This final part of a trilogy on love by Israeli company L-E-V – created by artistic directors Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, with regular music collaborator Ori Lichtik – is subtitled “Brutal Journey of the Heart”, yet there’s nothing brutal or heartfelt about this good-looking, easy-on-the-ear work; it doesn’t really go anywhere, either.
So forget the subtitle. What happens? It’s basically an hour-long music set, one number seguing into the next as it proceeds casually, if not causally, along a trail that leads from acoustic guitar songs, through modern blues, country, folk, Latin and Afrobeats, and winds up with beach-music crooning. The dancers look divine in their unitards (by Dior director Maria Grazia Chiuri): sleek second skins filigreed with foliage, a big red heart blazoned right above the heart. They are marvellous dancers, too: supremely controlled even as they flicker elongated limbs like antennae that reach in all directions, or pause on toe-tips, or lunge extra low, spines arching and torquing as if alloyed from steel with elastic.
At first they look like flamingos, all high struts and preens; then
there are froggy squats, lots of pulsing hips, a bit of bop, a hint of ballroom, some ballet, some cat-walking. Despite the omnivorous profusion, it all feels strangely samey, everything packed and processed into the same middling pace, the dancers repeating their moves right and left as they sidestep to the beat of whatever music is playing. Some striking groupings emerge – an anemone cluster, a throbbing ring of locked arms – but mostly it’s geometric patterns that form and re-form as
steadily and as unsurprisingly as those sidesteps.
The dancing is easy to admire; the choreography, hard to love.
