Words: Tish Weinstock
Images: Ioannes Papadakis & Fynn Stoldt
Date: 21.11.2025

When I first recorded this interview with renowned dancer Sharon Eyal, the file corrupted immediately, something that has never happened to me in my 15 years as a writer. And that’s because Sharon is a witch. A good witch, according to her friends. But a witch nonetheless. Something that manifests visually through her shadowy aesthetic: the eldritch locks, the smeared charcoal eyes, the hypnotic, smudged rouge lips and the inky, all-black looks. But there is as much light to her as there is darkness, a paradox that is also present in her work. In fact, for Sharon, the distinction between light and dark, princesses and witches is forever blurred.

Even speaking with her briefly, you can feel her power permeate through the screen. And yet words aren’t even her first language. Dance is. She is infinitely more comfortable communicating with movement, articulating feeling and emotion through her body, than with spoken word, something she tells me not just once during our conversation. And maybe that’s why the file corrupted, because Sharon shouldn't be experienced through words, but rather through movement, through dance, through the expression of her body.

Growing up a hyperactive child, her parents put her into dance classes when she was just four years old, and she’s been dancing ever since. “I have to,” she tells me. Honing her craft over the years, it wasn’t until she met her husband, the curator and producer, Gai Behar, in 2005, totally by chance (or was it by magic?) at some club, that she set up her own company, SED, through which she has been able to convey her truest expression of self.

For Sharon, each dance begins from within, before spilling out into movement, to which her troupe of dancers then respond in kind. The result is organic, authentic, kinetic, emotive, and sometimes even spiritual. Of all her core dances, Into The Hairy is perhaps the most celebrated. A tangle of opposites, it explores themes of vulnerability and strength, classical dance and club culture. A play of light and dark; it is haunting, poetic and powerful, brought to life by a group of umbriferous figures, dressed in black lace and with charcoal tears streaming down their eyes.

In her latest offering, a dance created especially for Aeyde, she inhabits the third and final incarnation of the witch, the crone. Historically characterised as a wise old woman, respected for her knowledge, intuition and power, but resolutely feared and vilified because of it, the crone is often a projection of male anxiety. It also represents our cultural attitude toward ageing. As women grow older, they are expected to wither away, and yet the crone remains defiant. Instead of withdrawing, she takes up even more space, and as such, she has become a powerful symbol of rebellion for women today. And who better to personify this than Sharon?

In addition to this, Sharon is also working on a new dance about her mother, which she describes as incredibly sad and spiritual. “If we’re talking about witches,” she laughs, “My mother was certainly one of them.” Like mother, like daughter.

Watch 'The Crone' here.