Hofesh Shechter’s dance always gives way to darkness at some point. You may start with a hand-scrawled sign saying “Part I, Pop”, and self-possessed performers channelling music-video vibes, looking us straight in the eye as bodies wind and pump and pop. But inevitably 10 minutes later half the dancers are flogging the other half, bodies fallen to the ground. Such is life in Shechter’s world.
Alongside the darkness comes playful cynicism – including about Shechter’s own art form – anarchic energy, humour, and a whiff of the Peggy Lee line: if that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing. All these are in the mix in Contemporary Dance 2.0, a reboot of a piece Shechter made in 2019 for Sweden’s GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, reworked for Shechter II, his own junior company of dancers aged 18-25. It’s a strong, hardworking group, pummelling the accents of the choreography for 55 minutes to Shechter’s own clubby score.
Shechter’s choreography is shot through with countless references, magpied steps and fleeting images that sometime feel like subliminal advertising – did I just see what I thought I saw? He pinches from different styles, arm movements from waacking or locking, gyrating hips from Latin dance. There’s a machine gun motion, a man turned monkey. There are sudden changes of texture, from sharp bursts to serpentine bodies. But it’s still all recognisably Shechter. A pulsing current drives the movement, and its repetition and ritual become mesmeric – the dancers themselves sometimes look as if they’re in a trance state. This troupe is about half the size of that in the Swedish original, and you can imagine more bodies would increase the impact.
Dancers hold up placards announcing each section with ironic detachment. Part 4, entitled “contemporary dance”, swaps electronic beats for Bach, and front-facing unison for the dancers noodling off on their own trajectories, but actually many of the steps are similar. What is Shechter saying? That all these things and more are contemporary dance? Is he mocking labels and conventions? Or just playing with how you can shape energy on stage and push it out into the room? Sometimes that last one is what matters the most.
