Sharon Eyal’s deeply personal work – Delay the Sadness

WEARING THE MOURNING

Ruhrtriennale 2025 presents the world premiere of Sharon Eyal’s latest creation, Delay the Sadness, at the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum

by Klaus Dilger

In her previous choreographies Sharon Eyal has stood for a kind of collective ecstasy to which one could hardly resist. Her dancers, moving with hyper-controlled precision, would merge into a single organism, leaving behind any notion of gender or individuality. A hypnotic wave sweeping the audience along, like a choreographed rave party that requires no drugs to unlock inner worlds.

In Delay the Sadness, premiered at the Ruhrtriennale in Bochum (or was it already in July at Torino Danza?), something shifts. Four couples, arranged in a light diagonal, open the evening. They carry within them the echo of classical ballet, even in their movement vocabulary, before dissolving once again into Eyal’s unmistakable lexicon of half-pointe scurrying, torsos arched far back, and ecstatic convulsions. The trance breaks; the wave parts. From the pulsating mass, duets emerge – fragile, charged, brimming with emotion.

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Delay the Sadness is a work about loss, about absence. Dedicated to her late mother, it exposes itself more openly, more personally, than anything Eyal has shown before. The dancers’ beige costumes, veined with red, resemble skins turned inside out, revealing what normally remains hidden: bloodlines, the tracings of memory, of grief. Their doll-like, rouged faces stand in artificial contrast, while torsos bend to the edge of gravity, fingers claw as though trying to grasp the fading traces of intimacy. At times they hold each other; at times they merely cling, as though to ward off disappearance.

Josef Laimon’s music drives them on (mostly in three-four time) – trembling scales, voices, whispers, interwoven with electronic textures. And then, almost unbearable: a child’s voice. Eyal’s son, as we later learn. “I can’t live without you,” he sings, again and again. Is it a lament? Or a tender suggestion that the mother lives on within the mother (Sharon Eyal), and that loss can therefore be borne? This ambivalence courses like a pulse through the hall, inescapable for anyone present.

Despite its classical structures, Eyal’s signature remains visible: the group gathers, swells into ritual masses, hands lifted, fingers pointing skyward, bodies propelled by a machine-like tripling. Yet the collective must now be rediscovered – through, and despite, the intimacy of duets, through the fragile closeness of two bodies mourning together.

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And then – that silent scream. A dancer, hand pressed to her mouth, frozen like a figure from Munch’s canvas. Time halts. Grief can no longer be postponed.

Eyal finds again and again striking images, as when dancers in the background seem to peel themselves out of nothingness to join the scene.

What follows is not catharsis, but something subtler, more perilous: the sense that grief has been rendered visible, given form, made danceable. In the final moments, as soft light brushes across the bodies and the ensemble merges once more into a breathing entity, one understands: this work does not speak of overcoming grief, but of carrying it – together.

The applause bursts forth with surprising immediacy, bravos cutting through the charged silence as though some in the audience could no longer withstand the weight of what they had witnessed. For an hour, Sharon Eyal has led her audience into a landscape where intimacy becomes ritual and dance renders visible what would otherwise remain unbearable. We can only guess, too, what the ongoing events in Israel and Palestine are doing to the soul of this artist and her fellow performers.

And though Delay the Sadness might have gained greater strength had Eyal succeeded in letting trance and mourning flow more directly into one another, the piece nonetheless resonates.

The remarkable dancers: Darren Devaney, Juan Gil, Alice Godfrey, Johnny McMillan, Keren Lurie Pardes, Nitzan Ressler, Héloïse Jocquevile, Gregory Lau | Choreography: Sharon Eyal | Co-Creation: Gai Behar | Original Music: Josef Laimon | Lighting Design: Alon Cohen | Costume Design: Sharon Eyal, Gai Behar | 3D Printing Designer: Serge H | Costume Realisation: Bas et Hauts Atelier Paris

A production by Sharon Eyal Dance in co-production with Ruhrtriennale, La Villette, Chaillot – théâtre national de la danse, TorinoDanza, Orsolina 28 Art Foundation, Montpellier Danse Festival, Sadler’s Wells, MART Foundation, Festspielhaus St. Pölten, Théâtre Sénart, Scène nationale, Les Nuits de Fourvière, Lyon.