Tuesday February 22nd, 2022 - The Brutal Journey of the Heart, the final installment of a trilogy on love by choreographer Sharon Eyal, opened this evening at The Joyce, performed by L-E-V. With a score by Ori Lichtik, costumes by Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri, and superb lighting by Alon Cohen, this dancework explores the ways we heal from wounds of the heart. As an oft-wounded romantic living in an unromantic world, I have had much experience with these healing processes. And - I am sorry to have to admit - I have also thoughtlessly inflicted such wounds on people who deserved better. And so, I expected The Brutal Journey of the Heart to speak to me with poignant clarity; what it ended up doing was make me want to go out dancing.
At curtain rise, a solitary woman on the dramatically lit stage begins to move to a fascinating beat. She is soon joined by her five colleagues who show off witty ways of walking, and pausing to pose. The movement is inventive and everything feels wonderfully fresh and vivid. As one alluring song melds into another, the urge to dance is increasingly difficult to suppress. After about fifteen minutes, though, one begins to wonder what comes next: a change of lighting? Maybe a pas de deux, something slow and heart-achy?
But, no: the dancers simply draw into a cluster, swaying and writhing in place while their arms and hands weave stylized gestures. Then they spread out again and repeat passages from earlier in the piece. Meanwhile, the music is pretty much relentless, and a feeling of 'too much of a good thing' starts to creep in. A male duet and a female solo are briefly eye-catching, but the ensemble keeps giving us recycled moves; it begins to feel like we're in the purgatory of lost love.
Maybe this is the brutal thing about the journey of the heart: it never really ends, and there's no redemption to be found. The dancers continue on to a false ending, and though it seems that the woman who opened the performance alone onstage has now found some kind of peace, we don't really know how, beyond the notion that dance is wonderfully therapeutic, especially to this music.
Despite a sense of aimlessness at times, the evening was very much worthwhile for the excellence of the dancing, the atmospheric lighting, and most of all for the score.
The dancers - Clyde Emmanuel Archer, Keren Lurie Pardes, Darren Devaney, Guido Dutilh, Dana Pajarillaga, and Edit Domoszlai - were hailed at the end with a whooping standing ovation, which they truly deserved.
~ Oberon