text by Lara Monro

photographs by Katerina Jebb

This Thursday, Sadler’s Wells will showcase Into the Hairy, the newest work from Sharon Eyal and longtime collaborator Gai Behar. Created for S-E-D Dance Company, the piece further refines Eyal’s unique choreographic language: a vocabulary of subtle intensities where sensation becomes form and form becomes meaning.

Those familiar with Eyal’s universe will recognize the pulse: a charged, hypnotic physicality that sits somewhere between ritual, runway, and rave. But Into the Hairy marks a shift, a paring back. As Eyal has recently said, her work has become “more precise, more clean, more pure, more minimalistic… less is much, much more.” What remains is movement distilled to its emotional core.

Co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells and created in close dialogue with London-based producer Koreless, the work is set to an original score that seems to emerge like breath through the body. Eight dancers move in unison that is both fierce and strangely intimate, the kind of togetherness that, as Eyal herself puts it, can make one feel “even more alone.” Clad in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s sculptural bodysuits, their forms are sharply visible; muscles, tremors, and the subtle hesitations of choice read like text.

Eyal often speaks of being uninterested in comfort. She wants the struggle, the fracture lines, the place where control and surrender collide. “Everything you see starts with my body,” she has said, improvisations that are then mapped, repeated, and refined until they become something shared. In Into the Hairy, that process is palpable. The dancers carry a vulnerability so present it feels like a kind of heat on the surface of the skin.

The result is both sensual and severe. A work that holds the paradox of contemporary life: closeness and distance, ecstasy and restraint, the collective pulse and the solitary self. It is a reminder that the body is an archive, that movement can speak before language, that emotion doesn’t need to explain itself to be understood. At Sadler’s Wells, Into the Hairy arrives not simply as a work of choreography, but as a deepening of Eyal’s ongoing inquiry into presence, power, and the vulnerability of being seen.