Love Chapter 2 is the second work from Israel’s L-E-V Dance Company, which the Sydney Opera House is presenting under the umbrella title of Love Cycle. Created by the company’s founding choreographer Sharon Eyal in 2018, Love Chapter 2 followed her 2016 work OCD Love with which it is programmed here.

Love Chapter 2. Photographs © Prudence Upton

Working again with her co-creator Gai Behar, and sound artist Ori Lichtik, who plays the techno score live, Love Chapter 2 is an abstract piece and even darker in tone than OCD Love. Its theme is the devastating aftermath of a failed love affair, with the dancers conveying trauma, heartbreak and emotional desolation. It’s useful to read Eyal’s somewhat elliptical program notes which say: “A sense of disaster, death of all hope and of ending, crawl like an illness via the dancers’ bodies. Now that there are no limits we are dangerous to ourselves. Liquids of information, the pain of loss and mental exhaustion mutate into a big heart coated with darkness and matter made from guarded secrets…..This creation is a reason to cry.”

As a drumbeat kicks in, followed by a ticking clock, the...