striplight-lined dancefloor divided by two concrete pillars, the 17-strong cast started to incrementally (almost imperceptibly) enter the stage. Wearing nude-coloured leotards and knee-high socks, the dancers marched, or strutted, into view on the balls of their feet, the stabbing motions of their legs mirroring the pulsing industrial score.
Before long, the marching motif gave way to a range of other repetitive motions: dancers snaked around the space in long lines executing continuous deep lunges, relentlessly flexed and contracted their torsos in militant phalanxes, and grouped together in close contact, their bodies knitted tightly together in an orgylike ball of flesh. One group of performers even threw a dancer up and down into the air repeatedly, as if she was bouncing on a trampoline.
To call a performance repetitive may, by many, be considered a criticism. However, this is far from the case with Soul Chain. Just as Andy Warhol posited that life is ‘a series of images that change as they repeat themselves’, Soul Chain’s relentless choreography allows the audience to see new things in gestures the more they are repeated, pushing the dancers, and the movements themselves, to their limits. It makes its audience hypersensitive to di¤erence. At points when the cast were dancing in unison, some individuals altered their motions to become slightly at odds with the rest of the group. Whether the turn of a head, a change of direction, a contracted stomach or the lift of a hand to the forehead, these slight adaptations immediately attracted the audience’s attention.
Extreme repetition is indicative of Eyal’s choreographic style. Soul Chain featured motions that occur frequently in her other productions: incessant marching on the balls of the feet and a repetitive backwards kicking motion are also found in Half Life, created for Staatsballett Berlin in 2018. As such, Eyal’s oeuvre is a veritable Where’s Wally? of signature motifs, and it’s extremely rewarding for devoted fans of her work to be able to identify them.
That Eyal and her dancers can evoke so much intensity from such a limited movement vocabulary is impressive. While a sensual tango track laid over the constant electronic sound score contributed a romantic twist to Soul Chain, the work’s emotional core derived mainly from the dancers’ deep embodiment of the movement they performed, which could have incited as much passion if executed in complete silence. Indeed, their fierce and almost frightening facial expressions further contributed to the intensity of the work.
Opening and closing their mouths at varying speeds as they writhed, grabbed and flung their bodies as if controlled by an external force, the performers at times looked on the verge of orgasm, at others as if they were wretched with torment. That their champing, grinding teeth alluded to the e¤ects of illegal substances also can’t go unnoted. If Rizzo’s positioned club culture as healing and holistic, Eyal’s Soul Chain spoke in darker, more ambivalent tones about how decadence can get out of hand, the thin line between pleasure and pain, and the agony and ecstasy of trying to realise unrealisable desires. Emily May