Shechter II, From England with Love Review ★★★★★

From England with Love is unmistakably Shechter: raw, dark, energetic and loaded with aggression, its meticulously choreographed sequences of ensemble dancing broken by bursts of individual rebellion.

The UK-based Israeli choreographer created this piece for the current cohort of his junior company, Shechter II, which is made up of eight dancers aged 18-25 hailing from a variety of countries as far apart as Belgium and Taiwan.

He billed it as his love letter to his adopted country, but although viewed through his middle-aged eyes, this is very much a youth piece, a powerful impressionistic portrayal of young people coming of age in complex, bewildering and sometimes hostile surroundings.

It starts in sedate fashion with the dancers dressed in school uniform complete with rucksacks clustered in a pool of milky light, performing slow classical port-de-bras to Elgar’s variation Nimrod, its volume gradually becoming very loud. Soon Elgar is superseded by the sound of what could be breaking glass or England’s seemingly incessant rain, and the group breaks apart and reforms in fluid movement reminiscent of an amoeba.

Shechter’s own loud, percussive, repetitive music now takes over leading the dancers in movement that contains all the tropes of Shechter’s dance-making: syncopated walks on quarter-pointe, rhythmic hopping, punching arms raised high - gestures which, for all that they are familiar, never lose their power.


Shechter II, From England with Love. Photo: Todd MacDonald

As the dancers get rid of their cumbersome rucksacks, ties and blazers, so they become freer to engage with each other, brief gestures of support morphing into fight. Sometimes a dancer writhing in the floor looks as if he’s fighting with himself as much as with the world around him; at other times the group confronts the audience with stares and grunts, in the sort of 'us against them' feeling that so often haunts young people.

In one particularly striking section, a series of static tableaux form and change during brief blackouts, the dancers showing remarkably precise positioning; in fact, throughout the piece’s 55 minutes’s duration you have to marvel at the professionalism and sheer commitment of these extraordinary young dancers.

From England with Love rates among Shechter’s darker pieces, his affection for his adopted country no bar to the portrayal of its contradictions, the clash between the legacy of history and the unknowns of a complicated present, and the contradictory pressures and demands this puts on the new generations.

NOTE: From England With Love will also be at the artsdepot, North Finchley, on 8 & 9 May. Full info and tickets here