Choreographer Sharon Eyal: “I don’t like the dancer to be comfortable – I want to see the struggle” | Dance

A A few summers ago, I was at a club in Manchester, dancing alone in the dark, when suddenly bodies flooded the dance floor. Androgynous men and women all wear tight skin-coloured lace. Their limbs and graceful torsos shook and flashed; They slid and strutted. They were seductive and inhuman, sexy and exotic. I was in the middle of ROSE, an immersive dance collaboration between record label Young and Sharon Eyal, the Israeli choreographer now based in France, who has become one of the most in-demand choreographers on the contemporary dance scene over the past decade. In her works that have reached the UK – Killer Pig, OCD Love, Saaba and more – she exploits stunning choreography to convey the feel of nightclubs and fashion shows, as well as something more primal in the coming together of bodies to move together.

There is something terrifying about these dancers and their distorted bodies, exquisitely confident and quietly aloof; I wondered if Eyal herself would be scary too. She doesn’t do a lot of interviews. But on a video call from her home outside Paris, she smiled. She is very guarded, mysterious, and difficult to get along with. She’s not the kind of artist who wants to explain her work (like Margot Fonteyn, who, when asked about something she’d done, once said: “I told you when I danced it”).

“What does it mean to you?” Eyal disagrees when I ask her about the title of the piece she is bringing to London, Into the Hairy. I’m rambling something about textures, mystery, monsters, and creatures (Chewbacca comes to mind, though I don’t remember it). “Awesome, beautiful. You have everything,” she says. Obviously, every answer will be the correct answer.

The root of it all, really, is the music (especially the dark, simple, soothing beats), and all of the choreography stems from Eyal’s body. Born in Jerusalem in 1971, Eyal has been dancing for a long time, starting lessons at the age of four. “I was a hyperactive girl. I didn’t sleep or eat. It was a problem. The moment my parents discovered dancing, I was probably calmer and had a better personality,” she smiles. Ask her how dancing made her feel. “I don’t know how to answer that question,” she says. “It’s just that I’ve become more myself. I can be more myself when I dance and create. I don’t think about what that means, just that I should do it.”

Eyal danced with the Tel Aviv-based Batsheva Company for 18 years, but she was always creating her own movement, and she was always a choreographer. She founded her own company in 2013. Everything you see on stage starts with Eyal’s own improvisation, which is then mapped onto the dancers. “I like to give my movement to the dancers and feel their interpretation,” she says. Every movement idea can be slowed down, reversed, or repeated – there is a lot of repetition – just as a composer does with a musical idea. With a small amount of source material, Eyal will manipulate composition, timing and layered movement. “The most important thing is timing,” she says. “For me, timing is everything. It’s almost like a movie to me,” she says, and I imagine her in the studio like a director in the editing suite, getting the cuts right.

Caius Pawson, founder of Young’s record label, who worked with Eyal in the band ROSE, told me via email about witnessing her process. “I’ve never experienced anything like it,” he wrote. “There is no reasoning, no justification, no explanation. Everything seems to come from within. Pure heart. She is open to everything, but very sure of what she likes. Precise in her choices but always tender.”

Pawson wanted to place Eyal’s dancers in a club environment to bring the profound impact of dance to audiences up close. The company has also performed at Bold Tendency, the south London arts organization based in a multi-storey car park turned performance space. Eyal’s work is credited to her husband and creative partner Jay Behar, a former producer of parties and multimedia events in the Tel Aviv club scene. You can tell the pair spent time on the dance floor by the worlds they created on stage (Eyal is often photographed with dramatic eyeliner and blurred lipstick, a kind of 3 a.m. look on the dance floor), though the dance itself is as disciplined and highly technical as classical ballet.

On the wall behind where Eyal is sitting, there is a large painting of two figures entwined in each other’s arms. It is Eyal and Bihar, given to them as a wedding gift. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” She radiates, like someone who still loves her very much. The pair have worked together for 22 years, but it is unusual for Behar, who is not a choreographer, to be credited as a choreographer. However, it seems as if it is necessary for the job. “His eyes are very different from mine, but his taste is very good,” Eyal says. She calls it a “cleaner” because it helps refine the choreography, focus her ideas, and refine the final dances.

Bihar is half French, which is one of the reasons they moved here nearly four years ago. Eyal also renamed the company, formerly LEV, now Sharon Eyal Dance, or SED. She told me that the two new works, Into the Hairy and Delay the Sadness, which premiered in Germany in September, were different from works she had seen before. Something has changed. “It has become more refined, cleaner, purer, simpler,” she says, all in order to intensify the emotions. “For me, less is so much more.” “It’s a different season,” Eyal says. Why, I ask, what has changed? “Life,” you say and smile, Mona Lisa.

Eyal spoke about the goal of her choreography being to “feel complete.” “The whole feeling is to be 100% present, physically and emotionally, in every sense of the word,” she says. “I think I’m someone like that: When I do something, it’s all in my heart.” She says it’s not just about being in your element, but becoming the element, the dancer. He is music, He is Movement.

But this overall feeling is not just a pleasant feeling. “I don’t like a dancer to feel too comfortable,” Eyal says. “It’s not that interesting to me. I want to see struggle, I like to see fragility, I like to see challenge.” She wants them to delve into their darkness. “In the end, I want them to have fun, and to suffer a little too.” She laughs a little. “When you experience feelings that are deep within yourself, I think people can relate to them.” When Eyal praises the music of electronic producer Corellis, aka Welshman Louis Roberts, who worked on Into the Hairy, she highlights the “disturbing feeling” of his music along with its texture, nuance and melody. A comment on one of Corelis’s tracks on YouTube describes his music as being like a brain massage, and Eyal is very happy with that idea.

Eyal often exploits the power of harmony in her works, where dozens of bodies move tightly in sync. “The power of harmony is the power of unity,” she says, perhaps counterintuitively. “The more you are in a large group, the more alone you become.” She trains her dancers not only to dance together, “but to really feel together.” “I often tell dancers: You have to feel like you’re looking at the same star, or you’re from the same planet.”

Do you think about the outside world when you’re in the studio, with thoughts of togetherness and unity? “I think about everything, all the time,” she says. “My creativity is not outside my life. But I don’t talk about society and things like that. I talk about human feeling, physicality and sensitivity. I’m not a philosophical person,” Eyal says. “I’m intuitive. That’s why it’s hard for me to describe it. It’s really something that comes from my desire.”

That’s the thing about Eyal. It’s about doing, not just telling others what to do. “For me, it’s also about the dancing itself. I need to move to do it,” she says. Does this mean that as you get older and change, movement changes with you? “Yes. And when I can’t do it anymore, maybe I can’t create any more.”

Or maybe you’ll turn 90 and develop a whole new way of moving? “Let’s see,” she says happily. “I hope so.”

Into the Hairy runs at Sadler’s Wells, London, from 13-15 November; Delay the Sadness is touring Azerbaijan, Austria and France in November.