Hofesh Shechter, the choreographer whose experimental work has pushed the boundaries of contemporary dance, is to stage a London season taking over the dance, opera and rock stages of the city.
The season will be the Hofesh Shechter Dance Company’s largest ever season of work in a single city. It will encompass everything from Shechter’s opera debut to bringing his critically-acclaimed piece Political Mother into the rock concert atmosphere of Brixton Academy.
“It is an amazing thing to be able to bring contemporary dance into so many different places, make it present across the city. It will show it has a place in Brixton Academy and it has a place in the Royal Opera House, as well as Sadler’s Wells and Stratford Circus,” he said.
Israel-born Shechter, who has been based in London for over a decade, burst onto the dance scene in 2003 with savage and often politically driven compositions that have seen him become a much-celebrated and divisive choreographer.His recent work ranges from Untouchable for the Royal Ballet in London, to a Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof.
The month-long season, which will begin in September, is intended as a celebration of the diversity of Shechter’s work as well a nod to the city in which the choreographer arrived 12 years ago “with no plan at all”, and was later scouted by contemporary dance producer John Ashford in a small North London pub.
“This is really my crazy playground,” said Shechter. “I think London is like the universe, everything is here and everything is possible here so you have to find yourself – that is what we are celebrating.
“There is something awkward about contemporary dance anyway and I wanted to see what happens when you push through that,” he added. “So I am enjoying testing what is cringey on stage, what is amazing. Is something horrific or is it beautiful? I am always looking for new ways to express myself.”
The season, which has been dubbed Hofest, will showcase two debuts for Shechter. Having contemplated branching into opera for years, the choreographer will finally make the leap into co-directing a new production of Gluck’s Orphee et Eurydice at the Royal Opera House to open the season in September.
His new dance production, a trilogy titled barbarians , will also be premiered at Sadler’s Wells. Shechter described the work as “bonkers” and said it represented new territory for him as a choreographer. The target audience, he added, was men in their 40s going through a mid-life crisis.
He said: “With barbarians I was trying to kick myself a little bit out of my own head. I am very analytical when I make my work but this time I was trying to turn off my head a little bit and see what happens. So we had this rule in the studio that everything goes.”
As a classically trained musician who was in a rock band when he arrived in London, Shechter said it was a dream to bring Political Mother, his work first performed in 2010, to the Brixton Academy stage. It is a show that blurs the lines between a traditional performance and a rock concert, which makes Brixton the “perfect venue”, he said.
“The electricity, vibe, the energy of Brixton Academy is amazing and I really connect with that kind of audience – I am that kind of audience,” he said. “It’s a rock’n’roll venue and I am confident that by staging the piece there it will bring in a rock’n’roll audience. And I love that they will be able to see what an amazing and liberating art form contemporary dance can be.”
Shechter described the work, and the month-long season as whole, as a “spectacle that is really questioning the right and wrong and the good and bad of art.”
“Contemporary dance is like some sort of underground club and when people encounter it and discover it, they feel like they own something very special and kind of crazy,” he added. “It’s a bag full of surprises – it can be great, it can be horrible and people have to accept that as part of the experiment.”
