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Join the Club

Many contemporary choreographers, especially recently, have attempted to capture the distinctively visceral, freeing experience that comes from dancing at a rave, that phenomenon where the lights go down and the music revs up; where people release their inhibitions and give in to the beat.

But the experience of dancing at a club is environmental, as much dependent on the space, lights, and sounds, and importantly, the other people, as the physical movement. Even among exciting new rave-inspired concert dances that have appeared over the past several years, a question has always lingered: Is it possible to truly portray what it's like to let loose at the club if the show consists of professional dancers performing onstage for a seated audience?

Performance

L-E-V: “R.O.S.E” by Sharon Eyal

Place

Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY, September 5, 2024

Words

Cecilia Whalen

L-E-V in “R.O.S.E” by Sharon Eyal. Photograph by Stephanie Berger, courtesy of Park Avenue Armory

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Sharon Eyal's “R.O.S.E.,” which premiered last year in the U.K. and was recreated at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan Sept. 5-12, offers an alternative. Eyal was a star dancer for Batsheva Dance Company for almost 20 years. While a dancer for the company, in the 1990s, she met the underground party producer Gai Behar, and the two bonded over their shared fascination with club culture. They began collaborating and together founded L-E-V (Behar is the other co-director). “R.O.S.E.” is a culmination of their experiments and conversations surrounding club culture and contemporary dance.  

Instead of a club-inspired performance, “R.O.S.E.” is an actual rave. For the week of Eyal's residency, the Park Avenue Armory's Drill Hall was transformed into a club with vibrant strobe lights, clouds of smoke, bars, and a dance floor. With no seats available, the audience is part of the show, invited onto the dance floor to groove to the electronic stylings of DJ Ben UFO. 

The immersive quality comes as a bit of a shock. The professional dancers of L-E-V do perform as part of the show, but they don't come on for about 45 minutes, leaving ample time to relax and submit to the rhythm, but also a period of initial confusion.

L-E-V in “R.O.S.E” by Sharon Eyal. Photograph by Stephanie Berger, courtesy of Park Avenue Armory

For the first half hour or so, as the audience tries to shift gears and release into the evening, they also attempt to pick out L-E-V plants on the dance floor. When the L-E-V dancers finally do enter, there's no mistaking them: Dressed in skin-tight, nude-colored lace body suits designed by Maria Grazia Chiuri of Dior Couture, the dancers twitch and bounce to the beat in a line. They walk on their toes and drag straight legs on the floor in a sort of limp. They press their pelvises forward and grab each other by the ear. 

Eyal's movement is characteristically uncomfortable-looking in an extraordinary and compelling way. The dancers are hypermobile and stretch their legs in every imaginable direction. Their torsos move in and out of alignment and they toss their heads backwards to look behind themselves. Their eyes, which in “R.O.S.E.” drip with black mascara tears, stare straight forward, but don't see anything. Even when within an inch of an audience member's face, the dancers’ eyes are wide and blank.

In “R.O.S.E.,” the L-E-V dancers never stick around for long. Rather, they come and go throughout the evening, haunting the dance floor for 15-minute bursts in eerie unison, like the ghosts of raves' past.

Later on, these other-worldly beings are met with a second cast of local dancers dressed in black. For a moment, the two parties engage from opposite sides of the floor. They mimic and build off of each other, splaying in backbends and high développés. Eventually, each group lifts a single, contorted dancer up in the air, and travels her around in monarchical procession.

L-E-V in “R.O.S.E” by Sharon Eyal. Photograph by Stephanie Berger, courtesy of Park Avenue Armory

Eyal explains in her program notes that she and Behar have long been interested in “bridging the gap between dance, community, and space. They bemoaned the arbitrary distances created by the arrangement of a traditional theater” and hoped that by bringing their club-inspired work into an actual club with an audience present on the dance floor, they could erase these distances and “make the feeling of the work immediately intelligible.”

Environmentally, "R.O.S.E.'s" rave proved successful. After overcoming the initial awkwardness of the evening's beginning, the audience released into the party and cultivated a friendly atmosphere of chatting and dancing.

Ultimately, however, the gap between the choreographed dance and the audience remained present. Normally, as Eyal stated, the distance between audience and performers is created by the space: a theater which physically separates the dancers from the audience. Ironically, in "R.O.S.E.," with the space readjusted to assimilate performers and audience, the choreography, itself—impressive and engaging though it may have been—was what proved divisive.

While the audience was able to give in to the DJ's groove, each time the L-E-V dancers entered, the audience would freeze. Partly, this was because Eyal's dancers are so captivating and their presence demands attention. It was also because their contrast to the audience—their ghostly inhumanness—was so extreme, that it proved to interrupt the sense of community built by the audience, rather than reinforce it. In these moments, the music also changed from rhythmic to lyrical, further emphasizing the separation between audience and performer. 

At the end, everyone gathered onstage for one last climactic dance. Even then, although we were all on the same playing field, the L-E-V dancers remained emotionally inaccessible to their fellow ravers. Whilst fist-pumping and shimmying, an L-E-V dancer might suddenly appear right next to you, pulsating spookily. You could easily shimmy up next to her and reach out to grab her hand. Chances are, she wouldn’t see you. These spectacular movers live in a different dimension, entranced by the beat. Physically inches away, their eyes are distant, staring right through you into some invisible, inaccessible void.

Cecilia Whalen

Cecilia Whalen is a writer and dancer from Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and holds a bachelor's degree in French. Currently, Cecilia is studying composition at the Martha Graham School for Contemporary Dance in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn.

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