Latest news with #Shechter
Telegraph
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Hofesh Shechter interview: ‘The British are all for classical ballet, but they think dance is too arty'
Hofesh Shechter thinks we are confused by modern dance. 'People are misguided,' he says. 'English audiences, in particular, expect to come in, understand it, and have a good conversation about it afterwards.' The Israeli-born, soon-to-be-British choreographer would prefer people to approach contemporary dance 'more like a concert' – something you experience 'through your senses'. He adds: 'You never go to a classical concert thinking, I'm going to draw a conclusion at the end and then I will say one clever sentence to the person next to me.'' Since exploding onto the British scene nearly two decades ago with pieces like Uprising (which plays with masculine identity) and Political Mother (about indoctrination and totalitarianism), 49-year-old Shechter has shaken up modern dance. His shows, renowned for their booming soundtracks, which he often composes, can feel like a rock concert, although his latest artistic collaboration saw him co-direct a play. In Oedipus at the Old Vic, with Matthew Warchus, his dancers made a wordless, electrifying Greek chorus, punctuating Sophocles's drama like an excess of exclamation marks. Their contribution was exhilarating and visceral, words Shechter uses again and again to describe his work, as we chat over tea (a soothing lemon and ginger with honey for his sore throat) in London's Groucho Club. Shechter's input was a huge hit, enlivening an oddly stilted production that featured a critically mauled Rami Malek as Oedipus. The experience was 'a bit of a suicide mission', he says about doing something new with such a well-known text. 'How did I feel? It was a really great challenge! I was frustrated! People really did their best with a mass of curiosity and love to the art forms,' he adds. I wonder if British audiences, with our love for classical ballet and musicals, struggle with contemporary dance. Shechter blames the terminology. 'People watch dance in a theatre, which is a misleading word here because a theatre is a place where stories are told and narratives are given and people feel like they should understand something.' It's more helpful, he adds, to think about contemporary dance in terms of 'dreaming at night', which both does and does not explain why his newest creation, which premiered at Sadler's Wells last autumn, is called Theatre of Dreams. Not that Shechter is in the business of explaining much when it comes to his productions. 'I always prefer for people to know nothing,' he says. With the second UK outing for Theatre of Dreams coming up at the Brighton Festival, audiences can expect to lose themselves in a pulsating dreamworld that ricochets between fantasy and nightmare, enlivened by endless lighting-enhanced 'jump cuts', something of a Shechter trademark. It's folk dance meets clubland, with a score co-written by Shechter and his regular collaborator Yaron Engler. Or in his words: 'It's like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. It's going to play with your mind, it's going to play with your heart, it's going to play with your thoughts. Let it. Ride the wave and let go,' he says, his tuneful accent a gentle fusion of Israeli, French and the odd bit of American ('gonna'). It's hard to fathom the speed of Shechter's success looking back. Five years after arriving in London by Eurostar to work as a jobbing drummer in late 2002, his nascent company was headlining shows at Sadler's Wells. The internet boom helped – he uploaded Uprising to YouTube – as well as generous Arts Council funding. 'I think the visceral nature of the work, the honesty, the rawness of it, is what people connected to,' he says. Born in Jerusalem in 1975, Shechter was brought up by his father after his parents divorced. He did some folk dance at school but discovered ballet aged 15. 'That's very late. I was horrible at it,' he says. He stuck with dance, joining the junior company of Tel Aviv-based Batsheva, Israel's main contemporary dance company. Dancing gave him a special status, so he 'didn't really serve' with the Israel Defence Force, which is mandatory for Israeli citizens: 'I was this kind of a cleric in a high school.' In any case, he soon left, quitting both Batsheva and Israel. 'I didn't want to be there. The politics is way too loud, and it's a small place.' He hasn't visited for a while. 'Not since the war started. I have two little girls [aged 10 and 12] and it's all very distressing for them.' Shechter, who is lithe and tall and could pass for one of his own dancers, has the intense air of someone who is fulfilling his fate. 'What interests me is to make people feel connected through music and dance. I feel that it's an important mission that can melt the problematic nature of politics, which is polarising,' he says, never less than earnest. He likens the power of dancing with an audience to 'a ceremony… like the high priests, thousands of years ago'. The 'weirdness' of dance obsesses him. 'For me, it's a place to really explore the big unknowns. Dance is a great medium to look at stuff like death that we can talk about but we'll never understand.' Dance is also fun, something that comes across well in the 2022 movie En Corps (Rise, in English), a love letter to contemporary dance by the French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch that features both his company and Shechter himself; he persuades an injured young Parisian ballerina, Marion Barbeau (a principal dancer with Paris Opera) to swap ballet for a role in his company after she injures her ankle. It didn't get a UK release ('English people, right?') but is a must-stream. In reality, it's rare for classical dancers to make the switch to contemporary. 'They hold themselves very straight and my work is about flow and [being] gooey,' says Shechter, who is just back from touring Theatre of Dreams in Korea. In Britain, dancers come to contemporary dance 'very late', which puts them at a disadvantage compared to their European, Asian or American contemporaries. He adds: 'The culture here is very traditional – it encourages classical ballet or musical theatre but contemporary dance is [seen as] a bit too arty.' More young people should dance, full stop, he thinks. 'I feel that young people might be lost for purpose and I think dance is a great one in focusing people back to your body, to life, to the simple things.' In From England With Love, a recent piece for his junior company, Shechter II, his subject was the fractured state of his adopted homeland (he is soon to become a British citizen; 'I want to be able to vote.') He has no plans for a similar sister piece about Israel. 'There is too much nuance, there is too much argument, there is too much disagreement. It doesn't interest me as an artist to go there,' he says. Despite having something of a reputation for work with a political bent, he insists that it 'happens in the dust of politics… It looks at people in the shadow of the social structures that we created. We did our best and they're still quite sh-tty.' He wants to reprise his earlier creations. 'I'd rework them a bit, but bring them back. A lot of this work is unfortunately still relevant. I say unfortunately because all these works are dealing with the oppression and the survival of human beings inside the wonderful and pathetic structures we have created for ourselves.' Just remember: it's fine not to understand what you're watching.
Korea Herald
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Hofesh Shechter brings exploration of subconscious to 'Theater of Dreams'
In Asia, choreographer's latest work to be performed only in Seongnam, Shanghai Hofesh Shechter, the internationally acclaimed choreographer known for his raw, hypnotic movement and pulsating soundscapes, is bringing his company's latest work, 'Theater of Dreams,' to Seongnam Arts Center March 14-15. This time, the London-based Israeli choreographer and dancer delves into the world of fantasy and the subconscious. 'I started exploring this show thinking about dreams, the world of dreams, but also our dreams in life―what we want, what are the reasons for the things that we want? And then our personal desires and wishes,' said Shechter in an email interview with The Korea Herald, on Friday. He described the work as an 'action-filled' performance, with the dancers' physicality highly intensified and a wide range of dynamic movements throughout the show, revealing fears, hopes, desires and a myriad of emotions that seep into both our dreams and waking thoughts. ''Theater of Dreams' looks at what is real and what is a fantasy. And what better place to look at this kind of subject than a stage, which is part reality, part fantasy,' said Shechter. 'I came up with this idea that the stage operates almost like a brain or the subconscious. It shows us some things and reveals and hides some other things. And the deeper we go into the stage, the more interesting things we see―that are connected to our existence as human beings.' After premiering in Paris in June 2024, 'Theater of Dreams' has toured major cities in Europe as part of a global collaborations with 20 co-produced theaters. It will be performed in only two cities in Asia―Seongnam and Shanghai―March 7-9. Thirteen dancers appear and reappear on stage at various moments, accompanied by a small band of three musicians who play live. The performance features a prerecorded soundtrack filled with electronic sounds and voices, set against the backdrop of Shechter's trademark cinematic soundscape, which he composed himself. Shechter, who began playing the piano at the age of six, expressed his enjoyment of composing and emphasized its importance in creating 'a full experience.' 'It's a conversation between the sounds and the imagery that is never ending,' said Shechter about composing and choreography. 'It happens simultaneously. I will find some sounds that inspire me, I'll take them to the studio and start making movements for these sounds. Then I'll get inspired by the movements, go back home, record more music.' Shechter emphasized the significance of being inside the performance hall as a 'visceral experience,' where you can see, smell and sense the stage and the performance. And also when a group of 1,000 or more people gathers in a room to share an experience, it creates a unique atmosphere that highlights the powerful connection among us. 'This is something we did for tens of thousands of years from the dawn of being a human being,' he said. 'There is a realization that our lives are very similar, the experiences we go through is very similar be it difficult or beautiful or amazing or whatever it is. And that we are all connected. There is a sense of a very communal experience.'
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in theatre: Oedipus; Elektra review
What a glut of Greeks on the London stage. Within four months, two productions of Oedipus, one of Elektra. Before Christmas, Robert Icke's superb rendering of Oedipus showed what Sophocles can offer in a desolate age: steady clear-sightedness and tumultuous feeling; an urgent present and the recovery of a long past; the recognition that injustice, though deeply buried, will rear up, and that no creed offers an instant solution. We have, like creatures at a play, to look steadily, without moralising, at the world we have made. These illuminations are not realised in this past week's productions. Still, there are glints. The most radical stroke in the new staging of Oedipus by Hofesh Shechter and Matthew Warchus is the most exhilarating. The wordless chorus is made up of dancers, choreographed by Shechter. They stamp and spring: advancing in a line as if performing a haka; huddled together, swaying, reaching upwards and outwards so that they look like an unclenching fist. They do not outline the plot, nor are they characters, but they are more than simply mood music. They act upon the drama – and where more needed than in Oedipus? – like a bubbling unconscious. They move to Shechter's score, which has at its centre an insistent drum like a heart taking revenge. A rhythm like a train gathering speed runs through the evening. Seven years ago in The Writer, Ella Hickson proved herself a dramatist who can shrewdly and subtly unpick certainty. Her version of Oedipus has vivid flashes, sometimes with a Stoppardian turn: 'People are always dying. It is their defining feature.' She gives the plot a plausible climate crisis background – those dancers stamp first through dust and then rain – and grants Oedipus's wife-mother, Jocasta, a particular scepticism and strength. Indira Varma is both stately and intimate. She subdues Hickson's excessive casualness, giving idioms – 'not everything is up for grabs' – an ironic roll. She blends with the sculptural quality of Rae Smith's design: a translucent white platform, the steady eye of a setting sun, long depths glimpsed at the back of the stage; majesty made uncertain by Tom Visser's lighting, with its melting blues and violets. Varma's is the performance of the evening. She is not matched by American actor Rami Malek – he of Bohemian Rhapsody and more ominously Mr Robot. It might be that his rigid face is an imitation of a Greek mask. Perhaps his awkward, angular movements are an attempt not only to suggest Oedipus's bad foot, but to externalise his anguish. It is hard, though, to find any reason for his weird phrasing, with words arbitrarily emphasised and long pauses in the middle of lines leaving verbs and their subjects vainly waving at each other. This is the latest bit of star casting not to work. The Canadian poet Anne Carson, translator of Elektra at the Duke of York's, has described the play's heroine as a 'vessel of eccentric sound', a woman whose voice, 'a thesaurus of screams', is her sole weapon as she seeks revenge for the death of her father, Agamemnon, at the hands of her mother, Clytemnestra. Marvel superheroine Brie Larson is the main reason for seeing Daniel Fish's all-over-the-place production. Shaven-headed, in a Bikini Kill T-shirt, she snarls into a handheld mic, slides in and out of song, lashes the stage with her anger. She is a cross between Hamlet and the unlistened-to prophet Cassandra. The other jewel is Carson's translation itself: caustic, forceful, filling the air with memorable images without losing the pulse of action. For Elektra, her mother is 'a punishment cage wrapped round my life'; the death of a character is 'just a crack where the light slipped through'. Nevertheless, the words are glimmers in a murky evening. This is a sprint of 75 minutes but it trudges. Fish directed a revelatory Oklahoma!, stripping away traditional swagger to create one of the best shows of 2022, but here he does not so much strip back as flay the drama into separate pieces: some are striking, but none of them feed each other. Ted Hearne's impressive music is sung by a silvery-voiced chorus, but the staging is sluggish: seated on a revolve (yes, yes, revenge is a cycle), the women in backless satin gowns might be decorative models on a wedding cake. As Orestes, Patrick Vaill bursts in dressed as a rally driver, capably delivering a gabbled commentary. Stockard Channing (in furs) is a sceptical but stolid Clytemnestra. Jeremy Herbert's design is baffling: a white wall behind the revolve that rises and sinks unpredictably; mics, lighting equipment, and an uncommented-on barrage balloon dangling in one corner. At times, it looks like a rehearsal room. If only this were just a rehearsal. Star ratings (out of five) Oedipus ★★★Elektra ★★ Oedipus is at the Old Vic, London, until 29 March Elektra is at the Duke of York's theatre, London, until 12 April
The Guardian
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Oedipus review – delirious dancers and booming soundtrack shake the plasterwork
Dance in Greek tragedy – why not? The ancient Athenians did it, their choruses a weave of sound and movement, though no one really knows what shapes they threw back in the fifth century. They probably didn't give the hands-in-the-air delirium of Hofesh Shechter's spectacular dancers in this new version of Oedipus – but dance becomes the irresistible core of the tragedy. Shechter and Matthew Warchus co-direct a text by Ella Hickson (The Writer). In a freak of scheduling, they follow Robert Icke's inexorable modern-dress Oedipus: two very different takes on Sophocles' family values. Here, Thebes gasps with drought under a harsh red sun and Tom Visser's lighting, a dust storm in charcoal and crimson. King Oedipus resolves to save his people, either by leading them to fertile ground or solving the ancient murder that a faction of hardline believers argue has angered the gods. Big mistake, huge. Rami Malek's air of having dropped from another planet has served him well on film as a Bond villain or Freddie Mercury. He brings outsider vibes to Oedipus – speaking in an elusive American drawl, adopting the mantle of leadership like a haunted robot. Confession later fractures his speech – he becomes shambling, disjointed, bones awkwardly resettling in his body. The truth remakes Oedipus, and then undoes him. Oedipus claims to lead with 'courage, conviction and ingenuity' – the very qualities which brought him to power will destroy him as he stubbornly pursues his terrible identity. As the state's climate change emergency is derailed by a cold case, he sifts through box files and summons the prophet Tiresias. 'Bring in a raving hermit, that'll do it,' scoffs his wife, Jocasta – though Cecilia Noble makes a strikingly disgruntled seer, feet planted wide, unleashing the truth in a wide-mouthed cackle. Shechter's soundtrack of fervent chants and wild drums rattles the Old Vic's plasterwork, volume rising like panic, and his dancers are on fire. They're mosh pit ecstatics – hands raised in plea or pleasure, lolloping, squirming. They scrabble, shuffle or form a serpentine scrawl of bodies. There's no literal transposition of Sophocles' choruses – no dance equivalent of 'call no man happy till he dies' – but their delirium leeches into your blood. You feel them lost in the stomp, consumed by physical impulses even as Oedipus struggles to unwind a mystery. 'People need to struggle with nuance and difficulty,' Oedipus huffs. But while the movement offers a superb, needling ambiguity, Hickson's text is parched. She struggles to find a resonant public register ('we feel your pain') or an intimacy for her private scenes: 'Darkness is the soil in which I nurture my humility' sounds like a shonky translation. Indira Varma's elegantly sceptical queen (cheekbones, pashmina) gets the best lines, resisting her brother Creon (Nicholas Khan), a black-clad theocrat with an itch for power. The ancient pollution is named and rain falls again. The blissed-out chorus spin, feet raising happy spumes of water – they appear fundamentally unbothered by the destructive, seamy dynamics of the royal drama. You're left with a sense of futility – what has it all been for, the destructive pursuit of truth, the secrets and cries?
