The Look by Sharon Eyal, Portraits: Leo Lerus/Sharon Eyal, Ici by Leo Lerus
Dear Shaded Viewers,
The 3 pm performance by the Ballet de l’Opéra national du Rhin with Léo Lérus and Sharon Eyal at Théâtre de la Ville, in collaboration with Chaillot – Théâtre national de la Danse, is one of those programs that quietly reminds you why you go out in Paris in the afternoon at all. Ici and The Look sit side by side like two parts of the same heartbeat: one rooted in Guadeloupean memory, the other projected into a futuristic trance.
Lérus’ Ici brings a contemporary lens to traditional Guadeloupean dance, threading Gwo‑ka–inflected rhythms through luminous, intimate ensembles that celebrate both individual bodies and the collective. There’s a grounded, solar quality to the piece—the sense of a community that remembers where it comes from even as it moves forward.
Eyal’s The Look, created in 2019 for Batsheva and now absorbed by this ballet company, shifts the energy into a darker, hypnotic register. Inspired by Gandhi’s “Nobody can hurt me without my permission”, it becomes an engaged trance about resilience in the face of violence and oppression, driven by Ori Lichtik’s relentless score. The dancers morph into a single organism that advances toward us, their classical rigor fused to Eyal’s unmistakable language of undulating spines, sharp footwork and microscopic shifts of the gaze.
Born in Jerusalem in 1971, Eyal spent nearly two decades with Batsheva, where she danced, then served as associate artistic director and house choreographer before launching her own company with Gai Behar (now S‑E‑D, formerly L‑E‑V). Her work, which has travelled from Norway to Chicago and far beyond, is instantly recognizable: a hybrid of club culture, minimalism and raw physical insistence. Seeing that language inhabit the Ballet de l’Opéra national du Rhin’s dancers—under Bruno Bouché’s adventurous direction—gives The Look a new tensile clarity.
Together, Ici and The Look offer not just contrast but complicity: two artists who once crossed paths at Batsheva now frame a diptych that moves from sun to night, from remembered territory to imagined futures. In the concentrated frame of this 3 pm performance, the program feels generous, necessary, and very much of this city, right now.
Later,
Diane
