In Your Rooms

I'm not entirely sure how, but Hofesh Shechter's double bill at Sadler's Wells somehow impinged on my consciousness as the thing to see, so we did. I gather I'll be repeating the experience tomorrow as a surprise treat from my dear friend Kym -- which will be no hardship.

Although there's a definite continuity between the two pieces, they're distinct enough to consider separately. The first, Uprising, sets the percussive tone of punchy, masculine, loose-limbed dancing. Seven men weave through shifting patterns of mostly high-energy, mostly lively, thoroughly watchable but almost entirely unexceptional choreography. It's like West Side Story danced by Les Ballets C de la B -- but without any of the more difficult things such a collision might give birth to. I enjoyed it a great deal, but there wasn't really anything I hadn't seen before.

The second half, In Your Rooms, was vastly more interesting, with a larger mixed cast and much more ambition. It's not wholly successful -- it goes on quite a bit too long and is woefully lacking in large-scale structure -- I imagine Max will also, rightly, have taken exception to the maundering monologuery on the soundtrack -- but nevertheless much of it is fucking fantastic. The use of lighting to divide up the space is particularly inspired -- I don't think I've ever seen anything achieve quite the same effect before -- and the switches from fragmentary isolation to mass tribal pounding and back are pretty thrilling.

Shechter wears a great many influences on his sleeve, including an unmistakable dose of la grande dame (perhaps via former employer and professed Bauschette Jasmin Vardimon) as well as (also former employer) Ohad Naharin, but In Your Rooms is clearly something of his own. I don't think I'd go as far as The Observer -- "probably the most important new dance-work to be created in Britain since the millennium" -- but it's certainly one to see.
Posted by matt at September 28, 2007 11:58 PM