words romana dalgleish photos ben rudick

Is dance the movement of meaning or the conveyance of confusion?

To picture Hofesh Shechter, the self-proclaimed existentialist, as a dark and gloomy character would be an easy mistake. He may be resigned to futility but that does not stop the choreographer from throwing himself into the chaos and coming up with contemporary dance that people can’t help but identify with. The articulate man with fine features transforms on stage into a ferocious shell of a being with only the fervor remaining. As he speaks about his work, the combination of pessimistic old-man-like frustrations and a childlike determination to make the best of things is magnetic – as with his work, blink and you’re transfixed.

The dance coming out of the Hofesh Shechter Company is animalistic, isolating and jarring. The two pieces they are bringing to the 20th Macau Arts Festival, Uprising and In Your Rooms are uncompromising in their endeavour to make audiences think. One critic has pointed out that Shechter ‘doesn’t seem to have anything to say about the state of affairs… it just is’ and to an extent he is right. The choreographer affirms that his work, if it does anything, creates confusion. ‘It doesn’t have an agenda or a political propaganda behind it. The more confusion it creates the better it is, as confusion makes people think for themselves, try to figure out the reality for themselves.’ And then he adds, ‘I see [my work] as representing individuals, their emotions and their behaviour. That can include reaction to social structures but it is only part of what the work deals with, it is not the main focus of it.’

As with all young Israelis, Shechter undertook his country’s compulsory three years military service but, fortunately, for the sake of his dance he was allowed to carry out a less intense version after the first year. ‘I had what they call a “special status”, which meant that I was training and performing with the Batsheva Ensemble during the day and working in the army offices in the evening. It was tiring but I was very lucky I was able to continue with my dance training.’ Military influences are everywhere in his work – even if it was only for a year, the full-time duty clearly affected him.

But when asked what conflict he would like to resolve if he could, Shechter is enigmatic. ‘Get Batman and the Joker together, they are really
pretty much the same,’ he says. Whether or not he is referring to bigger things than the comic book characters, the answer says a lot about how Shechter sees conflict, and what his years in the army didn’t manage imprint in him was a belief in the State: ‘For me,’ he says, ‘nationalism means that someone is so horribly lost that he prefers to follow a virtual entity rather than face the chaos of life.’ Nor does religion hold any answers: ‘Religion is incredibly primitive,’ he tells me. ‘This is not a judgement, it’s a fact.’

The Hofesh Shechter Company’s work evokes feelings we all recognize, highlights patterns we have all followed and then compels us to ask ourselves why. But it offers no higher wisdom because Shechter does not make any claim to such a thing. All he can do is try to communicate what the usual exchange of words cannot: ‘Movement can capture the moment in a very special way,’ he says. ‘It can defy and challenge our conceptions.’ And that, he says, is his aspiration.

Judging by the wide variety of people flocking to his productions, it’s an aspiration audiences appreciate – apparently they don’t mind being asked the difficult questions and left without answers. ‘Our company enjoys the attendance of a lot people that would normally see text theatre, together with a lot of young people that find the work exciting and somehow can identify with it. The work is very rich and layered and in a sense I make my work for the individuals that want to be touched and moved,’ Shechter says. ‘I’m trying not to limit myself to think that my audience is of a specific cut of society.’

It is telling that, when asked what he would do if he could no long dance or compose (he is very involved in creating the music the company uses), the choreographer says he would study physics, the science that quantifies all we can find: The science that organizes the chaos while digging for more. That he would find that appealing is oddly poetic – it is really not too far off from what he is doing now.

The Hofesh Shechter Company is performing Uprising/In your Rooms at the 20th Macau Arts Festival. See them on May 29 and 30 at 8pm at the Macau Cultural Centre Grand Auditorium. Tickets are MOP$200, MOP$150 and MOP$100, from (852) 2380 5083.