Pure Moods

Into the Hairy”—the 45-minute ballet by choreographer Sharon Eyal and her creative collaborator Gai Behar—sets the tone immediately. Dancers dressed in arachnid-like unitards have a severe look, with black eye makeup that drips intensely down their cheeks, gothic and dramatic. When the stage lights finally dawn on them, huddled, shifting through a kind of stationary march, their presence en masse is at once disconcerting and entrancing.

Performance

Nederlands Dans Theater: “Into the Hairy” by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar

Place

Amare, The Hague, The Netherlands, June 7, 2025

Words

Rebecca Deczynski

Nederlands Dans Theater in “Into the Hairy” by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar. Photograph by Rahi Rezvani

These visuals, paired with a repetitive, hypnotic score by British producer Koreless, are enough to inspire a light unease in the observer. But as unsettling as “Into the Hairy” may be, it is just as artful. It is impossible to look away, even as the piece builds to haunting crescendo.

This piece, with 28 dancers, is a collaborative effort between Eyal’s company, Paris-based Sharon Eyal Dance S-E-D and The Hague’s Nederlands Dans Theater. Originally created in 2023 for seven dancers, this expanded version debuted on May 15 at The Hague’s arts complex, Amare.

It is impossible to say what “Into the Hairy” is about—NDT artistic director Emily Molnar describes it in the program notes as exploring “the darker aspects of the self,” and “deeply personal and transformative.” What is immediately apparent, from the start of the ballet, is the piece’s firm emotional core, expressed through a fully realized production. Everything in “Into the Hairy”—the score, costumes by Maria Grazia Chiuri for Dior, makeup by Noa Eyal-Behar, lighting by Alon Cohen—elevates even further its already mesmerizing and gripping movement.

Nederlands Dans Theater in “Into the Hairy” by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar. Photograph by Rahi Rezvani

Eyal’s choreography—slippery, jagged, precise, and sinuous—is striking on the individual level, but affecting when taken as a whole. Unison, in “Into the Hairy,” does not mean dancers reflect one another as carbon copies; instead, they move together with the slight variations among one another that one could find across different members of the same alien species. The effect is organic, the cluster of dancers moving as one large anemone. One, or sometimes two, dancers escape just beyond the cluster, their movements larger and more exaggerated.

For the full 45 minutes of the piece, every dancer remains on stage, pulsing through different patterns of movement. There are many iterations of walking in “Into the Hairy.” Deliberately small steps—the heel of one foot raised, the other flat, carry the group through early formations. Later, the dancers expand their limbs, moving almost exclusively en relevé. They take big, exaggerated steps, lifting their legs through passé. This evolves to even larger steps with one leg repeatedly extending in développé. In nearly all of their movements, they maintain a bend in the knee, creating a look of angularity within a fluid shape.

There is something trancelike about Koreless’s electronic score, which combines crunches and gurgles—distortions of sounds that might be found in nature—with the strumming of a single guitar string and cut up vocalizations. An electronic melody, on repeat, creates a structure within which the dancers may exist.

Nederlands Dans Theater in “Into the Hairy” by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar. Photograph by Rahi Rezvani

Repetition, in both music and movement, is powerful in “Into the Hairy.” Each sound and step is fully explored before it develops into its next iteration. Patterns establish a sense of order within the world of the dance which proves to be all-consuming: soloists may break from the pack, undulating their torsos in more expanded movements but they are always, inevitably, swallowed back up. This happens most dramatically near the end of the piece, when one dancer, escaped from the pack, is ritualistically transformed, costume pulled down and torso left bare. When the dancer returns to the group, it is with a caress: a pair of arms fold around their back.

Throughout the piece, the dancers form a larger, pulsing organism, maneuvering themselves into big, complex poses. These sometimes involve acrobatic lifts, in which a few dancers, held aloft, cast their legs scorpion-like over their heads or out in a perfectly flat center split. Huddled into a mass, dancers fan their faces toward the audience like the opening of a flower—though with their ghoulish appearance, the effect is as chilling as it is beautiful. It is often hard to distinguish where an arm or leg may originate in these Rorschach-like formations.

The intensity of “Into the Hairy” derives from its measured and gradual evolution. The piece builds on itself while keeping the same pace at which it starts; what changes, however, is the dancers’ relations to one another and to the audience, at which they look deliberately and hauntingly. It is a descent into something hellish—the stage, at the end, cast in red light—yet impossibly arresting.

Rebecca Deczynski

Rebecca Deczynski is a New York City-based writer and editor publishes the newsletter Thinking About Getting Into. Her work has appeared in publications including Inc., Domino, NYLON, and InStyle. She graduated from Barnard College cum laude with a degree in English and a minor in dance.

comments

Featured

REVIEWS | Karen Greenspan

Mishima’s Muse

Japan Society’s Yukio Mishima centennial series culminated with “Mishima’s Muse – Noh Theater,” which was actually three programs of traditional noh works that Japanese author Yukio Mishima adapted into modern plays.

Plus