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.
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.
