Dancing around the problem
The Age
Monday October 5, 2009
Celebrated choreographer Hofesh Shechter tells Stephanie Bunbury he only started dancing to overcome his shyness. THIS is a story to give heart to every embarrassing disco dad, every clodhopper with two left feet and everyone whose attempts to strip the willow have created the dancing equivalent of woodchips. Hofesh Shechter, the hottest new choreographer in Britain, is telling me how he got into dance in the first place.It's unlikely, it's optimistic, it puts a smile on your face. Maybe the people at Disney should hear this.Back at home in Israel, Shechter says, he was a timid, nerdy boy who spent most of his time playing computer games. Then, about the age of 11, he was nudged by a teacher into auditioning for the local youth folk-dancing club. They took him, he says, because they would have taken any boy."And I sort of fell in love with the social side of it," he says."I had been inside my own bubble and it felt there was a bit of a way out for me, that I could break free. I started to go: 'To hell with it, I have to speak with people!' "The actual dancing worked in much the same way."Being a very physically closed person, that attracted me. I was totally not flexible. I couldn't stand up in front of people. And that challenge of just letting go and going for it, doing something that felt quite crazy at the time, I think affected me." So much so, in fact, that he continued to study dance at the arts academy in Jerusalem €” he could have studied piano just as easily, but decided the hours of lonely practice were too much like the computer games €” for "the social side, the lightness of being in art school". Now here he is, a fully blossomed wunderkind. There is hope for us all.Watching Shechter's pieces, however, suggests something much less random at work underneath his desire to make friends: a driven, determined and quite prodigious talent. It was this, certainly, that took him to glory at Sadler's Wells Theatre within five years of his making his first small dance work, a trajectory any choreographer might envy. His brand of dance is vivid and unashamedly masculine in a brawny, rock'n'roll way, with an undertow of philosophical anxiety. It's not the kind of thing, in short, to gladden the hearts of the people behind High School Musical.The first piece on the program he is bringing to Australia is Uprising, a piece that plays with the interactions and solitariness of seven men. In Your Rooms is "an essentially bleak view of modern neuroses", as The Independent summarised it. There are women in this piece, although they are subsumed by its pall of testosterone.This macho exclusivity is one of the few things for which Shechter has copped critical flak. "Well, I'm doing it from my body, which is a male body, so it won't be a huge discovery if it has a male energy to it," he shrugs. "But the subject of this evening is really these boys; the girls are giving more angles on that subject."But the criticisms must have provoked him as he set himself the task, earlier this year, of making a work with only women that turned out to be, if anything, even more relentlessly visceral.I suspect a lot of the information deposited in Shechter's inner self derives from his musical education. He writes much of the music that he uses €” thundering but engaging scores with undertones of the industrial and overtones of melodic cello €” and it came as no surprise, after seeing the thumping, pulsing In Your Rooms, to learn that he had spent some time after he left Israel studying percussion.When he thinks about it, he says, drumming affected his dancing very directly."You know, it's a funny thing. I did feel something physically," he muses. "That the co-ordination in my legs was stronger. My arms are a very strong initiator of movement for me, the legs always felt just a bit . . . there. But, studying drums, it's very little muscles in your legs you have to learn to control in order to keep rhythm."Shechter continues to appear on stage "for my health" but insists he is no great shakes as a dancer. "I always felt that the creative side rather than the performer's side will be a stronger side for me. I don't know, I feel you can't really change and therefore I would always be limited as a performer €” this block, this shyness, this judgment will always be there."As a creator, however, fear is crucial. Everything he makes is created on the hoof, through the rehearsal process."The element of the unknown is powerful in creating some strange things. I don't know how it would feel to walk confidently into a studio, but I don't think I would want that," he says.Again, it is the risky moment of letting go of the fear one feels, of being prepared to look stupid, that acts as the creative spark. However did that folk-dancing teacher spot this in him, more than 20 years ago? He certainly knew his man.
© 2009 The Age
