Sharon Eyal’s Into the Hairy does not take place in a world we recognise. It opens after the end, in dirt, dust, and in the dense humidity of something left behind. The stage is barren, the light ashen, and the bodies that emerge are not entirely human. Sheathed in black lace bodysuits that are funereal and opaque, they twitch and undulate like insects reacting to radioactive dust. The lace, once a symbol of delicacy and intimacy, becomes an exoskeleton that conceals rather than reveals, serving as a masquerade of identity, sexuality, and perhaps even humanity itself.
This expanded version of Eyal’s 2023 creation brings together the formidable talents of Nederlands Dans Theatre and her own company, S-E-D. Originally created for seven dancers, it now unfolds across more than twenty, transforming the piece into something more unsettling. The swarm multiplies, growing hypnotic, sublime, and eerily inhuman in scale. The figures in motion resemble biological aftershocks – survivors, or their evolutionary deviations. The body is still present, but it is glitching. And hauntingly beautiful.
Eyal’s choreographic language is unmistakably her own. Classical ballet lingers at the edges of her work, as something corrupted. The dancers move with balletic lines and extensions that feel eroded. The pas de bourrée couru, traditionally danced lightly on demi-pointe, becomes unnerving as one foot lands flat, dragging the phrase toward discomfort. Arabesques are held too long, arms awkward, and frames broken. Balances quiver. The long, clean lines of ballet are shortened, twisted, and made strange. It’s as if ballet itself has decayed. Its grace is still there, though it has curdled – deformed into something grotesque and uncanny.
There is no narrative. In this post-language world, what remains is movement, breath, and the relentless rhythm of the body repeating itself, as if survival depends on it. The dancers pulse like larvae, jerk like parasites, and move simultaneously like a nest disturbed. What we’re watching may not be human at all. It may be what comes next.
The title, Into the Hairy, speaks volumes. It suggests a descent into the bodily, the animal, the intimate, the unclean. This is choreography as texture: dense, fleshy, cyclical. The movement is signature Eyal: snaky spines, jerky accents, and a relentless, almost ritualistic repetition that transforms familiar forms into something otherworldly, an other-world that demands to be witnessed. Eva Lakeman 17th May 2025
