Michaela Ridgway in conversation with Hofesh Shechter, an interview in three acts
Bodies move. My body has carried me from 1968 to now and across the planet, itself a moving body. My body runs to the shops for milk, though there’s no rush. It crawls up steep, treeless hillsides. At night, it lies down. Dreaming, it flies through empty school corridors. In the morning, it stands up. Sometimes, at the apex of a jump, my body readies itself for the possibility gravity won’t pull it back.
On a balmy evening in Caracas in 1995, I joined a random queue. From a distance, the queue was a single, wriggling thing – legs, arms, chattering mouths, hands, slim torsos, filing forward. Inside, five white ceramic toilet bowls squatted on stage. Dancers circled, lifted lids, shut them, lifted, shut – I had never seen anything like it. I couldn’t stop looking.
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“When you see people move, there is this energetic exchange that you can’t match with any other form of art, or any other form of interaction,“ says choreographer Hofesh Shechter, whose new show, Theatre of Dreams, will open the Brighton Festival on May 3rd.
As with so many interviews these days, ours takes place on Zoom. Shechter, who studied piano then percussion before switching to dance at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, enjoys a devoted fan base in Brighton. The two performances at the Dome Concert Hall – the largest of the Dome’s three spaces, with a capacity of 1,800 – are likely to sell out. I’m curious to know what advice he’d give newcomers who worry contemporary dance is too difficult – that they won’t ‘get it’. “There is nothing to understand,” he says. “Just switch off your brain, sit back, and take the fast train. Imagery is going to hit you.”
It hits you. A man in pyjamas climbs onto the stage to the sound of a muffled heartbeat. Side-to-side, floor-to-ceiling curtains soar above him, their gathered folds splashed in light. Where they meet centerstage, the corners lift to form a dark, triangular gap. Bending at the waist, he slips inside. We follow. Hofesh Shechter’s creative process is instinctive, driven by imagery, rhythm and emotion rather than formal dance traditions. “I don’t really care about the ‘high language’ of dance,” he tells me. “When I make dance, I want it to be moving and interesting.” And he doesn’t consider himself a specialist: “I didn’t know what contemporary dance was when I was a child. I loved films, I watched MTV and Back to the Future.” What matters is “the sensations we go through.”
Theatre of Dreams plunders a clever bag of sound, shape, and light tricks to stir up its audience’s sensations and distort perception. “In the beginning, it’s simply a game between cold and warm that becomes more colourful as it goes.” Light and dark create atmosphere and so does music. “It’s really half the work,” he says. Known for his immersive soundscapes and original scores – this was written with Yaron Engler, who performs live on stage with Sabio Janiak and Alex Paton – Shechter suggests approaching his work as you would a rock concert. Don’t overthink it. The pressing question on everyone’s lips after a gig probably isn’t ‘What did it mean?’
It’ll be the question on at least some people’s lips after this show, though. The post-mortem in the pub will be fun. Shechter describes the stage as a ‘dreaming brain’. “Imagine you are sleeping, and your brain is showing you to yourself.” So the sleeper – us – observes the flow of contents in the collective unconscious. Those enormous curtains are a striking theatrical device (and metaphor, of course). “Curtains constantly reveal and conceal,” he tells me. They part onto an assemblage of crouching, leaping, hand-holding bodies drenched in a column of shadow and light. They shut then open onto more curtains.
“It’s a theatre of illusions,” Shechter says – not about his new show, but contemporary life. He worries about the online world, where truth, reality, and the physical self slip away, with dislocating knock-on effects in the actual world. We’re all feeling it. Too long on the internet reduces my body to hands and eyeballs. Outside, meanwhile, the day passes in a stuttering sequence of time-lapsed stills. Some people call bodies ‘meat sacks’ with annoying biological needs (food, water, sleep). They resent being dragged away from their digital selves. The singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O’Hara is right: the body’s in trouble.
Could dance be an antidote to society’s disembodiment problem? In Forms of Vitality, psychotherapist Daniel Stern says simply watching it awakens a sense of vitality and embodied awareness. ‘Our arousal level is constantly in play during a performance,’ he writes. The idea is that as we watch dancers move, our brains engage dynamically, anticipating what comes next. It produces an inner experience of movement. This is certainly true of my experience: watching dance isn’t just visual; it’s deeply felt.
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Twenty-five years ago, in the autumn of 2000, my friend Kate and I went to see Billy Elliot at the Odeon cinema at the bottom of West Street in Brighton. It’s a tear-jerker from start to finish, but it’s the final scene that stays with me most. Billy, now grown, stands in the wings. He’s the male lead in Swan Lake, powerful, all muscle. As the music crescendos, Billy charges the stage and in glorious slow motion, leaps.
It was good. But not as good as what came next.
All the way up West Street, on our way to the Number 27 bus stop at the Clock Tower, Kate and I, in our 30s at the time, made a glorious spectacle of ourselves trying to do a saut de chat.
Dance moves us in so many ways.
Theatre of Dreams is on at Brighton Dome on May 3 and 4, with a 90-minute runtime and no interval. Thirteen dancers perform alongside three musicians, playing an original score. The production premiered at Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, in June 2024, before making its UK debut at Sadler’s Wells in October. After Brighton, the tour continues internationally to Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, China, and South Korea, and in the autumn will be returning to the UK with confirmed dates at The Lowry in Manchester in October and further UK dates tba.