Soul Chain

I have only really seen the works of a few Israeli choreographers, and for some reason, each time I have felt the eerie presence of military on the stage. In some cases, this was quite literal – as with Dror Liebermann’s Neither Soft Nor Light in 2016, which was performed by an ex-member of the Israeli Special Forces. But often the presence has been more implicit, and points to the intertwining of military in Israeli cultures – maybe best seen in their famous compulsory conscription program, which has seen many contemporary artists, poets, and even supermodels get a good feeling for life from behind the gun.

In the case of Israeli-German choreographer Sharon Eyal’s Soul Chain, the presence is more abstract, in the form of the relationship between choreographer and dancer, and the fixed chain of command existing between both. Soul Chain begins with a whisper – two tip-toed, uniformed dancers move diagonally across a smoke-defined stage to the early pattering of Ori Lichtik’s soundtrack. Over time, it accumulates into a sort of organism or ‘shared body’ – the dancers float largely in unison, one occasionally standing apart, like a school of fish, as the music gathers and falls into various peaks and troughs.

 

Photo: Andreas Etter

The choreography sits in a sort of uneasy dynamic, never quite certain of the outcome for these fish-entities. What’s certain is the presence of discipline – if they are a collective, it is one without solidarity. The outcome is a kind of targeted aesthetic strike, executed by a group that has had the humanity drilled out of them by countless repetitions and exactions.

“Such is dance”, you might say. Yet the work, which won Germany’s DER FAUST prize for choreography in 2018, has drawn an unusually large following, reproduced across stages in Europe, among them, this re-staging from 2019. Given it’s fairly clichéd regurgitation of staid concepts (the human as animal, subject to control and existing relationally), we might well ask, viewing this in 2021 amidst a public health crisis that has seen a perhaps unprecedented crackdown on assumed rights, what exactly is the attraction.

Does the fascination with such work derive from an ironic lack of the “visceral” in European life, some bizarre misplaced fascination with violence, that needs representation on stage to repent for its absence? Or is it the opposite: life has become so violent these days, that the saturation of military thought goes unnoticed in the midst of consumer culture, invisibly slipping into everyday conversation (through military and policing terms like “lockdown” entering everyday vernacular, for example) and into our guiding assumptions informing our shared worldviews?

While it’s tempting to view its appeal as to the most cynical elements of an already deeply cynical culture, there are redeeming points in Soul Chain – a presentation of the entity as an interconnected vessel, not a pattern so much as a constant error correcting itself. It’s an effective strategy, creating resonances in computing, environmentalism, mathematics, and even non-human agency.

But I can’t help but attribute its popularity to its presentation of precisely nothing new.

Soul Chain

Touring Manager: Maria Eckert
Stage Manager on Tour: Matthew Tusa
Set up Light on Tour: Dominik Hager
Set up Stage and Sound on Tour: Luka Curk
Stage and Light design: Alon Cohen
Costume: Rebecca Hytting
Composition: Ori Lichtik
Rehearsal Director: Andrea Svobodova
Production Manager: Lisa Besser
Director tanzmainz: Honne Dohrmann
Assistant of Dance Directorate: Hannah Meyer-Scharenberg
Assistant to Choreographer: Rebecca Hytting, Tom Weinberger
Co-creator: Gai Behar
Choreography by Sharon Eyal

Viewed at Budapest National Dance Theatre

On Repertoire.