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By Miranda Stuck
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Published on October 3, 2024
R.O.S.E. at Park Avenue Armory; Photo: Stephanie Berger
Produced by Factory International for Manchester International Festival
Adapted by Park Avenue Armory
Choreography Sharon Eyal
Co-Direction Gai Behar
Co-Direction Caius Pawson of Young
Musical Curation Mattis With of Young
DJ Ben UFO
Creative Direction and Stage Design Daphnée Lanternier
Co-Lighting Design Alon Cohen
Co-Lighting Design Brandon Stirling Baker
Costume Design Maria Grazia Chiuri, Christian Dior Couture
Jewelry and Makeup Design Noa Eyal Beha
Company Dancers: Darren Devaney, Guido Dutlih, Juan Gil, Alice Godfrey, Heloise Jocqueviel, Gregory Lau, Johnny McMillan, Keren Lurie Pardes, Nitzan Ressler
New York Dancers: Julia Ciesielka, Blu Furutate, Antonia Gillette, Michaella Ho, Destinee Jimenez, Nick LaMaina, Natalie Wong, Nina Longid, Julian Sanchez, Luc Simpson, Kailei Sin, Jeremy Villas
September 5-12, 2024
Under the massive vaulted roof of The Park Avenue Armory, amid the flurry of New York Fashion Week, R.O.S.E, a week-long captivating experience with ritualistic dance movement stimulates every one of our senses. The stirring electronic soundscape played by DJ Ben UFO makes two-and-a-half-hours seem to disappear.
R.O.S.E first premiered at the Manchester International Festival in 2023, and was originally created by choreographer Sharon Eyal to make her work accessible to all audiences. An Israeli artist, Eyal is an award-winning dance maker rooted in Gaga-technique. She danced for Batsheva Dance Company, choreographing sixteen works for the group and serving as Batsheva’s associate artistic director between 2003 and 2004.
For her North American premiere of R.O.S.E, Eyal collaborated with producer Gai Behar, an innovator of the underground club scene with whom she has worked with since 2005. Behar immediately understood the power of Eyal’s physicality after witnessing her expertise in the studio. Joined by co-director Caius Pawson, founder of London-based music and arts organization Young, the trio has developed an immersive experience merging Eyal’s fearlessly distinct and commanding movement with the exhilaration of a night club.
Made up of two tribes, Eyal’s company and local New York artists, the cast of dancers, appears approximately 45 minutes into the evening. They interlace the large, excited crowd, with intense concentration, never acknowledging the chaos surrounding them. The distinction between the two groups is revealed through their costumes, androgynous garments exquisitely constructed and designed by Maria Grazia Chiuri with Christian Dior Couture. Eyal’s dancers wear flesh-toned lace while the NYC artists are donned characteristically in black lace. All dancers sport chunky gothic jewelry and stacked rings. It almost feels as if we’ve been popped into a high fashion magazine.
The cast shifts location at intervals of fifteen minutes. Most of the time the NY group and Eyal’s company are conjoined, moving as a unit in subtle curves imitating the vertebrae of a spine, or transitioning between stacked lines and semicircles which open and close like a Venus flytrap.
Appearing oddly sorrowful and serious as black eyeliner ink runs down their faces, the dancers’ limbs jut in unpredictable directions. They twitch, churn, oscillate, and throw their bodies, playing with the vocabulary of Gaga and surprising flashes of Vogue. Amid the circling crowd and booming sound, it is hard to tell whether the tribes are united or competing.
Spectators’ eyes dart around the vast Armory attempting to predict the dancers’ reappearances and traveling patterns. Flashes of red and royal blue slice through clouds of haze as quick flashing strobe lights streak the slanted staircases encompassing the massive ground floor.
In this hypnotic whirlwind of light and sound, R.O.S.E. proves contemporary dance is not a remote art form to only be appreciated by dance cognoscenti, it is a movement for the people.
