Forces

In BUSK, created in 2010 for the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York, Aszure Barton invites us to enjoy the fragility, tenderness, and resilience that exist within the human experience. BUSK is an attentive gaze cast on the physical unfurling of the human psyche to a spirited score. Every facet of the dancers’ bodies and minds are engaged. The dancers must tap into the collective – a hive mind – in order to execute Barton’s layered and intricate choreographic structures which then give way to the nuance of each individual. Deriving its title as much from the

Spanish word for search (buscar) as from the English verb for street performance, the performers of BUSK present themselves as they are and invite the audience to enter with them in the search for the inherent wisdom of the body.

Trepidation, loneliness, strength and resilience are the four characteristics that dominate Sharon Eyal’s choreography of Strong, created with Staatsballett Berlin in 2019, a work that carries the characteristic movements and distinctive music of Eyal’s pieces: a techno soundtrack alternated by drums and bass as lights and movement project an ecstatic experience for seventeen spellbound dancers. Strong develops a magnetism of bodies between the dancers which, as they come closer together, increase the eponymous strength of this performance. Strong is a composition of nervous movements, seemingly exhausting but light and supple.

The strength is in the group, but also in the alienation and solitude. The result is emblematic of the cohesion that derives from a common mission or belief. Sharon Eyal’s work is about the shared pleasure that sometimes comes from pain, as the dancers know well, or the pleasure of fighting with the same strength for the same goals.