Festival Dance
Love Cycle
King’s Theatre.Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
five stars
Love hurts. In OCD Love - created by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar for their L-E-V company in 2016 - the emotional turmoil of romantic yearning is complicated by the tics and dictats of obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Love Chapter 2 - which Eyal choreographed in 2017 - pushes that turmoil to fresh, and anguishing, extremes: whatever the relationship once was, it’s now over and the aftermath is a maelstrom of fixated hopes and excoriating disappointment.
Each piece is securely self-contained, each piece carries its own unnerving charge of humanity at bay within its own irrationally- beleaguered skin. But seen together in succession, under the umbrella title Love Cycle, viscerally heightens the impact of Eyal’s insights about OCD, and intensifies the agitated physicality she devises to convey the uncontrollable, unrelenting spasms of repetitive behaviour. You watch, forced to admire these works in all their wrenching hyperactivity while inwardly wincing.
The same five dancers perform in both pieces, to electronic soundscores (by Ori Lichtik) that generate degrees of insistent pulses or sudden surges of melody that - in Love Chapter Two - bursts into a Latino song. The dancers surrender to it with a blissful hip-sway sequence, that is lushly hypnotic. Earlier percussive rhythms had sent them into militaristic marching mode or, as the beats altered, propelled limbs into oddly gawky flailings as if inner impulses were short-circuiting. Costumes - black for OCD Love, grey for Love Chapter 2 - were brief and basic: every forward thrust of belly, deep-arching back bend or jutting rump was exposed as the dancers veered from strutting as a pack, to jittering and jerking in isolation. Some angularities were robotic, other moves hinted at shimmying social overtures, but at every turn the pace - like the exacting choreography - was pulverising. Love Cycle is an astonishing tour-de-force. You feel the pain.
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