Love Cycle: Love Chapter 2

• Claire Sawers
• 14 August 2018

c. André le Corre

Mind-boggling, heavy-duty sensual dance

All the destructive, self-harming and isolating aspects of obsessive love are explored in Love Chapter 2, the sister piece to L-E-V Dance's OCD Love, performed a few days earlier. Jerusalem-born choreographer Sharon Eyal describes both as 'deeply personal', with Love Chapter 2 letting her gaze into the abyss that comes 'post the actual illness, after all has been lost already'. ('Lev' is Hebrew for 'heart', and both parts focus on matters of the heart).

The work carried out by the five dancers (one flown in last minute the day before, to replace an injured colleague) is mind-boggling; 55 minutes straight of tensed-up, desperate movements, charged with urgency and craving. Striving for a feeling that's long dead, the dancers stalk, squirm and writhe through choreography that shows how alienated they have become – both from themselves and each other – sometimes play-stabbing themselves, at other times ducking from punches.

It's even more intense than part one, but there are flashes of relief, when Ori Lichtik's strong minimal techno score gives way to a romantic Latin American melody, as if this repetitive feeling of grief has transformed into something new, and the maniacal, furious movements become fluid and soft. It's heavy-duty, sensual dance, with strictly no slackers in the group, just five hypnotic bodies obsessed with getting across what that desolation feels like.

Reviewed at Kings Theatre, 12 Aug, run ended.