From psychopathic vaudeville to the comfort of physical contact
Hofesh Shechter Company: Double Murder Sadler’s Wells, London EC1 ★★★★★
Well, the past 19 months certainly haven’t blunted Hofesh Shechter’s appetite for mischief (or destruction) – if anything, they seem to have swelled it. In the past, the Israeli-born, London-based choreographer has drolly tackled existential angst (2007’s In Your Rooms), intergalactic strife (2010’s Political Mother) and global chaos (2013’s Sun). Now it’s human fallibility’s turn.
Clowns, his reworked 2016 piece that launches this new double-bill, begins with one member of his muscular, 10-strong troupe delivering an earnest-sounding little speech about how nice it is to return to normal, only for someone to screech out “New normal!” from backstage. This, you suddenly realise, is part of the act. And it’s an act that soon finds a decidedly bracing gear.
Within seconds, all 10 have bounded on stage to Offenbach’s celebrated Galop infernal. Dressed like old-school travelling players, with some of them wearing clownish ruffs around their necks, they proceed to cavort about like lemurs on amphetamines and mime out all manner of unpleasantness. They repeatedly hit and kick, shoot each other in the head, slit each other’s throats, the victims instantly jumping back on to their feet with smiles as broad as their assailants’, the whole thing apparently one big jolly jape.
After that vaudeville-bypsychopaths hors d’oeuvre, the stage suddenly goes dark, except for beams of light shining out across the smoke-filled house, the decet now in a motionless, rather beautiful line. But this restoration, perhaps, of some sort of natural (if spooky) order does not last long. With the assistance of Shechter’s own, increasingly grinding percussive score, and many pin-sharp, typically Shechterian “jump cuts” between different episodes and corners of the stage, the piece proceeds as an alternation between that sort of solemnity and the merry, crescendoing, endlessly repeated ultraviolence of the opening.
What Shechter seems to have in his sights here is a modern culture in which we are all addicted to and desensitised by violence, craving ever bigger hits of it: from TV, film, video games, wherever we can find it. However, while the 40-minute work’s endless returning loops therefore make perfect thematic sense, as enjoyment they yield ever-diminishing returns, as if desensitising us to the piece itself.
Still, if Clowns is perhaps, then, a partial own goal, it is nevertheless also a smart, punchily performed and impeccably produced one. And The Fix, which follows, makes a striking contrast.
Conceived and created during lockdown, and absolutely a product of it, this ditches the nihilism in favour of a fundamental, quintessentially 2021 truth: that there’s nothing like warm physical human interaction. Here, the troupe are in civvies, very much playing people as opposed to the ciphers of Clowns. Shechter often slows his round-shouldered, earthbound steps right down to a tense, virtual standstill, as the performers cluster, embrace, gather together as if on the lookout for some distant, invisible foe. One striking passage towards the end has them in a near-lotus position, as Tom Visser’s lighting bathes the stage and Shechter’s elemental sonic maelstrom fills their and our ears: a collective grace under fire.
As with Clowns, there’s too much of The Fix. And, although there’s undeniable chutzpah in having the (suddenly masked) dancers finally descend into the stalls and hug audience members, this feels mimsy and literal: the piece itself should be the “hug”.
Still, Shechter’s choreographic and musical “voice” is, reassuringly, as distinctive as ever, and all credit to him for continuing to make dance works with an IQ. That it’s wonderful to have him and his troupe at long last back, live on the Sadler’s stage goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway.