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Jan 07, 2025 |
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ff Article from Denis Sanglard

From England with love… declaration of love to England? Yes and no. Hofesh Shechter takes a critical look at his adopted country. Land of contrasts, of paradoxes, torn between well-established traditions and assertive modernity, between breakfast and a resolutely punk, pump and circumstance attitude. A disruptive culture, where beneath the veneer of a so-called legendary phlegm there is also social and political violence. But no more politics here, it's a postcard, a subjective look which does not knowingly escape clichés, a vision defused by a certain irony, but which also points out what can be explosive in this schizophrenia of 'a country torn between such opposite poles. The dance here keeps getting off track, falling apart severely before always recovering provisionally. Like these so British school uniforms quickly become ragged, these students immediately disheveled, after a first scene of too angelic a sweetness not to hide a harsher and more underground truth. We obviously find what defines the dance of this choreographer, a permanent hybridization of styles, from urban dance to folklore, here made in United Kingdom of course, but not only, this stubborn and always tense decompartmentalization, a consummate art of dry rupture and absolute fluidity in the same momentum, and an infernal energy sometimes carried to the point of trance and voluntary exhaustion. This is what frustrates us here, to find a summary of the know-how of a choreographer who does not seek to renew himself, repeating himself somewhat, and there seems to go somewhat in circles. For those who don't know Hofesh Shechter, it's an introduction, certainly, a perfect and flawless reader's digest, but what?… Nothing new under the umbrellas of England. From paintings to paintings, cut and sublimated by Tom Vissier's light, it is a slightly theatrical narration – and this theatricality is new or at least more assertive than until now – often confused in its subject and its intentions and whose event or even historical references are difficult to understand. Bodies being machine-gunned, corpses being dragged, scenes of cannibalism rub shoulders with student drinking parties, pure battles on the catwalk, five o'clock teas turning into catastrophe or moments that are curiously rural and very sweet. Fantasies or historical reality, in the absence of keys or references we are somewhat doubtful in the face of what sometimes resembles an annus horribilis started again. But dance nevertheless resists our prejudices. By the limitless energy deployed on the sacred music of Thomas Tallis or Purcell, William H. Monk and Edward Elgar, and the unstoppable technical mastery and impactful strike force of the dancers of the Shechter II, a company created for the promotion of young contemporary dancers, who do not obviously obliterate the strong personalities engaged here with passion and undeniable talent in this vision of an England with such contrasts and who, let's admit it, in this embrace feverish and seething in its treatment fundamentally escapes us.