A Conversation With Israeli-Born Choreographer Hofesh Shechter

October 10, 2012, 11:00 am

By ROSLYN SULCAS

LONDON - Hofesh Shechter is stirring his tea quietly in a café close to Trafalgar Square. Tall and dark-haired with angular-features, this Israeli-born choreographer is one of the British dance scene's hottest properties, the creator of works that are full of raw, visceral energy, set to blasting percussive scores that he composes himself. But in person, he seems calm and quiet, almost withdrawn.

Then again, Mr. Shechter, whose “Political Mother,” opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday, is full of contradictions. A pianist who became a dancer who became a drummer who became a choreographer. An apolitical Israeli who makes pieces packed with military formations and tribal rites. A loner w ho loves group energy.

Many of those oppositions can be seen in “Political Mother,” which sets 13 dancers and 8 musicians onstage in a hard-driving enactment of group brutality and camaraderie, subservience and domination, abandon and fear. Judith Mackrell, writing in The Guardian newspaper after a 2010 premiere at the Brighton Dome, where Mr. Shechter's company is now in residence, called it, “a work of galvanizing physical power.”

Mr. Shechter's rise to dance world stardom in Britain was a rapid one. His first piece, “Fragments,” created in an empty church hall in 2003, led to his appointment as an associate artist at the Place, London's breeding ground for new dance. A few works later, he had galvanized the British critics with “Uprising” (2006), following it the next year with the even more acclaimed “In Your Rooms.”

“There was suddenly an important new voice” said Alistair Spalding, the director of Sadler's Wells, where Mr. Shec hter has been an associate artist since 2007. “I think it's not just the choreography, it's his dominance of the stage. He works more like a film-maker in a way, telling you what you should be looking at when. He composes the music. He is brilliant at structure. And his choreographic style is very organic and somehow doesn't feel too far away from the way we might move if we had a chance.”

Mr. Shechter's success is not, however, the fruit of a longstanding ambition to be a choreographer.

“One of the first things that Hofesh ever said to me was that basically, contemporary dance was boring,” Luke Jennings, the dance critic for The Observer, said in a telephone interview. “But what he produced with “In Your Rooms” was absolutely not boring. I think that came from growing up in Israel and the way the boundaries between state and family spill over into each other. A lot of his work has been born of resentment towards that.â €

Perhaps other resentments too. Mr. Shechter's parents split up when he was 2, and he and his older brother remained with his father. “My mother left me when I was two years old,” he says on the soundtrack of his 2009 female sextet, “The Art of Not Looking Back.” “It's like having a bucket with a hole. No matter what you pour in, it's always empty.”

At 6, he began to study the piano; later he joined a youth folkdance company and discovered “the sheer power of movement, the feeling there was something beyond words.” At 15, he auditioned for Jerusalem's performing arts school as a pianist, but soon switched to dance, taking his first formal classes in ballet and modern dance, “having the basics beaten into my body.” Then came his required army service.

“Somehow it was a shock,” he said. “Israel is like America, a democracy, everyone can do and say what they like. Then suddenly you have no choices, it's completely undemocratic, your everyday experience is a lie.”

Midway through his basic training, Mr. Shechter was accepted into the Batsheva junior company, and was given an evening clerical job as his army duty. After two years, he was taken into the main company, directed by Ohad Naharin , an influential choreographer whose combination of hyper-coordinated physicality and manic detail has undoubtedly influenced Mr. Shechter's movement style. There were other influences too: Mats Ek, William Forsythe, Wim Vandekeybus.

“I was absorbing compositions, ideas, emotions, energies,” he said. Nonetheless after three years, Mr. Shechter abruptly left the company. “It somehow all felt too comfortable,” he said. “It was a respectable place to be, a good salary. I suddenly felt, hang on, did I choose this? What happened to music in my life?”

For a few years he studied drums and percussion in France, then moved back to Tel Aviv, played in a rock band, and occasionally taught dance. Bu t living in Israel, he said, was emotionally exhausting. “I was feeling some sort of creative bug and I knew it wasn't going to happen there.”

In early 2002, Mr. Shechter arrived in London with his girlfriend. Somewhat reluctantly, he found work as a dancer with a fellow Israeli, the choreographer Jasmin Vardimon. Within three years of starting to choreograph, he had formed his own full-time company.

Mr. Shechter's success has kept him on a choreographic path, although he has shown characteristic eclecticism by working simultaneously in theater and television (he choreographed the opening sequence of “Skins,” a hit teen drama on Channel 4 here), choreographing for other companies, and collaborating this year on a mainly musical work, “Survivor,” with the sculptor Antony Gormley. Is he attached to the idea of choreography? He pauses, shrugs.

“A life of creation is the one that I want,” he said. “Choreography is a way and it works. There is something about the mysterious power of dance and movement that I love. But I think in the end you don't choose anything in your life, it's just how it is going to happen. I don't mean that in a spiritual way, it's chemical; just how I am set up.”