Love Chapter 2 reviews – a powerful exploration of the consequences of passion | Step

L ove Chapter 2 is an extension of OCD Love, the work of 2016 in which the choreographer and creator of the Israeli LEV dance company, Sharon Eyal, and designer Gai Behar present the Love like an invading toxin. Mutually destructive submission and control. In this second piece, they explore the sorry consequences of love, a state in which the afflicted have been broken down into helpless atoms of isolation, exhaustion and loss

As with Love OCD , Chapter 2 is driven by the immersive techno score of Ori Lichtik. He opens up on a brutal beat – a brutal pulse that seems to force his six dancers to stay involuntarily alive. Staggered across the stage, they seem to have only one vestigial memory of being functional, their feet tracing quivering patterns on the ground, their arms faintly reaching the space, their torsos getting swaying like reeds.

Eyal is a choreographer with meticulous and fascinating details and his dancers are of exquisite sensitivity. We watch, hypnotized, these traumatized men and women weave hesitant patterns around each other – shock waves of emotion recalled forcing their arms to wrap defensively around their bodies, their mouths to squirt in a grin of agony.

As the music grows in a reverberant texture of voices and chords, the dark lighting illuminates, minimally, and the movement grows in a more daring terrain of flared folds, game play. legs, cantilevered curves. The group itself becomes a more dominant force, a determined set in which dancers energetically collectively can show resurgent moments of power. Momentarily, they become a chorus of bourreeing ballet dancers, high-level soldiers, or ecstatic clubbers. However, after each surge, their energy is deformed and disintegrated, reducing itself to inertia or febrile rage.

The Chapter 2 Love is a visceral charismatic experience; it is almost impossible not to be dragged into his dark and implacable heart. Yet the work changes subtly during its 60 minutes because what begins as a sophisticated register of raw emotion is inexorably turning into something like a show. The combined intensity of dance and music can be overwhelming, but there is a price to pay for this intensity, as the work gradually loses sight of the people who are at the heart of it.