Review: Into The Hairy (Sadler's Wells Theatre)

Review by Stephen Gilchrist

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Does choregraphed dance need to have a narrative? Is it obliged to deal overtly with a theme, or themes, such as the way of the world, the state of humanity, or an exploration of the key events of human life – birth, learning, emotion, aspiration, reason, and morality? Or can it justify itself by being an abstract enterprise, which prioritises emotion and expression over literal storytelling, to explore ideas, feelings, and energy?

Leaving Sadler’s Wells after seeing Into The Hairy, a forty-five minute dance piece created by Sharon Eyal, I was no wiser as to the meaning of the title or of the work itself, for which its creators (Eyal and her partner Gai Behar) offer no explanation. Did it matter? What did the eight androgenous dancers, dressed by Maria Grazia Chiuri, the creative director of Christian Dior Couture, in intricately decorated black bodysuits, lit by the dim stage lighting designed by Alon Cohen, against blackness, and idiosyncratic make up, intend to represent? The dancers wear jewels, and make up, sometime white face, sometime black eyes and teardrops, designed by Noa Eyal-Behar.

Co-Founder, Co-Artistic director and choreographer of S-E-D, Sharon Eyal created 16 new works during her time with the company. In 2005 Eyal started to collaborate with Gai Behar on her creations between their company and different projects. Into The Hairy seems to have been part of a longer piece created with Nederlands Dans Theatre which premiered in the Netherlands earlier this year and won the Dutch Swan for best dance performance 2025.

Eyal’s style provides intriguing stage pictures in which bodies flow, rock, and step almost in slow motion. The ensemble dance in unison, like a living organism, with bodies bending, undulating as one, and moving sometimes like an army of ants, and sometimes like a human caterpillar. The broad, sweeping, expansive and flowing arm movements, and compact group choreography from which individuals sometimes violently escape, are representative of Eyal’s style

At the beginning and the end, they form a sort of spider’s web of bodies, a stylised pyramid of music hall tumblers, embracing, or perhaps killing one of their number who now sports a bare torso. Is this the ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ made real? There is a certain power in the mystery of the piece. The word ‘hairy’ can mean alarming and difficult, and perhaps scary, and certainly the mood created by the creators leads the audience into a disturbing, dystopian darkness.

Sharon Eyal has been quoted as saying, ‘I don’t like it when a dancer is comfortable – I want to see the struggle.’ and these dancers are certain kept on their toes with the exquisite timing of their rising and falling forms to a soundtrack composed by Koreless, the moniker of the Welsh electronic musician, DJ and producer Lewis Roberts. Koreless's style is a blend of electronic, dance, and experimental club music. In this production it is a composite of pulsating repetitive rhythms, often with Spanish guitar, providing an otherworldly soundscape. The intensity of Eyal’s moves is directed by the score. The music cannot be divorced from the choreography, which apparently starts with Eyal herself improvising and then mapping onto the dancers.

There is a tension in this work. The audience is waiting for something to happen, for the dancers to break out of their slow, deliberate movement, but it never does. This where the tension originates. It’s like Waiting for Godot – we, the audience, do not know what we are waiting for, or why. The effect is hypnotic but if I have a critique, it is that this hypnotic quality can become soporific by the finale, and I would have preferred to see the full, expanded work with its twenty-eight dancers.

And so, I return to my original question of whether dance needs to justify itself by some sort of narrative or theme? In my view the answer is no. Modern dance is often considered to have emerged as a rejection of, or rebellion against, classical ballet, and the boundaries of contemporary dance are constantly being pushed by its emphasis on fusion, improvisation, and versatility, focusing on creative freedom and personal expression. This is the world of Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, an expressionist world that seeps out of our imagination as we try to make sense of both what we see on stage, and ourselves.

Into The Hairy played at Sadler’s Wells Theatre until November 15^th

For more information visit https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/s-e-d-sharon-eyal-into-the-hairy/

Photos by Katerina Jebb