Wednesday, September 30, 2009

In Your Rooms, Hofesh Schecter Company

Review by Tony Martins

Sure, just like almost everyone else who has seen them, I was dazzled during performances of Uprising and In Your Rooms by the Hofesh Schecter Company last night at the National Arts Centre (there's another performance tonight). But by now all the English-language superlatives have been used to describe this global dance sensation, so let me mirror the dancer/composer/choreographer's method with a bare bones description of the viewing experience: You cannot look away.

Schecter simply doesn't let your eyes wander for a second. The stark white lighting changes drastically every 30 seconds or less, as do the intense emotions in any given moment, shifting constantly from frantic to intimate, from political to personal, from chaos to control. You can immediately relate to the urgency of the movement because it is so primal, so universal.

At 34 years of age, the UK-based Schecter seems a child of the information age, where attention span is brief and a rising media bombardment threatens the stability of the human condition. No wonder he and his fellow dancers seem so desperate (Schecter himself danced in Uprising). The performers pulse and throb athletically, often frantically, right along with the pounding of Schecter's drum-driven live music.

Uprising is only 26-minutes long for good reason: the intensity would be nigh impossible to maintain for much longer—especially since most of the dancers must towel off for In Your Rooms just 20 minutes later.

Partly inspired by 2006 youth protests in Paris, the all-male Uprising could well be among the most masculine dance pieces ever created, even allowing for the few well-placed moments of humour, tenderness, and intimacy. Without a doubt, Schecter knows the male gender.

He and his posse of dancers shuffle like apes, run like wild dogs, jostle and spar, leap and sprawl, then suddenly slow to a halt and gently hoist one another in an air of brotherhood. But the bonding is short-lived and the resistance continues. The piece culminates in a literal uprising: all seven dancers grouped in a victorious flag-waving tableaux—surely a nod to the cheesy romanticism at the climax of Les Miserables the musical.

After intermission, the longer and more complex In Your Rooms begins with the same shock of intensity; this time the unbridled masculine energy is tempered by the presence of four female dancers—but only just—as the scope of the story broadens beyond the riotous to include stormy male-female relations and other kinds of choreographed chaos.

The stage, serving as back alley in Uprising, here becomes a community, a hive of activity where interwoven patterns of dancers move in tight unison suddenly shattered with a burst of fury or an outright collapse. Dancers peel away for brief solos then realign in groupings that dissolve and reform in kaleidoscopic shapes at once nonsensical and internally logical.

With Uprising and In Your Rooms, Hofesh Schecter taps into the shattered collective consciousness of modern times and lives up to his stellar acclaim. See these pieces and regardless of gender you'll be inspired to grunt like a beast, bark at the moon, and ponder in a puddle of your own sweat what it all means.

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Tony