July 11, 2025 |
It’s not a radical thing to chuck the audience in the throes of a performance. But Jerusalem-born, France-based Sharon Eyal and her collaborators – trailblazing producer Gai Behar and the music and arts organisation Young, founded by Caius Pawson – manage to do so in a radical way. In the fully immersive dance spectacle R.O.S.E, now showing at Sadler’s Wells East (July 11-13), conceived and choreographed by Eyal, the line between onlooker and performer is dramatically blurred.
Bringing together an eclectic crowd of pseudo-partygoers that counted the likes of both East London fashion kids and middle-aged mothers – plus the odd group of posho gay boys – the scene was set for something truly out of the ordinary.
Eyal and Behar, who met in a nightclub in the late ‘90s have held the pulse of nightlife and the human body at the centre of their work – Eyal as a Batsheva Dance Company-trained choreographer and Behar as a visionary nightlife curator and producer – for over a decade. Here, they beg the question: “How do you harness the raw power, energy and freedom of dance in a space that belongs to everyone?” And in this third iteration of R.O.S.E (it premiered at the Manchester International Festival in 2023 and went on to premiere at Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall in 2024) the duo answer by obliterating the traditional stage altogether, plunging dancers and audience into a shared vortex of ecstatic motion.
Club vibes were enforced from the start; security even popped a sticker over your phone camera on the way in as though this were any old London discotheque. Not so far from it, this was a rave reimagined as high art – or perhaps high art disguised as a rave.
As I descended the stairs into a darkened room, open, with ample space for movement, cast in a heady haze of smoke and pulsating ultraviolet lights, the transformation from passive spectatorship to communal ritual began almost imperceptibly.
The crowd jumped and swayed, hitting two step after two step as DJ Call Super (previous iterations tapped DJ Ben UFO) spun his intoxicating sound – it really was intoxicating, not only did the bass reverberate through my body, vibrating up from the Marley flooring and through my body like a tidal wave of energy. Gyration was inevitable. One couple embraced in an eruption of kisses, laughter and radical hedonism. Another group of friends jerked and jived like they couldn’t physically contain it, looking like The Twist contest dancers in Pulp Fiction, but sweatier and more feral.
Then, as a heady mix of jungle, EDM and sporadic sounds – techy, alien-like, sax solos, scraping shards of metal – filled the room, came the real show. And that radical sense of hedonism only grew.
It started with a group of eight clad in desert raider-esque leotards designed by the illustrious Maria Grazia Chiuri. Crafted from an intricate nude spandex lace, the costumes looked as though they’d been spliced up into fractured, almost ritualistic pieces and strung back together with suspenders like delicate cobwebs as the dancers contorted their bodies in anatomical motion. Bones and muscles seemed to stretch and protrude, with bodies morphing like alien entities made of dark matter, twisting, converging. The dancers came so close I could see the beads of sweat – or fear getting smacked if I didn’t move in time. Yet they were more than aware of their surroundings. They had to be, to perform Eyal’s off-kilter choreography among a crowd that bent and folded at the dancers’ command, that command being as simple as a gaze in the eye and a step in the right direction.
It was hard to see at times, and easy at others, but it created this visceral, magnetic pull toward the action. You moved, weaving through the crowd, standing on your tiptoes and lifting your chin to get a better look. The moments where you couldn’t see weren’t a bother. They offered a reprieve from the engagement, a chance to feel the exotic music without distraction.
And then, a short dance break. And after that, the dancers rematerialised as if from nothing. A solo male dancer, hood up, John Lennon-esque tiny black glasses and a rucksack on, emerged to re-energise the crowd before rejoining the group for another evocative routine. Animalistic at times, primal, with hints of Persian influences.
Makeup helped twist reality: red tears streamed down cheeks, wired eyes stared out. A shirtless dancer moved like a conductor to the other hooded movers. Then a dancer got up on the bar, her bag carrying a bouquet of red roses. She convulsed, before being lifted from the bar, descending and handing out roses to those close enough to catch them. The extraterrestrial promenade unfolded until the light faded to black.
Another dance break, during which some guests carried roses. A few kept a hold of them for the rest of the night, tucked behind ears or twirled absently in hands.
Then another dance began, this time in a lift, descending the tiered platforms that bordered the space, and reemerging in the centre of the room. It was a shorter routine this time but somehow it felt more powerful – not in its pull but in its resonant emotion. Something deep, sorrowful and triumphant seemed to wash through the space. Redemption, perhaps.
Another dance break.
Dancers reemerged behind the decks next, moving with Call Super like some strange hybrid of Boiler Room, Dune, Bob Fosse and something deliciously uncanny. They circled down to the centre of the dance floor, shaking shoulders like their lives depended on it, then pushed the crowd outward into a circle, leaving a lone male dancer to perform a physically impressive solo – mantis-like, insectile, almost demonic but not quite. As the crowd circled him, it seemed to give a new definition to the meaning of the mosh pit.
He was then replaced by a serpentine woman who, through sharp, erratic movements, called for cheers from the crowd. At times, the subtleties of her motion contrasted the intensity of the sound: a beat dropped and she simply shifted her hips slightly on time before bursting into full-bodied movement.
As she departed, the crowd refilled that open circle, once again moving and shaking, only for more dancers to come – a high-energy duet, a trio, then suddenly all eight of them were there and gone again as fast as they came. For a while, the routines carried on with a viral energy that completely enraptured the room, but then the lights went dark. And when they came up again, the dancers invited the crowd in to dance with them. And suddenly it wasn’t a show anymore – it was just a plain ‘ol party.
R.O.S.E is a party, yes – but also a daring experiment in dissolving the line between art and abandon, leaving us all somewhere between spectator, dancer, and beautifully willing sacrifice to the beat.
Book your tickets here. Photography courtesy of Sadler’s Wells East.
