Hofesh Shechter, Theatre of Dreams Review

You’ll have noticed there isn’t a star rating in this review. That’s because Hofesh Shechter’s Theatre of Dreams, a work as darkly unsettling as it is compelling, tightly knit yet sometimes typically self-indulgent, demands from its audience total emotional surrender, rather than rational understanding. I didn't quite surrender, but neither can I claim detached understanding.

It’s presented as a theatre within a theatre: behind Sadler’s Wells front curtain there stands another, and in Shechter’s most complex scenography to date, each slides open and shut in a frantic game of conceal and reveal timed to the split second.

What they expose or hide are nightmarish scenes animated by the merciless crescendo of Shechter’s own nerve-jangling pounding music. Shechter’s superb 13 dancers, kitted out in eclectic costumes that mix sequinned dresses with drab pants and shirts (costume design Osnat Kelner), appear in different groupings, pounding the floor, wriggling their hips, raising arms as if berating the gods.

Hofesh Shechter Company, Theatre of Dreams. Photo: Todd MacDonald

Shechter’s characteristic choreographic language, visceral, at times feral, relying on hyper-energetic jagged movement, intermittent marching on the spot, and incorporating gestures and movements from Middle Eastern folk dance, is pushed to the nth degree in Theatre of Dreams.

There is something hypnotic about the energy that flows unbroken through the work’s 90 minutes enhanced by live music played on stage by a trio of multi-talented musicians in bright red suits: Yaron Engler, Sabio Janiak and Alex Paton (again concealed and revealed throughout).

Perhaps most impressive of all is Tom Visser’s magisterial lighting design, providing a dazzling variety of atmospheres to frame and colour the stage and its denizens: now a pervasive hellish red, now shafts of milky white, a dazzling burst of Yves Klein blue. It’s a masterclass in how to use light as a key player in a performance.

A spot of gratuitous full frontal nudity led to a couple of walkouts from the stalls on press night; but on the whole the audience was more than willing to be conquered, so much so that when invited to ‘dance with us’ half-way through the performance, many who could poured forward towards the stage, while the back of the stalls and upper reaches of Sadler’s Wells stood and swayed quite wildly.

Maybe this brief interlude of audience participation was intended to show the choreographer the extent to which his demand that audiences should ‘follow him down the rabbit hole’ was successful; or maybe it was meant to offer a brief respite to both dancers, whose stamina is almost super-human, and audience, by then surely feeling a little battered, bruised … and maybe even a little abused?

Theatre of Dreams is very dark, inevitably tainted by the current horrors in the Middle East, which, if not directly quoted, must prey on Israeli-born Hofesh Shechler’s mind, even if he’s been based in London for many years.