Billed as the culmination of L-E-V’s trilogy interrogating contemporary love and survival, this arrived in Edinburgh following the staging of the first two parts, OCD Love (2016) and Love Chapter 2 (2017) in the blissfully pre-Covid days of the 2018 Festival. Given the visceral emotional brutality of both those pieces, what fresh hell could Sharon Eyal and her team be visiting this time, and what would be their conclusion?
Chapter 3: The Brutal Journey of the Heart brought together choreographer Eyal’s regular collaborators Gai Behar (Co-Creator) and techno-DJ-musician Ori Lichtik, whose driving score galloped through Afro drumming, blues harmonica, bossa nova-style samba slides and back again.
Curtain up on a dimly-lit stage and a single dancer began a typical Eyal solo, full of teeny-tiny steps on the spot, like a cat’s paws kneading the ground. She seemed completely in control. She was joined by the other six dancers repeating the same movements, and so the journey began.
Operating as a tightly-controlled entity, the group swept and retreated in waves over the stage, feet constantly in motion doing the cat-thing. They came together in a tight huddle, one sometimes breaking out or being ejected, or they briefly formed couples or trios. Sometimes the upper-body work – arms crossed over their chests, (protecting the heart?) or raised in aggression (or defence?) with clenched fists – sketched fleeting hints of emotion. Sometimes the footwork changed, swinging hips and widely spaced legs bent at the knee suggesting some kind of tribal dance: was that a slightly clunky analogy for the contemporary journey – finding one’s ‘tribe’? Although acting as a group, each dancer stayed in his/her individual space, mapping their own situation. When one was actually lifted by another, it came as a shock.
Brutality came from sudden convulsive twitches and spasms in the piece’s increasingly manic moments, and at one point, when bodies, lit in red, formed a striking sculptural tableau, they could have been souls in the circles of hell. It had all Eyal’s choreographic trademarks: the minutely detailed footwork, seemingly spineless backbends, lyrical arm-work and an intense, controlled sense of threat. But there was so little variation. The dancers were a joy to watch: lithe and graceful, brilliantly well-drilled, and yet…
From the photographs, designer Maria Grazia Chiuri’s body-suits (by way of Christian Dior Couture, of which she is Creative Director) were beautiful. Botanical drawings, tendrils of stems and leaves, wound up the dancers’ bodies as if printed on skin, and each had a scarlet heart positioned over the real one. Plant and human life mingling on their own unrelenting journey. It was a pity, then, that Alon Cohen’s lighting was (clearly intentionally) so dim throughout as to obscure not only most of this detail but also the personalities of the dancers. Perhaps, too, Lichtik’s soundscape over-compensated for the lack of content onstage.
Disappointingly, and despite the dancers’ skill, Brutal Journey lacked the emotional heft, the rage and intensity, of the previous parts and its 55 minutes felt over-stretched and inconclusive. Perhaps we were misled by the title and the expectation that a journey should have a conclusion. And perhaps, Eyal having detailed all our agonies and disappointments so graphically in the first two parts, there wasn’t much left to say about love’s messy, mystifying business, except that it’s all got worse.